State of the Woman, Part II: Freedom to Choose Our Futures

  As a girl growing up in the 21st century, I grew up in a very different world from my older female relatives. I was raised in the era of girl power, where opportunities for women were cropping up everywhere, and people had really begun to realize that women could do a lot of good in the world without devoting themselves to being mothers and wives. My peers and I were encouraged to dream big and make it happen, to not let our sex ever hold us back. We were taught, generally, to value ourselves as women, to know that we were wonderful and powerful all on our own. No man should ever make or break us, and we should never have to depend on a man. We could make our own way in the world and our own choices. Gone were the days when a woman's only real option in the eyes of society was to get married and have a family. We women could now do whatever we wanted.

Or at least, that's what we were told.

In recent years, I've come to question how much freedom modern American women actually have to choose their own path. I would like to think we've come a long way from our grandparents' generation, where women usually married early and then had children, entering domestic life instead of building a career. The women who came before today's generation worked hard to ensure that building our lives around a husband and children wasn't our only option. In doing so, did they really win the fight for women's autonomy, for our freedom to choose what we do? Or did society just change what it expected from us, without giving us any more real options?

I find myself more and more inclined to believe the latter - that women now having the right to choose what their lives will be like is mostly a bunch of BS. Maybe I'm just naive, but at twenty-three, I don't feel like I have real options. I feel like my peers and I must obtain at least a college degree or technical training. Sure, we can technically still choose to get marry young and have children while doing all of this, but how many of us actually feel like that's a viable option? How many of us are actually comfortable attempting to maintain a marriage and a family at the age our grandparents were able to? As women today, it feels like we have so much more to do before we can "settle down," and the definition of settling down has changed. Settling down used to mean our family became our sole focus, with very few distractions or other things, like a career, to focus on. Women devoted themselves to their husbands and children. Now, settling down is more about committing - to a person, a career, and a more moderate, responsible lifestyle. We're expected to keep a steady head while doing it all: maintaining a marriage, raising kids, and managing a career.

As a society, we have gone from nearly forcing women to sit tight as full-time housewives to nearly forcing women to divide their time and energy between work and family life. Without one or the other, women are so often objects of scorn and ridicule. If a woman wants to be a full-time mother and wife, at the expense of her career, others accuse her of setting women's rights back, because she isn't taking advantage of everything her fellow females fought for over generations. Many will judge her as weak. If a woman wants to focus solely on her career and doesn't care to be a wife or a mother, people will judge her as frigid and odd.

It seems like since America now allows women to be mothers and wives in addition to having a career, American women must do it all, and they are judged harshly by many if they do not. Is that really freedom to choose?

State of the Woman, Introduction & Part I: Why I Won't Call Myself a Feminist

This blog entry will be the first in a series I plan on posting focused on the state of women in America today. New entries in the series will be posted weekly for at least the next four weeks, in addition to posts outside the series. As a general warning, topics posted will reflect my own opinions and mine alone, which may be controversial. You are absolutely free to disagree and post your own opinions and feelings in the comments or elsewhere - and I encourage you to do so - but please keep your language free of bashing/hate speech. Comments that contain hateful language and/or personal attacks will be deleted.


When someone asks me, "Are you a feminist?" it's difficult for me to say, "No," as calmly as I should. I do believe in gender equality, and I think that whether you are female, male, or otherwise, you should have the same amount of autonomy as everyone else. But the words feminist and feminism get my blood boiling. Why do I loathe them so much?

Because I do not think the words themselves promote gender equality.

I am all for the empowerment of all people and for gender equality. I don't like the idea of us as Americans living in the world of George Orwell's Animal Farm, where "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." I feel like the words feminist and feminism, being so close to  the word female, send the wrong message. They imply that feminism is about female empowerment, not gender equality. To me, the two are no longer one and the same.

I know the definition of the term has changed over time. Technically, according to Merriam-Webster Online, one of the two current definitions for the word feminism is "the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes." However, the second definition is "organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests." To me, those definitions are at odds with each other. Today, working for women's rights is not necessarily the same thing as working for gender equality. In a lot of situations it is, but there are a number of situations in which it isn't, meaning that women's rights ≠ gender equality. The two concepts aren't mutually exclusive, but they also can't be accurately substituted for each other in every situation.

Consider the hypothetical situation in which a city opens shelters for female domestic violence victims. Since the majority of domestic violence is perpetrated against females, this makes perfect sense, and women should have a place to go in order to escape being abused and get help safely exiting such a situation. No woman deserves to suffer at the hands of an abuser or be trapped with one. No one does. So, what do you do when a man is in need of the same services?

I realize that many people may scoff at that image - after all, male domestic violence victims are widely considered to be in the minority. That's great, but that doesn't mean they don't exist or that they have any less of a need for help. Since many shelters for battered women are for women only (for obvious reasons), how can you make sure people that are not female have the same right to help? How do you even define equal rights in this situation? Does each gender have equal rights if they have facilities in proportion with the predicted number of people of that gender who need them, or does the number and quality of facilities need to be equal? Is there gender equality if a man needs to travel further than a woman to obtain the same services?

In this hypothetical, whether you believe in women's rights or equal rights for all genders can matter quite a bit. Those who are primarily concerned with women's rights will applaud the decision, as these types of shelters are obviously clearly needed in many areas. Those who are truly concerned with gender equality will be uneasy. Sure, it's great that these resources are available to females, but what about the males in need of the same services? What about people that are transgendered? Even if more females need these services than anyone else, can there honestly be said to be equal rights among genders in this type of a situation? I don't think so.

Though many people who believe in gender equality will call themselves feminists, it's not a term I will ever be comfortable using to describe myself, because so many people associate it only with female empowerment. Every group, whether historically marginalized and disenfranchised or not, should be able to have the same rights to life, liberty, and happiness. Traditionally, that's what female empowerment was all about, allowing women to have the same rights as men. Today, in many ways, men and women are not equal - but women are not the only ones suffering because of it. That's why, in good conscience, I cannot identify as a feminist. Regardless of gender, all humans are should be equal, and some humans should not be more equal than others.