Ever since I was a young child, the idea of gender equality seemed common sense to me. I came from a family where there hadn’t been a boy born until 5 years ago, so I was surrounded by women from various walks of life. From working-class housewife single mothers, to married child-less middle-class business women, and all were empowering regardless of their occupation and life choices.
From a fairly young age I discovered not everyone held this view, it sometimes felt like I was the only one who did. Boys were always encouraged to succeed and girls always talked about names of their future babies. Other girls were reluctant to achieve because they just wanted to get married and have children, they even had their entire lives planned out so school was unimportant. Adults would always talk to me about marriage and children, and even from a young age I knew I cared more about being successful and being independent (and rescuing as many dogs as possible) than marrying someone. The minute I got older and found out about this movement called ‘Feminism’ I fell in love. Finally, a group of people with the same ideas and attitudes as me, I couldn’t have been happier.
Over the years of being a feminist I’ve gone through many stages, that stage of ‘I’m better than everyone else because I’m a feminist- not like other girls’ which honestly looking back I don’t really class it as feminism, to my stage of ‘White Feminism’, a shortened version of ‘white-washed feminism’- a brand of feminism that focuses on white, middle class women and ignores other women’s experience. Now my feminism focuses more on the intersections of other factors, and how they affect gender inequality, often known as ‘Intersectional Feminism’, which has lead me to greatly criticise the movement in an attempt to get other feminists to be more inclusive in their feminism.
My first main criticism of feminism is that it’s very exclusionary when it comes to race. A lot of earlier feminism was built on degrading women of different races. In fact one feminist icon was Suffragette Rebecca Latimer Felton, who was the first women to serve in the Senate, held very racist views and was a white supremacist. Felton and her husband even owned slaves, and whilst arguing for the vote of [white] women, actively degraded black men, saying “if it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week.”. In the statistics most frequently quoted by feminists “One in six women will get raped in their lifetime” ignores, the race divide. The wage gap which typically talks says a man’s $1 is equal to a woman’s 79₵, however this is for white women, as women of colour can earn as low as 54₵ for a man’s $1, and this ignores men of colour who earn less than a white man. Native American women are around 3.5 times more likely to be raped in their lifetime than women of other races. There’s currently around 1,000 Indigenous Canadian women who have been murdered, or who are missing, and up until now there has been nothing done about this- for more information check the #MMIW tag on twitter to see Indigenous Canadians talk about this.
There is also the issue of choice. A lot of ‘white feminists’ have taken choice to mean walk around wearing little clothing and no makeup, which is entirely their choice and there is nothing wrong with this. However the issue comes when these feminists drag down other women for their choice, many preach about ‘freeing the nipple’ whilst degrading other women’s choice to cover up. If a person wears a hijab/head covering then that is their choice and this needs to be respected. If a person spends hours on their makeup then that is their choice, and not up for your discussion. If someone chooses to shave every inch of their body or whether they leave their body natural, that is their choice. Free will and letting people choose is such an important aspect of feminism, as long as that choice is not harming them or anyone else then you have no business to get involved. A woman can be just as powerful covered up as she can near nude.
The intersection of disability is an important factor; disabled women’s voices are often ignored in feminism. Studies have found 83% of women with disabilities will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Women with disabilities are also more likely to be in poverty and unemployment, and also more affected by the wage gap than women who aren’t disabled. If your feminism doesn’t include this, then you have excludes women with disabilities from the movement totally.
For transgender people, they deserve a place in this movement just as much as cis-gender people. If someone tells you they are a woman, they are a woman. You are in no place to say otherwise, the only time you need to be concerned with their genitals is if you’re having sex.
Women have such different experiences of everyday life that there cannot be a ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to feminism, as feminists we need to strive to include as many people who suffer from gender inequality without making them feel excluded from the movement. We need to uplift as many voices from as many different walks of life as we can, so if you want to find out about anymore issues surrounding the intersections of feminism I encourage to speak to people who have these different experiences of gender inequality, talk to them about their experiences and uplift their voices- don’t speak over them.
Everyone deserves access to the feminist movement, but if we ignore the many intersections of feminism then we risk excluding such a large group of people from this. Feminism has achieved so much, and we can’t stop now. With an ever changing group of people we can bring the benefits of feminism to so many others who have yet to achieve equality in their life, but we can’t do so unless we make improvements to the movement. So yes, I am a proud feminist, but unless we criticize feminism in such a manner we can never move forward and achieve more.
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