The Feminist Backlash

In my last post, I mentioned how a lot of people still seem to be against being unionized. This makes me think of how so many of my younger students are against feminism. They proudly state that they don’t need feminism. Some of them, especially the women, even go so far as to say that they don’t want to be associated with intellectuals or with lesbians or with man-hating, as though all feminists are those things. A number of my female students say they want to wear short dresses and make-up and find men so they can be stay-at-home parents, and they claim that feminism has nothing to offer them. Except, obviously, they wouldn’t be at university without the work early feminists did to demand equality for women, and they wouldn’t be in a position to choose what to wear or how to live without feminism. They’d simply be expected to be pretty housewives rather than being empowered to make that choice.

What has caused this feminist backlash? We still have imparity in the world, and feminism is about challenging and fixing inequity. I try to explain this to my students, but they seem to think the world – or at least their narrow area of it – is completely fair now, and that there is nothing more to fight for. And they certainly don’t want any part of feminism.

--Curly