What does it mean to be a feminist?

What does it mean to be a Feminist?

Here is a link to the author Chimananda Ngozi Adichie's website.
 And here is her Ted Talk.


Here is a discussion guide from Lean In.
Read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's essay, We Should All Be Feminists.





1. According to Adichie, what does it mean to be a feminist?  Is this different from what you wrote at the beginning of the unit?


2. Is being a feminist a bad thing to Adichie?  To you?  To American society in general?

Here is a 2016 report from WaPo about attitudes toward feminism in America.  A few of the findings are listed below in the graphs.

Why might "feminist" be seen negatively?

Is it simply being confused with misandry?

Or, is it connected to the traditional way masculinity is framed?  If being masculine means not being anything feminine, then does that create an inherent negativity of feminism?




And here is a 2020 PEW study,

61% of U.S. women say ‘feminist’ describes them well; many see feminism as empowering, polarizing

It's really interesting to me how the connotation of feminism has hurt the cause of feminism because people who believe in gender equality don't want to be labeled "feminists".   Should sociologists use symbolic interactionist paradigm to understand why "feminism" is not palatable to the general public?  If so, then what should it be called instead?  How can it be re-framed?  If not, why not?

Is there a connection to all things feminine being denigrated and the denigration of feminism?

Here is some research from JSTOR Daily about the history of the women's movement and feminism.  It might be hard to believe but within my lifetime, restaurants were allowed to say that they do not serve women.

Feminists framed the issue of male-only accommodations as a civil rights violation, akin to racial segregation. African American NOW member Pauli Murray referred to gender discrimination as “Jane Crow.” Exclusion from the sites of commercial and political power-broking, feminists argued, contributed to their status as second-class citizens. As the historian Georgina Hickey explains in Feminist Studies, they saw the restrictions as a “badge of inferiority” that circumscribed their lives and opportunities. The right to drink alongside men was symbolic of the chance “to function as an autonomous adult in a free society.”

Those against the feminist campaign were armed with an array of reasons for denying women equal access to accommodations. Some suggested that women lacked the ability to calculate the check and tip correctly, that bar crowds were too “rough” and boisterous for them, or that male-only spaces were sacred respites for politics and sports talk, where men could share “lewd stories” or “have a quiet beer and tell a few jokes.” The manager of Biltmore in Manhattan insisted that businessmen’s conversations were simply “not for women.” Bars were, in Hickey’s words, the “last stronghold of masculinity” in the early 1970s, an oasis for men during an historical moment marked by the transformation of gender norms. Government officials sometimes reinforced this notion: One Connecticut State Representative claimed that a bar was the only place a man could go “and not be nagged.”