Letters

Whenever I hear feminists talking about women still being second-class citizens, I am reminded of the Eleanor Roosevelt quote about being a victim because you allow others to treat you as one. Get over it already! Continuing to view yourselves as second-class citizens and eternal victims is only going to extend your suffering.

Arguing over the use of a word proves to me that feminists are just a bunch of middle-class/wealthy white women who really have nothing better to do with their time. The fact that Salon keeps giving page space to this kind of faux disaffected class is disheartening to say the least, and leads credence to the right's view that liberals are wishy-washy milquetoasts.

-- Meredith Bateman

I say this with no disrespect, because the same could be said about any of a thousand recent articles and books, but Rebecca Traister's "The F Word" nicely illustrates what's wrong with the left. Do those on the right sit around fretting about what they should call themselves? No, they spend their time thinking up creative new smears like "feminazi." We should return the favor. Forget about whether "feminism" or "liberal" or any other such terms are either accurate or politically wise; focus on what we can call our opponents, fairly or unfairly, that will put them on the defensive for once. The term "Christianists" used in War Room and elsewhere is a good start, but it has the defect of not being libelous enough. How about calling opponents of stem-cell research "disease lovers," and apologists for our foreign-financed national debt "antinationalists" and "China appeasers"? How about pointing out that those who want to waste our underequipped military in Iraq are "Osama's accomplices" and "G.I. killers"? Oh, and memo to Dick Durbin and his fellow Democratic wusses: Please don't undercut us by apologizing. For anything. Ever.

Do we not go this route because we worry it won't work? But the right has proven it does. Or do we think it will debase the public discourse? Please. The only thing that will get the other side to lay off, thus raising the tone of public debate in the long run, will be the threat of mutual assured destruction -- a situation where name-calling hurts both sides equally. As long as they have the field to themselves, they'll keep doing it and keep winning.

-- Jeff Smith

I am co-director of an international young women's organization, FAIR Fund. Every day, I see young women working toward gender equality from the Balkans to the United States. Some of them don't call themselves feminist; many do. At the end of the day, each and every one of them are achieving real change in their community, regardless of their terminology. But, my organization chose to use the "F" word explicitly in our mission statement because we feel that we should be taken seriously and have the right to use the word to define our success. We are not going to back down from a word because a few people have tried to twist gender equality into a bad thing. We build on the work of older feminists and have educated thousands of younger women about issues ranging from preventing human trafficking through our Campus Coalition Against Trafficking to creating democracy youth movements to advocate stronger laws against gender violence. We are young, feminist and not backing down!

-- Andrea Powell

I'm a 34-year-old liberal woman. I don't consider myself a "feminist" because repeatedly in the past (particularly while I was in college in the early '90s) women who do call themselves "feminists" have told me that I'm not one. They told me that I was not feminist because I am pro-pornography, because I am sympathetic to certain aspects of the antiabortion movement, because I questioned the academic rigor of certain elements of the traditional "women's studies" curricula, and for many other ideas and attitudes that are not in line with "feminist" dogma. So, I decided if they are feminists and they say that I'm not one, then I must not be one.

Simply: If this is what feminism is about, I don't want any part of it. Stifling women's voices because they dare to think for themselves sounds like what I thought feminism was supposed to be fighting -- not embracing.

And no, I don't have the motivation to try to "reclaim" the term -- if it means so much to certain "feminists" to keep women like me (in other words, women who don't faithfully preach the party line) out of the movement, let them have the term. I think the women's movement would be much better served by dropping its fixation on the word itself and addressing the reasons why we don't call ourselves feminists.

-- Jen Matis

Brava for Rebecca Traister for pointing out how a new generation of women is reinventing the labels and goals of feminism. But while celebrating the reinvention of the movement, Traister (and many of those she interviewed) shouldn't forget how much different generations of feminists have in common.

Debates over the meaning of "feminism" have defined the movement from the start. Ever since young radicals protested the Miss America pageant in 1968, throwing aprons and other symbols of female oppression into a Freedom Trashcan while others questioned their tactics, feminism has been a movement in internal flux. As in the early days of the second wave, today's fight for feminism is about the way we do feminism, the meaning of personal politics, and the movement's ability to withstand reinvention by diverse and ever-widening constituencies. To movement veterans, the questions young feminists are asking themselves should seem achingly familiar: What's a "feminist" act? Who decides? What's the source of women's oppression? What's the path to lasting change? OK, so now we're questioning the word "feminist" too. But the important thing is that through the very act of debating the continued relevance, meaning, form and shape of feminism, younger women (and men) are proving that the battle to name, claim and redefine it lives on.

-- Deborah Siegel

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