For anybody who doesn’t know, Thacher faculty members take weeklong turns as the teacher on active duty (TOAD) and begin the week by making some remarks at Monday’s Assembly. This week, my husband, Brian, is the TOAD, but it was easy for me to convince him to let me share some thoughts with the School. I thought I’d also share them here:
I’ve got a question for you.
How many of you consider yourselves feminists?
A poll published last May in The Economist found that only 28% of Americans consider themselves feminists (38% percent of women and 18% percent of men)—meaning 72% of Americans do not accept that label.
The poll also found that people are twice as likely to consider calling someone a feminist an insult rather than a compliment.
The results were so staggering the author of the article concluded by wondering if feminism was dead.
When I was a student at Thacher, some twenty-odd years ago, I would never have called myself a feminist. Even though I was horrified by the fact that just 80 years earlier women had not had the right to vote, I was very uncomfortable aligning myself with the very group who’d fought to ensure that right for me, who’d left me a world where I wouldn’t be owned by the man I married and I could wear jeans to school.
My connotation of feminism was confused and unclear at the time but certainly negative. Feminists were angry people with an abundance of underarm hair who didn’t like feminine women and more over hated men. Now, as a student at Thacher, aside from doing well in school and trying to be a good person, I spent most of my time wishing for a boyfriend. I was wildly unsuccessful in this pursuit (hard to believe, I know). I was endlessly confused about what made boys like certain girls and not others (namely me) but one thing I was not confused about was that calling myself a feminist would not help my case. So the label was off the table.
In college there was a bit more pressure to identify myself as a feminist—one of my closest friends attempted to engage me on the topic and proceeded to accuse me of being so thoroughly subjugated by the male dominant culture that I was oblivious to the powers controlling my potential. I had no idea what that meant—and worse—I still didn’t have a boyfriend. And anyways, what did it matter if I called myself a feminist or not? It was just a word, right? I didn’t need a word to tell me I was confident and could do anything I set my mind to. So feminism was put on the back-burner again.
After graduate school I became a teacher in co-ed schools and though I felt strongly about instilling in my students a deep commitment to equality, I worried that openly calling myself a feminist would alienate the boys in my classes. They’d think I was angry at males and that I didn’t like them or want them to succeed. It turns out that many of the 72% of Americans who refused the label of feminists held similar connotations and concerns about the moniker as I did.
So how have I arrived at this moment where I’ve not only raised my hand to identify myself as a feminist in front of my community, but I’ve asked Mr. Pidduck to let me give his TOAD talk so that I could persuade all of you to do the same? Well, first and foremost, I’ve quite successfully solved the boyfriend issue. So a big thanks to the fabulous and feminist Mr. Pidduck for helping me on that front. I’ve also had children and watched them begin to shape an understanding of what it means to be a girl and what it means to be a boy. I’ve listened to students, boys and girls, struggle with their sense of gender inequality in various aspects of their Thacher lives. And over the last few years, much of my reading, not by intention but by chance, has dealt in one way or another with this issue. One book in particular was written by a music and culture critic for the London times—a hilarious, off-the wall, punk rock, pop culture maven named Caitlin Moran— who based on the survey I mentioned earlier harshly questioned her readers about their reticence to identify themselves as feminists.
A feminist, she clarified for me, is simply someone who believes that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.
“What part of equal rights and opportunities isn’t for you?” she asks those who recoiled from the term feminist in taking the poll. “Has all the equality and opportunity gotten on your nerves over the years, or were you just drunk at the time of the survey?”
Her humor and bluntness gave me pause. Had I really let my confusion and cowardice and selfishness keep me from standing up for something that in some ways was so simple and in all ways was so right? I’ve decided it’s time to right that wrong.
So, first, let us as a community agree to jettison our connotations of the word feminism and replace them with its definition: the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.
Easy enough–we have a clear definition. What’s the big deal? Why do I believe we should take it one step further and all proudly call ourselves feminists? We all know you can be whatever you want to be whether you’re a boy or a girl, right? We all believe that men can be stay-at-home parents and women can be president, don’t we?
Here are two sets of statistics that suggest to me it might not be that simple:
First in regards to males:
Women outpace men in college enrollment 1.4 to 1. Men make up only 43% of college attendees. Only 40% of the Master’s Degrees conferred in 2011 were given to men. And this is a downward trajectory that started in the 1970s and has been increasing significantly in the last decade.
Second in regards to females:
Only 11% of the world’s 197 heads of state are women—that’s 22 women.
Of the top 500 revenue producing companies only 21 are headed by women—that’s 4%.
In politics women hold just 18% of congressional offices.
As a person, as a teacher, as a citizen, as a feminist, these statistics are deeply troubling to me. And I think they ought to trouble you as well.
How are you going to solve the debt crisis Mr. McGowan made clear last week will be your generation’s responsibility if the half of your population more likely to hold leadership positions doesn’t have sufficient educational opportunity and the half of your population more likely to receive higher education doesn’t have sufficient leadership opportunity? With the problems you’ve got to solve, you can’t afford to leave anyone behind.
The truth is we have work to do when it comes to protecting and promoting equal rights and opportunities for men and women.
So let us start today with the power conferred on us through language—by embracing the title of feminist because how we define ourselves matters. And let that title set for us an intention, a commitment to one another and the protection and promotion of each other’s equal rights and opportunities.
Let us stop telling each other we can be whatever we want to be regardless of gender, and start believing that there are as many ways of being successful in your given pursuit—whether it be in a classroom in a boardroom or at home as a parent—there are as many different ways of being successful in your given pursuit as there are people at this assembly.
Let us, men and women, boys and girls not be competitors in school, in work, in relationships, in life—but rather partners in solving the problems of this world.
So, give it a try. Tell someone you’re a feminist. Tweet it. Or put it on your Facebook status. Revive the word in its true meaning and engage openly and honestly in the discussion about gender equity that will follow, because, I promise you this, no matter what your future holds, you’re going to need one another.