The Politics of the Veil...ed Truth

‘Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.’ – Faith Whittlesey

‘Women belong in the house… and the Senate.’ - Anonymous

On the back of a toilet door at my high school, where I am currently in my HSC year, there is a scrawled question.

Is feminism dead?

The inquiry looked very lonely, for many years, until, reading it perhaps for the hundredth time I saw that a new scrawl had been added underneath.

In some countries, it hasn’t even been born yet.

Despite the fact that globalisation has made feminism more relevant to the world’s women than ever, it has stagnated as a movement since its third wave. It seems that despite its simplicity, public intellectuals, authors, politicians and activists treat it as an untouchable subject.

Women just want access to a higher status than that which they already occupy. They want to evade discrimination and access to social mobility. They want autonomy over their own bodies. They want freedom from fear of abuse or harassment. They want, quite simply, respect, choice and control over their own fates.

The complexity of modern gender inequality means many feminists approach it in different ways. This multiplicity of milieus within the movement only serves to divide and weaken it. Though facts like Australia’s 18% pay gap are concerning, it is the entrenched, misogynistic subtleties that women don’t have a hope of dispelling in the near future.

Despite the fact that modern feminists refuse to homogenise their opinions, the most important thing they have to offer the world’s women is awareness that the job is not yet done. Ideas of false independence and optimism have been instilled among young women so that instead of blaming patriarchy or misogyny when they are legitimately wronged by them, they blame themselves. Even feminist terminology like ‘patriarchy’ has acquired clichéd connotations as radical though it continues to be relevant.

It is for these reasons that I have to believe in feminism. I have to believe that one day it will dig itself out of the grave in which it now resides, festering in petty dispute.  The women of the world need its resurrection. From young women on Sydney’s north shore who hate their cripplingly high heels but feel obligated to wear them, to schoolgirls who have acid thrown in their faces on their way to school in Afghanistan, the world’s women need feminism as their defender.

And all feminism needs is for people to believe in it.

There are many divergent opinions about what feminism is, but I believe feminism to be about choice. Recently, a young man told me that women in his area feel ‘too empowered’ because they ‘have to go to work, and some don’t want to’. To me, this is a contradiction in terms, as anyone who feels obligated to do something they don’t want to do isn’t empowered at all. If the definition of feminism is freedom to choose, women must have opportunity to work if they wish. 

Only choice can empower.