On coming to terms with the need for feminism

For as long as I can remember I have struggled with calling myself a feminist.

There are two reasons for this. One perhaps slightly more acceptable than the other. The first relates to a pathological desire to avoid any type of mainstreamness. So everyone is a feminist? Then (thought haughty 15-year-old me), I’ll be the weird girl who wants to be a nun or a stay-at-home mum with 5 children (true story).

My other excuse has maybe more politically correct and humble flavours. Just like I have had a tendency to minimise my own predicaments pitting them against those of others, I could never prevent a vague feeling of shame when trying to justify going on a crusade for women’s rights. My thoughts went something like this: ‘In our day and age, in our comfortable, cushiony Western society?? What on earth do we have to complain about?’ I could feel on me the disapproving look of an imaginary panel of judges composed of feminine figures from past, much less forgiving ages and/or other geographical locations (hello, Saudi Arabia), rolling their eyes at us 21st century spoiled girls moaning about gendered pronouns and stuff. I mean, we got the vote, didn’t we? We (almost) have equal salaries, right? We can even drive cars. Think about this!

So what changed?

As I write this (entirely coincidentally) on International Women’s day, I have woken up to the painful realisation that entitlement is not acknowledging the need for feminism in our society. Entitlement is being arrogant enough to think any of us can afford not to be a feminist.

Because we have failed visionaries like Woolf, who in 1928 wrote:

In a hundred years, women will…take part in all the activities that were once denied them. The nursemaids will heave coal. The shopwoman will drive an engine.

-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

This timespan has been spent, and most legal obstacles have been lifted. Yet, in effect, many of the dynamics Woolf mentions are still very much a reality (albeit a slightly less explicitly enforced one).

As she remarked, we can remark, too, that we are still not complete, still not independent: we are props, meant to support, to highlight, to grow, to bend and disappear and sacrifice whenever needs must. If we are allowed to dream of having a purpose of our own, it is only acceptable as it is temporary. Double standards remain cryingly blatant: a man with a passion is never called selfish.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice his natural size.

There lies our true purpose. Beware of daring to question it. Independence is not our natural state. In order to gain it, we need to work twice as hard. Leadership positions are made inaccessible by family obligations and trust issues, STEM positions by lack of role models and lifelong brainwashing that us girls are ‘bad at maths and good at languages’.

We are preys or petitioners. We walk on eggshells. We avoid being loud. We ask permission. Because, given the reasons above, success and independence are often hard to come by, we are at the mercy of the other half. Unless we are lucky enough to be in the (still rare enough today) position enjoyed by Woolf herself, who thanks to a generous defunct aunt, had ‘money, and a room of her own’.

I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to offer me.

I’m not there yet. Most of us aren’t. I watch my back when I walk the streets. I please and flatter and refrain from making scenes because the risk never seems worth it. I struggle with self-confidence in what I do, having followed one path over another at 15 and finding myself still catching up fifteen years later as a result.

So yes, I will be a feminist, if that means the next little girl chooses to do maths.