Photo courtesy of American University
Gloria Young, director of AU’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program

by MICHELLE SEYLER

The word feminist conjures many stereotypes - angry, man-hating and bossy are just a few. Persistent stereotypes are the reason why some women don’t consider themselves feminists, even if they support their ideals, experts say.

The stereotypes can be traced back to the American women’s movement in the latter part of the 20th century, when women were forced to demonstrate and fight for equality, acting against their traditional roles in order to be heard.

But today, many women are unwilling to identify with feminism and the fight for gender equality. According to a 2001 Gallup poll, only one in four women said they consider themselves feminists.

Dr. Lucinda Peach, professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at American University, said women’s reluctance to identify with the women’s movement can be attributed in part to the negative stereotypes, which she said include such terms as “femi-Nazis, bra-burners, man-haters, lesbians, butches and dykes.”

Latifa Lyles, vice president of membership for the National Organization for Women, agreed, saying many people still assume that what feminists do is somehow threatening to society.

Although she identifies herself as a feminist, Lyles said she has friends who don’t. “My friends participate and feel the same way I do on certain issues but they do not identify as feminists,” she said.

Indeed, the same Gallup poll revealed that more women identify with women’s rights issues than the term feminism itself, according to Sarah Glazer’s Congressional Quarterly article, “The Future of Feminism.”

Opponents of women’s rights did a good job making feminism seem like something women should not want to identify with, Lyles said.

In the 1960s, when women were fighting for laws to protect them against violence, for example, they needed to demonstrate and be “militant” to get society’s attention, Lyles said. Women were calling for things they did not have, and people were resistant because it was against the status quo, she said.

“It left a bad taste in the mouth,” she said.

Indeed, the stereotype of feminists as angry women is one reason why some shy away from the term, said Professor Barrie Thorne, chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkley. The stereotype continues “because people sometimes feel threatened by social change, and also invested in current gender arrangements or ideals,” he said.

Mary Hunt, co-founder and co-director of The Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, a nonprofit based in Silver Spring, Md., agreed that mainstream media play a role in reinforcing unfair stereotypes. Some women, she said, “are plagued by the media-fueled mistake that being a feminist and being an attractive, able woman are mutually exclusive.”

Some women feel they can work independently for women’s issues without calling themselves a feminist, Lyles said. This shift reflects the changes that have been made since the women’s movement, she said. Women can speak loudly without the label, and some just do not want to be put in a box. “The groundwork has been laid and women can walk the path without having to say, ‘I am a feminist,’” she said.

But while women enjoy more freedoms and protections today than in the past, challenges remain, experts said. Globally, women are disproportionately poor and vulnerable to various kinds of gender-based violence, Thorne said. Many still lack the basics, such as food, water, housing, health care, jobs, birth control, and child care, Hunt said.

“The glass ceiling and other ‘firsts’ that women achieve in the West pale before these profound injustices,” Hunt said.

Sexual assault is also a persistent problem. A report issued in 2000 by the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that nearly one in four women reported being raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, living partner or date at some point in their lives.

In the United States, discrimination lingers in work and family life, Lyles said. Women trying to balance a career with raising children face resistance from spouses and employers, she said.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, women earned 80.4 percent as much as men in 2004. This gap is even higher for African American women, who earned 70.8 percent as much as men in the same year. The report also found that Asian women earned up to 86 percent as much as men while Hispanic women earned just 58.8 percent.

In her article “The Mommy Tax,” former New York Times financial reporter Ann Crittenden exposed the difficulty of women juggling personal and professional wants. She estimates she lost between $600,000 and $700,000 after leaving her job at the venerable newspaper to have a child. When she left, she earned a salary of about $50,000, excluding income earned from freelance, speeches and awards. Had she stayed at the paper, she would have likely taken early retirement and earned a pension, which she lost because she left before she had been there for 10 years.

For Dr. Gloria Young, director of AU’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, feminism is a set of ideas as well as a commitment to action; it simply does not fit into the stereotypes for the word.

“The best feminists are those that recognize the need for a broadly inclusive struggle against structured inequalities of all sorts,” she said in an interview. “It is a set of ideas and analysis, theory and action.”

Feminism is for everyone, women and men of all backgrounds, to help battle oppression of all kinds, Young said. It’s not just about equal pay and equality; it is a complicated issue that is too often trivialized in mainstream culture, she said. Unfortunately, mass media have contributed to the image of feminism as “man-bashing,” she said.