Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Do you have to be unhappy to be a feminist?

There was an interesting response in the comments this morning:
I think you have failed to understand the difference between feminine and feminist. With the way the world works against women, why wouldn't a feminist be unhappy ?
And then I read Simcha Fisher over at the National Catholic Register and found a similar sentiment:
Some women just fall naturally into their roles, and don’t think about it at all. Maybe, as off-putting as it sounds, a feminist is always someone who feels some distress or dissatisfaction with the way women are treated—someone who agitates for change.
Those are similar but not identical sentiments. Fisher's thought is softer: "some distress or dissatsifaction". (See update below as well.)

But does feminism, or any movement for justice, come from unhappiness? is it even likely?

And if you define a feminist as someone who is unhappy, doesn't it more or less have to follow that they need to sustain this unhappiness in order to remain a feminist?

In any case, defining yourself in terms of what you don't like strikes me as a recipe for, well, as a recipe for unhappiness and then more unhappiness ad infinitum. I would think that the only kind of feminist worth being is a feminist who defined feminism first in terms of what was good about being a woman and then second in terms of how society needs to change.

UPDATE: Rereading Fisher's column, I see that I missed that she arrives at a similar conclusion:
But feminism is not all about complaining and protesting. What I would like most of all is for women to ask themselves honestly, without worrying about history or politics, “What is it that I, as a woman, can do especially well? How can I help other women do what they do well?”

Which is pretty good if we add the caveat that not all women will be good at the same things.

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