Feminism or Bust

Who needs feminism when we've already won the war? Oh wait—we haven't . 

If you'd have asked me two years ago, I'm not sure I would have described myself as a feminist. It's not that I didn't believe in women's rights—what modern woman doesn't?—but it was just that, well, I didn't really see the point. When I think about it now, it sounds ridiculous—I know. But it's telling of a generation like mine, who shrugged our shoulders at the thought of feminism; we were already convinced that we had won the war.
I was born in 1981, sixteen years after Barbie became an astronaut and just around the time that Sally Ride joined NASA. I might as well have come out of the womb with POSTFEMINIST etched into my forehead: by the time I reached age 1, women had surpassed men in earning college degrees; I turned 11 during the "Year of the Woman," and I remember annual trips to my dad's law office, long before Take Your Daughter to Work Day became Take Your Child [boys, included] to Work Day. All my life, I was told that men and women were equal—so equal, in fact, that it wasn't even worthy of discussion. Like most of my friends, I outpaced my brothers and many of my male peers by a landslide in school, and took on extracurricular activities by the handful. I'd had it ingrained in me that I could accomplish anything I put my mind to. And I did, without ever embracing the fabled F word, or even learning about it in school.
So for all the talk about feminism as passe, mine wasn't a generation that rejected it for its militant, man-hating connotation—but because of its success. Women were equal—duh—so why did we need feminism?

It's only recently that I, and women my age, have come to eat those words. (In the words of Clueless's Cher, our own postfeminist idol, "As if.") High on our success in academia, entering the workforce was something of a shock: we felt like outsiders in a male-dominated club. I'll spare you the depressing statistics—if you want them, there are more than enough in this week’s issue of NEWSWEEK to get you started—but the point is this: equality is still a myth. We need feminism now more than ever. "I've heard people say, 'Why are you a feminist? You can work, you can vote, you can do everything you want,'" says Jessica Valenti, the author of Full Frontal Feminism. "And just because there aren't all these laws against us—your husband can't [legally] beat you—it doesn't mean that sexism has gone away."