by JAMILA RIZVI
Marissa Mayer is not a feminist.
Marissa is the CEO of Fortune 500 company Yahoo. She is one of the world’s most successful businesswomen and when she announced last week that she is about to start a family, she got everyone’s attention. Here is a woman who really does seem to ‘have it all’ and yet on the topic of feminism, she told AOL:
“I don’t think that I would consider myself a feminist. I think that I certainly believe in equal rights, I believe that women are just as capable, if not more so in a lot of different dimensions, but I don’t, I think have, sort of, the militant drive and the sort of, the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that.”
This is a woman who has benefited enormously from the women who went before her. A woman whose achievements are noteworthy in and of themselves but at the same time, a woman whose achievements would never have been possible without the feminist movement.
Yet Marissa Mayer takes that feminist name tag, casually chucks it into the garbage and wipes her hands of it. And she is not alone in doing so.
More and more, women are distancing themselves from the term ‘feminist’.
Surveys consistently reveal that as few as 30 per cent of women in Australia, Canada, the US and the UK consider themselves ‘feminists’. And the number of self-identifying feminists only decreases when you survey younger women.
Caitlan Moran in How to be a Woman asks the respondents to these surveys:
“What part of ‘liberation for women’ is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? ‘Vogue’ by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF THE SURVEY?”
Somewhere along the way being a feminist has become associated with hating on men, rather than being equal with them. So, I can see why women like Marissa Mayer, who work in male dominated professions, simply cannot afford to attract the label of ‘feminist’. After all, success doesn’t come to the woman who throws her hand up in the air and says ‘look at me, look at me, I’m a man-hater’.
Top Comments
One small point - you've got Julie Bishop listed as one of those "feminists who inspire us". No, she's not. She's the sort of woman who needs to take your message on board.
'Ms Bishop stressed that while she recognised the women's movement and the barriers that it had faced, "feminist" is "not a term that I find particularly useful these days ... It's not because I have some sort of pathological dislike of the term. I just don't use it ... It's not part of my lexicon."'
http://www.smh.com.au/feder...
" a woman whose achievements would never have been possible without the feminist movement." What utter garbage and a complete insult to the millions of women who made a life for themselves long before the first feminists were even born. Stop perpetuating this nonsensical lie.
Tell the likes of Amelia Ehrhadt or Florence Nightingale or Joan of Arc that they couldn't possibly achieve the things they did because feminism had yet to be established.
Um, well, for a start, Amelia Earhart was flying in the 1920s and 1930s. She benefited from going to university for a time, something that was only possible because the first wave of feminists in the late 19th century fought for women's right to vote and to have access to higher education. When she finally married, she believed in equal contributions from husband and wife in the home, and guess what? She kept her own name on marriage, which sounds like quite a feminist thing to do at the time.
What if Florence Nightingale had wanted to be a doctor? Well, bad luck because nursing was a feminine vocation at the time, and most other professional spheres were closed off to women. It's wonderful that Nightingale revolutionised nursing and hygiene on the batttlefield, but she's a woman who managed to excel in the narrow sphere that women were allowed to inhabit. Feminists helped to widen it, so more women could make major contributions to humanity in areas beyond those associated with "caring" for others.
Being burnt at the stake at the age of 19, as was Joan of Arc, is also not a fantastic indicator of what life held in store for women prior to the advent of the feminist movement.