The mission..

A lecturer of mine once asked a packed auditorium of second year students to raise their hands if they thought of themselves as being a “feminist”.

I didn’t.

I was too terrified that I would be classed as a man-hater, as someone who doesn’t wear a bra or shave their legs, or that I would be called upon to explain just why it was that I thought that, as a woman, I didn’t already have the same rights as a man.

After all, it isn’t the 1960’s anymore. Women can vote, work and chose whether or not to marry and have babies. Haven’t we already won the war?

One of my grandmothers recently boasted to me that women nowadays can have it all. “Of course there is gender equality”, she reasoned, “women don’t need a weekly stocking-allowance built into their pay packets anymore!”.

And she might be right. But sexism never stopped at stockings.

I’m starting this project because I want to explore the ways in which both sexism and feminism manifest themselves in today’s society. I want answers to why I couldn’t raise my hand in that lecture and why so many women (and men) seem to think that we have already achieved equality. Is there any way forward for feminism? Beyond finishing my much-thumbed-at copy of the feminine mystique, is there any other way that I be a part of the movement and help to achieve REAL equality? Or was my grandmother right afterall?