Rachel Taylor
Staff Reporter

I hear a lot of people that joke about rabid feminists, proclaim that they are “equalists, not feminists” or tell me that they are not feminists because they “don’t hate men.” Well, good for you. I don’t hate men either, and I don’t think you fully understand what a feminist is. The actual definition of feminism is “the doctrine advocating social, political and all other rights of women equal to those of men.” To me, that means that feminism is not about men hating, but women loving.

I think a lot of women today can proudly proclaim that they are not feminists because they are unaware of what the women who came before them did to ensure that we have the rights that we do.

For example, have you ever heard of Alice Paul? Today, women have the right to vote, and we know this is because of the success of the Women’s Suffrage Movement. However, I feel that many do not know the actual pain that came with that movement.

Alice Paul was member of one of the more vocal sects of the women’s suffrage movement, and picketed the White House. They were cordial with president Woodrow Wilson at first, but as tensions escalated and World War I occurred, she and nine other picketers were arrested for “obstructing traffic.”

Once in prison, Paul organized a hunger strike to protest her unjust arrest and bring attention to her cause. The prison reacted by forcing tubes through her nose to pump food into her stomach. She described the experience.

 “I resorted to the hunger strike method twice … When the forcible feeding was ordered, I was taken from my bed, carried to another room and forced into a chair, bound with sheets and sat upon bodily by a fat murderer, whose duty it was to keep me still. Then the prison doctor, assisted by two woman attendants, placed a rubber tube up my nostrils and pumped liquid food through it into the stomach. Twice a day for a month … this was done.”

This force feeding negatively affected her health for the rest of her life. If you ever want to learn more about her, there is a very good movie called “Iron Jawed Angels” that chronicles her journey.

You may be thinking right now that this is all well and good, but that we no longer need feminism because women are now treated equally with men. I have a couple of responses to this. For one, I would argue that feminism is an ideal that should still be held even if equal rights are achieved. For example, if I lived in a world without murder, I wouldn’t say “I’m not anti-murder. I don’t need to be because nobody even does that anymore.” It would still be an ideal I hold that people shouldn’t go around murdering each other.

Secondly, I would argue that equal rights have not yet been achieved. After all, I still live in a world where swimmer Brock Turner stuck his fingers so far up inside his victim that her DNA was underneath his fingernails, and yet he only received six months of jail time. After all, I still live in a world where the standing president has audio recording of him stating that as a celebrity he can treat women however he wants up to.

After all, I still live in a world where when Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore was being investigated for allegations of having sexual relations with an underage girl, that Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler defended him because, hey, Mary was underage when she married Joseph. But God Bless America, women are equal, damn it!

Which brings me to my third point. I think a lot of feminism thought today is too American centric. As much as I may lament over these events, there are countries where women are forbidden to attend school. We know Malala Yousafzai was shot for her vocal support for equal schooling, but do we really think about the implications of that? There are places where children are forced into marriage, and subsequently raped, but hey. It isn’t really “rape.” That’s her husband, y’all. There are women who have to worry about having acid thrown in their faces for rejecting a man. There is just so, so much that we as American women take for granted, that being able to say you aren’t a feminist is the epitome of ignorance.