#HipHop4Her: What It Means To be A Feminist

With the recent wake of the Planned Parenthood and abortion debacle, women everywhere have began pondering what it means to be a feminist. Should more feminists rise to the occasion and speak for women everywhere? It’s hard to pinpoint who is actually a feminist when there are so many posers.

The Suffragettes are the women who started the feminist movement in the late 19th century and early 20th century. After failing to receive a response from Liberal politicians about a woman’s right to vote, they took it upon themselves to hold up a banner that read “Votes for Women.” That marked the beginning of women empowerment. Although women have successfully received the right to vote in 1920, there are still issues dealing with women’s rights and inequality. Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, Diane Von Furstenberg, Lena Dunham and Angelina Jolie are current feminists, to name a few.

Beyonce posing as Rosie the Riveter, a fictional feminist character (taken from bitchmedia.org)

It’s easy to entitle yourself as a feminist rather than to actively be one. What does it mean to actually be one? What are the qualifications needed to actually sit at the feminists’ table? To look up the definition of feminists isn’t enough to clarify what their role is in society. Simply put a feminist is someone who supports feminism. Anyone can support feminism, so does that mean they should call themselves feminists or are there certain actions involved to provide certification. Being a feminist shouldn’t be a tough task seeing that Wikihow was able to provide us with nine easy steps.

Feminism isn’t about walking around as if every man is evil and out to ruin your social standing. It’s about acknowledging that there are gender inequality issues happening around the world and it affects people (mainly women!). Feminism is about empowering other women instead of bringing them down. Lastly, feminists aim to change the conditions for women.

So why does the word feminism bring about a bad taste in people’s mouths? Feminists are seen as women who hate men and all that they stand for. But if that were true, there wouldn’t be any male feminists (yes they exist). However, there have been situations where women have made comments about men that would cause people to feel this way. Such as “I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He’s just incapable of it,” said by Barbara Jordan, former Congresswoman. Feminism isn’t actually about that, but when people want to paint a negative picture of feminism they use the most outrageous feminists and their actions to promote it .