Could brands and business take a more direct role in helping women to define feminism for themselves?
Last year, the Merriam Webster dictionary named ‘feminism’ as its word of the year, after witnessing a 70% rise in searches for the term in 2017 compared to 2016. And yet last week, during a panel exploring the changing face of feminism, journalist Ella Whelan announced ‘I’m not a feminist’ to a room full of shocked women.
But Whelan isn’t the only one having a problem identifying with the movement. According to Mintel just 29% of UK women describe themselves as feminists. Almost half of all women agree that it’s too difficult to understand what being a feminist means.
‘Feminism is now a rich woman’s game, in which celebrities, commentators and politicians wax lyrical about the patriarchy to the sound of applause from Twitter and call it progress,’ Wheelan argued.
After Wheelan’s talk, I realised that we are so busy fighting amongst ourselves (in our female-only echo chambers), that we aren’t stopping to create a vision for what comes next.
Her point about feminism being ‘a rich woman’s game,’ draws light to the fact that we all access feminism from a different starting point, across a spectrum of needs. If feminism is going to accomplish anything we need to build an intersectional approach that everyone feels part of.
With many women feeling unable to identify with the movement, I wonder whether brands and business could take a more direct role in helping women to define feminism for themselves?
Maybe we should start by thinking about what we want feminism to achieve. Take power, for example. The traditional pursuit of equality has always looked at the power men have and considered how women might be able to gain an equal share of it, but in redefining feminism maybe our understanding of what power consists of should be challenged and reframed for the future.
Mary Beard points out that power is traditionally coded as masculine and it will always be insufficient for women to merely to adapt those codes; rather, the codes themselves need to be revised.
