I wrote a little about Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In movement yesterday. Marisa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo, formerly of Google, who famously foreshortened her maternity leave to return to the struggling Yahoo, is another powerful Silicon Valley lady who, like Sandberg, doesn't really want to be labeled a feminist.
I get that. These ladies are around my age. And to women in their early 40s, and younger, the image of feminism can be a sort of self-serious, angry, bra-burning, placard carrying woman in a pantsuit and sensible shoes wearing very little make-up.
What a buzzkill, right? Who wants to be that angry bitchy lady?
Not I! Not Sheryl and Marisa either.
But what ladies like me and Sheryl and Marisa have to understand is that we needed that be-pants-suited lady to be a bit unpleasant in 1979 so that we, in 2013, can sit in our chairs formerly reserved for men and comfortably reject the discordant notes and angry refrains of feminism past.
But that doesn't make us not feminists. Feminists, at their core, believe in the equality of and equal advancement of female persons. Surely, that's me and that's Sheryl and that's Marisa. We know that's them because that's the way they talk. Sheryl's starting a whole marketing campaign, I mean, movement, premised on helping other women advance professionally.
That's not feminist???
Here's the problem with ladies like me and Sheryl and Marisa who either do, or have in the past (because I have, in the past), reject the word feminism as a label for our general state of opinion that women should get all the same breaks and shakes that men get.
In rejecting feminism as a descriptor of some dour, placard-waving harpy, we have adopted the image of feminism set up by feminism's opponents. Feminists are angry. Feminists hate men. Feminists hate children. Feminists don't like to look pretty. Feminists are humorless scolds. Feminists whine.
I'm not saying some feminists along the way weren't those things. I'm not even saying that some feminists today aren't those things.
But if we accept that grim definition of feminism, we're ceding ground to feminism's opponents, aren't we? We're letting them define us? And when we adopt their definition of feminism and then claim not to be feminists, what we're saying is, "Geez, you're right. Feminism is a drag, but I'm cool and you guys can totally like me. It's all those other sour ladies over there that are the problem. But you can hire me because I'm cool."
See the problem there?
Instead, may I suggest an alternate definition of feminist: Feminists love families. Feminists love their kids. Feminists love and respect their husbands and are loved and respected back. Feminists are intelligent and competent. Feminists want everyone to be treated equally, even men. Feminists want you to succeed.
Nice, huh? Feminism without the frowny face.
So it's okay, Sheryl and Marisa, smile, you're feminists, just like me.
