“Freedom is a woman’s right, the right of a woman to be herself even if she’s a female and to express herself.” — Jean Paul Sartre, From Man to Woman
When you read these words that make it sound like the French feminists were a bunch of whiny complainers who demanded respect, take note: the reason I’m saying this is that there’s actually another reason we need to stop looking at our liberation at a vacuum, one that doesn’t rely largely on the fact that they were women, which is that their liberation wasn’t about them. Rather, there was a history of the oppression of women and girls and women’s bodies that goes far beyond their political struggles. The fact that they also fought back against their own oppression has been forgotten. But we should acknowledge that even within radical feminism and its history, there are aspects of women’s history that are, essentially, part of the American past.
That history is something that isn’t very well explained in historical terms. But its importance is clear. So when one reads, say, the New York Times, or any of the other mainstream outlets that have chosen to gloss over America’s anti-feminist legacy, one must ask themselves: what was the reason behind the anti-men attitude? After a century and more of working on a society that systematically excludes those who are not white, straight, able-bodied, wealthy, and so on, in other words, the working class and men in the white, able-bodied, wealthy, and “white, straight, able-bodied” groups, is it fair for those who claim to speak for the rest of us to assume that they spoke on behalf of us? The way in which feminism has been used as a lens through which anti-feminist and anti-white people have used the word “feminism”—which historically has been a slur against white, heterosexual, able-bodied, affluent, and “white, straight, able-bodied” groups—has caused some people to forget that feminism has historically been defined by those who were the excluded who fought to be included in its movement.
Take, for example, the term “intersectionality,” which was popularized by the women of the New York School in the 1970s. One can imagine the irony that the feminist term for discrimination against women was taken up to attack its original use: in a postmodern version of the word “intersectionality,” some of the worst forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia
high end flapper dresses, 1920s flapper dress costume, sparkly flapper skirt, 1920 flapper costume ideas, diy flapper dress