#suffragette-meaning-history

[calliopechild]

Listen, I wouldn't normally cite Cosmo as support for an argument, but I can't think of anything that sums up the dangers of the stay-at-home girlfriend/tradwife nonsense like this quote:

“If you give a man the power to feed you, he also has the power to starve you.”

[ftmtftm]

Feminism has always, always had a history with Racism and White Supremacy - particularly in a way that promotes fascist leaning "Protection for Me and Mine" type "activism".

There have always been several Upper Class, White, Women at the helm of Feminist movements and it is something Poor, Working Class, Women of Color have been vocally criticizing since the First Wave.

I mean, US Americans, did you not learn about Sojourner Truth? Have you not read "Ain't I A Woman?"? It is one of the most famous early accounts of the racialized nature of gender. It perfectly highlights the way the social aspects of gender have always been barred from People of Color in a way they aren't barred from White People in a firsthand historical account.

Women's Suffrage, and subsequently the First Wave of Feminism was an actively Racially Segregated movement. White Suffragettes intentionally campaigned for themselves and themselves only because they thought that campaigning for Black, Immigrant, and Indigenous Women would undermine their own movement. They did not seek liberation for women, they sought the Systemic, Institutional Power of their White Male Peers and they got it - by intentionally leaving Women of Color behind them.

This is most evident in the fact that White Women received the right to vote in 1920, but Black Women did not receive the right to vote until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. Almost 50 years later. That is over half a lifetime. This was also only approximately 2-3 years before Radical Feminism and the Second Wave began around 1967~1968.

If you think racial segregation and racism in the Feminist Movement ended with Black Women's suffrage and completely dissipated within the two years it took for the Second Wave to pick up it's feet, you are naïve at best and actively racist yourself at worst. The Women's Liberation Movement / Radical Feminism have always been White Woman's movements riding the coattails of the Suffragette's racism.

Look at the website for the Women's Liberation Front. WoLF is one of the original Radical Feminist organizations. It was founded in the late 60's and is one of the largest Radfem organizations to date. Now. Look at their board. Look at the photos of women they choose to include across their site. Look at the women who are speaking at their events. Beyond one or two token Black Women, it is a sea of Whiteness.

You know who is a special advisor to WoLF and the founder of the group "Standing for Women"? Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker. Kellie-Jay is the woman who popularized "Woman means adult human female" as an anti-trans slogan. Kellie-Jay is also real good buddies with - you guessed it! Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists!

WoLF also takes money from the Alliance Defending Freedom, (ADF) a Right Wing Christian Organization, and it's members have worked directly with the Heritage Foundation, a Conservative organization founded during the Reagan Presidency.

Radical Feminism as a political movement cares about the lives and held power of White Women under the guise of "Women's Liberation" in the exact same way as their foremothers, the Suffragettes. It's a foundationally White Supremacist movement. Black Feminists, Indigenous Feminists, Immigrant Feminists, and Colonized Feminists have been talking about this for over a century but it falls on White ears so why would they listen.

[honeytonedhottie]

HONEYS IT GIRL MAGAZINE march edition⋆.ೃ࿔*:･🎀

welcome back to honeys it girl magazine, this is the march catalog. get ready for the inside scoop on data that i've collected, things i've learned/started doing, and just general info like that organized in kind of a teen-magazine inspired fashion. a magazine for it girls ✨ and now please enjoy, the it girl magazine.

MUST HAVE FASHION ITEMS ;

for march/spring fashion in general its so fun to dress like a winx doll or a fairy. i feel magical in flowy material that shimmers, adorable mini skirts and accessories like gold bangles and waist chains.

when im going shopping, im mainly buying clothes for hot girl summer bcuz im just so excited and can't wait. plus i wanna be prepared yk? some patterns that i've noticed in my shopping patterns are that im buying lots of camisoles and sleeveless shirts.

also i've been looking for cute shorts and low waisted jeans. im looking for cute things to embroider onto the jeans and shorts to personalize them and make them feel more "summery".

something that i started was a FASHION BINDER. i followed @prissygrlsorority's idea for a fashion binder and started my own and so far im having SUCH an amazing time. i want to take time and perfect my binder but so far its going well ✨

spring traditionally has LOTS of pastel colors so formulate a color scheme based on pastel colors that look good on you. some rly good examples for color scheme this spring include

something to note for spring fashion specifically is to not look for colors that are specifically dark or bland, the idea behind spring fashion is giving fresh flowerbed, something REFRESHING.

FOR THE BLOG ;

i've been working this month on a larger project that i think you guys would really enjoy and find useful. it'll be released on the first of march and i'll announce it exactly a week before.

additionally during the month of march i expanded my blog by setting up a membership system and facilitating a way for u guys to tip my work and support my blog. i've also offered my services if u might want them.

for the month of april u can expect a variety of content but i wanted to get input from you guys on what you'd like to see the most so i'll be releasing a poll for april content later today.

HOT GIRL SUMMER PREP ;

look, ik its only march but hot girl summer is right around the corner so here are some ways that you can prepare yourself for the summer, so that you can be your most glowy, confident, and radiant self ✨

you can moisturize ur skin with the most sweet smelling and extravagant body butters and creams, but if ur skin is dull and dead you won't get that GLOW that u so desperately seek

for this i recommend juicing (i'll get more into health in the wellness girlies section) and start dry brushing to promote blood circulation and remove dead skin cells from ur body, leaving ur skin feeling baby smooth. also i recommend using a body scrub 2-3x a week depending on the sensitivity of your skin.

if u liked this hot girl summer prep section u can continue reading right one of my recent posts where i went more in depth about how u can prepare for ur hot girl summer.

OH HOW I ADORE BEING A WOMAN ;

this months catalog was in collaboration with @pastel-charm-14 and this section of the magazine was written by her ✨🫶🏽

march brings more than just the promise of spring, it's also a time to celebrate the amazing women who've shaped history. as women's history month rolls around, we can't help but reflect on what it means to be a part of this incredible legacy.

think about those bold suffragettes who fought tooth and nail for our right to vote. they weren't just distant figures in history books; they were real women with fire in their hearts and determination in their eyes. and what about the everyday heroes—the moms, sisters, and friends who quietly make the world a better place?

they might not be famous, but they have such an incredible impact. so here's to us—here's to the laughs, the tears, and everything in between. here's to celebrating our history, our struggles, and our triumphs—because they're what make us who we are.

cheers to being women, and cheers to the journey ahead. being a woman isn't always easy, but i know wouldn't have it any other way.

FOR THE WELLNESS GIRLIES ;

something that has come to my attention is that i drink a lot of fluids early in the morning. i've known that it was good to drink fluids in the morning, specifically water, but i wanted to have an in depth explanation of why it was good. so i googled it ofc.

ur body is dehydrated while u sleep so when u drink water first thing in the morning it helps ur body to recover from the temporary dehydration.

your body absorbs fluids faster in the morning on an empty stomach. so my routine has been, once i wake up to have an 8 oz cup of water, but water isnt the only thing that i drink in the morning.

bcuz fluids are so quickly and efficiently absorbed in ur body in the morning, you can drink other healthy drinks and reap the benefits. some things that i drink in the morning are ;

chlorophyll - this makes me feel so clean, it boosts red blood cells production and helps with glowy skin and weight loss. plus after i drink it i feel so clean, like a fresh out of the shower feeling

ginger shots - these are pretty lethal but they r so good for you. ginger shots are rly good for digestion issues and bloating, and it also boosts ur immunity which is always good

kombuchas - this one i dont drink on an empty stomach, but drinking kombucha in the morning though rly helps with bloating and reduces inflammation, leaving me looking snatched

FUN QUIZZES, VIDEO ESSAYS, RECIPES AND GAMES ;

what kind of flirt are you? - seventeen magazine

whats ur girl power anthem? - seventeen magazine

what kind of dessert are you? - queendom

FOOD FOR THOUGHT ;

this is the video that im going to be thinking about in order to write this section and here's what i thought about it.

ok so the conflict is unique but personally if i was the husband i wouldn't be mad bcuz its not like the wife was IN the bed with the brother in law 😭 she just said that he could use it cuz he was so sleepy. i think that what she did was nice and the husband could've communicated that he was uncomfortable in a better way then to get angry. but in that same breath the wife knows how strongly her husband feels about things like this so maybe she could've been more considerate. like bring out a pillow and some blankets for the brother in law and let him rest on the couch or whatever 💀.

if u thought differently or if u wanna elaborate on that and have more of a discussion feel free to share ur own opinions and thoughts in the comment section.

[thethirdromana]

LGBT+ Victorians

Since it's Pride Month and Dracula Daily is going to be pretty quiet for most of June, I thought it might be good timing for a little 1890s queer history. Plus I wanted to give a bit more fuel to everyone's queer headcanons for Dracula characters!

Popping this under a cut because it's long.

The start of queer identity This is a massive generalisation, but for most of British history, being queer was about action and not about identity. The idea that people who wanted to have gay sex belonged to a specific group that was different to other people didn't exist for the most part, at least not at a societal level. (This was also true - more generalisation - for much of the western world. It was very much not true for large swathes of the rest of the world who thought about this in entirely different and varied ways).

By the second half of the 19th century, that was starting to change. People like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in Germany (on the left), and John Addington Symonds (middle) and Edward Carpenter (right) in the UK started to think of themselves as homosexuals - Ulrichs coined the term "Urning" which became "Uranian" in English. This period marked the beginning of organised campaigning for LGBT rights in the UK, though specific campaigning for lesbian and trans rights came later.

This means that in the 1890s setting of Dracula, any characters might think of themselves as "Uranian" or "Sapphic", or they might not yet have picked up that way of thinking. At a guess I'd expect Seward or van Helsing to be particularly aware of the new theory around homosexuality.

LGBT rights in law It was a mixed time for the legal position of LGBT people. The death penalty for sodomy was abolished in 1861 in England, Wales and Ireland (1889 in Scotland), and replaced with minimum 10 years hard labour. In 1871, two amab people, Boulton and Park, were tried for dressing as women, but the judge ruled that this was not an offence under English law (though he also said that he thought it should be).

On the left: Fanny Park and Stella Boulton; on the right, the Illustrated Police News' depiction of their arrest.

And in 1885, the Criminal Law Amendment Act reduced the minimum sentence for gross indecency from 10 years' hard labour to two.

That said, before that act was introduced, there had to be a witness to any sodomy or gross indecency for it to be prosecuted. The Criminal Law Amendment Act changed that, so all private acts, arguably even love letters, could be prosecuted. So despite the reduction in sentences, this change to the law made life harder for queer men in the 1880s and 1890s. From a Dracula perspective, this means that people would be much more careful about what they wrote down - significant for a novel made up of documents.

Lesbian sex has never been illegal in the UK. (The idea that this was because Queen Victoria didn't believe in lesbianism is a myth). But in the 18th century there were a series of prosecutions of afab people who lived as men and married women. They were prosecuted for fraud when their birth sex was discovered, because they were perceived as having defrauded their wives. There were far fewer such prosecutions in the 19th century, possibly because of the belief that it was better not to create the publicity of a trial.

Victorian WLW There are HEAPS of notable Victorian lesbians and bisexual women, including a lot in the suffragette movement. So I've chosen a few examples based on there being good images on Wikipedia.

From left to right:

Margaret Benson and Janet (Nettie) Gourlay were Egyptologists who met at the excavation of the Precinct of Mut. Almost all of Benson's family preferred same-sex relationships.

Louisa Baring, Lady Ashburton, was briefly married to a man, but when she was widowed, began a 25-year relationship with American sculptor Harriet Hosmer. Harriet described herself as Louisa's "hubby".

Matilda Hays was a mixed-race writer and actress who had a relationship with American actress Charlotte Cushman, with whom she's pictured. Hays aimed to use her writing to improve the condition of women.

Victorian MLM Again, I've chosen people to highlight through the very representative method of good photos.

From left to right:

Edward Carpenter was a socialist, poet, philosopher and early gay rights activist who met his partner George Merrill on a train. The two men came from very different backgrounds: Carpenter from privilege, and Merrill from the Sheffield slums. Their 40-year relationship inspired the ending of EM Forster's novel Maurice.

Charles Ricketts and Charles Haslewood Shannon were artists who met as teenagers and lived together for more than 50 years. In the Times' obituary for Ricketts in 1931, their relationship was described as being "as remarkable as any of the great historic friendships, or the finest Darby and Joan examples of wedded felicity".

Ned Warren and John Marshall were art collectors who together were largely responsible for the Roman and Greek Art Collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Marshall married Warren's cousin, Mary Bliss, but only on the condition that the marriage would not be consummated. All three lived together until they died and were buried in the same tomb.

Trans Victorians I wrote last year about Dr James Barry, a Victorian trans man, in the context of whether Jack Seward could be trans. (The post is from October, but spoiler free).

Eliza Edwards was an actress who died in 1833 at the age of 24. Her body was autopsied, and discovered to be - in the words of the autopsy - "a perfect man", which had apparently not been known to any of her friends or colleagues.

Harry Stokes was a bricklayer in Manchester, who was outed as trans in newspaper articles during his divorce 1838 and again after his death in 1859. He became something of a figure of fun after being first outed, but met another woman who lived with him as his life, and was broadly accepted by the local community as a trans man.

It was only through chance that James, Eliza and Harry were outed (and in James Barry's case, despite considerable efforts on his part). There might well have been hundreds or thousands more people like them.

And Boulton and Park, who I mentioned above, have usually been treated as transvestite men by historians, but could equally - had they had the terms themselves - be identified as trans women. Some contemporary newspaper articles even used she/her pronouns for them.

Asexual Victorians Asexuality is tricky to spot in history, though even in 1896, German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was identifying it as a distinct phenomenon. What we do know is that more than 10% of women and a little under 10% of men in the 1890s never married, and in some cases that may well have been because they were asexual or aromantic.

From a Dracula perspective, family rumour held that Florence Stoker declined sex with her husband after the birth of their child. That may or may not have been true (and there's a ring of aphobia to some of the family's claims) but it shows how asexual people might also be found in apparently conventional marriages.

Sources British Library: A Short History of LGBT Rights in the UK British Library: A timeline of LGBT communities in the UK Girlfriends of Dorothy: A Timeline of Lesbian Rights UK 1601 - 2020s (note: the site intends to be trans-inclusive, but genders John Barry as female.) Open University: Lesbianism and the criminal law of England and Wales “Constant Companions” and “Intimate Friends”: The Lives and Careers of Maggie Benson and Nettie Gourlay Sapphic sexuality: lesbian myth and reality in art and sculpture British Library: Transgender identities in the past Warp and Weft: The extraordinary life of Harry Stokes British Academy: Happy Families? Coitus Interruptus: Sex, Bram Stoker, and Dracula 'Missing person' Florence Stoker added to DIB

[she-is-ovarit]

I love this. I posted a little about this before, but wanted to expand. Women's history fact of the day:

Women of the Neolithic era in particular loved keeping pets and it was common for them to trap small animals - such as cats - and adopted as pets.

In the Amazon region, where hunting and gathering and subsistence horticulture is still practiced by a handful of surviving Amerindian groups, hunters commonly capture young wild animals and take them home where they are then adopted as pets, usually – although not invariably – by women.

There's a theory that cats may have domesticated themselves by being attracted to human villages that produced grain and seeds and attracted rodents, and then the bolder cat clans survived under natural selection. Or, alternatively, women domesticated cats.

Based on these sorts of observations, it could be argued that the domestication of F.s. libyca occurred where and when it did because tamed wildcats were already an integral feature of village life as a result of people actively adopting, hand-rearing and socialising young wildcats to keep as pets

The relationship between cats and women stretch back since the stone age. They were burned with us during the witch trials (rabbits commonly too!), suffered from abuse and treated as property with us by men ambivalent to us under religions such as Christianity, were associated as us within medieval folklore and as a metaphor for female sexuality and anatomy ("pussy"), and continue to be associated with us today.

Women's independence from man is derogatorily associated with cats ("crazy cat lady"), a nod to female (and feline) separatism. It's tendency to groom itself frequently was also associated with cleanliness and domesticity, and it was frequently used in posters by anti-suffragettes symbolically to denote that women were simple and delicate, that women's suffrage was as absurd as cat suffrage. Some suffragettes took back the meaning of the cat, adopting a (black!) cat named Saxon as their official mascot.

They survived male oppression throughout history, for thousands of years, right beside us and within our arms.

[useless-englandfacts]

one of the things i find most interesting about the protests in france at the moment is this idea that the british would supposedly never do such a thing, because it makes me think about how different this country might be if we taught history properly.

by which i mean instead of just teaching kids about kings and queens and world war two, we taught them about chartists and suffragettes (and not just the polite, middle-class suffragettes), the peterloo massacre, the poll tax riots, the peasants' revolt, the general strikes of 1842 and 1926, the bristol bus boycott, the brixton uprising... i could go on but you get the picture.

[miracles-and-butterflies]

[Reincarnation AU]

Luisa, scrolling through YouTube: I hate this. What do you mean “Isabela sings Surface Pressure” or “Camilo sings Waiting On a Miracle”? What the actual fuck?

Isabela: Lmao, I’d need your whole song to be higher for my soprano.

Luisa: Um, forget that, what about the fact you can’t relate to our specific traumas? You already have your own fucking song about your own trauma, why do you need mine?!?

Dolores: I completely agree with Luisa’s points. The songs were made specifically for each of you, not anyone else.

Mirabel: I too hate the fact that everything I have must be stolen from me. Thank God, I can sue people and have it taken down.

Mirabel: Jokes aside, we need to talk about the attention on male characters. Camilo has two minutes of screen time and zero plot relevance, yet is more beloved than the four of us combined. Why? Because he is male. The same case can be made for Bruno. Every female character in our film is completely villainised and any misstep is blown out of proportion. ‘Camilo’ singing our songs, being forced to fit our parts, is proof enough of that.

Mirabel: The erasure and hatred of female characters in this supposedly ‘modern feminist era’ is an actual joke - we had more feminism in our rural town in Colombia that was stuck in the 1890s! And that was before the feminist movement picked up traction. All this love for men, character or otherwise, drives me insane. I don't give a damn about Alexander Hamilton and his measly papers, where is the acknowledgment for Kateryn Parr as one of the first women to publish a book? Emily Davison is dumbed down to an idiot for what she did for the Suffragette movement, Mary Wollstonecraft's work for what became feminism is left unsaid, Simone de Beauvoir—

Dolores: Okay! That's enough history for today. Thank you, Mirabel.

Isabela, filming on her phone: No, let her keep going, Diane would love this

[theriverdraws]

Minor rant: one tiny thing that annoyed me on the reboot's theme song.

(I actually still enjoy the reboot because of pure self indulgence. They could just animate the Warners on silent shorts doing nothing for hours and I would eat it uppp).

Now, the reboot isn't perfect by any means, and there are more stuff that slightly bothers me, (again, I'm very easy to please) but one thing that just really tickles my brain in the wrong annoying way, is replacing "Dot is cute" with "Dot has wit".

..why?

I understand there needed to be changes from the original that didn't age well, which is why the sexual harassment jokes had to be taken out obviously, and Hello Nurse couldn't appear anymore. (I'm still pissed they couldn't just, do something else with her character instead of taking her out. But this reboot wasn't the first or last to do this kinda thing, so I'm not gonna complain too hard about that).

But Dot's character was never itself a problem?? She was never treated lesser than her brothers in anyway, shape, or form. She wasn't less zany, or less smart, or less annoying than any of her brothers. Wakko is the more naive of the three, even.

Dot being cute is part of her character, and I don't think that's inherently sexist. It's the "little cute innocent character is actually a MENACE" trope. If Dot was a cute little boy instead, it would change literally nothing. But despite all of that they just had to go "gIrLBoSS beam" because that's true feminism according to hollywood. Girls can't be hyperfeminine anymore.

I don't mind the show's jab at sexism because it's just social criticism right, it was always in the show so I don't really care. And her ""feminist songs"" don't bother me, I like them a lot. The suffragette one was cool, and the cartoon spin on it made me very happy jsjen (it even got reposted on Twitter on the #standwithanimation tag), and the First Lady one is just a history song, a common Animaniacs move, nothing to complain about it there. (The one promo of the social media on Dot going on an unwarranted feminist speech of being more than just cute was so forced tho. SHE CAN SHOW IT WITHOUT SAYING IT. Y'KNOW.. LIKE IT ALWAYS WAS??)

But it's just this one thing that makes it sounds like "oh, we're so woke, we fixed her so good" when there was nothing to fix about her character in this way specifically??? GIRLS CAN BE CUTE AND SMART, IT'S CRAZY I KNOW.

[susansontag]

I think people who are actually serious about using the term gender-critical (especially those who make claims to using it in a merely descriptive way) need to be honest and acknowledge that broadly speaking, every wave of western feminism excluding the third wave(? which there’s still no real consensus on when that began or how it’s different from the second wave, but that’s a question for a few generations down the line) has been ‘gender-critical’, in the sense that it’s been about the advancement of female people.

the second sex should be considered a ‘gender-critical’ text, as should the suffragist movement. of course it can be argued that they were only incidentally ‘gender-critical’, because ideas about gender identity hadn’t yet the achieved the prominence it now has in the public consciousness. but regardless, if you’re going to be using the term descriptively, and many people make claims that this term is merely meant to be descriptive, then you should use it that way, and that means applying it fairly. if you really believe western feminism has had a crucial issue in not including ideas of gender identity from the beginning, even if this was solely accidental, then you should be all-encompassing in your critique of it. it’s not as though many modern feminists of all shades don’t argue past incarnations of feminism have had blindspots - most feminists probably believe it has.

I think the real reason this term isn’t applied fairly is because people who claim to use this term descriptively are, let’s be honest, using it as a pejorative. and therefore acknowledging honestly how most of the history of feminist thought has not really included a concept of gender identity, because it simply didn’t exist in people’s minds as it does now, would be a bit inconvenient, because 1. it would mean feminism had to have been based in part on a different way of recognising the difference between women and men, and 2. if ‘GC’ was applied fairly, it would look too much like a war was being waged on the foundations of feminism itself, and no one really likes the look of those optics.

but many movements and ideas in the history of humanity have been felled by later generations in the grounds that they were offensive, ill-informed, or blind to various factors later regarded as important. so why not feminism? if it really had been so incorrect about something now deemed so fundamental, why not let it burn? why not write the book about how simone de beauvoir was misled? why not the suffragettes? I would respect critics much more if they were honest and consistent. if it’s so wrong, say it with your whole chest and defend it.

[fanartka]

I love so many different ships with Strange and each relationship develops so differently. I like Clea Strange because she is always Strange's equal, she is not a damsel in distress, but in the same way studies magic and fighting and can take on the responsibilities of protecting her world or Earth.

I don’t know in which country what the habits are, but here in Ukraine, on March 8th, men usually congratulate women something like “you are such gentle and beautiful flowers, thank you for decorating our lives so much, inspiring us so much, take care of us. We wish you to always remain so beautiful, we wish you to find true female happiness (this means finding a man and getting married successfully), etc. " Then they give us a frying pan or some household item, as if this is exactly the one thing that every woman dreams of, flower and sometimes husbands take the responsibility of cooking on this day. Wow.

Of course, this is not done out of malice. None of them, or almost no one, I’m sure, wants to somehow offend a woman with such behavior, but just think about this.

March 8 is the day of women’s solidarity in the struggle for equal rights, for the right to be not only a muse and “hearth keeper,” but also for the right to simply be human. for the right that women, those who literally create and raise humanity, throughout the history of mankind, did not have, except for small historical moments of relaxation in some societies, and then very weak ones. And in many countries they still don’t. And it’s incredibly wild and painful.

This is the right to be not only a flower and decoration of a man’s life, but also to decide your own destiny. And all we hear in this day is "be kind as spring, be gentle as flower, here's a pan, isn't it everything you wish?"

I am so happy to live in a time when I can live my own life and earn my own living. My father could not marry me off against my will, and, knowing his character, he would have done so if he had the opportunity. I have the right to manage my property and have received an education. Such simple joys of a free person that many women did not even dare to dream about a hundred years ago.

I would like to thank all the women who made this possible for us, suffragettes, feminists, who demanded equal pay, demanded to reduce the working day from 16 to 10 hours, demanded voting rights. They were beaten and thrown into prison, barbarically force-fed when they went on hunger strike. Society hounded and mocked them, just google the caricatures of those years.

The most offensive thing is that women themselves were part of the bullying society, those who were taught to be obedient and comfortable and who taught this to their daughters, spreading from century to century the ideology of second-classness, which is very destructive for women. And even now in many countries, when terrible stories happen like a father and his sons trying to kill their daughter because she married whoever she wanted, the mother supports the killers, and not her own child, because the shame is on the woman. Always on the woman, no matter what they do to her. Being raped is a shame, being childless is a shame, giving birth out of wedlock is a shame. She left her husband who beats her - it’s a shame. She wore pants instead of a dress with a corset - well, you get the idea.

So many unfortunate broken flowers throughout history.

And just imagine how much faster humanity could develop if not only one half of humanity were allowed to create and learn! Look at the fandom artists and writers, most of them are girls. Now remove all the girls from the list of all fandom artists, leaving only the guys, and you will understand what humanity has been deprived of for thousands of years. Guys, your work is also wonderful, I have nothing against you. But I just see how many artists there are women, it’s just 70 or 80 percent, at least of those whose work I see on social networks or on Pinterest. We had frightening losses that we did not even notice, and many beautiful drawings and many wonderful stories withered and decayed in home notebooks and albums in attics, because women were not published. Only children's books, that's all you're good for.

I like living in this time.

I like to see how younger couples around me are gradually getting used to the fact that household responsibilities are not only the woman’s business, but also the man’s. And really, how weird it was. When a man worked at work and a woman at home, this could still be dealt with. But when both work, to think that after work a woman should bring groceries, cook food, clean, do homework with the children while the man rests after work - this is nonsense! But our women have lived like this for almost a hundred years, and many still live by this ingrained habit and teach their daughters this, “otherwise the husband will leave for another, a better and more comfortable housewife.” When will this end?!

I see many film studios, including Marvel, trying to be on trend and in line with the spirit of the times, but doing it so ineptly and without the slightest understanding that it causes more frustration than gratitude.

It’s the same as if you asked for bread in a store, but they covered it with cream and glitter, wrapped it in pink packaging and didn’t let you carry it yourself, otherwise it would suddenly be too heavy and you wouldn’t be able to handle it. And we just need simple, honestly earned bread.

Often in films they try to show a strong female character as some kind of Mary-Sue, an imba, a standard Superman, but in a skirt. And to emphasize this, such heroines are shown as almost super-cool, emotionless robots against the backdrop of stupid, weak men.

But this is not what we would like to see, not what women and humanity need.

I can't speak for all women, but I think we don't want to be the strongest males. We want to be able to become as strong as our character will allow, if we want to. We don't want to be stronger than anyone, we don't need to surround ourselves with weaklings to feel strong. We want an equal partner who will never say something like "I'm a man, so I'm in charge. You're a woman, so submit and don't talk back."

It's scary to think how many women still live in a world where they are forbidden to live their lives the way they want; where they are tortured and no one, not family, not the state, will protect them, because this is “the norm and traditions.”

So on the holiday of March 8, I wish all women that they live in a world where their equal rights with men will become such a common thing that they will never think that it could be otherwise. and men, knowing that a woman can divorce and leave him if he offends her, will become less aggressive and more understanding. I’m not saying that all men are like this, but, unfortunately, very often practice shows that as soon as a woman becomes dependent on a man, for example, while caring for a baby, husbands begin to take advantage of this and behave... as they should not there would be.

So, congratulations with March 8, girls. Remember the millennia that we lived without rights. Appreciate the rights we have now. Help those who still don’t have them. And be happy living your life the way you want.

P.S. I may make mistakes in English, I will be grateful if you point them out to me if you notice them.

Also feel free to write anything, share a thought or story if you wish.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

I’m a bit confused by your username

Feminism is a movement that’s defined by the desire for all people to be seen as equal, including men, women, and others. There’s extreme cases, like radfems and “kill all men” etc, but at its core feminism is a movement that’s supposed to embody positivity and equality, not hate

Do you really consider it a hate movement or do you only consider the extreme cases that way?

You're mistaken in a very fundamental way: radical feminism is not an "extreme case"; it's rather the bedrock of all feminist assumptions about the world that simply become more diluted and palatable to a larger number of people the closer to the mainstream they get.

Radical feminism is not fringe feminism but core feminism: All of the beliefs that the moderate foot soldiers of that movement obediently march along to and mindlessly assert to be true, such as "The Patriarchy", "rape culture", "gender is a social construct", "The Glass Ceiling", even the belief in a pay gap, 60 years after it was made illegal across all western nations to pay a woman less than a man for the same work... all of these originate with radical feminist thinkers and writers back in the 1970s onwards and are still chiefly propagated by radical feminists today.

The "why can't we all just get along" feminists don't teach gender studies classes. The "why can't we all just get along" feminists didn't write the textbooks taught in those gender studies classes. They don't organize the marches or start online forums devoted to feminism, etc. The more fanatically taken over by the false assumptions about reality that a person is, the more radical that person becomes and the more deeply involved and influential in the feminist movement that person becomes.

None of modern feminist thought originates with the moderates. There's a case to be made that the movement was for a time a much more moderate, vague and well-meaning ideal, post-suffragettes and pre-radfems, but that was before it was infiltrated and taken over by Marxist radicals around the turn of the 1970s. From then till now, all feminist theory can be most clearly understood as Marxist explanations about reality but with the word "class" replaced with "gender" and the words "the bourgeoisie" replaced with "men".

So, instead of saying all human history can be best explained as a class war, all human history can thereafter be best explained as a gender war. Both of these positions are obviously and self-evidently false, or, at the very, very, very least, so flawed and incomplete as an explanation of human society to be dangerously misleading and terribly destructive: the majority of the day-to-day reality of all the tens of thousands of years of human history can be much more realistically depicted as billions of men and women working together to care for and protect each other and the children they produced, which ultimately resulted in each of us.

Feminism, particularly of the past 50 years, is founded upon a narrative of the world that divides all women and men up into ‘innocent victims’ and ‘privileged oppressors’, and as such has done more to foster hate and drive a wedge between the sexes than any other political movement in history. Instead of seeing men and women as brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends and lovers, feminism sees only a gender war that it alone started and it alone propagates, with no realistic end ever in sight. 

Even fairly moderate feminists today think and speak of men almost exactly the way Nazis thought and spoke of Jews, and that’s why I say feminism is a hate movement.

[menalez]

I reject feminism not because of some misguided belief that women belong in the kitchen, or because I think women should be subordinate to men. American feminism, as a long and complex ideology spanning centuries, is often divided into “waves”. Each is a movement within a movement, all dedicated to making life better for women, but with slightly different goals. The suffragettes who fought for our right to vote are known as the first wave. Radical feminism, on the other hand, is a splinter group dating back to the second wave of feminism in the 1960s that feels fourth wave feminists of the modern era have lost touch with their roots (Grady). This is the group that spawned the misandrist, or men-hating, feminists. 

“Oh woe is me!” cries the radical feminist, also known as the radfem, as she types on her Macbook Pro. She furiously posts about how she was “mansplained” to that day at work when she couldn’t get the new coffee machine to work, and how her creepy coworker complimented her new blazer. “How dare he!” she mutters. The radical feminist clutches her privilege like barnacles to the bottom of a pier, seeing anyone who dares disagree with her as the underpaid workman hired to pry her off.  

Is this a stereotype? Certainly. Radical feminists are real people, after all, with stories and personal histories like everyone else, who are just as deserving of the right to speak their mind. But the fact remains that they use their right to speak to erase trans people, push their narrative of victimhood, and violently campaign against sex workers. When a group brimming with hatred and anger for those even more marginalized then they are is loud enough to be conflated with people fighting for equality, rather than further discrimination, there is a problem (Preen). And the problem is radical feminism, which has to go—and if this means getting rid of feminism altogether, then so be it. 

“TERF” is an acronym that stands for  “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”; however, those who identify with this particular sect of radfem denounce the label as a slur and prefer the name “gender critical”. Discerning readers will note that this is an unapologetic euphemism. 

Gender critical, in this case, doesn't mean that they are critical of the institution or concept of gender as a whole. Rather, it means they don’t believe in the existence of trans people and actively seek to erase them. These are people who only believe in biological sex, both primary and secondary sex characteristics, who refuse to use preferred pronouns, and who would seek to push through legislation that would cause numerous problems for transgender individuals. Now, one could argue that these are small subsets of productive, non-extremist communities, lurking online like internet trolls. But these communities are larger than you’d think, considering a subreddit called r/GenderCritical on Reddit has over 54 thousand members. These people have massive platforms to spread hate and enormous echo chambers of radfems who think just like them. 

A high-profile radfem group called The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF for short) has been particularly active lately in the justice system. They wrote a “Declaration of No Confidence in LGB Movement Leadership” (Women’s Liberation Front). 

The “LGB movement”. 

The entire petition is dedicated to somehow getting the “LGB Movement” to denounce transgender people and pay “restitution” to those they have wronged by campaigning for trans rights. The post sounded academic, perhaps even sounded reasonable if one didn’t read too closely. But it calls the surgeries and hormonal treatments that trans people use to alleviate their dysphoria, which is a mental condition, mutilation. They call it “irresponsible” for trained medical practitioners to allow, or even recommend such treatments.

Typical TERF dogma is to say that trans women are really just men who have a fetish for seeing themselves as women, which they call “autogynephilia” (Blanchard). All of these are just excuses for these women to discriminate against trans people while hiding under the feminism label, twisting the movement that historically fought for equality to their own ends.

This isn’t limited to niche Reddit communities or the odd militant organization. J.K. Rowling herself, a woman beloved by many people for writing the Harry Potter book series, was recently criticized online for tweeting her support for a woman named Maya Forster, who had posted transphobic sentiments on her twitter. Radical feminism may be a small group, but they are incredibly loud, and their dogma is pervasive. It’s seductive in that it makes you feel superior by playing upon your existing preconceptions of evil, dangerous men. The narrative of a faceless oppressor you can blame all of your problems upon is painfully easy to buy into. For example, you’ve probably been ignored or talked over by a man at least once. Chalking it up to how “all men are terrible people” is easy. And the whole idea that it’s time for women to be on top, for women to be in power when we have been historically oppressed, has a nice symmetry to it—some bitter irony for the other gender, right? It’s easy, and it’s symmetrical, but responding to oppression with oppression is the opposite of progress.

Tied into their anti-trans dogma, radfems are also strongly against sex work in all its forms. To them, there is no safe version of sex work—it’s all exploitation and “for the men”. This goes hand in hand with the victimization of women, because to these people, no woman in sex work could be in control of her own life (“Subcultures and Sociology”). This, of course, ignores that sex work is dangerous enough without privileged women, who likely have never needed to work in that particular field, trying to pass legislation to make it even more dangerous. 

The blatant victimization of women that pervades radfem dogma exists right there in the name of WoLF. The need for a “liberation front” itself implies that women are slaves, and a radical feminist would make the argument that we are, oppressed and enslaved by the patriarchy as we seem to be. But a deeper look into their website reveals more. 

Their membership page says that “Please note that we are a women-only organization, intended to serve and include biologically female persons who survived girlhood” (Women’s Liberation Front). Putting aside the blatant transphobia that is par for the course by now, the issue is with the phrase “survived girlhood”. This phrase implies that growing up female is some sort of Hunger Games-esque battle for survival. I don’t know about you, but my girlhood consisted of watching Disney Channel and eating cookies. I didn’t need to fight for the right to grow older, not in the ever-progressive Bay Area. 

And while this may be a different case in other countries, perhaps one with more restrictive laws than the US, it is important to note that WoLF is an American organization dedicated to making changes in America. Rather than fighting actual battles for women’s rights where women are actively oppressed by repressive laws and policies, and rather than aiding women suffering in abusive households, this “Women’s Liberation Front” is writing strongly worded letters to nobody in particular and pushing a narrative of victimization. 

An article written by the Independent in the UK expounds upon this idea that “Misogyny should be recognised as a hate crime for the same reason that misandry should not be: women and girls are systematically oppressed and exploited by men and boys” (Smith). This was about the issue of making misogyny a hate crime—should misandry, the hatred of men, fall under the same umbrella? This author argues that no, it should not be, because apparently our “systematic oppression” negates any reason for similar protections to be given to men. There are several issues with this idea of systematic oppression, the most glaring of which is how it makes women the victims. It makes us seem helpless, exploited by a system we cannot control. This demonstrates the inherent hypocrisy of radical feminism. These are the same women who virulently campaign against being seen as children, for whom their own autonomy is a right they must protect against the ruthlessly exploitative patriarchy. And yet they cast themselves as victims, adopting the infantilization they claim to oppose. 

Radical feminists don’t have it entirely wrong, however. Some of their goals seem downright reasonable rather than rabid, one of which is their goal to have women’s only spaces. These are spaces they describe as being for women only, such as gender-segregated showers and changing rooms, correctional facilities, and rape trauma centers (Women’s Liberation Front). Radfems do not believe that there should only be showers, changing rooms, prisons, and trauma centers for women; rather, they should be separated by gender. Which, of course, is not an utterly unreasonable expectation. Having gender-neutral showers, especially once past the age of puberty, would be uncomfortable and invasive. 

The problem with radfem’s “women’s only spaces” is two-fold. For one, they would seek to exclude trans women from such spaces on account of their “not being real women”. The sheer transphobia of such a sentiment cannot be ignored, despite the field of landmines that the issue of trans women in female prisons can be. But on top of that, there’s a growing sentiment among radical feminists that men are an utterly different species from women. Not in the strict denotation sense, of course, but that because of their different biology and supposed different experiences growing up, no man could ever sympathize with female issues and female struggles. No man should ever be allowed to weigh in on supposedly “female-only” issues. 

There is this growing divide between men and women during a time when the entirety of humanity needs to stand together on global issues. Climate change comes to mind, as do political conflicts and the return of measles due to anti-vax ideology. By emphasizing this divide, radical feminists push people apart. Movements, especially ones calling for great change, only succeed when the people behind them are united. When they are not—when there are splinter groups, competing ideologies, and those who refuse to hear one another—they fail, every single time.   

This is perhaps said best by the Washington Post, in an article saying that radfem fixation on the apparent bad behavior of men distracts from real problems (Young). But more importantly, it colors the movement as a whole. I am not a feminist, and I never will be—at least, not until there is a distinct ideological separation between actual gender equality and, as the article puts it, raking men over the coals for perceived slights and the crimes of their ancestors (Young). 

But above all, I reject this idea that womanhood is pain and the narrative of oppression that privileged women on the internet want me to believe. I refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the feminist movement until they themselves refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of radical feminism, and neither should you. It is only when there is a near-unanimous rejection of the monster this movement made that there will be any ideological change; indeed, any societal change.

Blanchard, Ray. “Early History of the Concept of Autogynephilia.” Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 34, Aug. 2005.

Goldberg, Michelle. “What Is a Woman?” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 9 July 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2.

Grady, Constance. “The Waves of Feminism, and Why People Keep Fighting over Them, Explained.” Vox, Vox, 20 July 2018, www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth.

Kearns, Madeleine. “TERF Wars.” National Review, vol. 70, no. 22, Dec. 2018, p. 25. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pwh&AN=132993584&site=pov-live.x

Preen, Katy. “Radical Feminism - a Good Idea in Theory.” Medium, Medium, 19 Apr. 2018, medium.com/@KatyPreen/radical-feminism-a-good-idea-in-theory-e3ba0e56ecc3.

Smith, Victoria. “'The Fact That We're Considering Making Misandry a Hate Crime Should Concern Everyone'.” The Independent, Independent Digital News and Media, 16 Oct. 2018, www.independent.co.uk/voices/misandry-men-hate-crime-women-sexism-racism-feminism-a8586591.html.

“Subcultures and Sociology.” Grinnell College, Grinnell College, haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu/radfems/.

Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF). “Become A Member.” Women's Liberation Front, Women’s Liberation Front, 2014, womensliberationfront.org/become-a-member/.

i read the first few paragraphs and then gave up bc youre an obvious MRA + boring + stupid + misinformed.

[thekimspoblog]

So here's the thing, boys, girls, and everyone outside and in-between. I migrated here from YouTube. And on YouTube (actually anywhere outside of Tumblr), if you voice even the most boilerplate feminist talking points, you will be dismissed as "radical". Same way if you are left-wing, you are "radical". So it's a problem when feminists with radical ideas can't organize on a more femme-friendly platform like Tumblr, because the term has been appropriated by transphobes. It's a problem when referring to yourself by the label the rest of the internet has already tarred you with will simultaneously alienate you from your sisters in other circles. Whether or not it was intentional, this kind of vocabulary confusion serves an anti-feminist agenda.

And on top of that, transphobes really just shouldn't get to call themselves radical, when what they are fighting for is by definition a reinforcement of the status quo. Not to mention it completely ignores the longer history of intersectional feminists who have identified their ideology as "radical". In my mind, words should mean what it sounds like they should mean: so a "radfem" is an activist who supports/condones extremist tactics to enforce a feminist agenda, and the dissolution of the gender binary is the only logical conclusion of the feminist agenda, so LGBT rights are automatically included. If you exclude trans women from your movement, not only are you not radical but you can't be a feminist.

Committing arson for the suffragette movement (or the pro-choice movement, or trans rights) is RADICAL FEMINISM. Arguing that t-girls can't be oppressed under patriarchy, as if misogynistic socialization can't happen while people are fully clothed, is just fucking stupid.

In conclusion "TERF" is a horribly confusing, oxymoronic misnomer, and we as the people trying to criticize transphobes should stop entertaining it as a valid descriptor.

[kimbureh]

it's very revealing about TERF rhetoric that jkr takes these two pictures as equal attacks.

on the left: backlash against Suffragettes who campaign for the rights of a marginalized group

on the right: backlash against terfs who campaign for the right to *oppress* a marginalized group

but all jkr can see is an attack, because terf rhetoric doesn't distinguish between oppression and the defense against oppression.

This is because the TERF dogma is designed to be a (self-)dehumanizing identity cult which defines cis women through victimhood, their inherent purity as women, and the martyrdom of their suffering.

What does that mean?

Terfism is dehumanizing to women, because it doesn't grant them the full human range of moral decisions: in terfism, a woman can only ever be a victim, a target of oppression and harm, but she can never be the *source* of oppression and harm by virtue of her being a woman. Women are seen as pure. And those who do *bad* things? They're are outliers, poor lost sheep who are corrupted by trans people etc.

This belief attracts a lot of women who have been hurt by patriarchy, who are searching for a meaning in their pain. Terfism not only recognizes their pain as valid, it *elevates* it as something moral, as proof that women are pure because of their victimhood.

So, with that idea in mind, the two images above *of course* have to be exactly the same to jkr: since women inherently possess victimhood & purity, the backlash against the oppression *committed by them* has to be the true oppression, otherwise terfs would have to admit that they are indeed capable of doing "bad things", and are not sacred martyrs who find salvation in their suffering.

look at this. This is a tragedy. This is a woman who feels so deeply, so painfully that the backlash against her own campaign of taking away trans people's rights was the same as the backlash against Suffragettes fighting for women's rights.

jkr here campaigns for her freedom to take away the rights of an oppressed group-- and feels herself to be on the right side of history because she feels the pain inflicted by patriarchy just so vividly. Her pain is valid, no question, but as I've explained above, the conflation of pain with victimhood and martyrdom in terfism prevents jkr from noticing the harm *she* commits.

[antis-hero]

"Feminists want people to think feminism began with the nineteenth-century suffragettes, but it didn't. The word feminist didn't become boilerplate language until the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, when women took to the streets in the name of 'equality' and 'liberation.' Betty Friedan is credited with being the leader of what is now known as 'second wave feminism.' It refers to the 1960s feminists who supposedly picked up where the suffragettes left off. In fact, the two groups have nothing in common. The suffragettes fought for (and won in 1920) the right for women to vote in all fifty states, but they were family-oriented women who had no desire to eradicate female nature. They were also resolutely opposed to abortion. The feminists of the 1960s (and later), on the other hand, are not pro-family. In addition to viewing abortion a matter of women's 'rights,' they see the home as a trap for women."

-Phyllis Schlafly and Suzanne Venker

From The Flipside of Feminism, 2011

The worst result of the lack of attention and honesty about the anti-suffragists has been that their anti-feminist descendants forget who their ancestors were, what they fought for, and why. They instead try to claim their opponent's history, which is why we have so many anti-feminist women who claim that we should "go back to the first-wave of feminism" or, like Schlafly and Venker here, claim that suffragettes were not "true feminists".

Some suffragists (called conservative suffragists) did not identify with feminism, but many prominent suffragists (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anna Howard Shaw, and many others that you can find criticized by anti-suffragettes) did. There were plenty of conservative feminists and suffragists who cared about the family and the differences between the sexes, but the suffrage movement required the changing of relations between the sexes to reach their goals, meaning that while some suffragists did want to protect the family, their ideology would not protect it for long, especially when they began to deal with the rise of feminism.

[purelyutilitarian]

Guys I strongly urge you to study women’s history. I’m not talking suffragettes and Harriet Tubman (I am, but that’s not really what I mean) I mean you need to understand what the patriarchy actually is and what it was designed for and why it worked for so long and the ways in which it still exists today. You need to understand the history of women’s participation in public life/the economy in order to contextualize your rights. You need to understand the history of women’s relationship with sex in order to contextualize your relationship with sex. If you consider yourself a feminist, please god start getting into women’s history because it will make your understanding of modern feminism so much richer.