What's your take on why many women and girls lost interest in feminism over the decades?

[nestoftables]

Just that...I've read a few things talking about why feminism became an unfashionable word etc.

Having just finished reading 'Material Girls' which has a brief summary of second wave and third wave feminism towards the end, I am interested in different perspectives on what happened, based on different experiences and different reading on this. Thanks!

Being feminist means different things to different people.
Some call themselves feminists but aren’t in favour of access to abortion or contraception.
Some so called feminists are actually just anti trans and use feminism as a mask to hide behind.
Some so called feminists are more concerned with welcoming trans women than they are about standing up for all women.
Some say they’re feminists but believe women are men’s property.
Some don’t think you can be a feminist if you take your husbands surname.
Some think it’s unfeminist to wear makeup and short skirts.
Some think stay at home mums aren’t feminists.

I grew bored with feminism when it turned into telling women what they should do, what they should believe in and how they should present themselves. Didn’t seem very feminist to me.

That said, I would always continue to stand up for women’s rights when I see them as threatened. I just wouldn’t identify as a feminist along with the ones I’ve grown accustomed to seeing on social media.

Feminism never bought into neo/marxist blah blah.

I may have misunderstood your post stumbledin but I used to know plenty of Marxist feminists in the 80s and 90s. One of the most prominent was Beatrix Campbell a prominent promter of conspiracy theories about satanic ritual abuse.

I do not believe that all feminists back in the day were Marxists but Marxism was a not uncommon interest for women at Greenham IME.

Apologies if I misunderstood your post

Feminism was based on the process of consciousness raising as pioneered by the Black Liberation Movement in the US.

This is where it gets very interesting.

IME Marxism the Civil Rights movement / Black Liberation Movement / the Black Panthers and various other movements did influence feminism.

I am very interested in the Black Panthers because they did so many things right in terms of working collaboratively with other oppressed groups including impoverished and disempowered white activist groups.

However they were still infiltrated by the CIA and the intelligence services of other nation states, including the KGB. Unfortunately this was inevitable, as grass roots activist groups will attract the interest of intelligence agencies and criminal networks as soon as they are sufficiently influential to come to the attention of such actors.

This is why we have to do our best to understand the nuts and bolts of Trojan horses, and this is why we should all pay great attention to cults.

I agree that legal protections such as divorce, contraception and employment rights made it easy for women to think they had achieved equality. The increase in the number of women in higher education (and their success) was also seen as showing that women didn't need any more legal protection. In reality, it hid other factors such as the failure to achieve equal pay for equal work. There are still cases going on from the 1980s and 1990s where eg caretakers employed by local councils earned more than home care workers.

I definitely think a lot of 2nd wave feminism was exclusionary. I would go back even further than Hoodathunkit to the links between feminism and Marxism. Many women in the 1960s and 1970s were attracted to Marxism. After all, it was Engels who wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State which linked patriarchal families to the rise of capitalism. At the same time, the media certainly encouraged these divisions by 'othering' feminists as shaved head hairy legged harpies.

It's interesting how even in countries where women have more legal rights in the UK, there are still problems. In Sweden, there are far fewer rape convictions than reported rapes.

Going forward, we need to think of the position of women collectively rather than thinking from the perspective of our own social circle. We can campaign for greater help with the costs of childcare AND the women who lost their pension rights.

Sorry - that turned into a bit of a rant. Great thread!

Have not RTFT.
In my own experience older (50+) women, of which I am one, are more likely to be feminists than younger women. We have not been put off over the decades etc. Quite the opposite.

Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in a household in which both parents went out to work, my mother had a higher status job than my father, and my sisters and I were encouraged to challenge gendered expectations, there was still an attitude of, "Look how far women's rights have come," rather than, "Look how much work on women's rights still needs doing." Feminism seemed to be all about Greenham Common, burning bras, and using a speculum and a mirror to see your own cervix. My daughters are much more likely than I was at their age to say, "Yes, but WHY are there fewer women than men in that role? Is there a good reason or is it something I should make a noise about?"

I think it is much more acceptable now, but too many women don't 'own' the world and will espouse feminist views while saying 'I'm not a feminist, but....', which really doesn't help, I wince every time I hear a woman saying it, especially ones who should be role models!

I have to agree with many others on the thread. I grew up thinking sexism was a thing of the past. I don’t know why! And the odd thing is, I’m not young - mid-30s - and looking back I can see sexism was thriving just as much in the 90s and 00s as it is now, if not more, so I find it bizarre that I thought it was all a thing of the past. Particularly as my dad was a raving misogynist.

It wasn’t until my early to mid-20s that the scales really fell from my eyes. Entering the world of work (corporate) and seeing the true scale of the power imbalance. Getting pregnant and giving birth were also huge eye openers. And starting to age was a big eye opener too - realising how differently society responds to an ageing man vs an ageing woman.

So I think it may not be that young women are losing interest in feminism so much that they aren’t interested YET.

I moved away from feminism at various times because of the female = victim / male = oppressor discourses that still permeate much of feminism to the extent that opining that AMANLT is seen as a ridiculous thing to say rather than as a statement of truth.

Most women have male friends, brothers, sons and other relatives who they love and who fall into the NAMALT category and they may be alienated by some of the prevalent beliefs and discourses in feminism.

But I think that’s slightly missing the point of the problem with NAMALT. No one (or at least no one that I know) thinks that NAMALT is factually incorrect. Of course not all men are violent rapists. But the problem with NAMALT is that it’s usually used to shut down discussion about male violence against women and girls and how our patriarchal society perpetuates that violence.

It’s not dissimilar to ‘All Lives Matter’. ‘All Lives Matter’ taken by itself as a three word statement is factual and correct. All lives DO matter. But actually, that statement is used to shut down any discussion about systemic racism and police violence towards black people.

A statement can be factually correct but used in a damaging way.

For me, I grew up (70's/80s) with a bullying father with traditional domestic roles, complete ignorance and/ or contempt but huge exploitation of the female contribution, and a mother who told me I couldn't do things because I was female but hated being a mother herself. Probably because of my father. When I went out I was constantly harassed, starting from the age of 11. So I was certainly aware of sexism and different sec roles and found it depressing. I didn't take the 'feminist' label though, innocently preferring 'egalitarian'. Not much excuse apart from lack of experience, lack of subtlety - not understanding the erasure of women in history for instance - and seeing feminists mostly as very vocal lesbians like a local one who famously proclaimed all penises to be oppressive.

For girls born a little behind me, I don't know, something seemed to go very wrong and they viewed being fashionable, socially acceptable and something I can only describe as 'aww ain't it quaint' as more important than practical issues. I don't know if they were truly raised in greater luxury, but that's my impression. I've never got over hearing a younger (British) woman thinking that needing a father's permission to marry would be sweet and cute.

Sorry that was clumsy language. I meant to that the younger woman had no traditional ethnic or religious heredity that might lead to a greater expectation of patriarchal permission. I'll stop digging that hole now.

@MissChanandlerBong22

I moved away from feminism at various times because of the female = victim / male = oppressor discourses that still permeate much of feminism to the extent that opining that AMANLT is seen as a ridiculous thing to say rather than as a statement of truth.

Most women have male friends, brothers, sons and other relatives who they love and who fall into the NAMALT category and they may be alienated by some of the prevalent beliefs and discourses in feminism.

But I think that’s slightly missing the point of the problem with NAMALT. No one (or at least no one that I know) thinks that NAMALT is factually incorrect. Of course not all men are violent rapists. But the problem with NAMALT is that it’s usually used to shut down discussion about male violence against women and girls and how our patriarchal society perpetuates that violence.

It’s not dissimilar to ‘All Lives Matter’. ‘All Lives Matter’ taken by itself as a three word statement is factual and correct. All lives DO matter. But actually, that statement is used to shut down any discussion about systemic racism and police violence towards black people.

A statement can be factually correct but used in a damaging way.

While I agree that the poster here misses the point of the dislike of NAMALT in feminist discourse, I think she illustrates one of the big reasons feminism isn't embraced by a large swathe of women and that's that feminist discussions frequently police language heavily.

If you're new to the discussion that can be really off putting. And it can make it harder for women from some back grounds and points of view to get their experiences heard. I don't just mean with NAMALT. There can be lots of attacking people for using terms like girls or hysterical and not listening to or engaging with what they are actually trying to say because they don't conform to some unwritten feminist code.

There are reasons that feminists do this and some of them are, at least some of the time, valid. But when that's what people see as the face of feminism it really turns them off and makes it difficult for a lot of people to engage.

While I agree that the poster here misses the point of the dislike of NAMALT in feminist discourse, I think she illustrates one of the big reasons feminism isn't embraced by a large swathe of women and that's that feminist discussions frequently police language heavily.

If you're new to the discussion that can be really off putting. And it can make it harder for women from some back grounds and points of view to get their experiences heard. I don't just mean with NAMALT. There can be lots of attacking people for using terms like girls or hysterical and not listening to or engaging with what they are actually trying to say because they don't conform to some unwritten feminist code.

There are reasons that feminists do this and some of them are, at least some of the time, valid. But when that's what people see as the face of feminism it really turns them off and makes it difficult for a lot of people to engage.

I see accusations of NAMALT misused more often that used appropriately, so that may influence people's perceptions of it.

However, I think there is something else that post touches on, which is that most women like men, have close loved ones who are men, and share their lives with men. Practically, and probably theoretically if they think about it, they are not going to see a good society for women as being an entirely different thing than a good society for men. There is a real quality of being in it together for most people, at the big picture level, and loving men specifically and wanting their good, at the personal level.

It's always going to be a turn off for them to see men characterised, as a group, as dicks, or relationships with them as inherently oppressive (a la Julie Bindle,) or for their well-being to be presented as in direct opposition and irreconcilable to women's well being.

And most women are not all that invested in making men more like women or women more like men, and a proportion really aren't at all keen on that idea.

Emphasis on those kinds of ideas will tend to mean a lot of women don't relate.