Are women who have been treated badly by men more likely to be feminist?

[superstarheartbreaker]

I have had an appalling track record with men sadly including severe abuse issues. It was this that attracted me to feminism . I don't hate men , I crave a connection with a decent man but I do detest the sexist culture which fuels an abusive mindset.
I sometimes wonder if I was happily married to a loving man with a comfortable life , if I would even think about feminist issues. Sometimes I think my independant spirit has led me to be single. Thoughts please?

This is just anecdote, but in my own life, I think it's less likely, sadly.

I know some women who've come through a load of shit and are feminists, and I do think being feminists helped them to cope differently. Amongst my close friends, there are a fair few of us who're aware we'd have made different choices if we'd been more aware of feminism earlier in our lives.

But then, the women I know who've been treated truly appallingly seem almost all to want nothing much to do with feminism. I think that is completely understandable. You want to believe it's just one truly horrible bastard you met, not a wider system including both bastards and a lot of men who're trying to be nice but are as socially conditioned as you.

I think, less likely. My birth mother was, as far as I know, given a shit time by men throughout her life. She didn't know her father, but my birth father was shit to her and us and since they split and I got back in contact as an adult, she's had shit people, not on the same scale, in her life again. Lost contact after my youngest brother was born but I think when you are used to men failing you, that is all you expect. I think I'd be the same if I'd grown up with her and my birth father.

Marriage isnt a protective shield.no one saves anyone else.
and marriage in itself wont necessarily decrease ones interest in feminism

I think maybe that women who have been treated badly by men will struggle with their self worth and may even fight for approval from men, which is so horrible and wrong. I never really cared for men, even though I have a great father and husband. I knew very early on they benefited from women`s suffering, even the good ones.

I've been brought up with feminism - but I'd say the older I get, the more active I've become, and part of that is because of my experiences at work. I just didn't see so much inequality when I started out - we were all at the same level, fresh new graduates, and while there weren't so many older women further up, that's partly because they were my mother's generation, who started working before the Equal Pay Act and so on, and were usually expected to give up work on marriage/motherhood and often did. I thought as my career progressed, I'd just see things getting better and better, but in many ways, I'm not.

I suppose I am more of a feminist by seeing men treating women (and other men) badly in the work place, but not so much in relationships - that's not to say there aren't abusive relationships, because absolutely there are, but it's the work side of things that get me most worked up.

I have had nothing but positive relationships with men from my father, through boyfriends to my husband. In many ways it was the positive role model of my father that made me feminist. But I'm not an activist and I wasn't conscious of my feminism as a young woman - I didn't realise that anti-feminism and misogyny existed as I hadn't encountered it. So I was quietly feminist. Didn't realise that not everybody thought as I did so didn't realise how much action was needed.
Also, I was a teenager in the 90s which wasn't actually that bad a time from a body image and sexualisation point of view (baggy jeans and long blonde hair...).

I was in my 20s in the 90s and I think that's when things started to twist backwards. After gaining some ground in the 80s (I saw two good strong female characters from the 80s on tv today Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Sophie Aldred (Ace from Doctor Who) as opposed to dramas like The Fall and Ripper Street which we get today.
Anyhow what im trying to say is that things started to go backwards again in the 90s with the advent of the lads mag culture. Then came reality tv/and a stronger celeb culture.

I always knew I believed in equality. THe gendered emotional/cultural abuse I experienced growing up at home cemented this.

But I didn't realise that I self identified as a feminist until 3 years ago.

The first 'reality tv' i think was Castaways, that bbc thing on Transay - i'm pretty sure it was a millennium project. SEries 1 of big brother aired in 2000 in the uk.
loaded and FHM magazines existed in the 90s but zoo and nuts (far more extremely objectifying) didn't come along until 2004.
Obviously the internet existed in the 90s but google didn't launch till the very end of the 90s, myspace in 2003.

So yes, i'd agree that things maybe started to change in the 90s but I felt that there was no real pornification of main stream media then. Certainly in my social life the girls were wearing jeans and tshirts with occassionl spice-girls type platform trainers. There wasn't pressure to perform sexually or to dress overtly sexually. We felt that things could only continue to build on the power-suit 80s idea in terms of our future careers.

The first 'reality tv' i think was Castaways, that bbc thing on Transay - i'm pretty sure it was a millennium project. SEries 1 of big brother aired in 2000 in the uk.

No, I think it was Living in the Past in 1978, some of which was shown on BBC4 a couple of years or so ago.

(This is totally irrelevant, I know. Things have changed a lot since the Iron Age.)