BEING A WOMAN DOESN’T MAKE YOU A FEMINIST

A reminder of what feminism is and who it is for and how we'll need it to fight our fascist future

Welcome to My So-Called Feminist Life: Essays, interviews, and book reviews that wrestle with what it means to be a feminist today.

The Nightmare, Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1781

I’m Heartbroken. And Enraged. And I Have Struggled to Find The Words. Here Goes.

I keep thinking about how when I was a kid and I’d have nightmares my response was always the same in the dreams: I’d lay down and pretend to be dead. I’d close my eyes and hope whatever scary thing was out there would just go away, or ignore me. It was not a good tactic, really. Often it felt like the dream would cease because the  monster would arrive and my eyes would be closed, and it would end. Me. The dream. All of it. 

Grisly, perhaps. But that’s where my head has been the last two weeks. I want to lay down and close my eyes. I don’t want to do this. I have not felt fired up. I have not felt called to action. I have only felt so so so so sad. Or else so so so mad. I am mourning the world that we live in that wants so desperately to blame an “other” for all the bad things we are all experiencing. 

I keep thinking about how he held a rally reminiscent of one the Nazis held at Madison Square Garden a couple weeks before the election. How a comedian there joked that Travis Kelce should be the next OJ Simpson. They joked about a serial domestic abuser who murdered his wife and got away with it. They joked about murdering the most famous woman in the world. And then they won. 

Violence against women and keeping women in their place and the desperate drive to maintain traditional gender roles, and the old binary idea of gender altogether are all concepts fascism depends on. When Benito Mussolini created the fascist party in Italy in the 1920s, one of the main tenets was the idea that women needed to leave the workforce, leave higher education, quit asking for more rights as individuals, and go back home and have lots of children and raise them to be good little fascists. Men, of course, needed to prove their masculinity through things like, working hard, being strong and violent soldiers, and loving war. Men and women who were found to be in violation of these ideas, LGBTQ individuals, were often sent to live in exile. Divorce was not allowed. And husbands could legally kill their wives if they were found to be unfaithful.

I keep thinking about Susan Faludi’s Backlash and how for every wave of feminist progress there has been a receding tide that follows. Faludi originally wrote the book in response to the backlash to feminism experienced after the third-wave movement in the 1970s, after the right to safe and legal abortion was finally codified into law via Roe v Wade in 1973. And the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed, outlawing banks from requiring male family members to sign for a woman to get her a loan or a credit card in her own name. And the 1972 Title IX education amendments, which finally made it illegal to fire teachers for getting pregnant or married, or to allow colleges to just not accept women or cap their female graduate students at 5%, and ushered in a new generation of women’s sports by finally forcing schools with sports teams to also field opportunities for girls and women. And after all that, Faludi writes, the zeitgeist in the 1980s insisted that women were more miserable than ever. Why? “The prevailing wisdom of the past decade has supported one, and only one, answer to this riddle: It must be all that equality that’s causing all that pain.” The reality, of course, that women were nowhere near equality still, that vast swaths of women were still suffering from underpayment, not being promoted, being harassed at school or work, stuck in marriages and partnerships that were violent or suffocating or just demanded that they now be full-time workers and mothers and housekeepers and cooks, was clearly not as sexy of a headline.  

Each generation is taught to believe that we’re in the good place. That we’re lucky to be alive now. That we didn’t struggle the way those before us had to struggle. But in part this myth is still the white patriarchy in action. The narratives, much as we progress, are still largely set by those who have always been in power, or been indoctrinated into the classic white male power structure. And these messages are meant to assuage us. To make us feel like we don’t need to fight anymore. That the progress we’ve gained is enough progress. I’m so tired of feeling like it’s radical to say that we should stop insisting gender is binary and that this binary dictates who we are and the options we have and our strengths and weaknesses and skills and jobs and who we can love and what sports we can play and what medical care we can receive. Yet here we are.

I keep thinking about how in 2016 I thought the country hated women because they would rather vote for a racist, sexist, madman than a qualified female politician for President. And how in 2024 I know what this country actually hates is feminism. In fact, knowing the man was mad and knowing he wanted “Hitler’s military” and knowing he wants to get rid of governmental structures and rule as a tyrant, and knowing he is guilty of business misdeeds, political misdeeds, and crimes of gendered violence, more people voted for him this time than would vote for a qualified Black, and Indian, female politician for President. Because feminism is about saying the structure in which we live: where the rich, white, male, patriarchy is always in power, needs to go. And that scares people more than fascism.

And it’s not about Hillary or Kamala. Not as individuals. It is, a litttle bit, of course. But more importantly it’s that voters would rather risk a descent into fascism to maintain the racial and gender hierarchy than to see who we could possibly be if we encouraged discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our schools, or maintained affirmative action, or merely allowed women to be in control of their own bodies, or affirmed children when they tell us who they really are.

I keep thinking about the women who died because they needed medical care. But that doctors weren’t legally allowed to help them because they carried a fetus in their body. A fetus that would never even become a baby, and yet, is now considered more legally important than a woman’s life because of where the person lives. Now these people are gone. Because the people that most of the people voted for think it’s OK to have laws that might kill women.

The people that most of the people voted for think it’s OK to joke that women should be killed, because they think it’s OK that we die, so long as the patriarchal, racist, classist power structure remains. The election results were devastating. But the way so many people are entrenching themselves in a certain demographic camp based on the exit polling feels like a distraction to me. Yes, there was a gendered divide, and a racial divide, and an educational divide. These are all political issues for someone to consider, I suppose. But for me, looking for certain mass demographic groups to point fingers at is what makes me want to lay down and give up. We are here because that existing power structure wants us to feel flattened into our demographics, our identities as they have defined them. In 2020, Faludi re-issued Backlash with a new forward. She writes about the devastation so many feminists and women felt in 2016, white women especially, when we learned how the majority of white women who cast ballots voted for Trump (as they did again this time) and she coaches us to learn from prior history. 

“The suffrage campaign’s shining moment of victory —the winning of women’s right to vote in August 1920 —had its larger promise reduced to ashes a half year later, after its mass coalition, built up over eighty years, blew apart at a convention of women’s organizations. The National Woman’s Party managed to alienate just about every wing of the movement by insisting on a single-minded focus on the Equal Rights Amendment —and sidelining the pressing issues of black women’s disenfranchisement at the polls, the labor conditions of female factory workers, aid for working mothers, and safe and legal birth control. Two months after the convention, the National Woman’s Party, which had 50,000 dues-paying constituents at its peak in 1919 was down to 151 members.”

I keep thinking about how Feminism has been co-opted by so many brands to make money on shirts and tote bags and celebrities in recent years and how sometimes that feels like a linguistic win? But that now this blanket, flat, meaningless Feminism is just today’s version of trying to force the kaleidescopic needs of women into one giant demographic group or affiliation that looks nice but means nothing, because it meets very few of our actual needs. We are exactly where those early suffragists are, assuming we can ignore the multificated needs of our suffering society in favor of this identity of woman, of this “sisterhood.” But being a woman doesn’t make you a feminist. As this election made abundantly clear, being a white woman in this country certainly doesn’t make you one. Feminism is not Kamala Harris. Nor Hillary Clinton. Faludi wrote in 2020: “We must start building a sisterhood with the vast numbers of women who need feminism the most, whether they are convinced of it yet or not.”

To that I would add that feminism needs to be the movement that addresses the needs of all of those most disenfranchised: women, men, and our trans and nonbinary siblings, the undocumented, Black and Brown people, immigrants, the poor and houseless. Feminism needs to be where we turn in the coming days and weeks and months and years when things get dark and oversimplified, to remember that we are fighting for a future that is complex. Feminism needs to be a place where our demographic limits do not exist, so that we remember that every human deserves a home, and food to eat, and respect at work, and bodily autonomy, and health care, and to be treated with kindness, and that yes these fights need to be focused on certain demographics sometimes but that the demographics are not what make a person who they are. Feminism will need to be the ideology we remember when we are told that cleaning up the mess society is in needs to be about blaming individuals and identities instead of all the myriad ways our selves can show up and care for one another.

I keep thinking about maps and counting votes and the ways we have turned our system of governance into a sporting event. We point fingers after elections because politics is about winners and losers. But true feminism is about recognizing that humanity isn’t a game. As we head into an era (again) led by powers who will certainly feed us lies upon lies and try to pit us against each other, and who are betting on us to lay down and play dead and wait for it to be over, I will hold onto the truth that drives my feminism: that we are all more human, more diverse, more powerful, than any one stereotyped identity we’re forced into. And I’ll keep trying to write about the truth, as long as they’ll let me.

---

Upcoming Events, Appearances, Etc.

I hate to self-promote at the moment, and I’m feeling REAL surly about capitalism, but retail therapy that supports small businesses and authors doing good work is OK, right?

• SEATTLE | Saturday, Nov. 23, 2-4 pm | Holiday Bookfest at Phinney Neighborhood Association. More than two dozen authors will be on hand for the 15th Holiday Bookfest! Books are great gifts – and signed books are priceless. For this much-anticipated event, treasured local authors of fiction, memoir, travel, nature, cookbooks, kids’ books and more will gather in one room, pens in hand.

  

• SEATTLE | Friday, Nov. 29, 5PM & Saturday, Nov. 30, 1PM | Seattle Marathon Expo, Westin Seattle Grand Ballroom. Come hear me speak about women and the marathon at the Seattle Marathon expo stage during the two days before the Seattle Marathon. Books for sale via Elliott Bay Book Company.

• PORTLAND | Sunday, Dec. 8, 12-4PM | Oregon Historical Society Holiday Cheer Book Sale

---

Thanks for reading! My So-Called Feminist Life is a newsletter wrestling with feminism in today’s world. I encourage conversation in the comments if you wish to share your own thoughts, feelings, memories, opinions. If you’d like to support this project financially, you can become a paid subscriber.

You can find me on Instagram: @maggiejmertens

You can order my book Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books) from your favorite local bookstore, request it from your local library, or push this quick order button from Bookshop.org. If you’ve read it, I’d love if you’d leave it a glowing review at Amaz*n or Go*dReads. I’ve heard that it makes a great gift for a feminist, runner, or history buff on your list.