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Reconciling a `feminist' label with a student identity

The woman speaking was one of my new hall-mates. It was my first night in college, and my roommate -- who would only have been another stranger -- hadn't yet arrived. I had wandered the hall until I found an open door and asked if I could join the three strangers in the cell-like room. At least they were people with whom to order pizza.

The second woman in the room assured the one man that she wasn't a feminist either.

He had just made some comment that insulted women. Four years later, I don't remember what because I knew men could be sexist.

But I still remember the complacent tone in the woman's voice, excusing his comment. I'd never heard "I'm not a feminist" come from a woman's mouth before. Theoretically, I knew there were women who would say they weren't feminists, but I presumed they were all older than my mother, or less than middle class, or intense about some religion that taught inequality, or from some culture completely different from my own. I'm embarrassed, now, to admit to these ageist, classist, racist, prejudiced assumptions.

But at the time, I would have been at a loss to imagine what a woman who would say she wasn't a feminist would be like. I would have assumed that such a woman had to be in circumstances so different from mine that I could never understand them. Raised on "Free To Be ... You And Me" and Judy Blume's novels by two parents who considered themselves feminists, I had never questioned my identity as a feminist any more than I had questioned my identity as a female.

I continued, that first year, to meet women who seemed as confident they were not feminists as I was that I was one. I tried, to begin with, to be open minded. Maybe it didn't matter if women didn't call themselves feminists, if they believed in basic gender equality, which some said they did. They really were feminists, they just didn't know it, I thought. But I couldn't shake my discomfort when women said they weren't feminists.

My friend had articulated what I was already observing. Like the women I was talking to my first evening at the University, non-feminist women tolerated sexism. As soon as men's comfort seemed at stake, they abandoned gender equality. But the notion of equality depends on the presence of both sexes. If you abandon it as soon as men come on the scene, you never believed in it. I decided it was important to call yourself a feminist. But I began to waver about what the label meant.

That first night, sitting in a strange room that looked, under the furniture, exactly like the one where I would live for the next eight months, I had to examine my identification with the frequently amorphous women's movement for the first time. It had become a choice. And now that it was a choice, it was a thing separable from myself. It was possible to -- hard not to -- hold it up to the light and examine it.

And I realized that being a feminist had always been about me. I was a feminist because I had respect for myself. I demonstrated for reproductive freedom because, first and foremost, I wanted control over my own body. I did not tolerate misogyny where I saw it because it directly took from my power. All other women were distantly second to me.

But I started examining feminism as I knew it in my heart, and I started listening to feminist thinkers that I met and read here. All women began to run neck-in-neck with me in the journey to feminist goals. Feminism became part and parcel of seeking the end of all kinds of oppression. Because I cannot be free until all women are.

It has taken years for me to come to that conclusion. I believe that feminism can and should be different for different feminists, and that it's appropriate for it to change over time. But there is one thing that has never changed for me and never will. As I said that first night, before I had a friend on campus, I am a feminist.

-- Kate Epstein is an LSA senior and an English major. She can be reached over e-mail at katebeth@umich.edu