I still call myself a feminist, though I’m getting close to the end of my rope in doing so. For me, what it means, and has always meant, is that I believe in basic equality for women: We can vote, own property, get paid equally to men for equal work if we choose that path, and get credit cards without our husbands’ approval. We deserve access to safety, which means we have private spaces such as women’s shelters and can access no-fault divorce and leave men who abuse us.
When I say this, even in a room full of young women who scoff at and hate the word “feminist,” as I did at the Turning Point Young Women’s conference last year for which the tagline was “feminine not feminist,” people cheer. No one disagrees that women deserve these things. Whether or not they want to call that “feminism” is another story.
When I was in college in the late 1980s, there were…
