Title: Why Don't More People Call Themselves Feminists?
Headings: Why Don't More People Call Themselves Feminists?
Why Don't More People Call Themselves Feminists?
It's 2014, and lots of women (and men) are still wary of embracing the term.

Content: Women secured the right to vote, but it took nearly 100 years of campaigning; women won court cases for the right to use contraception and terminate pregnancies, but only after sustained campaigns to criminalize both of those practices landed health advocates in jail; Hillary Clinton might just be the first female president of the United States, but Victoria Woodhull was the first to run nearly a century and a half ago; today, domestic violence is illegal and it's no big deal for a woman to have her own credit card or bank account, but just a few decades ago, beating your wife wasn't treated as a criminal offense and a woman couldn't open a bank account without her husband's permission. Many other American women also come to feminism through higher education, with more than half of college-educated women identifying as feminists. And women who came of age during the second-wave feminist movement of the '60s and '70s are also more likely than the average American to use the term to describe themselves. The problem, then, seems to be the word itself, and not what it stands for. When people learn what feminism actually means either through education or by simply hearing a definition of the term, they're more likely to adopt it. But who can blame folks for initially balking? Right-wing radio hosts have built entire careers on branding feminist-minded women " feminazis ," and every inch toward equality has seen a foot of backlash, often in the form of stereotyping feminists as unattractive man-haters.