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: Reluctance to use the F-word may be more about education and information than the word itself. When respondents to the 2013 poll were given the dictionary definition of feminist — "someone who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes" — 57 percent of respondents, including 67 percent of women and 47 percent of men, agreed that, yes, they were feminists. Education worked for me too. I stayed in my women's studies class until the end of the semester, and by then, not only had "feminist" lost its fear factor, but it felt tremendously disrespectful not to own a word that represented generations of struggle to set women on the path to equality. We know the usual markers of feminist success but not always the long haul that led to them: 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.