From the X case to Pussy Riot: why I'm still a feminist, 20 years on
As a teenager, ANNA CAREYwas told her generation had abandoned feminism. Twenty years later she refuses to make the same mistake about today’s young women
I’M TRYING TO REMEMBER the first time I was told that young women weren’t interested in feminism. It was probably about 1992, when I was both a very young woman – I turned 17 that September – and a feminist, and I remember being both surprised and annoyed. It kept happening, so I soon stopped being surprised, but I continued to be annoyed.
On both sides of the Atlantic the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s had apparently decided that their daughters’ generation were apolitical ingrates with no appreciation of or interest in the women’s movement, and they were keen to tell us how disappointed they were. It felt particularly unfair because every young feminist I knew was not only keenly aware of what that generation had done for us but also grateful. But some of them weren’t listening to us.
I am no longer particularly young, but I’m still a feminist, and for the past 20 years I’ve had to hear both older feminists and anti-feminists of all ages telling me that feminism was dead. According to the anti-feminists, this was because feminism was no longer necessary, as we were living in what was either a paradise of equality or a terrifying matriarchy; according to the feminists, it was because lazy young women were complacent and cared about nothing but Sex and the City and vajazzling.
But young women have never stopped embracing feminism, because they, and I, believe it’s still necessary. Girls were discovering it when I was a teenager, at the beginning of what became known as feminism’s third wave – the first was the women’s suffrage movement, the second the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s – in a flurry of riot-grrrl zines and bands and of declarations that you could still like make-up and be a feminist.
Twenty years later, as the huge popularity of feminist books such as Caitlin Moran’s hilarious, exhilarating How to Be a Woman and the rise of feminist blogs and campaigns from the Vagenda to the 5050 Group shows, they’re still discovering – and embracing – it.
THERE WAS NO thunderbolt moment in my feminist awakening in the early 1990s. In a way it was was probably inevitable. Having been brought up in a household where we were always encouraged to question gender stereotypes – throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Irish classes in our primary school would often include a small Carey asking, “Why are Máire and Mammy always in the kitchen and Seán always helping Daddy with the car?” – I began to take feminism seriously when I was about 16. This was partly thanks to riot grrrl, the musical movement that encouraged girls to get together, grab guitars and change first the music world and then, well, everything else. As a music-loving teenager I found the likes of Huggy Bear’s rowdy Her Jazz electrifying and inspiring.
Then there was Susan Faludi’s 1992 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. A brilliantly argued, compulsively readable critique of the political and cultural backlashes against women’s social and economic progression, it changed the way I watched television and read newspapers and magazines forever, and it remains the best guide to critical consumption of media I have read.
