Elise Kitchener

Alice Milner

Year 12 students, Elise Kitchener and Alice Milner, shared their insights into feminism and what it means to them and others, at High School Assembly.

Alice: A few weeks ago I was speaking to a friend of mine, a girl, and we were talking about the nature of being girls. I asked her if she was a feminist and she said she wasn’t. Hm. OK. She said she didn’t want to be branded as one of those annoying, preachy women that hate all men. Though she believes women deserve equal rights she said she couldn’t label herself a feminist. She was rather a ‘humanist’. 

She’s right. Some people think feminism has become a dirty word. Her comment focused on the very real perception that today’s feminism is unattractive – for both women and men. 

Elise: Feminism has come in waves. The first, around the 1800s, focused on women’s suffrage in which women, after years of protest, earned the right to vote in 1920.The second wave feminism broadened the scope to include issues of discrimination, reproductive rights and equal pay while the third wave greatly evolved to empower diversity. This created an idea referred to as intersectional feminism including minority women in the feminist discussion. 

Today, feminism is still evolving and remains focused on diversity and inclusion acting as a dynamic force in achieving gender equality. 

It is important to note the role of the MeToo movement in empowering women’s rights by enhancing awareness of power imbalances that enable misogynistic behaviours and by providing a space for female voices to speak out. Furthermore, men and boys committed to women’s rights have played a significant role in overcoming gender inequalities by standing against misogynistic behaviour, listening to female perspectives and challenging gender norms. 

Despite significant progress towards gender equality, there are still many pressing issues persisting in society. The gender pay gap stands as a stark indicator of inequity, reflecting the disparity in earnings between men and women performing similar roles. Australia’s average pay gap between men and women is 21.7%. This means that for every $1 on average a man makes, women earn 78c. Over the course of a year, that difference adds up to $26,393.

Violence against women remains a concern, with alarming rates of domestic abuse as over 50% of women in Australia have experienced sexual harassment, and one in three women have experienced violence from their partner. 

Alice: If the need to bridge these gaps still exists, why are we still hesitant to brand ourselves feminists? 

I think the answer to this question plays significantly into the idea of gender performativity. This is the idea that gender is constructed by a set of societal acts, ‘social performances’ that are coded feminine or masculine. 

For me, in being a woman, I play the role of a woman and my worth as a woman is based on how well I play the role of a woman.

This confines both women and men to unspoken rules; for women, these rules include things like treating inequality with a soft-spoken calmness, like remaining patient and quiet in the face of discrimination.

It doesn’t pay to be a loud woman like it does to be a loud man. We brand loud women unlikeable and pushy and rude. Think of women like Julia Gillard, or more recently the surging Taylor Swift hate. 

Rather, it pays to play the role of a compliant woman. By doing things like calling ourselves humanists instead of feminists, we are rewarded for playing the role of a woman well. 

And we fall into this trap all the time. When writing this speech I questioned whether I would come off the stage and tell my friends not to worry, that I wasn’t this feminist. To do that would mean I wouldn’t experience the burden of being a woman that doesn’t perform the act of ‘woman’ very well. 

The only way to undermine these gender roles and overcome the boxes it traps us in, is to shake up the expectations that confines these groups.

Essentially, to combat the divide between these groups we must exaggerate the acts that code us feminine or masculine. Something that already does this is drag. It’s working wonders to overturn definitions of gender. 

If this need to perform remains, it will stay a huge barrier to female success as we can already see with things like body positivity movements. I’m talking about the instagram posts of women urging women to always love their bodies. Don’t hate me but I hate it. 

Our society is constructed to make women hate their bodies but instead of combating this culture, the burden is held on women to accept themselves in a world that won’t accept them back. Women are told to present the illusion of self-empowerment and self-love, and when society is not conducive to this empowerment, as it invariably is, women are punished for not playing the role of the woman well. 

Mental. 

The expectation to ignore what society tells us and harness some fake body positivity is yet another modern barrier faced by women, a gap to bridge, a reason to call ourselves feminists. 

So, let’s all be humanists – cute. But let’s also be feminists and not the watered down, self-hating kind. We can all, men and women, be critical feminists that understand the burdens on women and men today and aim to deconstruct and overcome them. 

Elise: Last Friday, 8 March, was International Women’s Day, a day where we celebrated the women in our lives and their achievements worldwide. The day served as a compelling reminder of the progress made towards gender equality whilst also highlighting the work that remains to be done. This year’s theme was ‘Inspire Inclusion’, which emphasises the importance of diversity and the crucial role of inclusion in attaining gender equality. It advocates action to break down barriers, confront preconceptions, and foster environments in which all women feel valued and respected.

If you have time, you can still check out the International Women’s day library display showcasing female writers that have broken boundaries with both fiction and nonfiction. We got to enjoy some really fun IWD themed House assemblies and Shabbat, and can’t wait to continue the culture of International Women’s Day by understanding what it really means to be feminists that ‘Inspire Inclusion’.