(Taken from print edition. Newspaper not online, unfortunately!)

Muchacha Magazine
The magazine for young women
which doesn't exclude young men

Number 2
2006

ENCICLOGENDER

We Are Feminists
by Ivette


A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

You have most likely heard someone utter with a bit of reluctance, and sometimes even with rejection the following expression, “I’m all for women's equality, but I’m not a feminist! This is said to state a position of principles that places the speaker on the other side of the street.

Behind this statement hides mainly ignorance. There are those who believe feminism means to be against men and therefore wish to distance themselves from such a position.

However, what feminism opposes is male chauvinism – a backwards, excluding and conservative ideology. There are other people who know the essence of feminism but do not agree with it. This is a choice that one may share or not, but is still present.

Feminism is a movement that pursues equal rights and opportunities for men and women based on a cultural change that would modify gender relations and question the roles women and men have been assigned in different cultures and seeking to modify the economic and social foundations starting with changes in the organization of the family, work distribution and power.

Some scholars believe feminism started in the Renaissance, but most place its origins in 1791 with the Declaration of Women Rights and Citizenship, proclaimed by Olympia de Gouges, following the French Revolution.

There is not only one feminism. There are different trends within the movement, but they all seek to recover essential women rights. For centuries women were totally excluded from public life and deprived of legal rights. In other words: to be a woman and to be nothing was the same thing. Feminism promoted a massive mobilization to demand the right of women to vote, first in England, then in the United States and later, step by step, in almost everywhere in the world, their rights to education, to an equal standing within marriage, to divorce, and to participate in public life. Feminism cannot be isolated from its historical context. It is a movement that works to conquer more justice among human beings.

To declare a feminist standing does not mean to have this or that sexual orientation. It is a standing for progress, for a world of equal opportunities and possibilities, a struggle --- far from over – that has made you a better human being, not an object.