Was I born a feminist, or am I always growing into being one? Sure, I was born a woman, but as we all know, that’s neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for being a feminist. Many women won’t or can’t call themselves feminists. My brothers and some good male friends are what I would call feminists, in that they are aware of their inherent privilege, work to live with it and to mobilize it against injustices (individual, systemic) that affect women.<\/p>\n
I am a feminist myself in that I try to do this too, even though I sometimes find myself unwittingly participating in situations where sexism and patriarchy are reinforced. In these moments I remember that being feminist is not about proclamation, but about action — beginning in our everyday lives and practices but grounded in social justice. So, today, on International Women’s Day, I would like to provide some reminders of why we, women and men, still need feminism. For our bodies<\/a>, our selves<\/a>, our work<\/a> and our lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Was I born a feminist, or am I always growing into being one? Sure, I was born a woman, but as we all know, that’s neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for being a feminist. Many women won’t or can’t call themselves feminists. My brothers and some good male friends are what I would call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-unexamined-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pUfdR-1S","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}