Jamia Wilson - This Book Is Feminist: An Intersectional Primer for Next-Gen Changemakers

How could you not want to include the persecuted trans women or nonbinary folk so you have more comrades to fight against gendered oppression?

Janet Mock

... Of course men can and should be feminists too. It just means that we are getting rid of the gender roles that didnt always exist. Old languages didnt have he and she. They didnt have gender pronouns; people were people. Gloria Steinem

Merriam-Websters Dictionary made history when it chose feminism as its featured word of the year in 2017. The dictionary shared that online searches for the word rose 70% that year. So, what happened that year? And why was everyone suddenly googling a term dear to my heart?

This was the year of the #MeToo movement, ignited by survivor activist Tarana Burke against sexual harassment and abuse; the aftermath of the record-breaking Womens March, which mobilized five million people globally; and the historic upsurge of women running for elected office in the United States.

That year, I scrolled through news headlines and comment sections on social media about feminisms #trending moment, and thought about how much had changed and, sadly, what has stayed the same since the word was first described as the qualities of females in an English dictionary in the 1840s.

I thought about the over 12,000 years of sexism that led to this moment and the known and mostly unknown people whose work, art, voices, and partnerships pushed back at a structure that benefits and positions one group of people in power over others throughout history.

Historically, as cisgender (people who are not trans) men began to rule the majority of societies worldwide, women and girls held less autonomy, or ability to make choices for themselves. (These societies are known as patriarchal human social systems, where men whose gender identity matches the one they were assigned at birth hold primary control, power, property, and leadership.)

A widely held understanding is that what began as more egalitarian (equal) hunter and gathering cultures moved toward farming. Control and ownership of the farm began to be passed down the male line. Over time, this model became reinforced within religion, education, and government.

There are so many ways to be a human

Too often, when stereotypes become rooted as the norm, false ideas mask themselves as truth. There are so many ways to be a human, but we receive messages at an early age that were expected to behave or express ourselves in a certain manner, or wear specific colors. (Did you ever witness a young boy being told that boys dont cry, or an outspoken little girl being told off for being bossy and not being ladylike?)

This became the norm in many cultures around the world, especially as people moved from one country to another, either from migration or colonialism. This is how the false idea spread of a natural order of things being determined by biology. But we know this is not how things always were or should be.

A lot of what is recorded and understood about feminism occurred between the seventeenth century and today. However, the fight against imbalances of power began much earlier: from Andal, an eighth-century Tamil woman poet who boldly rejected gendered wifely duties, to fifteenth-century Italian-French author Christine de Pizans imagining of a women-only utopia. Modern-day conversations about gender equality are rooted in the seeds their lineage planted long, long ago.

Although I was happy people were looking up the definition of feminism, I yearned for the dictionary to speak more about the feminism I embrace and live forone that includes and uplifts the connection between:

racial justice, disability, immigration, LGBTQIA+ rights, labor rights, reproductive justice, environmental justice, and feminism.

The feminism that paved the way for me was intersectional