Source: Center for American Progress

What does the feminist movement mean to you?
A lot of my friends don’t call themselves feminists, although still believe that there are inequalities between the genders. It does bother me that females today think that we’ve advanced enough and no longer feel a tethered association with women’s movements before us, but obviously it’s less important to me that people actually associate with the word “feminist” than it is for them to employ a feminist line of thinking. There are different waves of feminism, and each means something to different to its generation. Right now I see feminism carving out corners in the media, which in an Internet-driven culture is very important and impressionable, and something that never really happened before on this scale.

Read more of Emma Orlow’s interview at thewomentakeover.com.

Did you ever wish you were a boy?

Did you? Did you for one moment or one breath or one heartbeat beating over all the years of life, wish, even a little, that you could spend it as a boy? Honest. Really. Even if you got over it.

Did you ever wish that you could be a boy just so you could do boy things and not hear them called boy things, did you want to climb trees and skin knees and be third base and not hear the boys say, Sure, play, but that means you have to be third base.
Oh ha ha ha.

But did you ever wish you were a boy just because there were boys, and there were girlsand they were them, and we were, well, we weren’t them, and we knew there must be a difference because everybody kept telling us there was. But what was it?

You never knew. Like you knew that you were a girl (you run like a girl you throw like a girl you girl you) and that was great, that was swell, but you couldn’t help wondering what it would be like if you…had been…a boy.

Read the full post at www.TheWomenTakeOver.com.

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the latest voice in the feminist movement and currently one of the hottest debates going, has been on shelves for a short period of time but is already receiving massive amounts of both kudos and backlash. I pre-ordered, then counted the days until my book (digitally) arrived. Once it did, I devoured its contents, desperately searching for someone with whom to discuss each chapter.

But before I was able to read the book I was reading all the Internet fodder, and a few things stuck out to me. The first was a writer saying, “You can’t start a movement from the top down,” which really made me stop and think. I tried my best to hold out any and all judgement of Sandberg and her “movement” until I’d read the book, but a lot of the Internet reviews and discussions were negative, so I admittedly had low expectations. Thankfully I have a feminist husband who read the book as well- finished before me, actually- and we talked exhaustively about what we thought it meant to us, and to each generation of women (and men) globally.

When I finally was able to start page one, all my concerns melted away. She wrote like a real person. She wasn’t preaching to me. She was saying things that RESONATED so hard I often had to set the book (iPad) down and think about what I’d just read. I can’t remember the last time something moved me to my quiet think-y space like this did. I highlighted so many passages the book looks like it’s written on purple and yellow pages.

I think a lot of women felt Sandberg was trying to tell them THEY needed to change to make a positive impact for women in the workplace. It’s true, a lot of her message is about looking inside yourself and examining the way you approach your own path, but when you stop and think about it, what’s wrong with that? If all our protests have fallen flat in the past, maybe by changing our own mentalities we can finally start to lessen the gap between genders in the office. Not to mention, there are so many points she brought up that absolutely resonated with me- and all those points were things I NEED to change about myself to become the best version of me I can be.

Read the entire article at www.thewomentakeover.com.

JESSICA BENNETT: WRITER, EDITOR, ADVOCATE

Some people are so gifted with words that you want to drop everything and read anything they’ve ever written. For me, no one fits that description more perfectly than Jessica Bennett. Besides being an outspoken advocate for equal rights, she’s been the executive editor at Tumblr, a senior editor at Newsweek, and has had pieces published everywhere from The Atlantic to The New York Times.

All her brilliance aside, she also happens to be really nice and incredibly funny.

Do you consider yourself a feminist?
Fuck yes! And proud.

How do you define “feminism”?
Feminism is the belief in equality for men and women. That’s not just how I define it, that is the definition. I can’t stand when people say they believe in the above (ahem, Marisa Mayer) but that they’re not a feminist. YES YOU ARE. Own it, girl!

Why do you think women are tentative to call themselves feminists?
The word feminism has a lot of baggage… angry, humorless, combat-boot wearing, bra-burning… no matter that none of this is true. (Seriously, if I had a nickel for every time somebody referenced “bra-burning” to me. It didn’t happen! Look it up!). But I think there’s something else at play here, too: the idea that young women who are outpacing their male peers in academics don’t need feminism. You know, they’ve been raised on Girl Power, they had a female Secretary of State, and so forth. But the reality is that gender inequality is still rampant, albeit in subtle ways. Many of those ways become visible when women graduate from school and enter into the workforce. So I think what we end up seeing is a lot of women embracing feminism later than our mother’s generations. I know that was the case for me. But really, better late than never.

Read the entire interview here.