Feminism is a difficult word. It carries a lot of baggage, both good and bad. I like the word feminist because it invokes the struggle for a women to be recognised as a sentient human being, separate from her family and valued as an individual. But it also carries a sense of a narrow, collective women-against-men view. It’s a powerful word with a heavy weight of history behind it. There are many different types of feminism, and I don’t agree with all of them.
I call myself a liberal feminist and a tory feminist. I choose not to use the term conservative feminist (with or without a capital C) because I’m economically rather than socially conservative.
By tory feminist I mean a few things. I think that all individuals are fundalmentally equal. I think the differences between two individuals are far greater than the differences between the two halves of the world’s population. I think that while we’ve come a long way, there are still social assumptions made, and the media plays a large and negative role. I think that the majority of laws should be completely gender-blind. And I think that change should come primarily from society, not from the state.
I’ve written a few posts which explain my thinking further, in particular on my type of feminism, equality and collectivism.
