The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism

"In reality, it's naively defeatist to assume millennia of patriarchy entrenched in law, culture, social arrangements and economics could be or should have been fully disassembled in one lifetime. The other assumption is that one event can be a weathervane, a measuring stick, for the failure of feminism."

"Is any other human rights movement measured by such criteria? Did anyone think the civil rights movement should be judged by whether it terminated all racism for ever? The perfect is the enemy of the good, and it's often both an impossible standard and a cudgel used to bash in what good has been achieved."

"It was a consequence of the preceding five years of feminist upheaval, which in turn built on earlier feminist work. That upheaval took place as a vast public discourse educating the public about the pervasiveness of gender violence and the fact that it very often does not unfold as stranger in alley attacks."

Declarations of feminism's death recur frequently but rest on flawed assumptions. First, expecting complete victory within 60 years ignores that patriarchal systems embedded in law, culture, and economics require generations to dismantle. Second, measuring feminism's success by single events like Roe v. Wade's overturning or #MeToo's continuation sets impossible standards. No other human rights movement faces such criteria—the civil rights movement isn't judged by whether racism ended entirely. #MeToo emerged from five years of feminist activism building on decades of prior work, generating crucial public discourse about gender violence's pervasiveness and challenging misconceptions about how such violence occurs.

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