What has caused the perception of feminism to change?

If you ask 10 different people around you to define feminism, you’d get 10 vastly different answers. The idea of feminism as a movement means so many different things based on who you ask. Feminism is often perceived differently due to the sources through which we get our information about it, and we can see how the perception of this movement changes based on caste, class, religion and even era.

To put it roughly, the feminism movement first started as the suffragette movement around the early 1900s. The media deemed the movement extremist and radical. The majority of the public considered suffragettes to be people who you should be wary of, partly due to the media’s portrayal of them but also due to the crazy stunts they had to pull to get attention. The attention that would give them the ability to reach out to more people and speak up. However, after the start of World War 1 and The Roaring 20’s, the intensity of the suffragette movement dampened down quite a lot with voting rights and better opportunities opening.

Nowadays, feminism is considered to be a lot more casual than it was earlier, and a lot more prominent in the mainstream media. With the #MeToo movement and Women’s Marches, the rise of social media has really redefined what the term ‘feminism’ means to one. More and more women are joining the feminism “bandwagon”. To them, it's something that everyone is doing, therefore they should join in as well. The structure of feminism today is built on privilege. Having a special “Women’s Day” or retweeting stories about strong female figures (while it may spread awareness) isn’t doing much to help the ses or social quotas even know there’s a day dedicated to them? Does it really help them? Pseudo feminism is doing more harm than good for the movement right now. This performative activism causes people to believe the feminist movement is shallow, and anti-men. Stripping away some of the hard-earned importance and respect it gained.

However, for every negative aspect, there’s always a positive one. The movement has moved on from its focus on cis, white, females and onto people of colour, people of different races, classes, sexualities, and other communities. The intersectionality between different marginalised communities gives them more credibility as a united work front. This has given the movement a strong push towards making more structural changes. The earlier feminist movement focused more on individual equality and empowerment, but feminism now is focused on breaking gender norms, and prejudices in society, advocating policy changes and challenging the inequalities that have caused women to be marginalised for so long.

Every day, society is striding towards a more secular and equal style of living to bridge the vast gap that was formed ages ago between people of privilege and other marginalised communities. And soon enough, we will end up crossing that bridge to a more united society.