Our hero!
[Photographer unknown]

Do you think it's important that women call themselves a feminist or is it enough that women are doing feminist work -- without necessarily labeling it as such?

I think that conservatives have really done an amazing job of taking away from us all the good words like "liberty" and "freedom" and demonizing the words that are left. Like "feminism" and "choice." And "liberal." I think we can't let them do this forever. If you lose a way to describe yourself, you've lost a lot. If you lose the word "feminism," you are losing the idea that there is anything particular to the way women's situation is structured in this society. I would fight for that word. But it's a losing game in the end. I think we've seen that with "liberal." "Liberal" was a very good word! "Liberal" was a word that put together the idea of our constitutional liberties -- like freedom of speech and the rights of the individual against the government -- with the idea of fighting poverty. Fighting racial discrimination. Once you lose the word, you lose a very good way of keeping those concepts together. And I think the same is true about "feminism." But if people want to start calling themselves women's liberationists, that's OK with me.

It does seem like we spend a lot of time -- and I do this myself -- debunking myths about the death of feminism. So how do we change the conversation so that we're not just constantly defending ourselves?

Well I think that's related to the way that feminist victories become incorporated into society -- they lose the character of being considered feminist. For example, half of all medical students are women, but how many of those women in medical school think, "My presence in this seat is a victory for the women's movement"? How often when people write about this fact, do they see that in terms of a social victory for women? People will maintain that this was part of the natural evolution of society, you didn't need a women's movement, that it would have happened anyway. None of which is true.

I think we need to reclaim the conversation in a number of areas. For example, when we talk about abortion, how often do we talk about it in terms of women's lives? As opposed to it about a fetus being a person. The anti-choicers have so thoroughly switched the conversation over to the question of the personhood of the fertilized egg or fetus that now it's even a person before it's implanted in your uterus! So on the one hand you have that our victories aren't being acknowledged as real victories and that the problem areas are areas of enormous retreat. So I just think we need to start talking more about our own lives as being important. I think that we need to be much bolder.

But all these things aside, you say that you're still optimistic. Are you optimistic about feminism too?

I guess I feel that the rollback of our rights is only temporary -- and I say that in my introduction. That a big modern industrial country like America is not going to become a right-wing Christian nation in which you have to show your marriage certificate to get birth control. If you can measure the strength of an impulse by the ferocity of the opposition to it, I would say that feminism is very much alive. People don't spend a lot of time anymore bashing unions, for example. They don't spend a lot of time bashing the black power movement, but feminism really gets to people. So I think the fact that it really gets to people shows both its relevance and its power.