Why Being a Woman Does Not Automatically Make Someone a Feminist

“Even many women are against keeping the hall gates open 24 hours a day.”

“Even many women do not want to give up their seats on public transport to the sick or the elderly.”

“Even in cases of rape, harassment or abuse, women engage in victim-blaming more than men do.”

These statements may well be true in particular contexts. But there is something deeply misleading about the way the “even many women ...” argument is often used.

In almost any discussion about an issue affecting women, the behaviour or opinions of some women are brought up to shift a substantial share of the responsibility back onto women themselves, often in a way that conveniently reduces the responsibility of men as perpetrators or obscures the patriarchal structures underlying the problem.

People who identify themselves as supporters of women’s rights make two fundamental mistakes when they do this.

First, they create the unrealistic expectation that women, simply because they are women, should occupy the same political and moral position on every issue concerning women.

There is no reason to expect that. Women are not a politically homogeneous group. They differ enormously in class, education, economic circumstances, geography, family background, access to information and exposure to different ideas.

There is no reason why a woman who has grown up with considerable freedom and access to education should understand the world in exactly the same way as a woman whose entire life has been shaped by restrictions on her education, mobility and choices.

The second mistake is failing to recognize that patriarchy is not merely a system in which men exercise power over women. It is also a set of social norms, values and expectations that people learn and internalize.

Women, no less than men, can absorb patriarchal ideas and reproduce them. A woman can believe that wives should obey their husbands, that women should not stay out late, that a rape victim is responsible for what happened to her, or that women who challenge traditional gender roles are somehow immoral.

None of this is contradictory. If patriarchal ideas are taught to everyone from childhood, there is no reason to assume that women will somehow be immune to them.

This is why the expectation that women should automatically protest against every injustice committed against other women is so problematic.

The issue is not, and has never been, simply women versus men.

Women can have interests that conflict with those of other women. They can compete with one another, discriminate against one another and defend institutions or social norms that harm other women.

Being a member of a group that experiences discrimination does not automatically give a person the political consciousness to recognize the structures through which that discrimination operates. Nor does being a woman automatically make someone a feminist.

In fact, given the society we live in, it may not be much of an exaggeration to say that a man can sometimes have both greater opportunity and greater potential to develop a feminist consciousness than a woman does.

That may sound counterintuitive, but it becomes less so if we consider what developing such a consciousness actually requires.

Nobody is born a feminist. Feminism, like any political or ethical outlook, is something a person develops through education, exposure to ideas, access to information, reflection and the freedom to question inherited assumptions.

Now consider who generally has greater access to those things. In a patriarchal society, men tend to enjoy greater freedom of movement, greater autonomy, easier access to education and information, and less responsibility for unpaid domestic and care work.

Women, meanwhile, continue to face social and material barriers to education, mobility and participation in public life. These barriers exist at different stages of life, from schooling to higher education and employment.

Some women overcome them through extraordinary perseverance, but many others cannot.

If a woman has had limited access to education, little economic independence and almost no opportunity to encounter ideas outside the narrow confines of the life prescribed for her, how realistic is it to expect her to develop the same political awareness of women’s rights as someone who has had considerably greater access to education and intellectual freedom?

This is not to suggest that education automatically makes someone feminist, or that women without formal education cannot possess an acute understanding of injustice. They absolutely can.

The point is that political consciousness does not emerge in a vacuum. People need opportunities to encounter ideas, question social norms and imagine alternatives to the lives they have been taught to regard as inevitable.

When those opportunities are systematically distributed unequally, we cannot simply blame individuals for failing to develop the consciousness that society itself has made difficult to acquire.

There is another dimension to this. Patriarchal societies often place women in competition with one another for recognition, security, social approval and limited opportunities.

From childhood, many women are taught to measure themselves against other women through standards of beauty, respectability, marriageability, obedience and social status.

Even basic freedoms can become things that women have to negotiate and defend individually. When a society creates an environment in which people must constantly compete for a limited amount of security and approval, it should not be surprising if some women become more concerned with securing their own position than with advancing the interests of women collectively.

This is where the idea of survival of the fittest becomes relevant, not as a biological explanation for women’s behaviour, but as a description of what happens when social conditions encourage people to compete rather than cooperate.

If a woman has spent her entire life learning that she must fight for the little space available to her, there is no guarantee that she will develop a politics of solidarity with other women.

She may instead develop a politics of self-preservation. She may compete with other women, judge them harshly or even try to prevent them from obtaining freedoms that she herself was denied.

There is also a powerful incentive for women to conform to patriarchal expectations. In a society where openly identifying as feminist can carry social costs, behaving in ways considered traditionally “feminine” can make life considerably easier.

A woman may learn, consciously or unconsciously, that being accommodating, submissive, agreeable and careful not to challenge men too much earns her greater social approval than being openly confrontational about women’s rights.

She may therefore distance herself from feminism, criticize other women for being “too feminist” and align herself with traditional gender expectations. In doing so, she may gain acceptance from both patriarchal men and women, avoid conflict and make her own life somewhat less challenging.

This is part of what is captured by the contemporary idea of “pick-me” behaviour, although the term is often used far too casually.

Not every woman who disagrees with a feminist position is a pick-me, and not every woman who reproduces patriarchal ideas is consciously seeking male approval. Socialization is often much subtler than that.

People can internalize social norms so deeply that they no longer experience them as externally imposed rules. What society has taught them to regard as “normal” can simply feel like common sense.

That is precisely why the existence of women who reproduce patriarchal ideas cannot be used as an argument against the existence of patriarchy. If anything, it demonstrates how deeply such a system can reproduce itself.

Patriarchy does not survive only because men consciously decide to oppress women. It survives because its norms can become embedded in families, institutions, communities and individual beliefs, including the beliefs of women themselves.

So when someone responds to a discussion about women’s rights by saying, “But even many women oppose this,” the appropriate response is not necessarily to deny that some women do indeed oppose it. Of course they do.

The more important question is why their opposition is being treated as evidence against the underlying claim. A society in which women have internalized patriarchal values will naturally contain women who defend those values. Their existence does not make the structural problem disappear.

Women do not have to agree with feminism for patriarchy to exist. They do not have to protest every injustice committed against women, and they do not have to be morally superior to men for women’s rights to be worth defending.

The fact that some women participate in reproducing patriarchal norms is not a reason to distribute responsibility for women’s oppression equally between women and men. It is a reason to understand more carefully how patriarchy works.

The real question, then, is not why every woman is not a feminist. It is why a society continues to teach women to police, compete with and sometimes oppress one another -- and then points to that very behaviour as evidence that the structures producing it are somehow not responsible.

Jannatul Naym Pieal is a Dhaka-based writer, researcher and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected].