The Essence of Feminism: An Artistic Portrait of the True Feminist Soul.
Text: Andréa Balt / Photography: Robert Sturman / Model: Ashika Gogna / Location: Paradise Cove, CA
Just like women, feminism has been widely misunderstood throughout history.
True feminism is much older than its unofficial beginnings, with the nineteenth and early twentieth century women suffrage movements, or its most remembered second wave, the 1960’s Women’s Liberation Movement.
Activist Gloria Steinem identifies a feminist as “anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”
It is nothing but a fair and compassionate response to one’s place in life and society in equal measure as he/she respond to the place of others. Our ability to face everyone as kindly and honestly as we (should) face ourselves. A deeper kind of response-ability.
Poet and essayist Adrienne Rich offered one of the fullest, most inclusive and far-reaching descriptions of feminism:
“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you… it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger.
It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind.
It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: ‘I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’
Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions–predigested books and ideas… marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems.
It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short… and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us.
It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be ‘different’…
The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”
In its purest essence then, feminism seems to be synonymous with…
Freedom.
Self-reliance.
An active, creative and independent kind of beauty.
Ambition, courage and belief in oneself.
True feminism is nothing but a combination of our basic, most honorable qualities, which we should all — men and women — seek to nourish daily.
Have you been feministing today?
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