Depending on whom you ask, good women bear children and stay home to raise them without complaint. Good women work but are content to earn 77 percent of what men earn.
Good women are charming, polite, and unobtrusive. We see this tension in socially dictated beauty standards-the right way to be a woman is to be thin, to wear make up, to wear the right kind of clothes (not too slutty, not too prude, show a little leg, ladies), and so on. As Judith Butler writes in her 1988 essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”: “Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all.” This tension-the idea that there is a right way to be a woman, a right way to be the most essential woman-is ongoing and pervasive. I feel like I am not as committed as I need to be, that I am not living up to feminist ideals because of who and how I choose to be.
My favorite definition of a feminist is one offered by Su, an Australian woman who, when interviewed for Kathy Bail’s 1996 anthology DIY Feminism, described them simply as “women who don’t want to be treated like shit.” This definition is pointed and succinct, but I run into trouble when I try to expand it.
