feministhistorian:

One thing I’ve noticed over the past year is how feminist history is either seen as good or bad. There is no discussion on how the feminist movement actually was. Feminist history is not all good or all bad. No one person is all good or all bad. They are complicated and able to hold contradictory views. It has been over simplified to “1st and 2nd wave feminist were bad and never did anything good.” This oversimplification of history happens all the time to everything in history (American Civil War is the best example). When people discuss racism, classism, heterosexism, etc. in the feminist movement, they are usually referring to mainstream feminist organizations (NOW for example). They over look the fact that -isms manifest themselves into all feminist organizations in different forms. However, if that happened no one could vilify just mainstream feminist because then we’d have to own up to the fact it was not just Betty Friedan, Susan B Anthony, Alice Paul, and other mainstream feminist who discriminated against people. While all those women did discriminate against people, so did other feminist. We’d have to admit every single feminist has screwed up and we couldn’t place any of them on a pedestal and say “this is what a good feminist looks like.” Which is what people have done with feminist and it happens throughout history. 

We have to own up to the fact that feminism has done good and bad things. Feminist have discriminated against queer women, working class women, women of color, etc. However they have also won the right to vote, get domestic violence/rape crisis centers, allow women to get an education, etc. We have to talk about the good and the bad. We cannot just brush off 1st and 2nd wave feminism as bad because it makes us think we are perfect. We are so fucking far from perfect it is not even funny. There is still racism, cissexism, heterosexism, classism, etc. in the feminist movement. If we keep just vilifying the past we have a false sense of superiority over past feminist which is bullshit. 

So my point is, cut the crap, we are as problematic as the feminist of the past but for different reasons. The -ism’s manifest themselves in similar and different ways in modern feminism as they did in the historical movement. You are only kidding yourself if you think you are better than 1st or 2nd wave feminist. You get no cookies for saying how horrible the 1st two waves are and ignoring the contributions from WoC, queer women, working class women, etc. in those movements. Which ironically is exactly what feminist do when they discredit the first two waves of feminism. 

Long story short, I am sick of some modern day feminist discrediting the work from the past while a) not understanding feminism of the past and b) discrediting the work of WoC, queer women, etc. because they label it only as a white middle class hetero movement. Understanding feminist history is incredibly important to understanding feminism but you cannot do that if you are constantly shitting on the past. 

(Source: historicalslut, via )