Twenty years on, she sets out on her mission to “reclaim the word ‘feminism,’ ” and it’s a mark of how enduringly unfashionable it is — she cites a survey finding that only 29 percent of American women would describe themselves as feminists — that for all Ms. Moran’s buoyancy, it is not a risk-free enterprise. She is being uncool and she knows it. She is also, beneath the frothy surface, standing up to various unshakable orthodoxies — most bravely that abortion should weigh on a woman’s conscience like infanticide.
And so she goes right back to basics. “What do you think feminism is, ladies? What part of ‘liberation for women’ is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? ‘Vogue,’ by Madonna? Jeans?” Were the respondents, she wonders, “just drunk at the time of survey?
— from Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman and the New York Times
And so she goes right back to basics. “What do you think feminism is, ladies? What part of ‘liberation for women’ is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? ‘Vogue,’ by Madonna? Jeans?” Were the respondents, she wonders, “just drunk at the time of survey?
— from Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman and the New York Times
