Rebecca Solnit | Feminism Has Just Started (and It's Not Stopping Now)

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Marchers in the Minneapolis Slut Walk on October 1, 2011.
The Slut Walk is a worldwide movement to protest the further
victimization of sexual abuse victims. (Photo via Shutterstock)

Pandora's Box and the Volunteer Police Force: Feminism Has Just Started (and It's Not Stopping Now)
By Rebecca Solnit
TomDispatch via Truthout | Book Exerpt

Tuesday 20 May 2014

The history of women’s rights and feminism is often told as though it were a person who should already have gotten to the last milestone or has failed to make enough progress toward it. Around the millennium lots of people seemed to be saying that feminism had failed or was over. On the other hand, there was a wonderful feminist exhibition in the 1970s entitled “Your 5,000 Years Are Up.” It was a parody of all those radical cries to dictators and abusive regimes that your [fill in the blank] years are up. It was also making an important point.

Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth -- and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanently, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has 999 miles to go and will never get anywhere.

It takes time. There are milestones, but so many people are traveling along that road at their own pace, and some come along later, and others are trying to stop everyone who’s moving forward, and a few are marching backward or are confused about what direction they should go in. Even in our own lives we regress, fail, continue, try again, get lost, and sometimes make a great leap, find what we didn’t know we were looking for, and yet continue to contain contradictions for generations.

The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/23816-pandoras-box-and-the-volunteer-police-force-feminism-has-just-started-and-its-not-stopping-now