John Kerry & feminism [View All]

[whometense]

I was out walking around town doing my Saturday errands, when for some reason I started hearing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" in my head. Don't ask. Anyway, it got me wondering, since we are such a mixed-age lot, what the younger Kerryites feel and think about feminism.

I scooped these quotes off the Kerry website:

In America, women should be able to go as far as their talents will take them.

But today, women are witnessing an unprecedented erosion of their basic rights. Over the last three years, they've seen attempts to block access to contraceptives, gag doctors from even mentioning abortion to their patients, freeze funding for family planning across the world, take away their constitutional right to choose, and ban medical procedures even when a woman's health is at stake.

They've seen 500,000 children shut out of afterschool programs. They've witnessed the end of the Equal Pay initiative, funding cuts for programs designed to promote gender equality, cuts to emergency shelters that protect women from violence, and administration-backed efforts to weaken Title IX.

Now more than ever, we need a president who will put the American government and legal system back on the side of women. Throughout his decades-long career in public service, John Kerry has been a champion of women's issues. He and John Edwards will commit to helping women balance work and family, expand college opportunities, protect their health and their constitutional right to choose, increase funding for cancer research, fight violent crime and close the pay gap.

Even among my own age group there's a vast difference of opinion on what feminism is, how women should balance home and work and etc. It's my impression that the word "feminist" has picked up a bad rep - angry, in-your-face confrontational, bra-burning and so forth. So I'm curious what you younger people think about this (guys too.)