Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to 'choose' between public justice and private happiness.
Interpretation
Feminism seeks to ensure that women can achieve both their personal happiness and public justice without having to sacrifice one for the other.
In this quote, Susan Faludi emphasizes that feminism advocates for the rights of women to pursue their personal aspirations and happiness while also striving for social justice and equality. The essence of feminism is to dismantle the societal pressures that force women to make a choice between their private lives, often defined by personal fulfillment and domestic responsibilities, and their public identities, which encompass their roles in social, political, and professional spheres.
In practice
During a speech on gender equality, I might quote Susan Faludi to highlight the importance of addressing women's rights.
Feminism's agenda is basic: it asks that women not be forced to "choose" between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves-instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.
The media and the rest of popular culture weren't recording people's reactions to 9/11; they were forcing made-up reactions down people's throats.
The women's movement hit my neighborhood like a freight train. Everybody got divorced. You wonder what would have happened to women if the suburbs hadn't been built.
The system of heroism depends on women to be weak so men can be strong.
As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it.
When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.
We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.
Young feminists have been sold a bill of goods about American feminism. The enormous changes in women over the past 40 years are constantly and falsely attributed to the organized women's movement of the late 1960s and '70s.
Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.
I think the world is ambivalent about feminism. So I can't blame college students. I think they're reflecting the greater culture's attitude toward feminism. So what I can do is, in ways that are appropriate, advocate for feminism and help the students learn what feminism is about.
Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn't want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.
I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
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