F is for Human

Twenty-first century feminism has come to be occupied with promoting a specific, and reified, understanding of womanhood. It is an understanding of womanhood in which ‘real women’ are forced to choose an adherence to the feminist ‘super-frame’ over and above any understanding of the intricate and complex substance that makes women thinking and feeling individuals.

What began in the late nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America as a significant historical turning point for women’s rights, and the political organization of feminist liberation, now appears to be culminating in the very forms of dominance that organized Western feminism had initially sought to eradicate. Further, it is a very different version of feminism from the one that appears to more naturally evolve from the history of female organization in Nigeria, and in other parts of the African continent. In the latter, the struggle for women’s rights—which in countries such as Nigeria began long before the second wave of feminism was sweeping the United States, and which certainly never self-consciously gave itself the ‘feminist’ labelling—was not only about women but also about the struggle for entire nations.