So You're "Not a Feminist"? Cute. Let's Talk About Your Bank Account.

Okay, we need to have a little chat.

I keep hearing women say "I'm not a feminist, but..." like it's a confession at church. And listen, I get it — the word has baggage. It's been dragged through decades of bad press, worse stereotypes, and that one aunt at Thanksgiving who thinks it means "hates men and burns bras for sport." But before you distance yourself from the word, I need you to sit with me for five minutes and think about your actual life. Your bank account. Your job. Your marriage. Your birth control. Your right to walk into a courthouse and just... exist as a full legal person.

Because every single one of those things? Feminism got that for you. Not a Founding Father. Not a nice guy who "believed in equality." Women fought, marched, got arrested, and refused to shut up for over a century so you could have the life you're currently living without a second thought.

So let's take a little inventory. A "things you'd have to give back" list, if you will.

• • •

If there had been no feminist movement, you would not have:

A bank account in your own name. Until 1974 — not ancient history, your mom might remember this — a woman in America could be denied a credit card or bank account without a husband or father co-signing. You wanted a Visa? Better find a man to vouch for you first.

A job you weren't fired from for getting pregnant. Pregnancy discrimination in the workplace was legal until 1978. Congratulations on the baby, here's your pink slip.

The right to say no to your own husband. Marital rape wasn't criminalized in all 50 states until 1993. Say that number out loud. Nineteen. Ninety. Three.

Birth control, period. Married couples didn't get a constitutional right to contraception until 1965. Unmarried women didn't get that same right until 1972. Before that, wanting to plan your own family was, legally, none of your business.

The right to serve on a jury. Some states barred women from juries into the 1970s, because apparently your judgment couldn't be trusted unless there was a man in the room agreeing with you.

A credit history that was actually yours. Divorced or widowed? Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, your credit history could vanish with your marriage. Decades of on-time payments, gone, because it was never really "yours" to begin with.

The right to keep your job if you were visibly pregnant. Some employers required women to quit or take unpaid leave the moment they "started showing." Your body, their scheduling problem.

The right to play sports in school with real funding behind it. Title IX passed in 1972. Before that, girls' athletics got the leftover equipment, the leftover gym time, and the leftover budget — if any budget at all.

The right to report sexual harassment at work and have it mean something. "Sexual harassment" wasn't even legally recognized as workplace discrimination until the late 1970s and 80s. Before that, it was just "the way things are, sweetheart."

The right to keep your own name, own property, or sign your own contracts without a man's permission. Coverture laws — which held that a married woman's legal identity was absorbed into her husband's — lingered in various forms well into the 20th century.

The right to vote. Obviously. 1920. A hundred and six years ago. Not that long ago at all.

That's not a "long time ago, doesn't affect me" list. That's a "your mother lived through parts of this" list. That's a "you could be denied a credit card in your own name during the Ford administration" list.

"You could be denied a credit card in your own name during the Ford administration."

• • •

About that stereotype

Let's talk about why the word feels so cringe in the first place, because it didn't get that way by accident.

Angry. Man-hating. Humorless. Unshaven. Unattractive. Can't get a date. That's the image a lot of us picture when we hear "feminist," and I want you to sit with how convenient that image is. Because if you can convince women that fighting for their own rights will make them ugly and unlovable, you don't need to win the argument. You just need women to be too scared of the label to show up.

This is not a new trick. Go look up political cartoons from the suffrage era — women fighting for the vote were drawn as haggard, mannish, joyless spinsters who'd clearly given up on ever being attractive to a man, because what self-respecting, pretty woman would want silly things like rights? Newspapers ran the same play in the 60s and 70s: feminists were "shrill," "bra-burning," "hairy-legged," always angry, never fun at a party. Funny how the criticism was almost never about the substance of what they were asking for — equal pay, the right to a bank account, the right to say no — and almost always about whether they were still pretty and pleasant enough to be worth listening to. That's not commentary. That's strategy. Make the ask look ugly, and you never have to answer it.

And it worked, honestly. It's still working. It's why so many of us instinctively lead with "I'm not a feminist, but" before asking for the exact thing feminism got us. We've been trained to think wanting equality makes us bitter, when really, wanting equality just makes us people who've read the room correctly.

Here's my favorite plot twist: you're allowed to want all of it. You can want equal pay and a great blowout. You can want bodily autonomy and also a cute headband that doesn't budge through a workout. You can be furious about the wage gap and still be the most fun person at brunch. Feminine and feminist were never opposites — someone just needed you to believe they were, so you'd police yourself instead of making them do it.

"Feminine and feminist were never opposites — someone just needed you to believe they were."

• • •

Here's the thing about "I'm not a feminist"

You don't have to march, you don't have to post a black square, you don't have to own a single item of pink pantsuit merchandise. Feminism isn't a personality, it's not a lifestyle brand, and it's definitely not a monolith — there's a whole buffet of feminist thought and you're allowed to disagree with parts of it. That's healthy. That's how movements grow.

But "I'm not a feminist" while cashing your own paycheck, running your own business, voting how you please, and deciding for yourself when or if you have kids? That's not a neutral position. That's standing on a foundation somebody else built with their bodies, their arrests, their hunger strikes, and their absolute refusal to be told to sit down — and then acting like the foundation was always just there.

Feminism, at its core, is embarrassingly simple: women are full people, deserving of the same rights, pay, respect, and bodily autonomy as men. That's it. That's the whole radical idea. If you believe that — and I have never once met a woman who didn't, when you strip away the branding — congratulations, you're a feminist. You can still hate the word. You can still cringe at the bra-burning myth (which, fun fact, never actually happened — that's a media invention from a 1968 protest where nothing was burned). But own what you believe.

• • •

The whole point was choice

Here's what I think gets lost the most in all the noise: feminism was never about telling women which life to pick. It was about making sure you actually had a life to pick from.

If you want to stay home and raise your babies and never clock in anywhere but the kitchen, that's amazing, and it's a real choice now instead of the only option handed to you because doors elsewhere were locked. If you want to be so girly you cry at glitter and own eleven shades of pink, go for it, queen. And if you want to shave your head, eat nails for breakfast, and try out for the Navy SEALs, that is also, somehow, the exact same movement working correctly.

That's the part people miss when they picture a feminist as one specific type of woman — usually the angry, unshaven caricature we already talked about. The whole point was never to swap one mandatory mold for another one. It wasn't "stop being a homemaker" or "stop being soft" or "toughen up." It was "you get to decide," full stop. A stay-at-home mom and a woman gutting it out through SEAL training are both walking proof the movement worked, because both of them got there by choice, not by default.

So no, femininity was never the opposite of strength, and strength was never the opposite of femininity. The actual opposite of feminism is somebody else — anybody else — deciding for you. Soft, tough, girly, gritty, home, headquarters, whatever combination you want, in whatever order you want it: that range is the whole point. Not one lane. All of them, open, yours to choose.

"The actual opposite of feminism is somebody else deciding for you."

• • •

Why this actually matters to me

I built a company in a town of about 3,000 people, in a building that used to just sit there collecting dust, and I did it so women in my community could have jobs that flex around their actual lives instead of the other way around. I didn't do that despite being a woman in a small town — I did it because of it. Because I grew up watching women work themselves into the ground for less credit, less pay, and less say than the men next to them, and I decided I'd rather build something that fixed that than just complain about it.

Every woman clocking in at SWAY, every woman running her own Shopify shop at midnight after the kids are in bed, every woman who negotiated her salary instead of just taking what was offered — you're standing on the same ground. She Will Amaze You isn't just a cute acronym. It's a dare. It's what happens when women get to actually use the rights other women bled for.

So wear the headband, run the errands, build the empire, do whatever your version of amazing looks like today. Just don't pretend you got here alone.

You didn't. None of us did.

💖