Feminism is for Everybody

The history of feminism and women’s rights in the Western world is complex and multi-faceted, and one aspect that often gets overlooked, bell hooks argues in Feminism is for Everybody, is that the growth of the women’s empowerment movement can be seen as a net positive for everybody. Simply put, we all benefit when we are all empowered to take ownership of our lives and decisions. For example, restricting men to speak only a limited vocabulary of simplistic emotional experiences (as is common in the West) dampens the quality of life of men as well as women, and women’s empowerment plays a key role in alleviating this burden. As systems research has shown over the last 50 years, feminism and systems theory have more in common than one might initially believe, so if we want to create (there’s that word again) better systems of the future, we had better learn as best as we can from the past.