Ignoring the women who never had a choice

Contributor Muskan Sandhu takes a shot at answering whether or not we will ever escape the shackles of patriarchy by examining choice feminism and its shortcomings.

Choice feminism allows women to avoid confronting their own actions that serve the patriarchy, keeping them concealed away with a sense of freedom that doesn’t really exist. Believing that every choice a woman makes is a feminist one, solely because they are a woman, is overlooking the women in the past and present who never had a choice to begin with.

“We are never escaping the patriarchy” is a statement that you might have seen floating around social media, and while some might call this dramatic, it is ultimately true. 

The patriarchy still dominates society in every single sphere, from private home life to our government institutions. The rise in choice feminism has led many to forget that feminism is a political ideology created for the liberation of all women across the globe. 

The little repackaged quips, such as “girl math,” “girl dinner,” and “I’m just a girl,” might seem fun and harmless, but they tie back to undermining women’s intelligence and agency. This isn’t a new phenomenon of gendering everyday concepts; people in the 1950s used to put “lady” or “woman” in front of job titles to undermine women’s accomplishments. And while defenders of these quips believe it’s harmless because a woman is making them, and it’s feminist of them to do so, it isn’t.

Choice feminism has reached a point where individuals have started to believe that every action made by a woman falls under the umbrella of feminism. This has guided us into an unspoken rule that you can’t point out how some women make choices that ultimately serve the patriarchy, because a true feminist would never judge a woman’s choice. Dissuading the idea that these individual choices are not made in a vacuum; they were shaped by years of socialisation under a patriarchal society that still pushes for women to be homemakers. 

Since the 1970s, feminism has grown into an individual ideology that sees inequality as a matter of personal failure, rather than a collective struggle, manipulating us into thinking that every woman is given the same choices. Choice feminism neglects the structural barriers that have been built to keep women from succeeding. It ignores how women of colour, queer women, disabled women, women living in oppressive countries such as Afghanistan, and so on, have extra barriers to overcome, and don’t have the options that many in the Western world believe they have.

And I get why choice feminism is appealing to so many individuals. Before the women’s liberation movements, any type of choice was denied to women from the day they were born. To get to the point we are at right now, women have to fight for the right to vote, to work, to choose who they marry, and to choose their own lifestyle. Therefore, it is no wonder that once these goals were achieved, a shift in feminism occurred, focusing on the individual rather than the collective struggle. But the issue is that not all choices made by women can be labelled as feminist. The wording needs to change to reflect how we don’t live in a perfect world, but instead in a patriarchal society that still wishes to keep women tied down while men dominate.

However, we cannot say that individual women who choose to become stay-at-home mums or housewives are bad or inherently oppressing other women. No, they have the right to make that choice, but it is misguided to call that choice “feminist,” and it is critical to understand that by not understanding this, we ignore the women who never had and never will have a choice. 

Choice feminism is a veil placed upon women that gives them a sense of freedom, but ultimately keeps them stuck in a cycle of patriarchal domination. It is an illusion of freedom for many, while others are not given a choice. In a world where, whether you acknowledge it or not, every decision is linked back to the patriarchy, it often makes me wonder if we will ever truly be free.

 by Muskan Sandhu