…and how “feminist” got turned into the opposite of “feminine”
Last Thursday, twenty-five of us sat in a circle in Gloria Steinem’s living room. (More on that below.)
We talked about motherhood — the real, unfiltered state of it in this country. There were laughs. There were tears. There was a lot of nodding, the kind that happens when a room full of strangers realizes they’ve been carrying the same thing alone.
I left that room lighter than I walked in. But I also left thinking about something that has nothing, and everything, to do with what we talked about: a phrase that keeps showing up in my feed: Feminine, not feminist. As if the two are opposites. As if choosing softness, or home, or motherhood, means disavowing the very movement that handed you the right to choose it in the first place.
When did “feminist” become a word women feel they have to distance themselves from?
Here’s my theory. And it’s not really a theory; it’s more like a pattern with a paper trail. Every time women make gains, someone builds a countermovement to convince women the gains were actually a loss. Not an organic backlash. An engineered one, built to turn women against each other instead of against the system that needed changing. “Feminine, not feminist” is just this decade’s version of a very old play.
The Receipts
Let’s start with the receipts, because we don’t say this enough: feminism is the reason women can vote. The reason women can own property, open a business, walk into a classroom their grandmother couldn’t.
In 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, after generations of women demanding it. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 made it illegal to fire a woman for being a woman. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, outlawed paying a woman less than a man for the same job.
Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974 a woman couldn’t get a credit card in her own name without a husband to co-sign it. Title IX, 1972, opened the doors of the classrooms and locker rooms women had been shut out of. In 1973, Roe v. Wade gave women the right to make decisions about their own bodies without the government making them for you.
And right now, some of that ground is being clawed back. Roe was overturned in 2022. And this year, the SAVE America Act, one of the president’s top legislative priorities, is pushing to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote — a rule critics warn would land hardest on married women, since many don’t carry ID that matches the married name they vote under today.
The rights feminists fought so hard for are being renegotiated right now, while we’re all distracted by a hashtag.
We’ve Been Here Before
This isn’t the first time someone’s tried to talk women out of their own progress.
In 1972, the same year Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, Phyllis Schlafly launched a campaign to kill it. Her argument: American women already had “the status of special privilege.” Equality, she said, would cost women more than it would give them. She said it would strip away the protections built around traditional roles.
It worked. The ERA was never ratified. And Schlafly wrote the playbook that’s still being run today: turn feminism into something women fight each other over, instead of something women fight for, together.
“Feminine, not feminist” is that same playbook. Researchers who study tradwife communities online have traced the phrase specifically to that world. It is used deliberately to rebrand traditional gender roles as a woman’s “empowering choice,” positioned against feminism instead of made possible by it.
Nobody arrived at this independently, and nobody is inventing it fresh in 2026.
It’s a rebrand with a long lineage.
The Unfinished Part
So why does any of this matter, right now, today? Because the reason women still can’t fully use the choice feminism won them — the choice to work, or not, without it costing them everything — is that we never got to the finish line.
We were almost there. In January 2020, women held just over half of all U.S. payroll jobs. It was a milestone decades in the making, the kind of number that should have marked the start of something.
Then the pandemic hit, and women became the default. The ones who cut hours. The ones who absorbed the school closures and the childcare gaps, quietly, because someone had to and the system had made it clear who that someone would be.
Mothers of young kids left the workforce and, unlike fathers who mostly came back, many never fully returned. In January 2021 alone, 275,000 women left the workforce. Seventy-one thousand men did.
That gap isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t a reflection of what women wanted. It’s what happens when the choice to work was never actually backed by anything.
Here’s the root of it, plainly: the US is the only country in the OECD without a national paid leave policy and child care costs have outpaced wages for years. Without those two things, “choice” is just a word with no floor under it.
Women aren’t moving in and out of the workforce freely. They’re being pushed, quietly and repeatedly, at exactly the moments they can least afford it. That’s the unfinished business. So while the laws might have changed. The support to actually use them was never put into place.
What We’re Still Fighting For
I don’t say any of this to leave you hopeless. I say it because I believe we can still get the support we need to win — to finally cross over the finish line.
If we win paid leave. If we win childcare that’s actually affordable, actually accessible. Then women get to make the same decision men have always gotten to make by default: how to direct their own lives, on their own terms, without penalty.
Not feminine or feminist. Just free to choose.
That’s the fight we’re in right now, and I’m really glad you’re in it with us.
An Evening in Gloria Steinem’s Living Room
Last Thursday, 25 moms from our Moms First community climbed the stairs of a brownstone on the Upper East Side and sat down in a circle in Gloria Steinem’s living room.
That room isn’t just a room. Gloria has been hosting talking circles there since 1968. It’s the same space where Ms. Magazine took shape, where the National Women’s Political Caucus first came together. It’s one of the longest-running gathering spaces in the women’s movement, and it’s still doing exactly what it was built to do: put women in a circle and let them talk.
This time, we talked about motherhood.
Isolation came up again and again. So did the old, toxic idea that if motherhood was hard for one generation, it should stay hard for the next. That suffering in silence is some kind of rite of passage. It isn’t. It’s a form of isolation. And we all agreed: motherhood is only doable with community.
That’s exactly why No Country for Mothers matters right now. It’s not just a documentary, it’s a way in. A way to turn a roomful of strangers into a village, and to name, out loud, that what feels like a personal failure on the hardest days is very often a policy failure instead.
Hosting a screening is free. There is no licensing fee to screen the film. We’re not trying to make money off this, we’re trying to get it in front of as many eyes as possible.
Can’t gather in person? Attend a virtual screening instead — just head to our events page and filter by “show virtual events only.”
And this isn’t just a summer thing. Put something on the calendar for fall — start your own talking circle, help carry this movement forward, and give yourself something to look forward to that isn’t labeled pumpkin spice.
Screenings Happening Near You
Every week another wave of hosts signs up to host a watch party. 350+ screenings are live right now, grab a spot or host your own.
- Highlands Ranch, CO, July 18, 2-3:30 PM at Douglas County Libraries: Highlands Ranch — RSVP
- Kansas City, MO, July 18, 3:30-7:30 PM at Victory Way — RSVP
- Boulder, CO, July 19, 1-3 PM at Meadows Library — RSVP
- Hopkinton, MA, July 19, 4-6 PM at KAYA Rehab and Wellness — RSVP
- Las Vegas, NV, July 19, 2:30-5 PM at Sahara West Library — RSVP
- Charlottesville, VA, July 19, 8:30-10 PM at IX Art Park — RSVP
- Sag Harbor, NY, July 20, 6-9 PM at Bay Street Theater — RSVP
- Baltimore, MD, July 21, 6-8:30 PM at The Bryn Mawr School — RSVP
- St. Peters, MO (virtual), July 22, 10AM-1PM — RSVP
- Davenport, IA, July 22, 4-7 PM at The Last Picture House — RSVP
- Stamford, CT, July 23, 7-9PM — RSVP
- Fairfax Station, VA (virtual), July 23, 8-10 PM — RSVP
- Queens, NY, July 23, 8:30-10:30 PM at The Ditty — RSVP
- Canton Township, MI, July 24, 8-10 PM at Emagine Theater — RSVP
Looking for a virtual event? Go to the events page and filter results by “Show virtual events only.”
Help Us Improve PaidLeave.AI in New Jersey
We’re running a pilot to see if we can help parents in New Jersey navigate even more benefits beyond paid family leave, including WIC, SNAP, and childcare subsidies.
We’re looking for volunteers to share their experience in a quick 15-30 minute conversation with our team. Your input will directly shape how we improve the tool. Sign up to talk with us.
Check out what people are saying about Moms First in the news
- The Culture War Against Women (Aspire with Emma Grede – podcast)
Every mother choosing “feminine” or “feminist” deserves better than a phrase built to divide her from herself. She deserves a country that finishes what it started. That’s what we’re here to build, and we’re so grateful you’re building it with us.
Here’s to finishing what we started,
