Maura Ross likes wearing makeup and doesn’t leave the house without meticulously picking out accessories to match her outfits. Though she’s single at the moment, she dates men. Like most Northwestern students, she books a lot of hours at the library and drinks a lot of coffee. And Ross also happens to be a feminist.

Ross was a sophomore when she transferred to Northwestern from George Washington University, where she says she wasn’t involved in anything feminist-related. When her Peer Adviser invited her to the College Feminists’ Annual Fall Barbecue, Ross found like-minded people in a community she “immediately wanted to get involved with.” Two years later, the Weinberg senior is now co-president of the student group.

“Belonging to a group like this where you have a safe space to come is invaluable because you meet people who challenge you to consider why you believe certain things,” she says.

Feminism. Just seeing or hearing the word initially brings to mind radical bra-burners, cynical protest-holders and angry man-haters. But according to the feminists at Northwestern, these images are wildly untrue.

“All around, I’m pretty much the average college student,” Ross says.

Stigma and controversy have almost always surrounded the feminism movement, says Dr. Ann Orloff, one of the program directors of Northwestern’s Gender Studies department.

“Anywhere women have challenged the status quo, there’s been controversy. Even if you look back to the origins of the U.S. women’s movement there was tremendous controversy over women’s claims. Ever since the beginning there has been a contestation about it.”

Many female students at Northwestern and women across the United States do believe in striving for equality with men, but because of the negative connotations tied to the movement, far fewer label themselves as feminists. Does nixing the label mean someone with the same beliefs isn’t a feminist?

According to Ross, a feminist has to want to accept the label. “You can have the same beliefs as a feminist, but if you don’t identify with [the word], you’re not a feminist,” she says. “But as long as women and men are conscious of the goals of feminism and they believe in some of them, the movement is moving forward regardless of if those people identify as feminists.”

There is yet to be a single universally accepted definition of feminism, and because women have so many different experiences and different needs, there may never be just one. However, most feminists will agree that the movement is about acknowledging inequality between the genders and moving to do something about it.

“Feminism is about expanding women’s choices and about making sure women have the same opportunities as men do,” says SESP freshman Elena Westbrook, who started a feminist-interest club at her high school.

It sounds simple enough-who doesn’t want to have an equal standing in life? Yet people continue to have many misconceptions about the movement.

According to Westbrook, the most common misconceptions of feminists are that they “don’t like men, blame men for everything or are lesbians.”

“I know a lot of people, men and women, who agree with a lot of things that I talk about in terms of women’s issues,” Westbrook says. “But when they label themselves, they’re afraid of people thinking bad things about them.”

The issues at stake

For a movement that directly affects the lives of approximately 50 percent of the population, people certainly aren’t as vocal as they could be. Ross says hundreds of students, both male and female, are on the listserv for College Feminists, but only about 30 people including the members of the group’s Executive Board regularly attend the general meetings. Considering that Northwestern has roughly 4,000 female students, the number of people involved with College Feminists is very low.

Dr. Orloff sees gender equality as an important issue for both men and women in college, especially as they go on to graduate and get jobs.

“There are massive kinds of discrepancies based on gender. That is a reason for college-aged men and women to be concerned about it,” she says. “In particular, college-aged women are going to be going into a labor force where they’re going to face some difficulties based on their gender. In particular if they want to combine family and work, which most women want at this point.”

It’s true that not all of Northwestern’s feminists are members of College Feminists. Some choose to express their ideals in other ways, like the annual production of Eve Ensler’s controversial play, The Vagina Monologues. After first running in 1996, the collection of monologues has opened dialogue on many women’s issues, including sex, masturbation, rape and yes-vaginas. When the play blew up in popularity, Ensler moved on to start V-Day, which serves as both a non-profit charity and a movement to end violence against women.

Communication senior Grayson Vreeland directed the play when she was a sophomore after watching it the year before. She was inspired to make her version more about sisterhood and unity.

“I really wanted it to be an experience for the people who were involved in it representative of the unity that I think is important for the women’s movement,” she says.

Vreeland and her castmates are still best friends to this day. When asked why productions like The Vagina Monologues are important, she said it’s exciting to have people talk about controversial women’s issues and that people tend to find think of vaginas as mysterious.

“We revere penises,” she says. “[In our society] everyone loves penises, but then we’re like ‘Oh vaginas-they’re gross.'”

Blaming the Victims

In the first few months of this academic year alone, the University of Minnesota has already reported three incidents of sexual assault. In a recent Fox News video report on the assaults, female students of the university give their own tips on how to stay safe in the party scene: “Mix your own drinks,” “Avoid the fraternity scene entirely,” “Be aware of how much alcohol you consume.” These messages make women shoulder the responsibility of avoiding rape. While men are the primary instigators of rape and sexual assault, women are the primary targets of blame. This victim-blaming behavior is something many feminists have a problem with.

“Women shouldn’t feel responsible for avoiding rape because if you think about it, rape is the only crime that gets treated like that,” Westbrook says. “[People] don’t say, ‘Avoid getting mugged!'”

And that’s where one of Northwestern’s newest organizations comes in. Weinberg sophomore Elliott Sweeney started Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault (MARS) after observing the social culture on and off campus.

“Seeing some things in the social culture here in the party scene made me feel like it was an important issue to get men involved and improve the ways that men tend to approach women in certain social settings.”

The group strives to educate male students and inform them that the issues regarding sexual assault are as important for men as they are for women.

“I think many guys, and girls too, don’t know and understand what consent truly is,” says Sweeney. “There are many different and at times conflicting, definitions of rape and sexual assault that get thrown around. In some situations, this makes knowing what is or isn’t sexual assault difficult for some people because they haven’t received good information.”

The group has already talked with College Feminists and SHAPE about getting more involved on campus. In the future, Sweeney says he would like MARS to talk to fraternity pledge classes, athletic teams and students who live in dorms.

“Hopefully one day basically almost every male at NU will have seen our presentation and hopefully that can help to influence peoples’ opinions just a little bit and get them thinking.”

Ross is supportive of MARS’ goals, saying, “It’s great
to see that men can make a difference in something that affects women.”

“I think that by getting men involved like MARS is a huge step forward to killing out that victim-blaming because men are taking part in this too. It’s no longer just a women’s concern.”

Picturing Equality

In the last hundred years, women have come a long way-It’s only been 90 years since Congress passed the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Since then, women have gained the ability to step into the workplace and even the social acceptance to wear pants. But gender-based discrimination can still be seen in almost every sphere of the United States’ male-dominated society. Out of 535 seats in Congress, only 96 are filled by women. According to a 2008 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a woman only earns about 80 cents to every dollar a man makes. In the United States, women are usually offered only 12 weeks for maternity leave, while countries like Switzerland, the U.K. and Spain offer at least a month more. Women often have to choose between a career and a family, and when they try to do both, they frequently do so at the cost of the other. Even with the progress women have already made, these hurdles will be difficult to jump.

“We’re going to need movements that challenge many of these obstacles, shifts in the way the economy is organized,” says Dr. Orloff. “It would take a range of associated interrelated changes to get something that would look like equality.”

Though it won’t come easily, Ross is hopeful for a society in which a person’s gender won’t matter.

“When men share the same concerns of women and women, they become people’s rights and there’s no longer that gender boundary.”