Feminist and Anti-Feminist Identification in the 21^st Century United States

ABSTRACT

Feminism and anti-feminism featured prominently in the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton was the first female major party presidential candidate and self-identified as a feminist speaking openly about the challenges facing women. Clinton faced off against Donald Trump, who was on record making sexist statements and arguing that Clinton’s success was from playing the “woman card”. We ask several questions: who identifies as a feminist today and how is this different from who identified as a feminist in the previous generation? Who identifies as “anti-feminist”? Are anti-feminists simply a mirror reflection of feminists or is it a distinctive social identity? Finally, the study explores the meaning of these labels by looking at what feminists and anti-feminists believe in terms of public policy and attitudes about gender equality. Thus, this study provides insights into the state of modern feminism and antifeminism in contemporary American politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist identification
• anti-feminist identification
• feminism
• gender equality

Conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The General Social Survey (GSS) only queried about feminist identification in 1996. No other comprehensive political surveys appear to ask about feminism over this time period.

2. Alternative models were run with gender x race and gender x Latinx interactions, and they showed similar results and almost no significant interaction effects. The one exception is that the gender x Latinx interaction was significant and positive for importance of feminist identification.

3. We choose not to include ideology in our models because of a high degree of “don’t know” responses resulting in the loss of 1,437 cases. Additionally, alternative models including ideology did not meaningfully alter results. We have included as a supplemental appendix all of the multivariate results (Tables 2–Tables 4) with the inclusion of the ideology variable.

4. In an attempt to understand how feminist identification evolved from 1992 to 2016 we also examined every poll available in Roper Ipoll, as well as publicly available YouGov surveys, from 1991 through 2018 that explicitly ask respondents if they identify as a feminist. If one exempts the results where the “strong feminist” category was offered, the results suggest mostly continuity in feminist identification, with some signs of a modest upward trend. For example, Gallup/USA Today found in 2003 that 23% of Americans consider themselves to be feminists, and in 2008, 30% did so.

5. Homemaker drops out of the analysis for the men-only model in 1992 because of a lack of men in that role at the time.

6. Feminist identification and anti-feminist identification remain significant predictors of attitudes on these issues even when a full set of controls are added, except on the issue of work hurting the maternal bond.