The decision to have a speak-out turned out to be brilliant; according to Ellen Willis, for the three hundred people in the audience, the personal testimony “evoke[d] strong reactions . . . empathy, anger, pain.” Just as protesters of the Vietnam War used the teach-in, women’s liberationists saw the speak-out, with its reliance on personal voices, as a way to sway public opinion.

which read DON’T COOK DINNER—STARVE A RAT TODAY and DON’T IRON WHILE THE STRIKE IS HOT. All kinds of women—young mothers, suburban housewives, college students, office workers, and even elderly suffrage activists—participated in the protest. The biggest women’s action since the parades of the suffrage movement, the Women’s Strike for Equality succeeded in capturing the attention of the media and, thus, the country; in so doing, it communicated the desires of a new women’s movement to a nation familiar with social unrest but largely unready for the seismic shift in gender relations already being legislated in the halls of government and beginning to play out in kitchens and bedrooms across America.

What had been happening in women’s lives that they felt the need—fifty years after gaining the vote—to demand their rights in a similarly public way?

I notice the ways society has started to show more concern about the experience of girls, not just in terms of sexual assault, but in terms of girls’ intellectual development and their growth in confidence. Although this may be a trivial example, the popularity of the Disney film Frozen indicates that young girls, tweens, and their parents crave movies that feature relationships between female characters. Even though it is marketed as just another Disney princess movie, the film is different: in this movie, Prince Charming turns out to be a schemer, romantic love is not the focus, and sisterhood is powerful. Indeed, the love story of the two sisters is what is most central to the narrative. Like Frozen, other recent cultural creations show a desire to take girls—both young and adolescent—seriously. Not long before I saw Frozen in early 2014, I heard about GoldieBlox, a toy company that, by encouraging girls’ interest in building and designing structures, hopes to address the underrepresentation of females in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. An ad for GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine depicts three girls delighting in the construction of a Rube Goldberg machine in their house, garage, driveway, and yard. The ad’s soundtrack, an unauthorized remake of the Beastie Boys’ “Girls,” asserts that girls are tired of “pink and pretty” playthings and instead “deserve to see a range” of toys, particularly those that allow them “to use [their] brains.” Although GoldieBlox is packaged in pink, its goal is to value girls for their intellect and their potential as problem-solvers.

As a result of her connection with abolition, the people present at the Akron conference were worried that Truth would speak out against slavery and thus detract from the event’s focus on women’s rights

Smith’s definition does not use the word “equality”; instead, Smith states that feminism aims to “free all women.” What might women need to be freed from?

These days a woman can expect to earn 77 cents to a man’s dollar. Only twenty-three women are Fortune 500 CEOs; only 16.9 percent of the seats on corporate boards of directors are held by women. While there are more women involved in politics than ever, there are only twenty female U.S. senators (out of one hundred) and eighty-four female U.S. representatives (out of 435). Of the nine members of the Supreme Court, three are women, the largest number of women ever to serve at once. The social inequalities women face are as great as the economic and political ones.

When I ask students to describe what they imagine when they hear the word “feminist,” in short order they are able to rattle off all of the often-invoked stereotypes. They tell me that a feminist is ugly, hairy, and wears no makeup. She is a man-hating, butch lesbian. She is violent, angry, and humorless, rushing from one protest to the next. Constantly policing her own behavior along with that of her family, friends, and colleagues, she is, to use Rush Limbaugh’s famous neologism, a “feminazi.”

In spite of these changes, feminism is still needed, among other reasons, to ensure that women are treated fairly in school and on the job and to critique and correct a culture that mandates a homogeneous beauty ideal for all women. It is also needed—and these are no mean feats—to protect women’s reproductive rights and to eradicate sexism.

Toothpick arms were folded protectively across a gaunt body dressed in a short skirt and T-shirt. Even the horizontal stripes of her shirt did not give the teenager’s emaciated body any heft; smiling quietly, the mother endured her daughter’s complaints as if used to them. I turned away.