I’ve loved learning about feminism for as long as I can remember. When I was in elementary school, my mom was getting her PhD. She wrote her dissertation on the intersection of theater and feminism in American history, particularly during the fight for the 19th Amendment. Needless to say, girl power was a constant topic at our dinner table. I was raised to push against any notion that girls are inherently less deserving than boys. In my mind, success came down to drive, and anyone could achieve what they wanted if they worked hard enough.
I especially loved learning about the women’s rights movement in school. I understood that women hadn’t been granted equal rights at the founding of the United States, and I was really proud of the progress women had made to correct that. I knew about the traditional roles women were expected to fulfill as wives and mothers, and I remember thinking how ridiculous it was that society had once pushed women into those boxes. I never really understood the reasoning behind this thinking, and I just couldn’t fathom how those ideas had ever been taken seriously in the first place.
Because of feminism’s success, it was easy for me to think of sexism as a solved problem. Something confined to the past, not the present. I had always been a top student and succeeded in almost anything I tried. In my life, there was never a race to prove I was equal to my male peers, because I was always standing alongside them in success. Because of these experiences, I didn’t just believe in feminism; I assumed, on some level, that it had already done its job.
Of course, I’d heard that sexism existed, but I never really experienced it. I would get angry with characters on TV for underestimating their female counterparts or making rude comments, but watching it through a screen made it feel like a caricature, and not something that happened in real life. As someone who’s deeply empathetic, I couldn’t understand this mindset at all. I never really took sexism seriously and assumed it was some inside joke that everyone actually knew didn’t make sense.
It wasn’t until college that I was face-to-face with true sexist ideology. One day in class, we were discussing how women weren’t allowed to be college students until the mid-19th century and how, even then, they weren’t receiving an equal education to men. As we examined the excuses universities used to keep women out of school — like claims that too much education would cause a woman’s brain to melt — my teacher asked if anyone in class agreed with this reasoning, and one hand quickly shot up. When asked why, my classmate claimed that men and women are biologically different.
It’s human nature, he said, for women to be nurturing. Sure, there are some exceptions and cases where girls go into STEM fields, but the majority are biologically better suited to be caretakers. Men are naturally more rational and protective, and therefore should lead, while women support.
He articulated this argument very sincerely, like he truly believed that this hierarchy was justified and even necessary. This was a wake-up call for me, and I realized that sexism is not just a performative or ironic concept of the past — but still deeply held by many. I know this sounds really silly, but any conversation I’d had around sexism growing up was making fun of it and talking about why it is so clearly incorrect. It wasn’t until now that I realized how naive my understanding of progress had been.
But sexism is not just a topic of debate among classmates. It is embedded in every aspect of our lives and impacts the social, political, and economic systems that run society. In the United States, many of the rights that allow women to function as independent citizens were only established within the past century. Women did not gain the right to vote until 1920. For much of modern history, they were excluded from financial and legal independence, unable to open bank accounts, own property freely, or even legally wear pants.
Because these advances are so recent, they are also fragile. At its core, current debates surrounding abortion are questions of whether women can be trusted to make decisions about their own healthcare. In overturning Roe v. Wade, the government decided that these decisions can, and should, be taken out of women’s hands. And this applies to so much more than reproductive health. Advances in gender equality are still shockingly recent, and none of them are guaranteed. We cannot take these rights for granted, because at any moment, they can be taken away.
And it’s not just that one issue. There are still ongoing efforts that reflect the same underlying assumptions, whether it’s legislation that risks limiting women’s political participation or broader pushes toward traditional roles in the home. In my last article, I discussed the SAVE Act, and how this bill targeted toward election security actually risks disenfranchising millions of women nationwide. When faced with an amendment to lessen this risk, House Republicans blocked it. Similarly, the Heritage Foundation — who published Project 2025 — recently came out with a new report that focuses on the American family. A key goal of this document is to advocate for the return of traditional family structures, doing so by discouraging women’s participation in higher education and the workforce in favor of domestic roles. Both of these advances suggest pushing women back into secondary roles in society and discourage a woman’s agency in terms of political voice and career choices.
But I just cannot wrap my head around why.
Across history, attempts to keep women within the confines of domesticity are clear to see. I can follow the patterns, see how these systems operate, and even predict the outcomes. But no matter what I do, I am truly incapable of understanding the reasoning behind it. Appeals to science don’t hold up when you see how often people fall between the lines of biological categories. Arguments about tradition assume that the past was justified in the first place. Even the idea of natural roles doesn’t hold up when you think about who set up those standards and what biases were at play.
And as someone who genuinely tries to understand different perspectives, this is really frustrating. I want to be able to follow the logic all the way through, even if I don’t agree with it, but I can’t. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe sexism doesn’t persist because it makes sense, but because it doesn’t have to.
At face value, sexism is irrational — but it is undeniably real, and just because something feels absurd does not make it harmless. Feminists are not like flat-earthers, for example, who argue against concepts that are proven correct over and over again. We fight against an opponent that doesn’t have to be right, because it has already embedded itself into systems and beliefs that have outlasted their own reasoning. Women have spent centuries being forced to prove their capability in response to doubts that were never grounded in anything concrete.
Maybe that’s the biggest obstacle feminism faces. It’s not just about proving that women are capable, because we’ve already accomplished that. It’s about exposing how little sense the opposition ever made in the first place. Maybe then, we’d be able to conquer gender oppression once and for all.