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From Political To Personal: Forming Feminist Identities, Elizabeth Newman

Sociology Honors Projects

Many young women are reluctant to claim a feminist identity although they hold feminist beliefs. Why and how do some women begin to identify as feminist while other young women reject a feminist label? Knowing the way people identify with political and social movements contributes to an understanding of what makes a movement successful. I use interviews with nine young women who are college students at a small, urban, Midwestern liberal arts college, to determine the events and influences of feminist identification and the processes of developing these identites. While I find that feminist identification is situational, contextual, and changing …