Competitive individualism is, in some sense, a byproduct of feminism.

First, I tell my students that I am a feminist. Startled that a feminist could be packaged as I am—a petite white heterosexual woman who smiles and has been known to wear lipstick—students then listen as I read a standard definition of “feminism,” such as this one from The American Heritage Dictionary: Feminism is the “belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes” as well as the “movement organized around this belief.” We talk about this definition, and many students begin to realize that, even if they had never thought so before, they are feminists.

Later, as I walked down the street to pick up my daughter from childcare, I ran into a friend who asked if I’d seen the newspaper story about a grad student we both knew. I hadn’t, so my friend explained that this woman had just filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against her dissertation director. According to the woman’s allegations, the professor manifested his misogyny by saying that women are good only for sex; he expected his student to find female sexual partners for him, and if she didn’t, he would not continue to support her research

When my older sister, then in college, went through a brief radical feminist “phase”—not shaving her legs or armpits, questioning the Catholic Church’s exclusion of women, agitating against the antiabortion group Operation Rescue, whose founder lived in her college town—I didn’t know how to interpret her behavior. Instead of wondering why she was rebelling, I categorized her as odd, a fringe-dweller. I was content to keep my head safely inside books; I rarely engaged with current events, though I am happy to say that I voted for the first time in the 1988 presidential election, for Dukakis, no less.

Perhaps because I have two young daughters, 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.