If you were to ask most young American women if they believe in equal rights for women, the answer would no doubt be a resounding "yes". When it comes to voting or being able to get an education, women of my generation are in little doubt as to our rights. When it comes to injustice against women abroad, from acid attacks and female genital mutilation, we are similarly unconflicted.

The young women of my generation are driven and outspoken. We start blogs and play on athletic teams and run student theatre companies. We are more likely to graduate from high school and college than the boys in our cohort, and we enter professional and graduate school at a comparable rate, too. We look forward to full and busy lives made possible in part by the progress made by our mothers and grandmothers. We are heirs to a legacy built by the women's libbers who came before us and the suffragettes who came before them. And yet, if you ask the average young American woman if she is a feminist, the answer isn't often a resounding "yes". The answer is usually, "I'm not a feminist, but …"

What follows will be the profession of a feminist view, like her belief in equal pay for equal work or in a woman's right to choose. But, she will add, this doesn't make her a feminist. In an age when feminist beliefs are almost a given for young women, the word "feminist" has become quite the opposite and many are shunning the label.

It's hardly surprising. After all, feminism has a pretty dreadful reputation. In her landmark book Backlash, Susan Faludi painstakingly chronicled over a century of scare tactics designed to deter women from embracing the ideas of feminism. Fortunately, those tactics were ultimately unsuccessful: most women of my generation embrace feminist ideas. What the backlash has succeeded in doing is making feminists, and the idea of being a feminist, unappealing. Faludi's book was written in 1991 but almost 20 years later, too little has changed. In the popular imagination, feminists are still the ugly, angry extremists who killed chivalry and who seek not gender equality, but world domination. Calling yourself a feminist carries with it the risk of having any one of these labels slapped on your forehead.

It's also unsurprising that women of my generation feel that the feminist movement hasn't made room for them: for a long time, it didn't. But thankfully, feminism has now recognised that young women's voices matter, and that young women's leadership is valuable. The website that I write for, Feministing, is devoted to giving young feminist women a platform, and it's not the only one. There are thousands of young women out there who proudly wear that label, and I'm grateful every day for the hard work that they do: none of them would deny that being a feminist is hard work. Feminism demands a complete overhaul of how we think, how we behave, how we talk, where we work, what media we consume, how we vote and how we raise our families. For women and for men, feminism is a dramatic shift away from the way things have always been. That's why it's so thrilling – and so threatening.

Unfortunately, despite the enormous strides we have made towards gender equality, that overhaul is far from complete. In a country where only 17% of Congress is female, where women – with or without children – make 77% what men make a decade after finishing their education and where only 6% of rapists will serve jail time, we can't afford "not a feminist, but …" – a disclaimer that signals to the world that we're willing to settle for an incomplete overhaul.

"I'm not a feminist, but …" is a way of telling the world that we don't pose too much of a threat. It's a way of saying that we don't plan to rock the boat too much, that we will play nice. And yet, feminists are people who dare to imagine a world in which women are 50% of Congress, where women are paid 100% of what their male colleagues earn and where every person who violates another human being is reported, prosecuted and convicted.

It's tempting to hide behind this disclaimer, this shield. But it is feminism which got us where we are today and without action and leadership from unabashed young feminists, we won't get much further. So step out from behind your shield and say it: "I am a feminist." No ifs, ands or buts.

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