How Has the Feminist Movement Impacted Members of Our Society? When you read that question, was the FIRST thing in your mind “Feminist Baby”? The children’s book written by Loryn Brantz shows a little girl who is not afraid of doing her own thing. If that somehow wasn’t your first thought then you will relate to the majority of my class who was happily surprised when our launch activity included us looking through this book and thinking about why it was created. After reading the very entertaining book we each created mind maps showing everything we thought of when we heard the word feminist. Here is mine:

I thought that I was fairly educated in this area until I actually had to create my mind map. As you can see my mind map was fairly basic, but while that’s unfortunate, it was still fine seeing as though it was only day one of the project.

 After this launch activity we learned that our final product was going to be a research paper/essay that included an interview. When I heard this I…….was not excited. I was conflicted because I knew it was an important topic but I also knew that I dislike interviewing people, writing isn’t my strong suit, and that it was going to take a lot of work.

To start the project off, our investigation stage was all about building our knowledge on the four waves of the feminist movements. We would spend our classes listening and reading about the feminist movement then writing responses to various questions. I have never been a fan of reading in class because I find that I never finish the article by the time we talked about it as a class.  I was able to give well written out answers but many times I had to ask for an extension in order to do so. 

The next part of this project I am actually really proud of myself for. Over the course of the whole project we read Becoming by Michelle Obama which is a great book but its also our fourth and longest novel study of the year. Normally in high school we do one or two novel studies in a year, so I was not overjoyed, initially, to learn that we would have to read the 24 chapter book. This is the part where I am proud of myself because I actually used my systems and did really well. I found an audiobook and listened to my book while having my screen split between my notes and my online book copy so I could highlight, get quotes, make notes, all while following along. Then for the book notes I always had more than one question and I backed them up with in text examples. For the Socratic seminars I would always offer to start off the conversations and I continued to contribute multiple times and would ask questions and build off the ongoing conversation. I normally hate talking in class but I also wanted to show my ideas and how I did in fact read the book and that I did understand what was going on. 

This brings us to the hardest part of the project, the final product. To start we needed to decide what we wanted to research and write about. Knowing I had to interview someone I decided that I would ask and see who I could talk to before deciding what I wanted to directly focus on. When asking around to my relatives and friends I still couldn’t decide on what I would be interested in learning more about. It wasn’t until I read about Christian involvement in the second – third wave that I realized what I wanted to do: can someone be a Christian and a feminist? With my topic I now had to find someone to interview and write my thesis. Finding someone to interview turned out to be fairly easy, I had three plausible options that in the end I decided to go with only one so that my essay wasn’t too busy. I interviewed Ms. Vance who currently holds a Masters of Leadership and Development and is Director of Organizational Development for Norquest College in Edmonton, Alberta; however, she also worked as a pastor for many years. Even now, outside of that role, she serves on national and western Canadian boards for interdenominational organizations. In other words, she knew what she was talking about both in experience and in an academic sense. My interview with her went smoothly and with my questions I was able to get even more information than I needed. The thesis was next. I did probably 20 different drafts of my thesis before writing my introduction, then I wrote ten more after showing my introduction to my friends and teacher. Their feedback was that my thesis was too chunky and no matter how many times I reworded it I couldn’t change that enough. In the end I decided to switch the order of my body paragraphs around so the thesis flowed better. 

With my introduction and thesis done it was time for the research and writing part of the essay. Even though I’ve always struggled with writing this part didn’t go to bad because I made detailed notes, asked for lots of feedback, and got help when I needed it. In the end my first draft was finished on time and I was able to get feedback from multiple different classmates. My favourite part of this process was learning about feminism in Christianity and how words are often mistranslated. For example, in some translations a word that means “everyone” is translated into “men” or another translates the same Hebrew word into “elder”, when in reference to men, and “servant” when in reference to women. This area of study has always been really intriguing to me and I’m glad I got to look into it. One particular line of my essay that I am proud of is “By seeing this inter-connectivity, there is proof that it is not only possible to be a Christian and a feminist but that they can support one another’s desire to bring societal change.” 

In the end, I am happy with the essay I handed in and enjoyed the project more than I thought. If I had to do this project again I think I would’ve liked to do more research on Christians in feminist movements as well as how different feminism movements has affected the church.