"Feminism is not a one size fits all movement"

Published in October 2018, Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (and Other Lies): Amazing Women on What the F-Word Means to Them is a book of essays curated by Scarlett Curtis, co-founder of feminist activist group The Pink Protest.

Contributors include teenage period poverty activist Amika George, trans activist Charlie Craggs, anti-FGM campaigner Nimco Ali, and gal-dem founder Liv Little, as well as actresses Keira Knightley, Jameela Jamil, Emma Watson, and Jodie Whittaker.

Feminists Don’t Wear Pink is a collection of women’s writing that aims to inspire and empower. Proceeds from every sale go to the United Nations Foundation’s Girl Up initiative, which supports 80,000 girls worldwide through its leadership training programs and investments in UN programming for girls.

Here the book’s curator Scarlett Curtis explains more about the motivations behind the book, and what she’s learned along the way.

When I started working with Penguin I knew I wanted to create a book that expressed the feminist movement in 2018 and made the idea of being a feminist seem approachable. I also knew I definitely didn’t think it should be just my voice!

We decided to make a collection that shows the various different ways you can be a feminist and all the different voices that contribute to this amazing movement and hopefully encourage young girls to become feminists. Someone once asked me how I could be a feminist activist and still wear so much pink, and so the title was born from that!

I think a lot of women feel they don’t ‘know enough’ or haven’t read enough to be a feminist and this holds them back from exploring the movement more. All you need to know to be a feminist is that you believe that men and women should be equal, and the rest will come!

I really learned something different from every single essay. I was particularly shocked by how incredible the young feminists in the book are, like 18-year-old Amika George, who founded #FreePeriods to campaign against period poverty in the UK. We have a lot to learn from teenage girls!

I think we can learn a lot from how early groups within the women’s movement transformed personal stories, trauma and suffering into genuine political change.

I think one problem within the feminist movement is when we think that equality looks the same for everyone. Muslim women’s equality looks very different from trans women's equality, which looks very different from white women’s equality.

We wanted the book to reflect all of the different ways that someone can be subject to discrimination and the fight to overcome those specific intersections of what it means to be a woman. We also need to figure out how to get men involved with the movement in a way that keeps women and minorities at the centre but allows them to help.

I hope that readers see that feminism is not a one size fits all movement! And hopefully if anyone reading this didn’t know they were a feminist we might be able to change that by the time they’ve finished the book.