You’ll find Judith every Friday, passing out leaflets along Cornmarket Street, a popular walkway filled with tourists and shoppers in the University town of Oxford. A seventy-year-old peace activist who also promotes Palestinians' rights to land on the Gaza Strip, Judith hasn't let age slow her down. She's led a long life of protests, some of them landing her in jail for brief stints, once for refusing to get off the pavement at Westminster, once for cutting down fences around a nuclear base.

Her small frame contrasts with her obstinacy in the face of authority. A woman who has never been afraid to say what she thinks, she still faces arguments from Friday passersby who disagree with her stance. With some pride in her voice, she admits, "I can be strident." However, the woman who hasn't been stopped by police, government fences, or Arab/Israeli hostilities says, "Sometimes I've been put off by feminists."

British, and of an older generation, Judith is far from representing the newest crop of young American activists interviewed for this article. Yet her sentiment is echoed by many of them who perceive the term "feminist" to be off-putting, who, whether or not they support feminism, use the term cautiously. Though Judith has close friendships in the feminist community, and has participated in Greenham Common initiatives, she does not identify as feminist. Her main argument against doing so centers around balance. Judith senses an exclusivity about the movement, something close-minded, even a little off-kilter.

Cristina Hoff Sommers would be the first to agree. Sommers is the author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women and numerous other books and articles criticizing the "New" or "Gender" feminists that she sees as ruining the neighborhood. Forgoing the customary critique of 60’s Radical Feminism, Sommers focuses her attack on current academics and writers such as Carolyn Heilbrun and Susan Faludi for her 1991 bestseller Backlash. According to Who Stole Feminism? the once pure and wholesome Women’s Movement has been hijacked by paranoid man-haters and bad scholars who have alienated everyone in town. Judith, in her cautious refusal to use the term "feminist," far from modeling an older British brand of reticence, can be seen as sharing with mainstream America a distrust for what feminism has become.

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