I Enjoy Being a Girl: Collective Self-Esteem,Feminism, and Attitudes Toward Women

This article examines the self-esteem thatfeminists, anti-feminists, and those who labelthemselves as mixed receive from their gender group.Feminists and anti-feminists were expected to havesimilarly high levels of gender collective self-esteem(CSE) on three of the four CSE subscales: Private, one'sjudgments of the goodness of one's group; Identity, theimportance of one's group to one's self-concept; and Membership, personal evaluation of oneselfas a group member. Similar levels on CSE subscales forfeminists and anti-feminists were expected as a resultof differing levels of adherance to traditional attitudes toward women. Anti-feminists wereexpected to have higher means than feminists on PublicCSE, which measures judgment of how other's evaluateone's group. Participants were undergraduate women (91.4% white, 5.6% Black, 1.3% Hispanic, .4%Asian, .9% biracial) who selflabeled as feminist,anti-feminist or mixed. Feminists and anti-feminists didhave similarly high levels of Membership CSE, higher than those who were more non-committal.Feminists were the highest in Identity CSE, whileantifeminists had the highest overall Public CSE. Thesefindings are relevant to those who work with bothfeminists and those who reject feminism, as they suggesta need to recognize the amount of self-esteem women getfrom their gender.