Why we needed feminism and still do.

Today, most girls who haven't read about what life actually was before feminism, fantasise about all the regressive values and question if we actually did need feminism in the first place? We lived under patriarchy globally, all the institutions of our society from "family to the state " were structured around patriarchal notions, where women didnot have choices. You may think they did, but it was merely the illusion of choice. Choices can only exist when opportunities precede it.

Even the financial provider–dependent dynamic was weaponized against women from a young age. “What will you do studying so much? You don’t have to earn; your husband will take care of that.” That was the logic—used to justify why families invested in sons’ education over daughters’. On paper, it may appear ideal—women freed from financial responsibility—but in practice, it had devastating consequences. The provider-dependent model made women economically powerless and socially voiceless. Because they were “not working,” they were burdened with all the unpaid domestic labor and childcare. They had no say in when or whom to marry, treated as dependents to be handed from one man’s care to another. Men could marry multiple wives and justify it through their earning power, while women had no recourse but endurance. Even their inheritance rights were minimized on the pretext that they had no financial duties—yet their unpaid duties were endless. In patriarchy, marriage has always unevenly benefited men, a fact both history and statistics confirm. This wasn’t confined to the East; it was the norm even in the West before the feminist movement. A change of social values in one part of the world benefits the other parts as well. Men often resent feminism because it stripped away their entitlement to free, unpaid domestic labor and a household full of children they rarely helped raise, because they were earning.

It was feminism that gave women control over their own bodies—the right to birth control, to education, to paid work. Look at the data: in Pakistan, the average birth rate dropped from around 6 children per woman in the 1990s to about 3.14 today. This isn’t coincidence, it’s the result of empowerment and access..

As Sir David Attenborough once observed, the key to solving overpopulation lies in giving women the right to education, work, and political participation. Ecofeminists like Vandana Shiva and Carolyn Merchant have long argued that the domination of women and the domination of nature stem from the same patriarchal logic—a system that exploits both bodies and earth as resources to be controlled.

Overpopulation is a feminist issue. Environmental degradation is a feminist issue. Climate change is a feminist issue, exploitation of nature and the exploitation of women are deeply intertwined. If we want to save the planet, we must first save women—from the systems that keep both them and the earth in chains. The Global North has taken a troubling leap backward—drifting toward fascism and totalitarianism. The first act of any totalitarian regime is to suppress basic human rights, especially those of women. Such regression will inevitably have devastating consequences, further worsening the already fragile state of women’s rights in the Global South as well.