''I am not a feminist, but'': College women, feminism, and negative experiences

Basing our analysis on survey data collected from college women aged 18 to 22 years, we assess their psychological orientations toward the feminist movement generally as well as the specific influences of negative experiences and labels used for the movement upon those orientations. Our findings show that negative experiences (e.g., sexual harassment and gendered violence) positively affect respondent support for feminism. Substituting the label ''feminist'' for the label ''women's movement'' results in more negative evaluations. We conclude that the typical dichotomies of feminist/antifeminist and feminist/postfeminist mask the complexity of young women's attitudes toward the women's movement.