By Catherine Redfern | 17 March 2010, 23:44

How do feminists explain what feminism is? These images might give you a clue.

[Image shows a ‘cloud’ of 50 words (e.g. women, equality, men, belief); the words are different sizes based on how frequently they were mentioned]

They are produced from the answers given to our survey of 1265 UK feminists (for the scope and limitations of the survey, see more information here), as part of the research for my book with Kristin Aune Reclaiming The F Word (more of the survey results will be published over the next few months and I may cross-post some of them to The F Word, as I’ve done here.).

So, one of our survey questions was “What do you understand the term feminism to mean?”

These images represent the free text of the responses pasted into Wordle (above) and Tag Crowd (below).

I’m hoping to publish more detail about the actual responses to this question in due course. (One of my favourites was the person who wrote: “you’re pulling my leg? i haven’t the time to write this answer!”)

Important points to note: The images represent the most frequent 50 words from the 824 respondents who answered this question online (we had 1265 survey responses in total and about two-thirds completed the survey online). Unfortunately we don’t currently have the funding to type up all of the free text responses that were submitted on paper, but the paper responses were counted in our main (statistical) survey results which are in our book.

I removed the word ‘feminism’ from the responses before processing it, since that’s what they were asked to define.

[Image shows a ‘cloud’ of 50 words (e.g. women, equality, gender, belief); the words are different sizes based on how frequently they were mentioned]

I’ve included both clouds as they look slightly different: the one above, for example, doesn’t have the word ‘men’ in it. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s interesting to see how it gives a slightly different impression.

Both of these make me very happy! More of this sort of thing to come, I hope!

(I’m concerned that these are probably not accessible to all readers, and I’m going to investigate if there is a way of fixing that. Advice very much welcome.)