Fifty Feminist Mantras: A Yearlong Practice for Cultivating Feminist Consciousness

By Amelia Hruby

An illustrated journal for feminists looking to raise their consciousness and strengthen their well-being in a positive, inclusive, and radical way.
Fifty Feminist Mantras began as a weekly blog post and blossomed into a year-long project with the purpose of helping readers embrace feminism and themselves as feminists. Inside are fifty mantras—memorable phrases or words—arranged by week and season. Each mantra is paired with guided reflections and writing prompts, along with journal pages for readers to fill.

Sample mantras:

Grow Soft:
As we consider soft power, I invite you to experiment with growing softer. How might this make you more powerful?
 
Enact Your Emotions:
Which of your emotions lead you toward other people and into action with them? (Does being angry rile you up the most? Being hurt? Falling in love? Feeling scammed?) How you can express those emotions with purpose?
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
• Release date: Oct 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781524863043

Book preview

Fifty Feminist Mantras copyright © 2020 by Amelia Hruby. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

Andrews McMeel Publishing

a division of Andrews McMeel Universal

1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

ISBN: 978-1-5248-6304-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934875

Cover Design and Illustrations by Emily Jaynes

Editor: Charlie Upchurch

Art Director/Designer: Diane Marsh

Production Editor: David Shaw

Production Manager: Tamara Haus

Digital Production: Kristen Minter

ATTENTION: SCHOOLS AND BUSINESSES

Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail the Andrews McMeel Publishing Special Sales Department: [e-mail].

To your feminine self, your feminist potential, and every woman* who’s inspired or supported you along the way.

*Anytime I say woman or women in this book, I mean anyone who identifies as a woman or with communities of women. I also mean the socially constructed, structurally oppressed position that produces concrete experiences of discrimination and marginalization for women. The spelling womxn would also be an appropriate descriptor.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Winter

Spring

Summer

Fall

Closing

Resources

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

HOW TO USE THIS EBOOK

This book is intended to be a journal. Please grab a pen and notebook to follow along.

INTRODUCTION

On Halloween of 2016, I started a project that I named Feminist Mantra Monday. The idea was to create a weekly mantra series that would help people of all genders embrace feminisms and themselves as feminists. So each Monday for a year (with a few exceptions, of course), I posted a mantra on my Instagram profile and a brief essay explaining its meaning and feminist potential on my blog.

In many ways, the project was a public journaling process. The mantras were fueled by my activities and reflections from the week prior, often in response to things happening in the world at large. In other ways, however, the project took its own shape and form as readers invested their lives and meanings in the mantras and shared comments and conversations on the posts.

The mantras were always a self-exploratory prompt, but a community also blossomed around them. Originally published on the heels of the 2016 presidential election, they became a collective rallying cry against the election of a sexist, white supremacist president. As years passed and I continued writing weekly feminist mantras, they served as a reminder of the importance of activism and self-care and a signpost of the necessity of developing our deeply personal but always political feminist practices.

Reading and working with the feminist mantras in this book will not provide you with a detailed history of the feminist movement or a critical analysis of feminist theory. But the book will teach you some of the feminist values that I’ve learned by studying feminism and interviewing feminist activists for the past seven years.

These values are communicated through important lessons in trusting your intuition, learning to listen, cultivating community bonds, nurturing our emotions and desires, reconsidering the role of the feminine, and imagining futures for ourselves radically different from the ones provided by the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society in which we live.

I believe that these lessons represent important feminist values like empathy, community, imagination, pleasure, joy, and soft power that you will learn about over the course of the mantras. As you read, I invite you to consider your own list of values and why each entry on your list may or may not be feminist. Each of us will arrive at our own answers, and I encourage you to treat this book as an invitation for your own reflection rather than a guide to the right answers.

The intention of this book is to make space for each of us to continue (or to begin) a weekly feminist mantra practice in our lives. I encourage you to set aside a time each week to read and meditate on one of the mantras.

They are arranged in the book by season, but feel free to skip weeks that don’t resonate with you and come back when they do. There are structured journal pages with each mantra to help you reflect on how it may apply to your life and the lives of others. Sometimes these pages are just a few simple questions; other times they will guide you through creative exercises. Again, sit with or skip