I recently got married. I have two children. I own a house, and I have a full-time job. At first glance, none of these circumstances may strike you as remarkable. In fact, maybe you share in many of them. But if I had been born even 50 years earlier, I wouldn't have many of the rights that I have now to love who I love, make choices about my body and own property.

I don't want to bore you with a long history of feminism, first and foremost, because I don't know the long history of feminism, but I do know this: Without it, my life would not be possible. In the mid-1800s, women in the U.S. earned the right to own property. This might not seem like a big deal, but at the time women were property.

That's right. The husband owned the wife, the land and the money. If the husband died, sometimes the wife was allowed to own his property, but she wasn't allowed to do anything with it. It just had her name on it, which was actually his name. The whole point was to keep the property -- the woman and the land and the money-- in the family or owned by the brothers, the sons and the fathers. This had far-ranging implications.

It still forms the foundation of many of our current arguments about pro-choice and abortions. It still impacts the laws that we have about who can marry and why. It's the reason that we objectify women's bodies and try to outlaw yoga pants. But here is how it affects me.

It's been a tremendous amount of work exercising the rights I've been granted and being responsible for the property I own. We have bankrolled the entire thing with 78 cents on every dollar that a man would have had for the same job done. We have filled out forms and jumped through hoops to take what might have been granted easily or celebrated more if we were a man and a woman with jobs, a house and children. But I'm still tremendously grateful for what I have. Many people have much, much less.


So when Nicki Minaj, Shailene Woodley and Carrie Underwood are not sure if they are so "extreme" as to be feminists, I would suggest that they have another look at the string of diamonds, the mansion or the record contract that drives their privileged lifestyle and ask themselves if they would like to have all that freedom and independence transferred to their father or their brother, because women shouldn't own property, they should be property. Your choice. And that alone, having the choice, is feminism.