Meghan Markle defends the word ‘woke’; reveals the advice she got days before her wedding

"What is so scary about a woman having an opinion as strongly as a man does?" the duchess asked

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The duchess said she received a crucial advice from a "very inspiring woman" before her wedding in 2018. (Photo: Instagram/@misanharriman)

Meghan Markle is back with another episode of her podcast series ‘Archetypes‘ that attempts to challenge global stereotypes about women. In every episode, the Duchess of Sussex and her guests discuss a topic — that is supposedly a taboo — and share their personal experiences. This time, they touched upon the word ‘woke’ and why it assumes a negative connotation when used by women.

During the episode, titled ‘The Audacity of the Activist‘, the 41-year-old — who stepped down from the post of a senior royal in 2020 along with her husband Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex — defended the word ‘woke’ and said, “I thought a lot about words that become unnecessarily charged as it pertains to women, like ‘feminism’, for example, [is] often treated as a taboo, as the F-word or the word ‘woke’.”

ALSO READ | What does Meghan Markle think of the ‘B-word’ and women being called ‘difficult’?

The duchess admitted that the word ‘woke’, particularly, has been used against women for a long time, stating: “I know I’m saying woke, I fully realise I am spoon-feeding the clickbait, but here’s why… Because woke, by definition, means alert to injustice in society, especially racism.”

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Meghan continued, “What’s loaded or wrong with that? When you layer a woman into that seemingly anodyne definition, it becomes for many almost disgusting. ‘Outrageous,’ they would say. But why? What is so scary about a woman having an opinion as strongly as a man does? And why do we sometimes cower to that?”

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For the episode, she was joined by actor Jameela Jamil — who is quite vocal about issues such as reproductive and women’s rights on social media — who said the duchess takes “an unfathomable amount of sh*t”. “And I fought back on your behalf years before I’d ever met you, because I was so outraged by the twisting of this very normal, very kind, very civilized woman,” she said in the episode.

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Elsewhere in the episode, the duchess also revealed that she had received crucial advice from a “very inspiring woman” before her wedding in 2018. “[The advice was shared] by a very, very influential and inspiring woman, who for her own privacy, I won’t share who it was with you. But, she said to me, ‘I know your life is changing, but please don’t give up your activism. Don’t give up, because it means so much to women and girls’.”

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