Jane Fonda: "It took me 30 years to get feminism"

The actor and activist Jane Fonda has admitted that she was “a late bloomer” when it came to feminism, and it was not until she was in her 60s that she really understood the movement.

Writing in Lenny, Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s online newsletter, Fonda – who is a prominent women’s rights campaigner – said she had gone from viewing women’s issues as a distraction from more important problems to the realisation that “women are the issue, the core issue”.

“It took me 30 years to get it, but it’s OK to be a late bloomer, as long as you don’t miss the flower show,” she said.

Fonda wrote: “In 1970, when I was 33, I learned that 5,000 women in New York City were demonstrating for legalised abortion. I wrote in my journal: ‘Don’t understand the Women’s Liberation Movement. There are more important things to have a movement for, it seems to me.’”

The actor, who is a two-time Academy Award winner, was a prominent opponent to the Vietnam war and civil rights activist before becoming a supporter of feminist causes. “I began to identify myself publicly as a feminist, although it would be many years before I would look within myself and locate the multiple ways in which I had internalised sexism and the profound damage that it had done to me,” she wrote.