Emma Watson and Malala Yousafazai Want to Take the Fear out of Identifying as a Feminist

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/11/05/malala-emma-watson?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2015-11-5

While fans of Harry Potter might geek out should they ever encounter actor and activist Emma Watson, celebrities also have their own upper echelon of renowned public figures. For Watson, one of those people is Malala Yousafzai.

Despite being clearly in awe of the Nobel laureate, Watson kept her cool long enough to interview Yousafzai at a screening for the documentary film He Named Me Malala at the Into Film Festival on Wednesday. (Disclosure: He Named Me Malala was produced in part by TakePart’s parent company, Participant Media.)

In the roughly 20-minute interview, there’s a great deal of mutual admiration between the two activists. They also discuss shared goals, including an end to gender-based discrimination and rebranding the word "feminism," although Watson had planned to stay away from the topic.

“I had initially planned to ask Malala whether or not she was a feminist but then researched to see whether she had used this word to describe herself. Having seen that she hadn’t, I decided to take the question out before the day of our interview,” Watson wrote in a Facebook post accompanying the interview.

Yousafzai didn’t need to be prompted because it turns out that Watson—a U.N. Women goodwill ambassador—inspired Yousafzai to identify as a feminist during a speech Watson delivered last year at U.N. headquarters in New York.

“After hearing your speech, when you said, ’If not now, when? If not me, who?’ I decided there’s no way and there’s nothing wrong by calling yourself a feminist,” Yousafzai told Watson. “So I am a feminist, and we all should be feminist, because feminism is another word for equality.”