Illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photos: Getty

Farewell To ... is an end-of-decade series that explores some of the biggest cultural trends of the last 10 years. HuffPosts culture team says bye to the era of one queen of hip-hop, so long to lily white and mostly male literary institutions, R.I.P. to the movie star and more.

In October 2010, Taylor Swift was profiled by The New York Times in advance of the release of her new album, Speak Now. The piece homes in on her anger, the way that Swifts musical genius seems directly correlated to how incensed she is at the time. As an aside, journalist Jon Caramanica asked Swift whether she was a feminist.

I have never really thought about that, she said.

Over the following decade, Swift and a whole cohort of famous women spent a lot of time contemplating that very question. Between 2010 and 2015, the question dogged everyone from pop stars (Beyonc , Lorde , Katy Perry , Carrie Underwood , Kelly Clarkson ), to actresses (Sarah Jessica Parker , Kaley Cuoco , Shailene Woodley , Susan Sarandon ), to reality TV personalities (Patti Stanger ), to CEOs (Marissa Mayer ), to Martha Stewart . Each time a famous woman was asked whether or not she was a feminist, her one-to-three sentence answer would become national news. The more misguided Feminists hate men! Feminists have a chip on their shoulder! But Im a humanist! the more newsworthy.

Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting Does Not Consider Herself a Feminist: I Love Feeling Like a Housewife

Kelly Clarkson Needs to Learn What Feminism Is, As Do So Many Others

Beyonc Doesnt Like Labels But Im a Modern-Day Feminist, I Guess

Marissa Mayer Thinks Feminists Are A Drag

Dont Go Calling Taylor Swift a Feminist, Says Taylor Swift

But when 2016 presidential election rolled around, the churn of Are-You-A-Feminist-Check-Yes-Or-No celebrity news headlines had slowed to a crawl, only cropping up when a famous person said something more substantive about the political movement.

The rise and fall of the celebrity feminist litmus test provides a helpful lens to consider the decade in feminism at large. When the decade opened, feminist was a label that was still considered unpalatable to the masses. It was a word female celebrities would probably be advised to sidestep, allowing them to capitalize on the amorphous concept of female empowerment without actually having to get political. As we look toward the decades close, the political and cultural climate has shifted dramatically. Feminism is both mainstream and expansive, an essential and explicitly political project in a world in which virulent online misogyny has become de rigeur, and in which celebrities (and others who choose to publicly claim the feminist label) are being asked to do the work of feminism, rather than simply pay it lip service.

I think into the decade, there was this rising popularity of feminism that started off as a slow burn and then increased toward the middle of the decade, said Caitlin Lawson, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of communication and media at the University of Michigan, whose research largely focuses on celebrity feminism. She pointed to Girls, which premiered in 2012, as well as other female-fronted TV shows like Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock, as cultural products that helped usher in a feminist pop culture moment.

These white feminist celebrities [like Lena Dunham, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey] were incorporating [feminism], particularly into the television content that they were creating, Lawson said, Girls, I think being a particularly spectacular moment where Lena was out there talking about feminism and was this young cool face of what feminism might be.

2012 was also the year that Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a viral TED Talk , aptly titled We Should All Be Feminists. In that talk, Adichie uses the dictionary definition of feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.

Her words would go viral, prompting a book of the same name , and perhaps most significantly, leading Beyonc to sample her talk in her December 2013 anthem, ***Flawless .

There was a growing, nobly intentioned movement to make feminism more accessible and inclusive, and to combat the decades of misinformation and negative stereotypes that had surrounded the movement.

And it worked.

Kaley Cuoco apologized for offending people and said that her comments were taken out of context. Katy Perry admitted that she used to not really understand what that word meant. Swift also claimed prior ignorance, saying that she had thought that feminism was akin to hating men, not just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities. And Swift notably credited her burgeoning friendship with Dunham with helping to usher in her feminist awakening.

When Beyonc performed in front of a giant projection of FEMINIST at the 2014 Video Music Awards and received widespread and overwhelmingly positive media attention it was indicative of a cultural sea change, one which had been building in the years prior.