Feminist Generations/Feminist Locations: The Continuing Vitality of Feminist Thought and Action
Here it is finally, a recap of a spectacular panel, held at the New School, March 27, 2008, with Deborah Siegel, Linda Abad, Meredith Tax, Ann Snitow, Cleopatra LaMothe, and Erica Reade.
A meeting of the feminist minds across generations came together at the New School on March 27, 2008, with a Caribbean-American queer woman (LaMothe), a Filipino migrant workers’ rights activist (Abad), a Third Wave feminist of the “post-feminist” 90s generation (Siegel), a young 20-year-old who refuses to see “feminism” as a dirty word (Reade), and two women who helped begin it all—one an academic (Snitow), one an old-time activist through and through (Tax). It was an epic panel, to say the least. In fact, it reminded me why people hold panels in the first place—not to intellectually masturbate (as can sometimes happen), but to edify and inspire.
Ann Snitow, professor at Eugene Lang College and NSSR, and editor of this amazing book, oh, and this one too, opened up the panel by discussing “generations.” Generation, to my mind, has long needed to be recognized alongside race, gender, class, and sexuality as a critical category of historical analysis. Quite simply, time passes and attitudes change and from this arises different conflicts, concerns, knowledge cores, and experiences. To ignore this is to lump issues and misunderstand the results of struggle. Snitow noted that feminists today range from age 10 to 80, which means there are a hell of a lot of generations in the mix. Recounting that when the feminist movement began in the late 1960s, any woman over 30 was shunted to the “Older Women’s Liberation” group, she wondered what today’s drastically changed demographics and attitudes could mean for feminism.
The two main questions of the night were: Is the term “Third Wave” useful, and what is “Third Wave Feminism”? Much of our current generation shuns the very term feminism; it is an unmentionable, resulting in awkward downward stares when invoked at parties. Barely able to even say the word, this generation can hardly have meaningful conversations about changing feminisms in popular discourse. But those with enough chutzpah to dwell on this question have debated pros and cons to “Third Wave.” Some worry that moving away from “Second Wave” creates needless divisions within the feminist movement. After all, we’re all women, aren’t we? they say and voice concerns that a mother vs. daughter fight will take place, the “hipsters” vs. “the women with shoulder pads.” Semi-valid concerns, perhaps, but I think it hardly realistic to argue that if we hide the name the divisions will disappear, and the reification this impulse implies is anathema to my way of thinking.
The arguments for the use of “Third Wave” are extremely powerful. Women must acknowledge not just inter- but intra-generational differences. Women today live significantly different lives than those of ’68. Feminists of ’68 tended to be white and middle to upper-middle-class, for one thing. They fought their fight and made their mistakes, but any valid feminism today must address the needs of women of all races, ethnicities, sexualities, and classes. We are working with a much different beast today, and that beast is the Third Wave. As Snitow emphasized, this does not mean that the older generation must pass the torch to the next. In fact, they should be chastised if they try to do so. How are relationships and conversations to be had and lessons learned if the older generation decides to preemptively stick its foot in the grave?
Deborah Siegel, author of Sisterhood Interrupted, gave the most comprehensive review of the Third Wave and the inter-generational problematics the term raises. She spoke of her “click” moment (the instance when she realized that her personal and political struggles were not hers alone but were unique to all women) occurring first with Anita Hill and then with the publication of a book which blamed women for turning into a victim, proposing that accusations of date rape were overblown. She was a member of the “post-feminist feminism” generation, whose primary voices announced: everything’s fine, we’ve fought all the battles, stop sobbing about it! But Siegel instead took on Rebecca Walker’s maxim in Ms. Magazine, “I am not a post-feminist feminist, I am the third wave,” with ferocity.
What is Third Wave Feminism? According to Siegel, third wave incorporates a multiplicity of identities into feminism. This means embracing the contradictions (I can be a feminist and wear lipstick), and recognizing that there are race, class, ethnic, sexuality differences that must be in conversation, if sometimes in opposition, with each other. The failure of the Second Wave to acknowledge these variations within the term “woman” first hit me while reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. In it, she issues a clarion call to women: have your cake and eat it too! Go to work and have kids, and if you need, hire a nanny—it’s that simple. Which begs the question: who are these nannies? What women are these nannies? And who is looking after the nannies’ kids? What does it mean for feminism, if one woman’s freedom relies on another’s exploitation, as Abad asked in speaking on Filipino female domestic workers in the US.
Siegel also reviewed specific issues on which Second and Third Wave feminism differ. Clearly, given all the older women I see running around with proud Hillary pins on their chest (in contrast to the Obama badge pinned to my bag), while one generation is focused on having a woman in the executive, another generation doesn’t think the political female face necessarily indicates an allied female mind. In general, I think my generation, for better or worse, is much less concerned with the political representation of women, and more obsessed by the cultural manufacturing of the female image. Which leads to Siegel’s second issue: Sexuality.
In one corner we have the raunch feminists of Girls Gone Wild, in the other, the older feminists yelling, “This, this is what we fought for? Wet t-shirt contests and girl-on-girl action?!” This is something I would like to address in more detail. As a young feminist who believes fully in a woman having the right to express herself freely and sexually, seeing commercials for Girls Gone Wild causes a putrid black hole to grow in my stomach. These women hardly seem to be stripping their tops off for empowerment, but instead they bask in the alienating and objectifying male gaze of the camera. Each piece of removed clothing shouts, “Hey! Look at me! I am completely insecure about my intelligence, my personality, my beauty, my weight, my worth, and unsure of ever being loved!” Perhaps if we worked on building the self-esteem of our daughters, then such a spectacle truly would be the ferocious cry of feminist sexuality. Then again, if more women were actually raised to have the same cockiness that many men do, I doubt such a malformed thing would exist. Finally, Siegel briefly addressed career: is it empowering for elite women to elect out of a career, because they prefer to stay home with house and home?
Of course, at base all these questions lead to a fundamental question with an ever-changing answer: what is sexism these days and how do we fight it? Is sexism at the origin of Girls Gone Wild (um, yes) and opting out of a career (at first glance, I would say it depends). And then the other questions flood in: Are we equal? Can we have it all? What is the relationship between personal transformation and broad change? Do we subordinate our individual desires to the greater good—what is the greater good? Have our desires been molded by the sexist society in which we live? Can we say there is just one greater good to apply as a panacea across society? Well, what is it?
In the end, it was Cleoptra LaMothe who summarized and represented what Third Wave feminism should ideally be all about. She recounted how she had just begun calling herself a feminist (she’s 21—about the same age that I started to stick the label to myself), and how, raised in a Caribbean household near Boston, there hadn’t even been a word for “feminism” or for “patriarchy” in the Haitian Creole she spoke at home. But most importantly, she talked about “different thinking” and the importance of it; the importance of not being afraid to say something different from what all the women around you are saying, the importance of not fearing that different thinking will break solidarity. Because, in the end: different thinking is vital to deconstructing patriarchy in all its forms.
In her words, “We hear the feminism is about women—but what “women” does one mean?”
Identity politics can become complex and intimidating, inconclusive and thus frustrating, but, as Snitow said, “You can’t do without identity politics—difference is our condition.” But she emphasized that that wasn’t enough. You can’t just rest there, you need to start talking, finding common ground, and working together.
It has crossed my mind that some, who come to this blog for RHPPA and sexual health posts, may wonder why the devil this woman keeps spending so much time on feminism and the historical experiences of women. Well, partly, it’s because I can. But at the end of the panel, Snitow summed up the larger picture of this all—the real reason why an expanded view is necessary alongside the specifics of pro-choice rights. Snitow expressed her frustration over the fact that even though there are new generations with new concerns, we are still fighting for some of the same issues we were in ’68. “How many times can you ask for abortion?” she asked, throwing her hands up into the air. “I’m 64 and I’m still asking for abortion! But,” she said, “it was never just about abortion.” Opposition has whittled down the movement and the idealism of the 1970s has been replaced with a necessary irony today, Snitow concluded. And this is true, as we struggle again and again for the same thing and realize that the personal is political is cultural is historical. But I think the inclusiveness and multiplicity of voices in Third Wave feminism is inspiring. It means taboos are being lifted and it is getting easier to talk, and with talking comes action.
Kristen