The Feminist Agenda

[prog_expat]

Courtney Martin: Reinventing feminism

Click to view

Of course, this "reinventing" of feminism is a bit meaningless for most, as they don't know what feminism really is to begin with. I recently stumbled on a quote - by a woman, no less - that I'm kicking myself for not bookmarking, as I can't find it now to include in this entry, that assumed that feminism sought the inversion of patriarchy, that is to put women in power and subjugate men.

So, first of all, I would like to direct everybody to kindly crack open a dictionary and read the real definition of feminism. In fact, I'll give you a hand.

Notice that all those definitions, taken from multiple dictionaries, use words like "same" and "equal", and not, say, "greater than"? That's no accident.

Another cringe-inducingly misinformed criticism of feminism from no less than Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the notion that Western feminists only care about the concerns of upper-middle-class white women:
These things, I think, are more basic than the stuff that current feminists are concerning themselves with - like shattering the glass ceiling or finding a balance between work and home life. There was a long article in the New York Times that went on and on about who [in a couple] would load and unload the dishwasher. If you have a career and you're so intelligent, you can work that out. You don't have to have a manifesto. There is feminism that has evolved to a kind of luxury.

It's as if her knowledge of the history of feminism ends in the 1980s. She's also shockingly ignorant of what "current feminists" are really up to.
Feminism, like any movement over 100 years old, is not monolithic, and any sweeping portrayals of what feminists are or do should be looked at with suspicion. For starters, speaking historically, there's been three major phases, or "waves", within feminism. However, even this is misleading, as the second wave is still very much alive and in tension with the third wave.

The first wave of feminism was the period in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries when the focus was on securing voting rights, property rights, and education rights for women. (Of course, the dates here apply to the West, as the struggle in certain parts of the world is still at this phase.)

In the second wave, the focus shifted more to cultural issues - this phase (roughly equivalent to the "women's lib" era) can be argued to have begun with the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963, which explored the forces that drove women from the workplace after World War II ended - although politics remained important with the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), workplace discrimination laws, sexual harassment laws, and so on.

The third wave emerged in the late 1980s as a response to a perceived over-emphasis by second wave feminists on the experience of upper-middle-class white women, and rejects the second wave's notion of a one-size-fits all, universal female identity, and with it, much of the absolutism of the second wave. Pornography, prostitution, and other forms of sex work are not seen as something to be banned wholesale as fundamentally, unavoidably misogynistic, but as something that should be reformed to allow women who choose to do this kind of work to do so safely and with dignity. Other elements of this sex-positive trend include de-stigmatizing BDSM, supporting the LGBT rights movement, and rejecting transphobia. (Some second wave writers have criticized both transwomen and transmen for various reasons.) Finally, third wave feminists expand the scope of the movement to a global one - reaching out to and supporting gender and orientation rights activists in developing countries - as well as being more vocal regarding the impact of sexism on males (circumcision of newborns, discrimination against males in traditionally female jobs such as nursing, outreach to men having difficulty seeking help for emotional trauma, etc.)

The 1990s were a period of bitter infighting between second- and third wave feminists, and second wave feminists are still very much active with the two groups in strong disagreement about how to best achieve equality - and even what constitutes equality.

However, one thing is for sure: the various debates where feminists would be inclined to weigh in are muddied by bizarre and unearned assumptions of what feminism even is and we do nobody any service by forcing feminists to first dispel these stereotypes before the real debate can even begin.