It's not your Mother's Brand of Feminism

It's been almost two weeks since Maureen Dowd's essay in the Times magazine about the current state of American feminism, but I only read it this morning. I'm pretty touchy about Dowd's generation accusing my generation of having abandoned feminism. Here are the flaws I find in her argument:

1. The female sex is not divided into two categories in which you either are or aren't a feminist. Not having been alive in the 70s I suppose I don't really know, but it seems to me that binary was a big part of the movement at the time. It made sense; it was a radical movement which was (at least in the beginning) a minority opinion. Having pride in gender equality meant being vocal about it, and therefore it mattered whether you did or did not want to be counted as a member of the movement. But I would argue that feminism has become so successful that those categories no longer apply. Not even the most hard-core rightist would publicly admit that women are not equal, even if his actions would seem to contradict it. Everyone is a feminist now. And that means that any given woman exhibits some "feminist" and "non-feminist" behaviors, falling somewhere along the spectrum between Mamie Eisenhower and Bella Abzug. Many young women disavow feminism because they have internalized a caricatured notion of it, but if they still believe they have the same right to earn money, to strive for societal roles of their own choosing, to generally shape their own destinies, then I don't really care what they call themselves.

2. Feminism was supposed to give women choices. The evil of sexism is that it restricts the freedom of both sexes to carve their identities and take certain societal roles that would be most fulfilling to them. If what you're fighting for is Choice in its widest sense, then you have to accept that some women will choose traditional roles. What made a woman's job so horrible wasn't only the job itself, it was that she was forced into it without the power of reshaping it. Someone who truly wants that role and stays in it because it makes her happy is not a bad feminist. Therefore you can't simply look at numbers (or, in Dowd's case, anecdotal evidence) and take that as proof of the failure of feminism. I don't personally think the traditional man is a creature I should imitate, nor do I think it's my duty to do so by virtue of the fact that men have been slow to imitate the best aspects of womanhood. And even if you do, why are women being blamed for this phenomenon while the men are let off the hook?

3. The other problem with looking at "numbers" alone, is that it involves a distortion of the experience of 70s feminism. It's not as though there was a consensus among women as to the virtues of feminism at the time. What, there were no housewives in Dowd's generation? Please.

4. Feminism then as now has been concerned with the most convenient aspects of gender inequality: A. The success of the top rungs of professional women and B. Cosmetic issues. It seems obvious to me that if women earned the same amount as men, and truly had equal roles in their family lives, then no one would give a shit about whether or not they changed their last names or wore makeup. It also seems obvious to me that women of low socioeconomic status have the most to gain from feminism--they don't have a choice about whether or not to work. They have the most need of self-reliance and the chance to achieve equal benefits of their labor, and they are not much better off today than they were thirty years ago. While Dowd and her generation are up in arms about Harvard Business Graduates giving up their jobs, there are thousands of mothers who couldn't give up their jobs if they wanted to. That is a real feminist issue.

5. The reason the behavior of Harvard grads is changing is that in Dowd's generation, the women who went to business school were mostly women who allied themselves with traditional feminism. Now that, as I have argued, feminism is all-pervasive, any "type" of woman can go to business school, and that's going to include some Phyllis Schlafly types. That's the consequence of true success. If you really want to create a society in which women and men don't have to give up their jobs to raise children, then you have to create a structure that helps them to raise those children. I sure wish the energy that went into mainstreaming the title "Ms." had gone into creating widely available and affordable child care. I really see no point in denying that women who keep their jobs have a harder time raising their children the way they would ideally like to and blaming the women who have observed this phenomenon for themselves.

I don't wish my argument here to come off as a defense of the status quo. I know full well the limitations of gender equality in this country, and let's not even talk about the rest of the world or I'll be too frustrated to finish typing this sentence. But I think it's such a waste of emotion and resources to argue about the symptoms of gender disparity instead of its true causes. I can't help feeling that if Steinem's generation of activists had kept its eye on the ball, we wouldn't be having this conversation.