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| Ms. Steinem |
I used to roll my eyes when people called me a feminist just because I was female and I said what I thought. I grew up without any notion that I might be considered inferior because of my sex. I didn’t encounter it in any schools I went to, including college. I majored in history and technical theatre, fields with a few more men than women, but nothing extraordinary. Never encountered sexism, not until I got my current job. But that’s another story….
As a history instructor, I read a lot of textbooks, looking for good ones to assign. I have always objected to putting women’s history, or anyone’s history, in sidebars and boxes. To me, if you’ve got a U.S. history book, you should have the history of everyone here. Putting women in a box is ridiculous — they, and everyone who isn’t a white adult male citizen, are part of the main flow of history, period.
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| Ms. Pankhurst |
Well, I could take that attitude, because I was a child of the 70s. Feminism was, apparently, so engrained in me I couldn’t see it for what it was. When strains of feminism began to denigrate men, I rejected them. Equality, not superiority, was the goal. Militant feminists (a term used 100 years ago for suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst) seemed hostile to half the population, so I didn’t want to be called a feminist. Thus the eye-rolling.
The history of the push for sexual equality has, like all other historical movements, been one of ups and downs, not continual progress. I grew up during an upswing, but the goals of that era (economic and social equality) were simply not achieved.
For example, women still do not receive equal wages to men. New studies are quick to point out that is because they do not enter the high-paying fields. They choose Marketing and Human Resources over Finance. Pamela Stone’s study Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home noted that successful women with children often quit jobs because of inflexibility and insensitivity in the workplace, as well as husbands’ career demands. Leslie Bennett’s The Feminine Mistake warned that younger women leaving the workforce will have trouble returning and possibly financial trouble in the future because of how the workplace works (see a blog entry by her) . What both books, and zillions like them, have in common is that they consider only middle-class educated women in careers that they have chosen. As Joan Walsh points out, many of these books miss the simple fact that most women in the workplace do not have a choice about having a job — they need it to survive. At that point, it is no longer a women’s issue, but everyone’s issue.
So if it isn’t really about economics, perhaps it’s social. In the last twenty years, the focus has been not on how men and women are the same, but on how they are different. Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. In an effort to appreciate each other’s differences, and create a sort of sexual multiculturalism, we’ve lost a basic “feminist” goal, one I had just assumed. I see powerful women on television spending their time sitting in chairs talking about clothes and makeup. Most medical studies are still done using men, but the resulting medication is given to women, and often doesn’t work right. An acceptance of our differences has done very little except provide a different set of excuses for refusing to see individuals as individuals.
What we now have is called “post-feminism”. This is the idea that basically, feminism has been achieved, so we don’t need it anymore. When I first heard the word, I thought it meant “feminism lite” (you know, less filling, fewer calories than feminism). But in fact, it’s more of a return to traditional roles, just using sexual multiculturalism, biological clocks, and Harvard grad moms to shore up the argument. Susan Douglas notes that post-feminism is a necessity to sell products, because it keeps women buying stuff to make themselves more beautiful and their domestic chores more managable. Now I’m thinking that anti-bacterial soap (soap is already anti-bacterial), air freshener (open a damn window) and Charmin Ultra are post-feminist plots designed to keep me from ever being equal to men. I saw a bumper sticker awhile ago that said “I’ll become a post-feminist when I live in a post-patriarchy”. A valid sentiment.
Oh, sorry, I gotta go have coffee with my girlfriends and feel empowered. 
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