“Naomi’s a popularizer, I guess,” said Alix, after a moment. “We need those people, too.”
For me, Wolf, in all her glamour and insight, was soon joined by Rebecca Walker, Kathleen Hanna, Susan Faludi, Amy Richards, Ani DiFranco, Farai Chideya, Ariel Levy, and a whole host of other women who, like I was, were writing and speaking for and about feminists. A critical mass of us emerged, and with that emergence came generational tension characterized by public complaints and private resentments. The Second Wave complaint was that they had gotten there first and were not being acknowledged; furthermore, they were a lot more radical and thus more effective. The Third Wave complained of not being respected by the Second Wave, who seemed preoccupied with asking, “Where are the young feminists?” Yet when all of the Riot Grrrls, Bust readers, and Third Wave activists raised our hands to be counted, they somehow couldn’t see or recognize us.
As for radicalism, the Third Wave proudly boasted multiple strategies for changing the world, and mass protest was only one of them. We wrote music, TV shows, magazines, and movies, along with important books. We were as interested in creating pop culture as the Second Wave was in critiquing it. The Third Wave incorporated theory from within the Second Wave—from women of color, gay people, and transpeople—into our feminism and their approach to activism. Thus, abortion wasn’t the biggest issue, porn wasn’t taboo, and women-only spaces were no longer the priority. Some in the Second Wave worried how “big tent” feminism had become. Susan Faludi called this conflict “Feminism’s Ritual Matricide” in a 2010 cover story in Harper’s, writing:With each go-round, women make gains, but the movement never seems able to establish an enduring birthright, a secure line of descent—to reproduce itself as a strong and sturdy force. At the core of America’s most fruitful political movement resides a perpetual barrenness.
While that grudge continued to simmer, we all aged. Since Manifesta was published, some women who appear in its pages, such as Andrea Dworkin, Betty Friedan, Marilyn French, Mary Daly, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Seaman, June Jordan, and Ellen Willis, as well as civil rights icons like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, have all passed. Meanwhile, my peers are in a different stage, too. In our forties now, we are raising children, struggling with infertility, and getting divorced. We’re middle-aged.
There is a power in youth. It’s partly the energy—I used to be able to stay up all night to have fun or follow through on an idea, and now I’m lucky if make it to midnight. It’s also the effortless beauty—the plump cheeks and shiny hair and body that works the best it ever will. But the strength of youth is also being “in it” and “of it,” rather than out of it. When Amy and I were promoting Manifesta, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my red pleather pants (chic in 2000, I swear) and snug “I Spy Sexism” T-shirt spoke volumes about whether feminism was relevant. My working knowledge of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was as important as my having read The Feminine Mystique. I addressed crowds of younger women and men at colleges across the country those first few years with Amy, confident that we were speaking as older sisters. “We’re here to let you know that feminism is for you,” we conveyed with both our friendly talks and our penchant for fishnet stockings, “and you are as important to feminism as anything that came before it.”
One young woman, Courtney Martin, wrote about our effect on her when she was an undergrad at Barnard, saying that she had been reluctant to call herself a feminist (in spite of deeply held beliefs) because it was too confusingly connected to her mother and another era. “This was contemporary, brash, even a little sexy,” Courtney wrote of our presence. “This is who I wanted to be.”
Courtney went on to be a core blogger on Feministing, the author of several books, and the founder of the Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy, among many other accomplishments. She’s a decade younger than I am, and I can already see a critical mass of her peers having the effect on younger audiences that I once had.
When I address crowds now, I don’t dress as zanily as I once did. I’m more likely to wear a blazer than a giant white fake-fur jacket. My remarks are peppered with references to my children and schools and having a mortgage. I attempt to talk about Nicki Minaj, the young rapper with all the gender-extending alter egos, but I know I’m in danger of sounding out of it (as that description perhaps just exemplified). My memories of college, which I drew from to make connections, are now further away and less relevant to my audience. “We didn’t have email or the Internet when I was in college,” I might say, and it’s sort of like the curfews for women that I used to hear Second Wavers reference—interesting, but alien.
Although I’m in another awkward adolescence, it’s not one of youth. (You can tell by the wrinkles that frame the zits.) This crisis is one that Second Wave women had to go through, too, when it became clear that they could no longer speak for the fresh recruits of feminism. Their fall from that rampart was complicated by the backlash of the 1980s, when a slew of pop culture and putative journalism piled on to express a nation’s anxiety about independent women, causing them to think it was mainly antifeminist forces pushing them from their spotlight. Those feminists licked their wounds for a while, but then some, like Ann Snitow and Charlotte Bunch, turned their attention internationally. Others, like Marie Wilson and Nancy Gruver, skipped over problematic adults altogether and focused on creating a movement to address girls’ self esteem, creating the 1990s phenomena Take Our Daughters to Work Day and New Moon Magazine.
And others, like Marcia Ann Gillespie and Winona LaDuke, continued to break barriers for women—becoming the first African American woman to run a “general audience” magazine or the first Native American woman to mount a campaign to become the Vice President of the country.
Still, it was not without resistance that many faced my generation. We heard: “We did that already!” “That’s not feminism.” “Today’s younger women seem to not understand how tenuous their newly won rights are.” I found myself in the audience at panels where well-known Second Wavers spoke about my peers, seemingly only to tear us down. I attended meetings where the topic was “What do you young women think about abortion?” and waited in vain for someone to call on any of the young people with their hands raised. Eventually, we started our own organizations, projects, and periodicals. We wrote our own books. We became part of the feminist establishment.
Now it’s our turn to feel the pinch of time. I admit I have read a younger feminist’s work and said to myself with a mix of alarm and pride, Amy and I already addressed that in Manifesta and Grassroots! I admit I feel anxious about appearing out of it. I am still confused by Twitter, and I don’t think I have time to figure it out, either. I don’t speak for the future the way I once did. I still have a lot to do and say for feminism, but I’m not the person who will necessarily make audiences of twenty-year-olds say with excitement, “She’s like me. Maybe I’m a feminist, too.”
As I shed the skin of “young feminist,” though, I find myself a lot more settled about being forty. I am working on more interesting projects than I was ten years ago, from a film about rape to hosting feminist summer camps (cocreated with Amy Richards), and don’t feel that I am at all irrelevant. Still, there is this magic about being a “young feminist” that has media currency and offered me a cherished and proud identity for a long time. I hope that I will do a good job of getting myself off the stage and into the audience for panels on “young feminism,” so I can learn from the future even as I revere my own feminist past.
I feel smarter than I did as a young feminist, it’s true, but the feminists fifteen years younger than I am inspire me. These feminists, raised after the horror of 9/11 and the good intentions of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, are confident and evolved, and they do things I’m still reminding myself to do. There’s Constance DeCherney, who bravely asks for raises and never went through a phase where she felt she had to reject style to be serious. (“My specialties are abortion and fashion,” she told me.) There’s Shelby Knox, who is
coming up with newer ways of framing feminism that challenge me to reassess my own. And Nancy Redd, who updated Naomi Wolf’s update of Second Wave beauty-image theory with Body Drama—a book that features photos of many vulvas, something more liberating to witness than I could have dreamed, even as a proud owner of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Amid these progressive takes on vulvas, negotiating raises, and constantly changing ways of doing feminism, I’m also struck by how much the young fems have to go through the same trials that the Third Wave—and the Second Wave—went through, too. Sexual assault is still rampant, confusion (and humiliation) about how to have an orgasm abounds, and saying, “I had an abortion” is still as risky as it is empowering. I can’t save younger feminists from any of this, but as they grow themselves up, my generation can be the allies we always wanted for ourselves. That alone is progress.
THAT SEVENTIES SHOW
On a blustery day in April 2002, I sat in Barnard College’s Altschul Hall among fifty accomplished feminists in their fifties and sixties, ten or so students, and two high schoolers for the annual Veteran Feminists of America meeting. Part conference and part awards ceremony, the event is a look back at the early days of the modern women’s movement, starring the women who led the charge of the Second Wave. Feminine-mystique buster Betty Friedan was there, as was “zipless fuck” creator Erica Jong. Different-voice researcher Carol Gilligan stopped in for the dinner to receive her medal. Seven of the original thirteen Our Bodies, Ourselves collective stood with their arms around each other on the dais, recalling the days when they sat at a kitchen table hammering out the original feminist health bible. Many of the women at the event spoke of having been through hell and euphoria, having known intense excitement and bravery and loss, which is why they use the somewhat tongue-incheek term “veteran,” connoting one who served in a war, instead of the less bloody-sounding “pioneer” or “trailblazer” or (ahem) “foremother.” In other words, these women enlisted in the revolution, and they have the scars to prove they were there.
I have attended this meeting for the last four years as a guest of Barbara Seaman, who wrote The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill and Free and Female, among other influential books. I’m not a pioneer of the Second Wave but a person who was raised with the benefits of that surge of feminist activism. This year was a salute to the writers of the movement, and at the nonfiction panel it was suggested that no big, groundbreaking feminist books were being written today. Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will and In Our Time, argued that this was because so much was unearthed by the Second Wave that it was next to impossible to find a hot, profound topic that would make millions of women exclaim, “Wait, she’s writing about me!” Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a former editor of Ms. magazine and cocreator of the game-changing children’s book Free to Be . . . You and Me, added that it was also due to the kind of feminism practiced by the daughters of the Second Wave, which she characterized as very individualistic, concerned with culture rather than politics. (This was seconded by sister panelists Brownmiller and Phyllis Chesler, author of Women and Madness and Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.)
The theory that the important books were ones written roughly between 1964 (The Feminine Mystique) and 1975 (Against Our Will) struck me as provocative and inaccurate. I am the coauthor of two books about the current state of feminism, and the author of two more books along feminist lines, so I have a personal stake in resisting the news that all the important writing has been done. Ironically, I had embarked a few years before on a grand plan to bring out some of the classics of the Second Wave. I focused on out-of-print books that I thought were ignored by the publishing industry and therefore unavailable to my generation. In pitching the Feminist Classics series, I was asked to prove that those important feminist books (written and trumpeted by the vets) were, well . . . relevant.
On a personal level, I wanted some role in preserving the legacy of Second Wave feminism. That compulsion can be traced back to my first job after college, in the editorial department at Ms. Ms. didn’t reflect the feminism I saw in my own life, the prerogative of having been raised in a more liberated time, when groundbreaking acts come from sheer confidence, freedom, and a sense of entitlement and not from consciousness-raising groups, NOW memberships, and mass protests. Ms. didn’t direct itself to an audience raised with both Maybelline ads and critiques of makeup. Nonetheless, I was fascinated by what I then perceived to be the “real” women’s liberationists, and I was in the privileged position of meeting many of these veterans. It was heady stuff.
ONE NIGHT DURING the spring of 1995, I attended a gathering for the writer Susan Swan in a Greenwich Village bar, when I met Karen Durbin, now the film critic for Elle, who was part of the later crest of the Second Wave. In 1995, she was the editor in chief (the first and only woman in that job) at the Village Voice, the once-influential soapbox for the lefty counterculture. We talked about whether young women really had a grasp of feminism’s theory and history. I recall Karen saying something like this: “Look, you’ve got to read the big books of the Second Wave. Even if you spit 99 percent of them out, reading those books is critical.” So Karen wasn’t insisting that I swallow everything the ’70s feminists came up with. She was suggesting that my generation hadn’t read feminism’s foundational books and thus was unable to build on them. That was an epiphany.
I started reading: from Sexual Politics (Millett) to Pornography (Dworkin) to In A Different Voice (Gilligan); from The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill (Seaman) to Against Our Will (Brownmiller) to Vaginal Politics (Ellen Frankfort). I read the novels (Burning Questions and Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, both by Alix Kates Shulman; Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room; Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying). I bought out-of-print books from street vendors who displayed their wares on card tables on Avenue A. I read the books written about the women who jump-started the radical Second Wave, like Personal Politics (Sara Evans) and Daring to Be Bad (Alice Echols). I organized intergenerational readings and wrote in my magazine articles about events that occurred before I was born. I revisited the Miss America Protest of the late 1960s and the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, reviewed the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, and wrote about the SCUM Manifesto.
Then in 1998, I had the Feminist Classics idea. It seemed like a good idea back then—and deceptively straightforward. I (a twenty-eight-year-old feminist writer) noticed that most of the major classics of the Second Wave were out of print. I was outraged. Would Das Kapital ever be remaindered? Does anyone have to scour the Internet to find the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.? I would lobby to get these books back in print so my generation could read them and take the revolution to the next level.
“Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792; a few years later it was out of print and, with it, the first challenge—the foundation—of feminist intellectual tradition,” began my 1998 proposal to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “As a writer working on a book about feminism, I don’t care if the seminal texts of the Second Wave aren’t on lists of influential books—I’d be happy if they were in print. Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, and The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone are all dead. (And the works of lesser-known influential thinkers such as Ti-Grace Atkinson and Jill Johnston? Forget about it.)”
I approached a dozen younger feminists and asked them to lend quotes to bolster my case. “It’s amazing that Firestone took on Marx—how bold,” said Kathleen Hanna, a founder of Riot Grrrl and lead singer of Le Tigre. Susan Faludi threw her weight behind the project. “If there is a sense in the industry that younger women wouldn’t be influenced by these books,” she said, “it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: They certainly won’t if the books aren’t available.”
My agent, also twenty-eight, was eager to help out with what was essentially pro bono work. We approached the editor I was working with on my feminist book (who also happened to be under thirty). She went
for it. What happened next was a rollercoaster ride of frustration, leading to what I think of now as “Lessons in Feminism.”
LESSON # 1: JUST BECAUSE A WRITER IS A FEMINIST DOESN’T MEAN SHE DOESN’T (OR SHOULDN’T) HAVE AN EGO.
I approached Millett first. She had written an article that year in On the Issues about how she couldn’t get a teaching job anywhere and almost all her books were out of print, including the 1970 classic Sexual Politics. That book was the first major example of something done routinely now: the parsing of a beloved cultural creation for its misogyny. The lens she held up to D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer is now almost automatically applied to work from such varied artists as Woody Allen and Eminem.
When we spoke, Millett was interested in my classics proposal but noted again that all her books were out of print. She was sick of being reduced to the first book of her career (her PhD dissertation, for God’s sake) and wanted a publisher to commit to doing at least four of her books. I quickly read Sita, Flying, and The Loony Bin Trip and made the case to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. They came back with the news that none of the other books were bestsellers, influential, or classics. The idea of getting her masterwork out for my generation wasn’t enough inducement for Millett. Though I was disappointed, I could hardly blame her. No points for taking less than you think you deserve.
LESSON #2: JUST BECAUSE A SECOND WAVE FEMINIST IS OLD ENOUGH TO BE MY MOTHER DOESN’T MEAN THAT SHE IS MY MOTHER.
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