Armed with my cell phone and my tampon case, I’m hearing stories about women raping and men being raped, continuing to evolve an understanding of this common, silenced experience. The problem of rape persists—it overwhelms—but the crews of feminists I see taking an individual interest in everyone’s safety makes me feel like someone really is taking back the night. And also seizing the day, the subways, and the movement. I say to all of you Slutwalkers, Knightriders, and Hollabackers, “Don’t you stop.”
A WOMAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE
I grew up in the kind of Midwestern small-town household in which my mother stayed at home with us kids, dealing with meals, laundry, cleaning, and volunteer work, while my father worked as a doctor and was the more authoritative disciplinarian. We were three daughters, though, and while our family was superficially traditional, we were fed a steady diet of “you can be whatever you want.” That meant, to be honest, “you can do what boys do” more than it was an invitation to also become full-time homemakers.
At age seven or so, I remember musing that I might become “a fashion designer or a nurse” when I grew up, and my mother’s responding, a bit too intensely, “Or a doctor. You don’t have to be a nurse. Women can be doctors!” Her adamancy came not from any contempt for nurses—her own mother, my grandma Effie, had sent three kids to college and helped countless people in Grand Forks, North Dakota, as an RN. No, the intensity with which she begged me to consider the more publicly valued work came from her own biography.
Growing up, she got the impression that there were two jobs for women: nurse or teacher. Once she got a glimpse, during the 1970s, of the vastness of the world women might have access to, she felt a bit rooked. She got her master’s degree, writing her thesis on the life of Billie Holliday, and also invested many of her hopes in seeing what her daughters would do. Like many of her generation, she lived (consciously or not) the mantra that she would be the root and her daughters the bloom. Meanwhile, although she was proud of the work she did raising us kids and running the household, she knew that until women occupied the spaces men had always called solely theirs, it would be hard to argue that we were “just choosing” to become homemakers or nurses or any “helping professional.”
I thought a lot about my mother’s dream that her daughters—and thus women—would continue to demonstrate that they were as good as men while I observed the 2008 presidential candidacy of Senator Hillary Clinton. She was not the first woman to run—from Belva Lockwood (1884 and 1888) to Brooklyn Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (1972) to Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun (2004), we’ve had a handful of women gutsy enough to go for the top job—but HRC is by far the most serious contender, as demonstrated by the infrastructure and money she was quickly able to attract. Like Oprah and Madonna, she had 100 percent name recognition (a crucial element in politics), but unlike them, she had cowritten and sponsored important legislation, was a very successful two-term senator from a huge state, spoke of women’s rights as human rights at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 (the first time that seemingly obvious observation was made in a way that could affect policy), and blocked the confirmation of the FDA commissioner to protest the long delay in approving Plan B for over-the-counter use. During the primaries, she created the most detailed and only truly universal healthcare proposal put before the voters—something similar to the plan Obama passed after becoming president.
The reasons people gave for not supporting Clinton ranged from her war authorization vote to fear that her husband would dominate the rest of the election cycle or the White House, but what I heard more was the fact that she’s just not “electable” because, as some said, wrinkling their noses, “she’s not likable.” Creating this self-fulfilling prophecy, the media piled on, chalking up sixty-two major incidents of egregious misogyny in fewer than six months leading up to the election, according to a tally of anti-Hillary sexist episodes in the primary-campaign compiles by Melissa McEwan. As Stan Fish wrote on his New York Times blog, to mention her name is to prompt an archive more of vitriol than substantive criticism, most of it reflecting a frightening level of woman hating.
At my Brooklyn polling place on Super Tuesday, I unambivalently—proudly! —voted for Hillary Clinton. As I left the building, my eyes pricked with tears and a wave of emotion swept over me. I’m often moved by voting (is it the barely conscious realization that women went on hunger strikes not even a century ago so I could have that right?). I cried when I voted for John Kerry, and I wasn’t even that enthused about him as a candidate. But February 5, 2008, was different. It was a big deal to me, at age thirty-seven, to pull the lever for a woman who so clearly had what it takes. More than that, Hillary Clinton had endured the attacks and derision we all know happen when women step out of line. She had become a sort of martyr-feminist, putting herself out there at great personal cost to provide some reality behind our “free to be . . . you and me” rhetoric.
I spoke with other friends who also reported being utterly choked up. “I have devoted forty years—practically my entire adult life—to bringing about this possibility, this fulfillment of what seemed an unattainable dream,” an older friend wrote me in an email. “It’s hard for me to understand those feminists who are voting for an unknown quantity instead of her, when they have this chance of a lifetime. Especially since the rivals’ positions are so similar.” Other women recounted voting for Obama, then feeling surprised at how happy they were that Hillary did well on Super Tuesday. “I felt it would be selfish to vote for her,” another friend told me.
At the height of the historic presidential election of 2008, a bitter reality began to sink in for me, a daughter of the Second Wave, and even sink me a bit. There we were, several generations who were raised with the mantra that a “woman” could be president, learning that it didn’t mean any woman who actually existed.
Barack Obama is clearly a feminist-minded man who shares little with traditional rules of masculinity or the typical biography of a president. He is biracial, was raised by a white single mother, scarcely knew his father, and never served in the military. He married a powerful woman who made more money than he for many years. He is bookish and literary, doesn’t profess to hunt, and is the doting, hands-on father to two girls. When he was inaugurated as the forty-fourth president, I felt proud of America. What a leap forward it was for a nation still wrestling with the trauma of our slavery-based past. Having him achieve this office, even when Hillary didn’t, salved the pain I felt from knowing that the crimes against women in the United States are many and often invisible. We aren’t ready for women who dare to be both mothers and people, for a woman whose ambition is direct—and so unseemly.
Hillary Clinton is my mother’s age. What might it have meant for a woman of her generation to achieve what we all assumed would go to her daughter’s generation? Sometimes I wonder if the pain of those missed opportunities—of wondering what could have been accomplished if a woman had simply been selfish and not submerged her hopes in her daughters or lived in a different time—was behind some of the commitment to making sure we don’t have a woman in the White House, except as First Lady.
IS THERE A FOURTH WAVE? DOES IT MATTER?
The people who were part of what is often called the First Wave of feminism in the United States didn’t identify as “First Wavers.” That designation was applied to the suffragists retroactively after a second swell of activism by American women occurred, in the 1960s and 1970s. Martha Lear, a journalist, is credited with coining the term “second feminist wave” in her 1968 article about the women’s liberation movement for The New York Times Sunday Magazine. Active feminists at the time considered themselves part of that movement, preferring that association to the term “feminist.”
After the backlash of the 1980s, women my age got interested in and active in women’s rights on their own behalf. In 1990, writer Rebecca Walker—daughter of poet Alice Walker and exactly my age—wrote that our generation was not full of postfeminist
feminists (the slur that had appeared in another New York Times Sunday Magazine article); we were “the Third Wave.” Her term sounded good to the several cofounders of the Third Wave Foundation (Walker included) and to scads of younger academics, activists, and feminists, and it sounded good to me. It was both connected to and different from what had come before, I thought—and still think.
Of course, not everyone agrees. Within feminism, many find the concept of waves deeply flawed and annoying. “I don’t know who Martha Lear is,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a professor and cofounder of the Boston separatist feminist group Cell 16 in the late 1960s, told me, “but I’d like to give her a piece of my mind for inventing that ahistorical and politically reactionary moniker.” The journalist Susan Faludi pointed out that she is chronologically between the two waves but temperamentally skews toward the Second Wave. Eve Ensler, who is chronologically Second Wave and came of age in that movement, calls her sensibility Third Wave because she’s committed to being funny and sexy and she uses art and pop culture to create her movement. Certainly, Eve’s most profound contributions to feminism—The Vagina Monologues and V-Day—are powered by Third Wave feminists who have performed her play on college campuses and around the world for the last decade. Feminists twenty years younger than I am don’t fit easily into my era’s identification with Nirvana, Riot Grrrls, and abortion rights marches in spite of the fact that no backlash has corrupted our wave. Meanwhile, I don’t understand an adolescence with abstinence-only education, purity rings, and Livejournal. And where to put bell hooks, the 1970s feminist who is also the most significant influence on Third Wave college students and Riot Grrrls?
If you think too hard about the criteria for each label, the integrity of the waves disintegrates rapidly and they eddy into one another, the way ocean waves do. But if anyone is going to resist a new wave, it is the previous wave, populated by women and men who believe that they have plenty left to offer and don’t need to be put out to sea. Ednie Kaeh Garrison recast this metaphor as radio waves, rather than ocean waves, in a 2000 essay, to convey that feminism’s reach was growing with each wave, moving further away (in time and in sheer numbers) from the small band of women who came together in 1848 for the first women’s rights convention on U.S. soil—the Seneca Falls Convention.
Garrison believes that the waves are bound to historical cultural moment but don’t necessarily define a cohort of feminists by age. “The ‘third’ is the mark of historical specificity, and like the marker ‘second’ in the Second Wave, it is not simply a sign of generational descendence,” she writes. “When we automatically assume ‘third’ refers to a specific generation, we actually erase the significant presence and contributions of many overlapping and multiple cohorts who count as feminists, and more particularly, of those who can count as Third Wave feminists.”6
Personally, I find the waves useful shorthand in describing the broad strokes of feminist history, which most people don’t know in even the most cursory way, much less a nuanced one. The American history we get in schoolbooks is also condensed, politically retrograde, and filled with holes—yet it at least provides the barest frame to view where we have been and where we are going. Feminism needs that same road map. We can add to it, balk at it, revel in it—but first we have to have it. What follows is a really, really short history of feminism.
WAVE ZERO
More than five hundred years before the Seneca Falls women’s liberation meeting in 1848, on the piece of land that would come to be called the United States, Iroquois and Cherokee clan mothers decided who would be chief and created war strategy, boys and girls were given an equal education, and women had control over their fertility and children. Many of the nearly five hundred Native American tribes thriving at the time provided an example of egalitarian society that the accidental arrival of Christopher Columbus would later obliterate.
In 1405, Parisian scholar Christine de Pisan published The Book of the City of Ladies in France. She argued that throughout history, women who had challenged the patriarchy had ruled in France and expressed the right and desire of women to be treated as fully human—that is, capable of being ambitious, intellectual, brave, or opportunistic. In Britain in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, a foundational feminist work that says women aren’t intellectually inferior to men but their lack of access to education and other resources stunts their development.
THE FIRST WAVE (APPROXIMATELY 1840–1920)
The First Wave grew out of the movement to abolish slavery. That movement, and the ensuing one dedicated to women’s rights, drew from the ideals and disappointments of the new democracy. These Americans, many of them Quakers, believed that it was their moral responsibility to oppose slavery. The women who were active in this movement soon discovered that they, as females, didn’t have the rights that they were agitating for black men to have. As just one example, many women traveled with their husbands across the Atlantic to a historic abolitionist conference in London, only to be barred from entering once they arrived. They applied their raised consciousness, organizing skills, and philosophical template to themselves and fought this exclusion. Their strategies and technology included creating the Declaration of Sentiments (based on the Declaration of Independence, but including women), making speeches, writing books, and organizing marches.
If the First Wave had to be boiled down to one goal, it was rights of citizenship. The most important symbol of citizenship in a democracy is the right to vote, which suffragists asked for in July 1848, to universal ridicule, and achieved seventy-two years and one month later, on August 20, 1920. En route to the vote, these feminists changed our culture, shepherding in dress reform, birth control, and granting to women the right to own property, get divorced, be educated, keep their income and inheritance, and retain custody of their children. Alice Paul, a crucial organizer for women’s suffrage, quickly identified that a vote in such an unequal nation was less powerful than it could or should be. In 1923, she introduced the Lucretia Mott Amendment, also known as the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA.
THE SECOND WAVE (APPROXIMATELY 1960–1988)
Like the First Wave, the Second Wave grew out of an enormous social justice movement—the civil rights movement, which was reaching its apex in the early 1960s. Young people of all races flocked to the movement, eager to be a part of finishing the work of ensuring rights to black Americans. Once again, women in this movement—as well as the peace, free speech, and gay rights movements—found that they themselves didn’t have the rights that they were agitating for on behalf of others. They turned their raised consciousness and organizing skills on themselves and created an independent women’s liberation movement (the preferred term of this band of feminists). The radical feminists of this era believed in full-scale revolution for the common good. The liberal feminists fought for women to share in the opportunities and responsibilities men had, including creating a career, pushing off the drudgery of housework, and refusing to be held hostage by their reproductive systems.
The dominant goal of these feminists might be boiled down to equality—valuing equally that which was marked as female or feminine, such as knitting or childbirth, and having equal access to domains that had been exclusive to men. Second Wave feminists demonstrated that, given the opportunity or necessity, women could do what men did. They also made women’s activities visible and valuable. Their core beliefs stemmed from Marx, identifying women as an oppressed class and patriarchy as the illegitimate power over them. These feminists declared that they were the experts—not male doctors, shrinks, religious leaders, fathers, or husbands—when it came to abortion, rape, pregnancy, and female sexuality. They created language and resources for atrocities once just called “life”—such as date rape, domestic abuse, and illegal abortion. They lobbied for laws and court decisions to strike down legal inequality, such as Title IX, the Equal Pay Act, and Roe v. Wade.
By the mid-1980s, the concept of women as a class with overarching
shared values and experiences was deeply splintered. Black women, women with disabilities, Latinas, lesbian and bisexual women, and others began critiquing the broad philosophies of the movement from within, causing splits that were rife with both tension and detailed feminist theory. The Combahee River Collective, a black feminist lesbian group that included Barbara Smith and Alexis De Veaux, created the theory of “interlocking oppressions.” This necessary deepening and expanding of feminist definitions coincided with a general backlash against feminism by people who wanted to undo the gains of the Second Wave.
THE THIRD WAVE (APPROXIMATELY 1988–2010)
The Third Wave grew out of an enormous cultural shift. By the late 1980s, a cohort of women and men who’d been raised with the gains, theories, flaws, and backlash of the feminist movement were beginning to come of age. Whether or not these individual men and women were raised by self-described feminists—or called themselves feminists—they were living feminist lives: Females were playing sports and running marathons, taking charge of their sex lives, being educated in greater numbers than men, running for office, and working outside the home. For those who were consciously feminist, the splits of the 1980s formed the architecture of their theories. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s description of “intersectionality” drew on the work of the Combahee River Collective and advanced the idea that gender might be just one of many entry points for feminism.
The Third Wave rejected the idea of a shared political priority list or even a set of issues one must espouse to be feminist. It inherited critiques of sexist dominant culture (having grown up in a feminist-influenced civilization) and embraced and created pop culture that supported women, from Queen Latifah to bell hooks to Riot Grrrl. Girlie feminists created magazines and fashion statements (and complicated the idea of what a feminist might look like). Sex positivity undermined the notion that porn and sex work are inherently demeaning, and revealed a glimpse of the range of potential sexual expression.
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