The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  On television and radio talk shows, Americans mostly heard the conservative voices of such authors as Christina Hoff Sommers (Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys), and Katie Roiphe (The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism), who were regularly called upon to discredit feminists by denouncing them as too ideological or too caught up in their own victimhood.

  The Third Wave grassroots movement was far less audible and visible, but it gradually swept up many young Generation X artists, artisans, writers, and performers interested in exploring women’s power and identity. Feminist magazines like San Francisco’s Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture and the New York-based Bust, which billed itself as “the Voice of the New Girl Order,” spoke to a generation eager to take up the feminist torch, but on their own terms. The turn of the millennium also witnessed an explosion of feminist “zines” and influential books, including Rebecca Walker’s anthology To Be Real (1995), which used autobiographical stories to explore women’s lives, Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake’s Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism (1997), and Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’s Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000), which described the next generation’s direction and goals.

  Third Wave feminists clearly valued, even honored, the legacy of older feminists who had opened up public life for them. “For anyone born after the early 1960s,” wrote the authors of Manifesta, “the presence of feminism in our lives is taken for granted. For our generation, feminism is like Fluoride. We scarcely notice that we have it—it’s simply in the water.” But, wrote the editors of the 3rdWWWAve Web site, “This is not the second wave warmed over. We are building on what they accomplished and taking it in new directions appropriate for the twenty-first century.”17

  One important difference lay in their distinctive sensibility, which dramatically contrasted with the women who had forged the women’s movement in the late 1960s. Younger women were ironic, cool, outrageous, and self-consciously politically incorrect. Baumgardner and Richards rejected ideology in favor of accepting the “lived messiness” of feminism. To some younger feminists, Second Wavers seemed like dogmatic, humorless, prudish women who demanded that men call them women, rather than girls or chicks and even worse, wore sensible shoes.

  Inevitably, tensions arose between Second Wave feminists, who had emphasized collective action, and younger feminists, who often focused on individual self expression. Some older feminists argued that equating appearance and sexual adventures with empowerment, however playful or ironic, skirted feminism’s still unachieved goals of social and economic equality. By itself, they argued, personal expression offered no real threat to discrimination or injustice, failed to free women from the home, and ignored the limitations on women’s real choices.18

  What some older critics failed to grasp, though, was that this generation felt burdened by the pervasive stereotype of a feminist as a bra-burning, hairy-legged, ugly, shrewish, man-hating lesbian misfit. For younger heterosexual women, a major issue was how to reconcile their feminism with their desire to embrace their sexuality and femininity. Liz Funk, a young NOW member in upstate New York, explained, “Just because a young woman feels inclined to argue in a class debate for pro-choice abortion rights, equal pay or having a woman president doesn’t mean she cannot do so in Tiffany jewelry, a pink dress, and sequined sandals. . . . People are surprised,” she added, “that a 16-year-old high school junior doesn’t ‘look like a feminist.’”19 To counter the media’s negative image of feminists, some young college women sported tight pink-and-black T-shirts with the words “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” written across their chests. “People have said to me you can’t be a feminist, you are too sexy to be a feminist,” said Lisa Covington, a senior at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. “The T-shirt is a way to reconcile this. . . . I am a feminine feminist.” “The shirts are hot,” said Amy Littlefield, a freshman at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “Maybe they help us send the message that you can be sexy and proud of your appearance and still be a feminist.”20

  Some Third Wave feminists also embraced what Baumgardner and Richards labeled as “Girlie feminism”—the color pink, glitzy fashion, Barbie dolls, cheerleading for causes, knitting, and cooking—traditional feminine activities or styles that Second Wave feminists had discarded in their effort to enter male-dominated institutions.21 Some even fetishized fashion and consumerism, flaunted their sexuality, and argued for a “do-your-own-thing” feminism in which they emphasized individual choice and self expression. In the mid-1990s, Marcelle Karp, editor of Bust, wrote, “We’ve entered an era of DIY feminism—sistah, do it yourself. . . . Your feminism is what you want it to be and what you make of it.” The authors of Manifesta agreed: “Feminism isn’t about what choice you make, but the freedom to make that choice.”22

  An important contribution of this generation was to make feminism appealing and attractive. For them, reclaiming sexual power and a feminine appearance was vital. With a certain gleeful political incorrectness, Third Wave feminists reappropriated the words cunt and bitch. Some women even urged using their sexuality to wield power over men. Bust tested sex toys. In an essay titled “Lusting for Freedom,” Rebecca Walker expressed her generation’s conviction that there was nothing incompatible with sexuality and feminism: “When I think back,” she wrote, “it is that impulse I am most proud of. . . . I deserve to live free of shame, that my body is not my enemy, and that pleasure is my friend and my right.”23

  But Third Wave feminists did not always agree about sexual behavior, which has often divided feminists. Second Wave feminists had split over the emergence of lesbian feminists. Now, noted Lisa Jarvis, editor of Bitch magazine, “genderqueers”—young activists in the transgender movement—“were occupying the place that lesbian issues did in the last generation.”24 Genderqueers rejected all gender categories and promoted the ideal of a gender-blind culture. Speaking to NOW’s National Board on Transgender Inclusion, Ricki Wilchins, an architect of the genderqueer movement, said, “Consider for a moment that men with vaginas are what gender looks like when it’s deregulated.”25

  Not surprisingly, Sex and the City, an HBO television series that celebrated female friendship, glamorized consumerism, and unabashedly explored all kinds of sexual preferences and exploits, became a phenomenal hit among this cohort of women. So did Eve Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues, a one-woman performance that premiered in 1996 and, like Sex and the City, explored women’s sexual desires. It also condemned rape as a war crime, riffed on women’s body image, and celebrated what women couldn’t see—their vaginas. In 1997, Ensler created V-Day, a grassroots nonprofit campaign to end violence against women. By 2006, the play, often performed on Valentine’s Day, had been staged in fifty-four countries and on hundreds of campuses across the United States.

  The Third Wave’s emphasis on individualism naturally concerned some young feminists. Some worried that the political had become too personal—detached from a larger vision of economic and social equality. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, editors of Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, wrote “Despite our knowing better, despite our knowing its emptiness, the ideology of individualism is still a major motivating force in many third wave lives.”26 Carter-Ann Mahdavi, the editor of World Feminism, an international feminist online magazine, argued that such individualism “is a very laissez-faire form of politics that makes me nervous. What I find disconcerting is how the ‘personal is political’ slogan is being interpreted. The focus on individualism can be interpreted as the freedom not to worry about issues that do not personally affect you.”27

  Unlike Second Wave feminists, who had met in consciousness-raising groups in women’s living rooms, Third Wave feminists mostly shared their revelations, desires, and dilemmas in magazines and on blogs and feminist Web sites. One sixteen-year-old from Nebraska wrote Lisa Jervis, publisher of Bitch:

  My view of my whole life, from boys to bodies and from TV to tampons, has changed drastical
ly since I read my first Bitch. . . . Thank you for teaching me how to think for myself. Thank you for letting me know it’s okay to voice my opinion, no matter how cynical or harsh it may be, no matter how much the world around me doesn’t seem to care. Thank you, Bitch: I am a 16-year-old feminist and for once in my life I feel comfortable saying so.28

  Cyberspace also helped create a sense of a feminist community. On feminist Web sites, young girls discovered each other and most important, found that they were not the only ones who felt outrage and indignation. One young high school student posted this note: “I had no idea there were any other girls my age who identified as feminists the way I did—angry, sluttily rageful girls who took no shit.” Another young high school student, who had discovered feminism, contributed this revelation: “There is this whole other world simmering below the surface, and, like Alice, I just tumbled down into it.”29

  The group of young women writers and activists that identified with Third Wave feminism was extremely articulate, highly prolific, but actually quite small. Far greater were the numbers of young female activists (including the elders of Generation Y, born after 1976) who took their feminism for granted, integrated it into their personal lives, and carried it into their work as activists against the war in Iraq, advocates for reproductive and transgender rights, the homeless and the poor, female immigrants, and as organizers and activists in the labor, environmental, anti-sweatshop, and human rights movements. Also high on their agenda were the problems of HIV/AIDS awareness, prison reform, child sexual abuse, self-mutilation, eating disorders, mandatory drug sentencing, domestic workers’ rights, as well as gaining equal access to the Internet.30

  Many of these activists also joined the interminable battle to defend women’s reproductive rights. One-third of the participants in the 2004 March for Women’s Lives were young women who had not yet celebrated their thirtieth birthdays. Kystal Lander, campus program director of the Feminist Majority, observed that “Bush’s relentless attempts to confer personhood on the fetus and to choose judges who are opposed to abortion have galvanized young women all over the nation. They get it now; it’s real. Bush is educating a whole new wave of women, more than anyone could have imagined.”31

  Although a majority of young women favored the goals of the women’s movement, many still uttered the famous phrase, “I’m not a feminist, but. . .” In their next book, titled Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism, Baumgardner and Richards urged their generation to change these words to “I’m a feminist and . . .” and encouraged them to engage in “Everyday Activism,” which might include supporting socially responsible companies, starting campus organizations, or letter writing campaigns.32

  Everyday activism surfaced with particular creativity during the 2004 presidential election. One group of young friends in Berkeley, California, for example, decided to find some edgy but effective way of mobilizing women to register and vote. The group christened itself 1,000 Flowers and sent beauty salons in swing states nail files, postcards, and posters that urged, “Nail the election,” “Shape the oval office,” “File your complaint,” and “Don’t let this election be a nail biter.”33

  Young activists often deployed their generation’s sense of irony to mobilize other women. Heidi Sick, a thirty-two-year-old technology analyst, organized twenty of her friends to march in D.C. as “San Francisco Choice Chicks.” Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, who founded CodePink as a women’s antiwar organization, gave pink slips (the kind worn under dresses) as dismissal notices to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Such playful theatrics attracted young women, who, unlike their mothers’ generation, happily dressed from head to toe in pink at antiwar demonstrations.

  One issue, however, that did not appear on the Third Wave feminist agenda was child care. Though many young women agonized—sometimes alone, often with friends—and obsessively tried to plan a future that combined a career and children, they tended to view child care as an individual problem. Manifesta, for example, contained a thoughtful thirteen-point agenda that never mentioned child care. The authors explained that they had not yet had children when they authored this important book.34 In a similar vein, Jessica Valenti edited feministing.com with all the cool, ironic outrage typical of her generation; her Web site featured a defiant image of a mudflat figure with its finger raised in the air. But when I asked her and dozens of other young editors, reporters, activists, and writers about their highest priorities, many cited abortion rights, racism, health care, poverty, and violence against women. None mentioned child care.

  Born into a political era dominated by rampant individualism rather than by large social movements, some young women clearly could not imagine child care as anything but their own responsibility. They also expressed considerable skepticism about government-subsidized child care, which they envisioned as some grubby Department of Motor Vehicles center, not the clean and educational Scandinavian child care centers that had inspired an earlier generation.35

  Here was a serious disconnect. Young women privately anguished over an issue they could not imagine turning into a public and political debate. Even sadder, more than a few young women said that the lack of affordable or available child care made them reconsider their plans to have children.36 One young feminist put it this way: “I feel terrified of the patchwork situation women are forced to rely upon. I think many young women are deciding not to have children or waiting until they are well established in their careers—and that this has become an individual solution for many.” In short, they had no language for what they viewed as the most important dilemma they faced in their immediate futures.37

  THE CARE CRISIS; THE PROBLEM THAT HAS NO NAME

  A baby is born. A child is stricken with a serious illness. A spouse has a stroke. A parent falls ill. These are the kind of events that throw a working woman’s delicate balance between work and family into uncontrolled chaos.

  For four decades, American women had entered the paid work force, but American society had done precious little to restructure the workplace or family life. Women still bore most of the burdens of family life. The country was stuck in what sociologist Arlie Hochschild has called a “Stalled Revolution” and suffered from what she described as a “Care Deficit.” An inadequate and hopelessly broken health care system, which left more than forty million Americans without health coverage, often meant that this care deficit, which has turned into a full-blown Care Crisis, became a matter of life and death. To imagine erasing that deficit, wrote political scientist Joan Tronto, Americans would have to embrace an “ethic of care,” by which she meant that the highest “goal of society should be to protect and care for its citizens.”38

  By 2000, the Care Crisis, in a very real sense, had replaced The Feminine Mystique as the new “problem that has no name.” It was the 800 pound elephant at home, at business, and in national politics—gigantic, but ignored. The Second Wave movement had succeeded at turning many personal and private experiences into public and political issues. But neither they nor Third Wave feminists had so far been able to get Americans to grasp the danger of the mounting care crisis.

  More than three decades after Congress had passed—and President Richard Nixon had vetoed—comprehensive child care legislation in 1971, child care had dropped off the national political agenda. Small wonder, then, that so many young women viewed the care of their children as their own problem, to which they needed to find an individual solution.

  As a result, most American women suffered privately, without realizing that the care crisis was a pandemic problem among working- and middle-class families. And, with each passing year, the care crisis only grew larger, burdening the lives of working mothers. But it never became part of a national conversation or central to the nation’s political agenda. One of America’s dirty little secrets was that the government and business—as well as many men—found it both profitable and convenient for women to do the unpaid work of housework and caregiving.

  It
was as though Americans were trapped in a time warp in the 1950s, still convinced that women should and would care for children and the elderly. But of course they couldn’t. In 1950, less than one-fifth of mothers with children under the age of six worked in the labor force. By 2000, two-thirds of these mothers worked in the paid labor market.39

  Antifeminists naturally blamed the women’s movement for creating the impossible ideal of “having it all.” But it was journalists and popular writers, not feminists, who had created the myth of the “Superwoman.” Second Wavers had known that women couldn’t do it alone. In fact, they had insisted that men share the housework and child raising and that government and business provide and subsidize child care.

  The good news was that men in dual-income couples were steadily increasing their participation in household chores and child care. But women still managed and organized much of family life.40 By 2000, moreover, the political atmosphere had grown positively hostile to using federal funds for subsidizing working families.

  The truth is, Market Fundamentalism had failed to provide a much-needed answer to the question, “Who will care for America’s children and elderly?” As a result, most working women returned home after work to what Hochschild called a “Second Shift”—housework, child care, and sustaining the social networks of their extended families and communities. Looming ahead, in a rapidly aging society, was even a “Third Shift,” caring for aging parents.41

  Although America’s working women felt burdened and exhausted, desperate for sleep and leisure time, they made few collective protests for child care or for family friendly workplace policies. Globalization created stiff competition and both men and women tried to hold on to their jobs; American businesses and corporations sought higher profits through layoffs; and cell phones and e-mail accelerated life and blurred work and family time. Single mothers naturally suffered the most from the care crisis. But even when two parents worked forty or more hours a week, there was simply no time for a balanced life. Parents became overwhelmed, children often felt cranky, spouses felt neglected, workers quietly seethed and gulped antacids and sleeping pills, and extensive volunteering in community life began to vanish.