by Anne Summers
Editing Ms. Magazine
The more than two years I spent as editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine gave me an unparalleled vantage point from which to assess the workings and accomplishments of the American women’s movement. I went into the job taking for granted, as I am sure most Australians would, that America represented the pinnacle of the achievements of second-wave feminism. I very quickly learned how wrong this assumption was. Many of the entitlements Australian women take for granted, such as federally funded child care, mandated (if unpaid) maternity leave and the existence of women’s policy advisers at every level of government, simply did not exist in the US. Even more surprising, but seemingly related, was the low number of women holding elected office, especially in federal politics.
In 1988, my first full year at Ms. and a US presidential election year, there were only 25 women in the entire US Congress, a mere 4.7 per cent.7 I made political coverage a top priority of the magazine; in the US, women register and vote in greater numbers than men, and we published figures that showed that in the previous election, in 1986, women’s voting patterns had delivered the margin of victory to a significant proportion of the winning contenders.8 So it seemed self-evident to me that, as in Australia, women’s votes would be solicited and that a relatively large-circulation (550 000), mainstream feminist magazine, which for the first time was treating electoral politics seriously, would be in for some serious wooing by candidates. Not so, as it turned out. The major party candidates were courteous, they answered our monthly questions on policy issues, but they evidently felt there was no advantage, and perhaps some disadvantage, in getting too close to Ms. magazine. The biggest surprise was the calculated contempt shown to us by Democratic contender Michael Dukakis, who had agreed to pose along with his senior campaign staff, many of whom, including his campaign manager, were women, for the cover of our October 1988 issue. Right at the last minute, after our photographic team had already flown to Boston, Dukakis cancelled. ‘Scheduling difficulties’, was the official explanation. Cold feet was the truth.
I was amazed at the seeming impotence of the women’s movement, their inability to influence or even be part of the campaign debate, and the fact that politicians could so easily disregard them. Ultimately I became convinced that at least part of the responsibility for the movement’s political frailty lies with the movement itself, especially the national leadership, which has no political strategy whatsoever and seems incapable of putting together a pragmatic plan to force the political system to deliver to American women the social and economic equity long promised by the movement’s rhetoric. It can perhaps be postulated that the Reagan–Bush era is responsible for the movement’s failure, that 12 years of feminist-unfriendly administrations in Washington left the movement battle-scarred and exhausted. If that is the case, that exhaustion appears to be near terminal, as the advent of the feminist-friendly Clinton administration had not in the first six months of the new regime produced anything remotely resembling the kind of partnership Australian feminists have managed to forge with government. (‘Letter to the next generation’, the final chapter in this new edition explores this theme more fully.) Indeed, early in 1993 there seemed almost to be an air of hostility towards President Clinton, and a strange ambivalence by many feminists towards Hillary, his high-profile and policy-active wife.
Instead of the joy, and appreciation, one might have expected from feminists during his first few weeks in office as Clinton reversed one after another of Reagan and Bush’s restrictive abortion measures, there were complaints and even outright opposition from women’s movement leaders, who claimed the changes did not go far enough. After more than a decade of fighting to preserve abortion rights, the National Organization for Women astonishingly opposed Clinton’s proposed Freedom of Choice Act, a measure that would give the right to abortion a federal legislative base and remove it from the vagaries of judicial review. Their opposition stemmed from the view that it was not sufficient to keep abortion legal; the proposed law should make abortion easily accessible by forbidding states to impose any restrictions, such as the need for parental consent for minors.9 American feminist leaders will not settle for anything less than purist perfection and, as a result, they mostly end up with nothing. Rather than entrench even a few basic rights that can be built on and expanded later (as Australian feminists did with the Sex Discrimination Act 1984), women’s movement leaders – as distinct from their frustrated and apparently impotent membership – would rather fight than win. This is what happened with the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982 when the refusal of feminist leaders to compromise on substance or tactics left American women without a constitutional guarantee of equality.
Why is this the case? Why has the movement that brought the world the second wave of feminism proved incapable of delivering the political agenda it originally mapped out? Movement leaders have a tendency to defensively blame the media, blame the politicians, blame anybody in fact rather than engage in the kind of self-reflection that might provide some answers. Movement leaders will protest that the powers that be are afraid of the F-word – feminism – when in fact the movement has its own F-word problems: the movement is too dominated by fame, factionalism and fuzzy-thinking to provide American women with the representation they are entitled to – and so badly need.
The American women’s movement is no different from American society in general in its obsession with fame and celebrity. The movement has its own celebrities, and the famous American feminists are very famous indeed – women like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Susan Brownmiller and Bella Abzug are known to millions of people across the globe. This phenomenon does not exist in the women’s movement anywhere else in the world, and certainly not in Australia, where a much greater egalitarianism prevails. Nor have other national movements surrendered much of their political agenda to the fads of the famous. For, far from being able or willing to resist this national fetish, American feminism has become so dependent upon celebrities that it has had serious consequences for the movement’s credibility and effectiveness.
The women’s movement uses famous people to raise money, to make political statements and to march in the front row of political demonstrations. The rationale is that the presence of a Jane Fonda, a Glenn Close, a Whoopi Goldberg or a Cybill Shepherd will attract the media and result both in better coverage of the event or the issue, and a greater chance of ordinary people paying attention. In practice, it means that a tremendous amount of effort goes into persuading famous people, especially movie stars, to lend public support to women’s movement causes and activities. This gives American feminist events a very different character from those in Australia. I attended the star-studded dinner in Washington, DC the night before the massive pro-choice abortion march in April 1989, and was struck by how elitist and alien it was. The movie stars did some mingling at the post-dinner reception (naturally, you had to pay extra for the privilege of such propinquity), and each celebrity immediately attracted a cluster of starstruck women who pushed past bodyguards to have their brief encounter with fame. The next morning the stars – wearing their Distinguished Guest sashes – were closeted in a special VIP tent until the march began.
The sight of feminists fawning over movie stars is something to behold, especially if the particular star’s recent roles have not exactly been ones feminists would want to review favourably. (Glenn Close, star of Fatal Attraction, provided a case in point at the time of the march.) But this is usually overlooked if the star is willing to lend her celebrity to a pro-feminist statement or event. The presence of fame seems to blunt the critical faculties of the non-famous, who will simper and gush and otherwise demean themselves. The inequalities involved are more extreme than those between women and men; indeed if any woman grovelled towards her husband or boyfriend the way some feminists kowtow towards the rich and famous, we would feel we hadn’t progressed very far.
American feminism’s dependence on fame, and the famous, seriously weakens
the women’s movement. Time and energy that could be applied to political struggle, lobbying politicians to get legislation passed for instance, are diverted to selecting, seducing and then servicing the celebrities (don’t think these people stop being temperamental just because they are donating their services to a worthy cause). But perhaps even more important, it means the movement has surrendered control of its political agenda. In a sense, the women’s movement has become captive to the ideological whims of the celebrities who, in turn, usually only have strong (public, at least) feelings about issues involving personal lifestyle choices such as abortion. It is almost unheard of to have famous names lending their support on economic issues – they are too complicated, too difficult – and maybe this is why these subjects are so neglected by American feminism. Yet it is issues like equal pay and job opportunities that affect the daily lives of most women and are of more immediate, urgent and continuing relevance than the more fashionable subjects Hollywood stars feel strongly about.
No political movement is free of factionalism, and the women’s movement is no exception, but only the American women’s movement would conduct so many of its fights, and especially the feuds between famous feminists, in the media. This of course does nothing to improve the impression of unity among feminists, and thus weakens the movement as a whole.
The most famous feminist feud, between Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, author of the 1963 classic The Feminine Mystique, seems to have started in 1970 when Steinem formed the Women’s Action Alliance in seeming competition with Friedan’s brainchild, the National Organization for Women.10 Two years later, Friedan reacted to the founding of Ms. magazine by issuing a press release stating that Gloria Steinem ‘was ripping off the [women’s] movement for private profit’ and that ‘no one should mistake her for a leader’. Steinem retaliated by telling a reporter: ‘If I have a lot of problems about my being a leader of the women’s movement, I’m sure she has even more about me being a leader of the women’s movement’.11 The willingness of both parties to perpetuate, and escalate, their hostility via the media would horrify most Australian feminists, who would see it as unsisterly to publicly denounce one another in this fashion.12 Nor would Australian feminists publicly trash other women for having the temerity to offer alternative views of reality, especially of feminism, as American feminists do, seemingly without hesitation. In 1991, Steinem described Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn as a water bug (a creature Australians know as a cockroach) for an article that questioned the political achievements of the women’s movement. As editor of Ms. magazine, Robin Morgan used her letter to readers to describe, in mid-1993, (the admittedly controversial) author Camille Paglia as ‘a publicity-obsessed, intellectually bereft, rather pathetic person trying to revive the lie that women want to be raped’.13 Comments of this kind might be made in private by Australian feminists, but it is difficult to think of a single example of them occurring in print – let alone in a supposedly feminist journal.
This fractiousness among individuals repeats itself in organisational animosity. The major women’s groups find it difficult to agree on a broad, common agenda and are surprisingly fuzzy in their thinking about issues and strategy. It should not seem a dauntingly difficult task to identify the three or four key issues that, once won, could transform the lives of millions of American women. Such a battle plan would command respect from women and from legislators, and might oblige candidates for office to become more responsive to the political demands of the women’s movement. But the sad reality is that during the Reagan–Bush years, abortion rights was virtually the only issue on which movement leaders could find common ground – and even then there were plenty of disagreements about tactics. The frenetic political activity around abortion rights in the late 1980s and early 1990s actually helped disguise the extent of disagreement within the movement. Most grassroots members of the major organisations are probably unaware of it. Yet the movement’s inability to organise around a broad-based agenda, and to link it to a tough-minded electoral strategy, has meant American women have endured a decade where nothing new was accomplished, and some entitlements (federally funded abortions for poor women, for instance) were taken away. The Reagan–Bush years were not good for American women, but they were even worse for the American women’s movement because it lost its perspective – and its nerve. The movement has always had a tendency to dwell on single issues, especially those of a personal or cultural nature, at the expense of the economic issues. The movement spent the 1980s preoccupied with abortion, pornography, sexual abuse (especially of children, including present-day adult survivors) and, after the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill Senate hearings14, sexual harassment. While these are all important subjects, for most women, job protection, pay equity and affordable child care loom larger as day-to-day imperatives. For the women’s movement to do justice to American women, it needs to be out there fighting on a broader front, forcing the political system to deliver economic justice to women so that they have real choices about their lives. The woman who can’t afford to leave a violent husband because she has only a low-paying job is probably not going to be overly impressed to see Jane Fonda in the front line of an abortion-rights march. For no number of famous faces could hide the fact that the American women’s movement entered the 1990s without a strategy for improving the lives of American women. The contrast with the Australian movement, which has a clear and articulated agenda, could not be greater.
Two decades of change
The way we talk about women, and about women and men, is very different from 20 years ago. Even when the words are the same, their meaning has evolved. When I wrote the Introduction to the first edition of this book, I fumbled for a definition of feminism. As a movement, we were still working our way through the differences between radical feminist, socialist feminist and women’s liberationist – to name just the major groups then – and our definitions were long and convoluted. The sheer simplicity of the notion that feminism is merely ‘advocacy of equal rights and opportunities for women, especially the extension of their activities in social and political life’, as the Macquarie Dictionary puts it, was just not available then.15 Dictionaries produced since the arrival of the women’s movement reflect the fact that feminism has entered everyday language.
We might still debate shades of meaning, or complain about being misrepresented in the media or elsewhere, but we are doing this from an entirely different vantage point now. Back in 1975, when we were still groping for the words that described who we were and what we wanted, we were still trying to make the case. We were tentative, pleading for legitimacy, wanting to be taken seriously and our language was less certain than it is today.
We also had trouble differentiating clearly between sexism and male chauvinism and the terms were often used interchangeably, and usually vituperatively. We had yet to grasp the distinction between sex, or gender, as an organising principle of social relations, usually to the disadvantage of women, and the aggressive advocacy by individual men of the continuance of this system. Today the dictionary deals matter-of-factly with concepts we were just beginning to understand and define. ‘Sexist’ is an adjective describing ‘an attitude which stereotypes a person according to gender or sexual preference, rather than judging on individual merits’, states the Macquarie Dictionary. Its other adjectival meaning encompasses ‘pertaining to sexual exploitation or discrimination, esp. in advertising, language, job opportunities, etc.’, while as a noun, it describes ‘a person who displays sexist attitudes’. What could be more simple!
We had yet to start using the term ‘gender’. We described the world as being determined by differences, and inequalities, in sex and, while the distinction is perhaps a semantic one, I believe that once we began to use the more neutral term gender, more people could understand, and agree with us. The colloquial association of sex with sexual activity made it a word some people, including many women, just could not bring themselves to say. Incredible as this might sound to
day, major newspapers were only just permitting words like ‘pregnant’ and ‘virgin’ to appear in their pages.16 When Germaine Greer’s classic work The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, I was surprised to discover that its salty language presented some difficulties for many women who were otherwise eagerly receptive to its message. I first realised this when I spoke at a seminar on Greer’s book held in Sydney in the early 1970s and met a middle-aged woman who confessed that she had covered the book in brown paper and hidden it among her shoes because her husband had forbidden her to read it!
Ten years later, Australia’s landmark anti-discrimination legislation, the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, may have had a less difficult time making its way through parliament had its very title not been seen as so inflammatory.17 Hysterical critics of the Bill claimed it would do everything from ‘denigrate marriage’ to ‘force [women] into a gender-free, unisex society, in which women are locked into the paid labour force for their entire lifetimes just like men (except for brief periods of maternity leave)’.18 Such fanatical opponents would doubtless have used everything in their ideological armory against the legislation whatever it was called. After all, the more neutrally titled Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the US met equally illogical opposition and, in the end, failed to be ratified. But the name of the Australian legislation provided its critics with additional fodder, something they were quick to try to exploit; fortunately they failed, but only because the newly elected Labor government had a strong public commitment to ensuring the legislation passed. The 1984 debate remains the longest in the history of the Australian Parliament, and the eventual vote in the House of Representatives saw several members of the Coalition cross the floor against their colleagues who opposed the Bill. Eight years later, when Prime Minister Keating introduced significant amendments to the Act, the heat had gone out of the debate. There was no dissent, and the Opposition supported the measures designed to toughen up the legislation.