Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (34 page)

Ecofeminism bridged the academy and the cultural feminist community, flourishing especially in the latter, in which there was less discomfort with the dualistic and usually essentialist linking of woman and nature. Ecofeminism flowed naturally into an emerging feminist spirituality movement emphasizing images of Mother Earth and ancient goddess traditions. For many ecofeminists, it was important to evoke an earlier time, only hinted at in the archeological record, when societies were less patriarchal, when divinities were female as well as male, and when human beings coexisted with nature in a more harmonious way than in the modern industrial age. Both women’s gatherings and environmental protests in opposition to nuclear power plants, deforestation, acid rain, and toxic waste were increasingly marked by the presence of rituals led by pagan spiritual leaders like Starhawk.
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And a new round
of lifestyle issues came to the fore: vegetarianism, abjuring leather products, using recycled paper, riding bicycles, and otherwise striving to live in a manner congruent with the values of honoring and preserving the earth.
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The evolution of ecofeminism represented yet another of the boundary-blurring developments within the women’s movement.

The emphasis on maternal values also contributed to a revival of feminist peace activism in the tradition of Jane Addams’s Women’s Peace Party during World War I, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in the 1920s, and Women Strike for Peace in the 1960s. In the summer of 1983, a Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice convened for several months in Seneca County, New York. Modeled after the British women’s encampment at Greenham Common, the group framed its opposition to nuclear weapons in the context of “a value system which affirms qualities that have traditionally been considered female: nurturing of life, putting others’ well-being before one’s own, cooperation, emotional and intuitive sensitivity, attention to detail, the ability to adapt, perseverance.” Women provided the backbone of a “nuclear freeze campaign” in 1984, urging a freeze on nuclear weapons. Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) joined feminist and pacifist actions across the world in confronting the horror of global holocaust with a female vision of a humane world. The spirit of Frances Willard’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union found new focus in a powerful lobby as Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), founded in 1980, made alcohol consumption a political issue again. In the name of protecting innocent loved ones, laws against drunk driving were strengthened across the country.
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The fragmentation of the women’s movement and the blurring of its boundaries were caused by both internal and external changes. Women’s activism lost focus in the 1980s as feminism spread to encompass a far broader range of American women; feminist experiments stabilized and became institutionalized; and women emerged into public life in a dizzying array of roles. This change was exacerbated by the political strength of the opposition (symbolized by the defeat of the ERA) and a loss of government funding, which forced many activist institutions into hard times. For some, cultural events and celebrations became
a critical means of feminist persistence. It is an interesting paradox that an essentialist, maternalistic, cultural feminism, which emphasized the difference between women and men, continued to attract a following at the same time that women struggled with deep differences among themselves. Soon a new generation of women would reject the idea that difference meant separation or that one had to choose among identities based on race or class or sexual preference.

The emphasis of cultural feminists on female difference, in turn, was ironically congruent with the popular culture’s stress on gender polarization. Maternal values of peacemaking, nurture, and cooperation that informed ecofeminism, goddess spirituality, and peace activism echoed many of the same themes of the “women’s leadership” workshops being offered to corporate leaders. By the late 1980s, such notions had become part of the mainstream. A bestseller,
The Chalice and the Blade,
offered a sweeping interpretation of history, contrasting societies based on dominance (the blade) and those based on egalitarianism and partnership (the chalice)—the same ideas that management consultants used in workshops that described “women’s leadership” as a style more appropriate to the economy of an information society.
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I
N THE CONSERVATIVE
climate of the 1980s, feminist-driven changes in mainstream institutions provoked growing resistance. Inclusive language revisions of the 1989 Methodist hymnal, carefully calibrated to avoid changing the gender of references to God or the words of especially beloved hymns (e.g., “Onward Christian Soldiers”), were greeted with polls proving that most Methodists preferred male images of God.
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So were inclusive language translations of the New Testament and Psalms.
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Protestant denominations also struggled with the ordination of homosexuals.
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Multiculturalism joined feminism and homophobia as touchstones for conservatives emboldened by pronouncements of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Chair William Bennett and his successor Lynne V. Cheney.
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Once again, backlash was a measure of feminist success. Although resources for the humanities were diminishing, feminist scholars were in the vanguard of many disciplines and beginning to
appear in positions of professional prominence. It was their very success, against the grain of official policy, that drove an energetic rightwing assault on liberal education that by the late 1980s was gathering considerable momentum.
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Even as the “culture wars” gathered steam, however, the feminist spirit of feisty confrontation countered with another round of consciousness-raising activism. In 1985, a group of women artists, writers, performers, and filmmakers created Guerrilla Girls to protest discrimination against women in the art world:

Dubbing ourselves the conscience of culture, we declare ourselves feminist counterparts to the mostly male tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger. We wear gorilla masks to focus on the issues rather than our personalities. We use humor to convey information, provoke discussion, and show that feminists can be funny.
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They called attention to the absence of women artists in shows at major galleries like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and the fact that art, like popular culture, had taken a strong turn toward masculine imagery and style. They curated their own exhibitions to provide women artists with opportunities to exhibit their work, and they showed up in gorilla suits to demonstrate, hand out leaflets, and plaster posters all over town.
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In 1989 Guerrilla Girls posters carried the following headlines:

• • When Sexism & Racism Are No Longer Fashionable, What Will Your Art Collection be Worth?

• Get Naked: How Women Get Maximum Exposure in Art Museums

• Relax, Senator Helms, the Art World Is Your Kind of Place

• Are Bus Companies More Enlightened than NYC Art Galleries?
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A resurgence of feminist activism was gathering force among young women just coming of age in a world already transformed by their mothers’ generation.

CHAPTER 7
Resurgence

This movement never stops. It rises
and subsides, just like waves and, like waves, it erodes what
it cannot smash.

—BEV MITCHELL CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA, 1992
¹

—BELLA ABZUG APRIL 24, 1997
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Women will run the 21st century…. this is going to be the women’s century, and young people are going to be its leaders.

T
HE END OF THE
C
OLD
W
AR
in 1989, with the dismanding of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and the overthrow of communist regimes, changed the dynamics of domestic American politics. Americans watched with amazement as people around the world toppled authoritarian governments on both the Left and the Right. The international surge toward democracy took place alongside—and perhaps even drew strength from—an increasingly internationalized movement for women’s rights. In the summer of 1985 14,000 women from around the world gathered in Nairobi, Kenya under the sponsorship of the United Nations. They debated the implications for women of political participation, economic development, human rights, and sexual exploitation. Inspired by the Nairobi meeting, American women joined the international campaign to place women’s rights on the human rights agenda, creating new institutions and networks linked to women’s
rights activism across the globe, such as the Center for Global Women’s Leadership at Rutgers, directed by Charlotte Bunch, and Arvonne Fraser’s Women’s Rights Action Watch Project at the University of Minnesota. By 1995, among the 35,000 participants at another United Nations women’s conference in Beijing, 7,000 were from the United States.

Yet even as the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, young women in the United States were increasingly aware that the rights they had taken for granted could also be ephemeral. Abortion, although legal for more than 15 years, had remained the most severely polarizing issue in American politics, and the violence against abortion clinics that began in the late 1970s had succeeded in shutting down many of them. Supreme Court decisions upholding increasingly restrictive state laws generate fears that
Roe v. Wade
could be overturned. By the spring of 1989, when NOW called a national demonstration for abortion rights, between 300,000 and 600,000 people showed up for one of the largest demonstrations ever held in Washington, D.C. Yet that July, the U.S. Supreme Court again confirmed its willingness to severely restrict abortion, and four of its five justices wrote a minority opinion signaling that they would have preferred to overrule
Roe v. Wade
altogether. In
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services
, the Court upheld a highly restrictive Missouri law, which began with a preamble stating that life begins at conception and went on to prohibit the use of public funds and public facilities for abortions, except to save the life of the mother.

As always, adversity proved a boon to women’s organizations. Membership in NOW and NARAL soared. Younger women had found their issue. Paula Kamen found that many young women she interviewed in the late 1980s said that “… after
Webster
, they suddenly realized how tenuous their rights were and how seriously they must fight for them.”
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Glimmers of a new assertiveness among younger women in the late 1980s broadened into the voice of a new, overtly feminist generation by the early 1990s. Feminist publishing had never waned in the 1980s, but it suddenly shifted from the margins to the best-seller lists in 1990 with books like
The Beauty Myth
by 26-year-old Naomi Wolf. This passionate critique of beauty standards reignited conversations (common in
consciousness-raising groups two decades before) about women’s identities and the commercialization and manipulation of the female body.
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In 1991, Susan Faludi’s
Backlash
exposed in graphic detail the antifeminism of the Reagan era, and Paula Kamen’s
Feminist Fatale
explored the ambivalence and ignorance of young women vis-à-vis feminism.
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A new sense of solidarity showed up among younger activists. Undergraduates at Mills College initiated a strike on May 3, 1990, when the board announced its decision to admit men for the first time. After 2 weeks, the decision was reversed.
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By the mid-1990s young feminists labeling themselves the “Third Wave” announced their presence with anthologies like
Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation
(1995),
Feminism
³
The Third Generation in Fiction
(1996),
To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism
(1995), and
Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism
(1997).
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None of these were best-sellers, but they marked a new rhetorical presence within feminist debates matched by the appearance of new organizations, including WHAM (Women’s Health Action and Mobilization), FURY (Feminists United to Represent Youth), and YELL (Youth Education Life Line). A reporter for
U.S. News & World Report
found these Third-Wavers to be both confident and angry. “While they have witnessed social change and believe they have the power to affect the status quo, young feminists … complain that they are inheriting a ravaged environment and a ruined economy….”
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The culture of this emerging generation was assertive, multicultural, and unabashedly sexy. Gone were the rules and the academic theory (mostly). In their place were powerful, sexual women who claimed to have no limits. Pop star Madonna was one embodiment of the contradictions and ironies of the new feminists. Younger women loved her brilliant manipulation of image and persona, musical talent, and business acumen—her “in-your-face” attitude. Her muscular body, honed with hours of exercise, clothed with sexy underwear, was hers to use or display as she chose. Cultural critic Camille Paglia argued in the
New York Times
in 1990 that “Madonna is the tnie feminist.” Challenging what she saw as the “puritanism” of American feminism, Paglia proclaimed that “Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and
sexual while still exercising control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive, and funnyall at the same time.”
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Similarly, for 2 weeks in the summer of 1992, Americans watched the Olympics, mesmerized by images of female physical excellence. Perhaps the greatest of them all, African-American track star Jacqueline Joyner-Kersee, flamboyandy demonstrated the power of an unabashedly sexual body with the discipline, grace, and muscle that had once been presumed masculine.
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