Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (37 page)

The 1994 Republican victory, in which Republicans gained majorities in both houses of Congress, was widely portrayed as a revolt of the “angry white males,” whose voices were heard in a profusion of radio talk shows. The most popular talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, led the attack on Hillary Clinton and what he viewed as a liberal takeover. “We have lost control of our major cultural institutions. Liberalism long ago captured the arts, the press, the entertainment industry, the universities, the schools, the libraries, the foundations, etc.”
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For Limbaugh and others, a galling symbol of this loss was the surrender of the last bastions of an all-male military culture, the Citadel in
South Carolina and Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Shannon Faulkner, who had applied without indicating her gender and then waged a battle in the courts, entered the Citadel in 1995 in the national spotlight. But 2 years of litigation and public scrutiny had taken their toll and she dropped out after 2 weeks, to the cheers of her fellow students.
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By the next year, however, there were several female students, and the Citadel joined West Point and Annapolis as a coeducational institution. Phyllis Schlafley, in an impassioned letter to VMI, offered a challenge to that final holdout of all-male, military education: “You’ve lost a major battle. Are you going to be survivors, or are you going to let the enemy wipe you and your kind from the face of the earth, pour salt in the soil that produced you, and drop you down the Memory Hole?”
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Schlafley skillfully deployed the threat to manhood articulated throughout American history whenever women moved forcefully into public life. By 1996, however, those changes had reshaped the lives of women and men alike, and the arguments, though virulent, no longer had the same potency. Debates themselves were more public and took place in more varied arenas. The 1994 elections may have been driven by “angry white men,” but 2 years later those men no longer dominated the campaign. Instead, the “gender gap” returned in force, and when Bill Clinton was reelected in 1996, a president’s margin of victory was clearly based on the votes of women for the first time.

W
HEN THE
“T
HIRD
W
AVE
” women appeared in the mid-1990s they set out to claim a place within feminism distinct from that of their literal and figurative mothers. Born between 1965 and 1974, the very years when Second Wave feminism was hurtling across the landscape, they grew up believing they could do anything. Legal barriers to education, work, and athletics, which enraged their mothers, were long gone. They also came of age when feminism was visible primarily as a stereotype, however. Introduced to feminist theory in colleges, the most powerful writers among them were women of color who challenged what they perceived to be a monolithic, white, middle-class “sisterhood.” They never experienced feminism as a sisterhood of sameness. Indeed, they stumbled over saying “we.”

Multiplicity and contradiction, “lived messiness,” these are recurrent terms in the stories of those who name themselves Third Wave. “Third Wavers waver,” as one writer put it.
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“As Gen-Xers we have no Utopias,” writes another.
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Like the founders of women’s liberation, Third Wavers need to tell their stories (even against an academic culture that now disparages personal storytelling), to articulate the distinguishing aspects of their life stories, the ways in which their generational experience demanded a different feminism.

Third Wavers criticize others of their own generation, including Naomi Wolfe, Rene Denfeld, and Katie Roiphe, who (admittedly in very different ways) castigate Third Wavers as “victim feminists” and advocate a frequendy individualistic, assertive “power feminism” or “equity feminism.” Sharply critical of the individualism of these writers, they also point out the implicitly white and middle-class assumptions built into their use of the word “woman.”
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Thus, Third Wavers not only differentiate themselves from their feminist elders, they also participate in a public debate with others of their own generation about what feminism might mean and how it needs to change. The good news is that on all sides of this conversation one hears calls for a feminist discourse that can tolerate disagreement.

When Third Wavers meet resistance, unfortunately, is from some Second Wavers unwilling to hear that the world is different. At the ReImagining Gathering in November 2000, both Mary Daly (early theorist of women’s culture and ecofeminism) and Rebecca Walker (daughter of Alice Walker and one of the originators of the Third Wave) were invited speakers, especially interesting since neither of them considered herself Christian. Daly, in her talk, spoke dismissively of the so-called Third Wave. Walker responded from the audience afterward, defending herself and others in her generation as able to define feminism for themselves. Daly brusquely dismissed any need for redefinition. In the aftermath of that interaction, a group of young women linked to the Re-Imagining community sent out a call via e-mail for others of their generation to meet as a Third Wave group. Soon after, the office received a gruff response: “Well you can take me off this mailing list. I’m not in my 20’s or 30’s. As usual, I’m just an old bitch not
needed anymore. You forget who went ahead of you and paved through this shit.”
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Feminists who have been active for more than three decades, fighting not only with the world but also with each other, are understandably tired. Younger women are often ignorant about and cavalierly dismissive of the struggles of previous generations. By the same token, older generations have trouble listening to and supporting younger women’s effort to claim the movement as their own and assert leadership for struggles that will be no less difficult than those in the past. The early years of women’s liberation were marked by a full measure of youthful hubris and intolerance toward elders on the Left (who failed to understand the fundamental nature of the “woman question”) and “First Wave” suffragists who “screwed up” because they focused on a single issue.

T
HE
F
UTURE OF
F
EMINISM

Feminism in the twenty-first century inherits all the complexities and contradictions stirred up in the late twentieth century. Personal politics was the wellspring of feminism’s power to reshape the landscape legally, institutionally, and personally because it named the realities of power and inequality in the most deeply personal and private aspects of women’s lives. As personal politics entered increasingly differentiated public spaces, however, the women’s liberation movement found it difficult to be
effectively
radical, to rethink traditional constructions of public and private
as a politics
. In its early years, the dominating model for change was individual conversion, the “click” that consciousness-raising group participants could almost universally recall:

“… the sudden comprehension, in one powerful instant, of what sexism exactly meant, how it had colored one’s own life, the way all women were in this together. It was that awe-inspiring moment of vision and of commonality, when a woman was instantly and irrevocably transformed from naive to knowing, from innocent to experienced, from apolitical to feminist.”
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That “vision of commonality” touched deep needs for relatedness, for release from isolation, marginality, and deviance. It was creative and powerful, but at the same time it remained a fundamentally private impulse. Each woman’s vision of commonality looked outward from herself and presumed that others only needed the opportunity to “see” their own reality in this new way. It depended, in fact, on an assumption of “sameness”—captured in the language of “sisterhood”—and it faltered in the face of fundamental differences and institutional realities that consciousness alone could not combat. Too quickly, difference became hierarchy (good versus bad) to be erased or suppressed, and the moral privilege to speak from feelings made serious debate extremely difficult.

Soon, of course, activists had begun to address the
theoretical
problem of difference, starting with feminists of color and socialist feminists in the 1970s and broadening to include much of academic feminism in the 1980s. Theorists explored different structures of oppression, different histories, and different: subjectivities (i.e., what is the inner experience of being a particular combination of race, gender, sexuality, and so on?). Although the rapid growth of activism among women in all racial, ethnic, and religious groups made coalition politics increasingly possible, the difficulty of creating feminist public spaces in which differences could coexist remained an ongoing source of fragmentation. This is where the perspectives of a new generation may bring about a fundamental and necessary shift. In the early years of women’s liberation, the struggle’simply to challenge the subordination of women based on their “natural” roles in the privacy of the family called into question cultural definitions of “male” and “female.” The consciousness-raising task of naming the realities of power and inequality in personal life required such a radical (in the sense of fundamental) assault on conventional notions of what constituted personal and political, private and public that it led some activists to try to erase those distinctions altogether. At its logical extreme, that side of personal politics established a recurring disintegrative force in the movement.

I
N A SENSE
, the energy behind feminism will always lie at the intersection of personal and political, public and private, but the force of the
tidal wave has also revolutionized those categories. American women in the new millennium confront a rough new terrain shaped by the tumultuous energy of the last half-century. The wave has swept through our labor force, our laws, our language, and even our bedrooms. The contrasts with the past are striking. Women now comprise almost half of the paid labor force and can be found in virtually every field. They occupy positions of public authority that would have been unthinkable even in the 1960s: Supreme Court justices, ministers and rabbis, engineers, generals, and airline pilots. Their political clout is growing, through a sophisticated policy infrastructure and a presence in state and local politics.

Family formation is no longer uniform. Marriage ages are up and marriage rates are down, fertility remains low, divorce is common, and a high proportion of children are born out of wedlock. Indeed, the definition of “family” has been challenged profoundly by single parents, by gay and lesbian couples, and by reproductive technologies that separate biological from social parenthood, sex from conception, and conception from gestation. Laws now provide defenses against not only employment discrimination but also marital rape and sexual harassment. For most men as well as women, the feminist ideal of marriage as a partnership is, according to Paula Kamen, “utterly mainstream.” She cites poll data showing that young women’s attitudes shifted dramatically toward a “liberal feminist” view of marriage and of women’s place in society in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Young men were slower to change, but by the late 1980s their attitudes were close to those of women in the 1970s.
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The contradictions of women’s lives are likely to continue to fuel their involvement in feminist politics. Women remain caught between a world of work, which assumes that there is someone behind every worker who is available to take care of family needs, and the tenacious presumption that women have primary responsibility for children and household. The process of redefining work through such measures as flextime, shared or part-time jobs with full benefits, parental leave, and on-site child care has proceeded at a glacial pace even as “welfare reform” forces large numbers of single mothers into low-wage jobs with minimal benefits. Through the eighties, women’s expectations regarding
work and family changed far more rapidly than men’s. In the nineties, however, as even middle class men began to expect their wives to work, in some instances they actively opposed wives’ taking off time or working part-time while children were young.
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It is possible that the shift toward more egalitarian expectations might have a different and less coercive impact if, as seems also to be the case, men are more and more drawn into serious engagement with the daily life of their households. Perhaps they too will see the necessity of policies that affirm the social importance of child care and personal life. For the moment, however, in the political arena fights over child care continue to mark women as a voting bloc, and we can anticipate that women are likely to be at the center of policy initiatives on these issues for the foreseeable future.

The crumbling of legal barriers has also created an illusion of equality, especially in contrast to the earlier, overt forms of discrimination. It is still the case that men comprise 85 percent of all elected officials and 95 percent of corporate executives. Although two-thirds of female attorneys would say that they have experienced discrimination, only one-third of male attorneys have noticed any such thing. Job discrimination is subde, and the people doing it not only deny it but genuinely believe that they do not discriminate. When an ABC television crew followed a man and a woman with similar qualifications as they applied for jobs and subsequendy confronted employers with their very different job offers (management positions for the man, secretarial and receptionist positions for the woman), the employers sputtered that they were not prejudiced. They did believe, however, that women don’t “do well” in field management positions, and men really should not be answering phones.
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Legal scholar Deborah Rhode argues that a widespread pattern of denial makes it difficult to acknowledge the continuing need for fundamental change. “We setde for equality in form rather than equality in fact, for commitment in legal mandates rather than in daily practice.”
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