Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters (17 page)

For all the pressure women have on them to become perfect mommies, you would think that society would make it easy (or easier) on us. But hells no. Like I’ve mentioned before, there’s a Mommy Wage Gap, problems with paying for childcare, and issues of negotiating work life with motherhood.

I mean, just the fact that women with children make seventy-three cents to a man’s dollar (single mothers make fifty-six to sixty-six cents to a man’s dollar), while women without children make about ninety cents to a man’s dollar, is pretty nuts.
¹⁶
The wage gap is tied up with motherhood, and we’re not even talking about it.

Not to mention, moms are just downright underappreciated. A recent study on motherhood by the University of Connecticut and the University of Minnesota shows that not only do moms feel undervalued by the people in their lives, but they also don’t feel appreciated by society in general—nearly one in five moms said she felt less valued by society since becoming a mother.
¹⁷
Now that’s screwed up.

A great organization (and website) that addresses these issues is
MomsRising.org
, run by Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner—authors of
The Motherhood Manifesto: What America’s Moms Want—and What to Do About It
.

The organization, which has more than fifty thousand members and fifty national organizations aligned with it, aims to “build a more family-friendly America” through grassroots and online organizing. Its manifesto—which I think is fabulous—focuses on maternity and paternity leave; flexible work hours and options for parents; safe after-school options for children; healthcare for all kids; quality, universal, affordable childcare; and fair wages for parents.
¹⁸
Seems simple and straightforward—and reasonable.

So why the hesitancy by society (and politicians) to make these seemingly simple things happen? The truth is, as much lip service as mothers are given, folks just don’t care. If we cared about mothers and families, we would have universal childcare. If we cared about making motherhood easier, we would ensure that women and children got the healthcare they needed, got the flextime they needed,
and got the support and—maybe most important—the trust they needed.

The sooner we start trusting women to make decisions about their lives and their families, the sooner we start valuing motherhood again.

The history of feminism in the United States is generally thought of in an extremely limited way: Women got the vote, then some women burned their bras. Then it died ’cause women were equal. Done and done. Exciting stuff, huh?

Even the more complex version that’s taught in women’s organizations and classes often leaves out the racist and classist background of the movement. (Hey, we have to admit that shit.) Especially as everything stands right now in the feminist movement, there’s a lot of back-patting and selfcongratulation—as there should be, to some extent. But what we haven’t been doing is being really honest about the less-PR friendly aspect of the feminist movement, or looking forward in a substantive way.

After all, if we can’t be critical of ourselves and recognize our weaknesses, how can we be effective as a movement? The problem is, feminists are
so
used to people giving them shit—the constant backlash—that we’ve learned to focus on the positive. We’re always on the defensive, for good reason. Feminists have become very good at anticipating backlashy comments and putting forward a united front, because we have to. But there’s a way to do that while still remaining honest with ourselves.

American feminism—like a lot of social justice movements—has had plenty of growing pains. And we have to own them. Especially because many of those growing pains are still poking at us. Unfortunately, a lot of organized feminism these days is pretty damn cliquey—at least in terms of the “big” gals. National organizations, which are generally the public face of feminism, often don’t represent the reality of the movement.

The same people who were running shit back then are running it now. (Time to pass the torch, ladies!) Not that I blame them. You start something, you want to finish it. But one of the major problems with feminism today is its inability to recruit younger women and keep them interested. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone: If you get younger women into feminism but then don’t give them power or decision-making abilities, they’re going to get real bored. Real fast.

So while I’m going to do my best to give you some background about how we got where we are today, I want to spend more time writing about where we’re going. Because
as important as feminism’s history is, and as proud as we should be of our foremothers, the more important question is about how we move forward. Together.

It’s difficult to say who the first feminists
really
were. I imagine women have been subverting sexism for as long as it’s existed. But no one talks about the small things women do every day to buck the system, I suppose because it’s impossible to measure. So when most people talk about feminist history, it’s limited to the organized, popular movements.

If you’re all-knowing about the “wave” history, feel free to skip this section. I don’t want you to get bored. But if you’re not, read on.

Most feminists discuss the movement’s history in terms of waves: first, second, and third. Nowadays, the absence of a “fourth” wave seems to indicate a desire to end the wave terminology and just move forward without labels.

When folks talk about feminism’s first wave, they’re talking about women who fought for the vote. Think Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. (If you didn’t learn about them in school—at least—I might cry). Some mark the beginning of the first wave as the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—when women got together in New York and created the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, which outlined the issues and goals for a women’s movement.

If you want to watch a good movie (with a somewhat unfortunate soundtrack) about the later part of the first wave, check out
Iron Jawed Angels
. It follows the fight for suffrage through the story of Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who formed the National Woman’s Party.

So, very long story made short: Women got the vote via the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Yeah, so it took them a long-ass time (wonder why . . . ).

The problem with the way the first wave is generally talked about and taught is that it tends to ignore contributions by women of color and women who weren’t all rich and privileged. It’s all white, middle- to upper-class women all the time. (You’ll see that this is a trend through the waves.) In fact, the most famous suffragettes turned out to be a tad racist. Stanton and Anthony got all pissed that black men got the vote over white women and forged some pretty unsavory alliances with groups that opposed enfranchisement for black people and even said that the vote of white women (of “wealth, education, and refinement”) was needed in order to combat the “pauperism, ignorance, and degradation” of voting immigrants and men of color.
¹
Lovely.

Fact is, women of color were fighting their own battles at the time and not getting nearly enough recognition. One speech that (thankfully) gets a lot of play is Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” delivered in 1851 at the Women’s Convention in Ohio.

Awesome.

Now, of course, it’s great that women got the vote and that so many women fought for it—hard. But we have to take an honest look at history. Because unfortunately, this dismissive nonsense about anyone other than educated white women would repeat itself, to some extent, later on in feminism.

The second wave is probably the most well-known time period in feminist history. Or at least the most talked about. (Bra burning! Hairy legs! Lesbians!) It’s also the most misrepresented, in my opinion.

When people think about 1970s feminism, they think Gloria Steinem and burning bras. Steinem was real, braburning was not. The mainstream, popularized women’s movement back in the day started out of a desire to get out of the home. Women felt trapped by the ’50s-housewife model set before them, which laid out a life that pretty much entailed getting excited only about ovens and kids and bringing your man a drink when he got home from work. Woohoo!

Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
took on “the problem that had no name” (women being sick and tired of being maids).
³
Friedan was also a founding member of NOW, which was created in 1966. The organization’s original statement of purpose, written by Friedan, declared that “the time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America, and toward a fully equal partnership of the sexes.”
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The statement also focused on the issues that second-wave feminism is most known for: women working outside the home, the wage gap, sex discrimination, women’s representation in the government, and fighting traditional notions of motherhood and marriage. Obviously, we’re still fighting some of those battles (okay, all of them), but orgs like NOW did a hell of a lot for women on these issues.

But (there’s always a but) what
isn’t
part of NOW’s celebrated accomplishments is the other side of the organization’s past—and, by proxy, that of the mainstream second wave. After its inception, NOW was accused of being homophobic and in later years was criticized as speaking only to issues that affected middle-class white women.

Afraid to be stereotyped as “man-haters,” NOW distanced themselves from lesbian issues in the late 1960s. Friedan even called lesbians a “lavender menace” to the larger women’s movement.
The lesbians are coming! The lesbians are coming!
It’s essentially the same nonsense that the suffragettes pulled—afraid that the radical notion of black people getting votes or lesbians defining feminism would kill the mainstream-friendliness of the movement. Pshaw.

Criticism of NOW as being a middle-class white women’s organization—along with the second-wave movement as a whole—isn’t exactly a new trend. After all, much of the movement was based on the idea that women should be working outside the home. But low-income women and women of color had already been working outside (and inside) the home—they had to!

Some cool stuff that came out of the second wave:
Ms.
magazine was founded by Gloria Steinem and run by Robin Morgan and Marcia Ann Gillespie (among others);
⁵
Roe v. Wade
was decided, and women obtained the right to get abortions;
⁶
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was passed, making employment discrimination illegal on the basis of sex, as was Title IX, which banned discrimination in education;
⁷
Angela Davis (yes, just her—she rocks);
⁸
Susan Brownmiller wrote
Against Our Will
about the culture of rape; feminists fought for increased awareness of violence against women;
⁹
Alice Walker coined the term “womanist” (“a black feminist or feminist of color. . . . Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.”);
¹⁰
lesbian theory gained popularity;
¹¹
and the “sex wars” happened, in which anti-porn and not-so-anti-porn feminists clashed .
¹²
Shit, I could go on forever—so make sure to check out the resources at the end for more stuff. Now, I may catch some flak for not expounding more on the successes of the second wave and telling you
everything
. But the thing is, there are about a million books out there for that. Go read them. And I’m not being trite—I think we owe a lot to our foremothers. So much in fact, that not getting down to business would be a disservice.