The World Split Open (68 page)

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 drastically 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Overworked American families, whose time spent at work had increased three extra weeks between 1986 and 1997, suffered from what Hochschild called a “Time Bind” and a few people even started movements “to take back their time.” But neither the secular nor the Religious Right, who glorified “family values,” supported any national effort to help working families regain a sense of stability and balance.
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The wealthy solved their own care crisis by hiring full-time nannies or attendants, often from developing countries, to care for their children or parents. Middle-class families tried to patch together care for their children with relatives and babysitters. The very poor sometimes gained access to subsidized child care or elder care, but more often, women who worked in the low-waged service sector lost their jobs when children or parents required urgent care.
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