Yes, Virginia, there is a feminism, Part I

For several reason, feminism - and its twenty-first century incarnations - have been on my mind a lot lately. First, because of an excellent book I recently finished reading - Susan J. Douglas' Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media - that helpfully, cogently, and often humorously recounts the mass media's generally hate/hate relationship with American women over the past fifty years. Second, because of the first season of the excellent AMC channel drama Mad Men which I have been catching up on this past week On Demand. The first of these reminded me about the actual history of feminism in America - a history that is markedly different from the mainstream view of how the movement developed. (Just one example of this difference is alluded to in the picture that headlines this blog. Contrary to what most mainstream media will tell you - there were bra burnings as part of the feminist movement. The 1968 protest outside the Miss America pageant included bras being thrown into trash cans. There were, however, no matches.) The second reminded me about the stultifying climate of the 1950's and 60's from which the movement developed - a cultural climate viciously enforced the virgin/whore dichotomy, expecting the 'virgins' to stay home, raise the children and get dinner on the table my seven while demanding that the 'whores' be good sports about the sexism that surrounded them, work demanding jobs as secretaries and the like for demeaning pay, and be willing to service the boss at the office before he drug himself home to the drudgery of all things familial and domestic.

While no doubt the portrait of 1960 corporate culture that Mad Men paints is likely only a simulacrum of real life, the show has reminded me how very far women have come in a relatively short fifty years. The sexism we decry now has most often gone underground; no longer overt and obvious, gender discrimination is for the most part now covert and subtle. As sexism has become more difficult to point a finger at, it has simultaneously become less powerful - though I find myself disgusted at John McCain for refusing to chastise a supporter for calling Hillary Clinton a bitch, I can at least take comfort in the fact that Lt. Gen. Ann Dunwoody got her fourth star. This is not to say that sexism has become powerless - I think it played at least some part in Senator Clinton's ultimate defeat in the democratic primary - but I would argue what power it retains is a mere shadow of the oppression that Betty Friedan railed against in The Feminine Mystique.

But if gender stereotypes have come a long way in this country so, too, has feminism. Unfortunately, too often women my age tend to defend themselves against the mantle of feminism rather than embracing it as they should. Part of their instinctive aversion to twenty-first century feminism is, I think, the perhaps oppressive shadow that the titans of 60's and 70's feminism still cast and the seeming impossibility of reconciling that feminism with the lives women my age are leading today. I consider myself a feminist, but I am also a happily married woman. And my marriage has not meant for me the same sort of suffocation and unhappiness that many early feminists railed against. The sentiment that marriage was the end of a woman's life - that "It starts when you sink in his arms and ends with your arms in his sink" - is not one that most of the women I know share. Unfortunately, however, it is this Ypte of anti-establishment anger that has become indelibly identified with feminism:

And the crazy part of it was even if you were clever, even if you spent your adolescence reading John Donne and Shaw, even if you studied history or zoology or physics and hoped to spend your life pursuing some difficult and challenging career, you still had a mind full of all the soupy longings that every high-school girl was awash in... underneath it, all you longed to be was annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled up by a giant prick spouting sperm, soapsuds, silk and satins and, of course, money. (Erica Jong)

For those of thus - and we are many - who entered into marriage or contemplated it without consideration as to how well we would be kept, such sentiments have served, among other issues, to ensure that when we mention feminism it is usually to disavow it all together. As recently as two years ago I distinctly recall beginning a conversation with the phrase, "I don't really consider myself a feminist..." This despite the fact that many of my most cherished beliefs dovetail perfectly with the concepts of personal freedom that feminism has long espoused.

What changed my mind? Stay tuned for Part II.