Feminisms

Hi all,

I have been thinking about our discussion of feminism, particularly that vein of it captured by Colin's question of whether it is appropriate to use the label "feminism" to refer to women's activism in the 1960s/1970s. This taps into an issue that has become more and more fascinating to me the longer I teach 20th century history: why is the civil rights movement so lionized even as it is misunderstood, while feminism is so condemned even as it is misunderstood?

Undergrads regularly describe the civil rights movement as "not radical" or "only asking for common sense things like equality" or "led by moderate and peaceful men like MLK Jr." We know there is virtually no basis in reality for these descriptions. But student voices, I think, are good bellweathers of what's on TV, the History Channel, what's said at their dinner table, etc., etc. So their words speak to the astonishing success of men like King to win the PR battle over civil rights--not just against white supremacists but against other elements of the civil rights movement and even against awareness of their own very tactical side--and also the success of conservative "color blind" language in improbably transforming King's legacy into an argument against civil rights legislation.

Then, too, undergrads also describe feminism as "radical," "man-hating," "angry," and absurd, and they seem entirely unaware of either the gender-based inequalities and traumas that gave rise to feminism, or feminists' concrete (yet limited) successes in addressing them. There were, of course, feminists who fit students' stereotypes, and not all feminist efforts were even remotely successful (or even desirable). But these hardly represent the "average" feminist, if such a creature even existed in such a diverse and wide-ranging movement. As with civil rights movement memory, students' conventional-wisdom view speaks to the vagaries of historical memory, not the historical record: first, the success of affluent white feminists in defining feminism as concerned with their issues, and second, the success of anti-feminists in associating feminism with its elites and with its most radical non-elite elements. Together this has produced a dynamic neatly opposite of what has occurred for the civil rights movement.

How does this relate to the question about who to call a "feminist"? I think--though I could be wrong--that this distorted historical memory explains the very widely held desire to "protect" women activists from being tarred by the feminist label. Why? Well, for example, "First Wave" feminists did not (mostly) call themselves feminists at all- they were suffragists, or Temperance crusaders, birth control advocates, etc., etc. But taken together they were clearly a notable social movement, and rarely is there debate over whether we can call them "first wave feminists."* Almost all social movements are warehouses of enormous internal diversity--the civil rights movement included, as we now know!--and usually we are able to settle on a general term for them, albeit with caveats and the occasional illuminating debate (see: black power). The intensity and specific shape of these debates concerning Second Wave feminism seem unique to me, however. (Maybe old fashioned debates over whether the Progressives exist are a parallel case- maybe.)

What to do, then? Given the diversity of postwar feminism, if we shouldn't call the Operation Life people "feminists," then perhaps historians shouldn't bother talking about "feminism" as much as they do--if that word can only refer to, say, affluent, white, self-identified "feminists" speaking to issues that only pertained to their own group, then it is a poor frame for understanding both women's activism, and the radical cultural, social, and legal changes that it produced in the postwar era.

My first instinct was to think of this as a loss--allowing present-day ideologies to erase historical understanding (not necessarily approval: we should understand history but make our own value judgments about it; the problem isn't criticisms of feminist values/actions, but lack of awareness that they even happened at all, or at minimum a very distorted sense of what they involved). But perhaps this is investing too much in a word. Maybe it would be better to drop "feminism" as a general label and just use it to refer to affluent white women's activism. One trouble with this, however, is translating the decision outside the academy. Understanding women's activism and its consequences seems equally important, to me, as understanding race-based civil rights activism. The easiest way to bring that story out, I have usually thought, would be to "rescue" feminism by correctly applying it to the very broad range of women (and men) activists who reshaped postwar gender relations. I think this is what people *think* they mean when they say the term, but they just mistakenly think that that very broad range is actually homogenous and narrow. But after trying unsuccessfully to do this in ten years of undergraduate teaching--after getting essay after essay repeating cultural stereotypes, blissfully free of any historical evidence or fact even after two-week-long units on feminism--perhaps it is time to give up the ghost. But the word "feminism" already has a niche in historical memory that means at least a good portion of what it is supposed to mean. Would it be better to fix what's wrong with it, or to concede the point and try to carve out a whole new niche based on some new term like "postwar women's activism"?

What do you think?

David


*There is debate, of course, over whether particular parts of these various movements deserve the label, e.g., Temperance--but this has mostly been over exactly that: whether they have "earned" the label through progressive gender beliefs and actions, not over whether they should be "tarred" by association with feminism.