Feminist Smack Down

The author of Sisterhood Interrupted wants us to know why feminists fight. What I want to know is, what's wrong with fighting? I think feminism is made of fairly solid stuff, and can take it.

Evidently, the publishing industry agrees, churning out critiques like The Feminine Mistake and Sisterhood Interrupted. Well, this isn't an issue just with feminism. After all, you could argue that a lot of us got pretty comfortable during the Clinton years (Bill) with our status. Not that the gains were so amazing, and there was the whole ending of welfare as we knew it thing. But choice was safe. The Supreme Court wasn't so scary. And clearly, everyone relaxed just a little bit.

Here's how Deborah Siegel, the book's author, lays it out in an interview with Alternet on the idea behind "personal as political."

Siegel: The idea behind this truly brilliant slogan transformed the way Americans thought of the politics of private life. In the book I write about how these words launched a movement, then quickly morphed into a philosophy and a blueprint for action that meant different things depending on where you sat.

Today, we're smack dab in the middle of those conversations -- whether we realize it or not. But there's a new hitch. In the absence of a visible, organized, and powerful mass movement and in an era that's far more conservative and individualistic, younger women are less inclined to see our problems as shared.

The thing is, just like in all movements and especially on the left, women don't fall into lockstep, and it's ridiculous to expect that just because we're women, we have the same agenda. As Jessica Valenti said recently, feminism makes your life better. Feminism is the best self-help guide a woman could have. But somewhere after women's lib of my mother's generation and pigs like Rush Limbaugh, the ideals of feminism came under attack. But while the academics were sniping from inside, the power drain came from the outside.

Well, it's a convenient time to look back, if not in anger, then in understanding. After all, on the surface, many of us are doing pretty well, especially when compared to the 70s. Frankly, when I speak to women in my mother's generation, they look at me like I'm crazy. "It was hard" they say, of working, raising kids, running a household and the PTA, "but we did it." Point being, why do women of my generation complain so much? My mom pointed out to me that when she was my age, she was raising a 14 year old and a 10 year old, as a single mom, and working, too.

I'll be 38 on Friday, and am responsible for myself, my husband, a very needy cat and a large shoe collection. What is my problem? Do I really think that having a family is so untenable in this day and age that it's not worth trying?

The problem is, and this is the premise of my book on my Smith Class (Whatever Happened to the Feminine Mystique) is that the path in the sand left from the second wave of feminism is hard to follow. Each woman must make her own way. Who has time to join together in anger when we can watch the Sopranos do it so much better on TV?

Now, we have parental leave, paid. It is actually illegal to pay women less than men (but oh, don't get me started on that one, coz it sure got a lot harder to prove that women aren't paid equally) and women make up the majority of college students on campus. Do the math: in the next 20 years, women are going to be running most everything, whether men like it or not.

But here's the thing: if feminism really wants to re-charge, things are going to have to get a lot worse. And heck, with Bush in the White House we are getting there. But it's going to take more than a book.