On generational tensions and the third wave

I know this blog is called "Fourth Wave Feminism" and, as such, I should probably be claiming some sort of transition away from third wave ideologies and into a hypothetical fourth wave. The problem, of course, is that even after writing this blog for three years, I'm still not quite sure what the fourth wave might look like. That said, I do have some ideas, most of them revolving around a reapplication of feminism for the future while not denying or forgetting its past, which leads me to my reason for posting today...

Yesterday, my good friend L. sent me an article from The Huffington Post. She was curious about my opinion, she said, and, after I'd read the article and devoted an unnecessary amount of Facebook wall space to typing out a response, I decided I might as well turn my response into a blog post, as it so typified the kind of debate that I often see in generational disputes over feminism's relevance, efficacy and enactment.

The article in question is written by filmmaker Dawn Porter, with whose work, I'll be honest, I am not terribly familiar. For the purposes of the case she's making and my reaction, however, knowing her work isn't essential. My response is to her article, not her work (although now I'm curious and will make an effort to track some of it down). Porter's article is intriguingly entitled "Women Like Me are not Like Women Like You, Does That Have to Make us Enemies?" and in it she discusses the negative response she received from an unnamed, presumably older, feminist journalist regarding her latest film Dawn Gets Naked in which, you guessed it, the filmmaker gets naked. According to Porter, her film chronicles women's body image issues in today's society, specifically "challeng[ing] the media's idea of perfection and the pressure that it puts on women."

Porter expresses frustration that her unnamed critic "drew the conclusion that [Porter] presumed that feminism is just about getting your tits out" and "didn't like it one bit." She goes on to argue that feminism can mean a lot of things to different women and, essentially, that's it nobody's business if she chooses to trim her pubic hair, wear stiletto heels, and still call herself a feminist.

I wholeheartedly agree. She points to some of the same problems in the ongoing clash/debate/tension between feminist generations. Obviously, you can't expect a movement or an ideology not to shift as time passes, and for people not to enact its principles differently. (For further reading, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards' book Manifesta addresses these generational dynamics really well.)

But...

I do take serious issue with one thing Porter says (although its worth noting that maybe she doesn't mean it the way it sounds or she wasn't really thinking what it could mean when she wrote it). Towards the end, she writes, "But I do think that as feminism is having a golden moment and there is a chance it might really go somewhere this time, women who want to attack others should pick their arguments more carefully." The latter part is all fine and good. Nudity in a documentary that purports an interest in building self-esteem and interrogating media representations of body image does seem like a rather silly thing to get worked up over vis-a-vis feminism.

So here's me picking my argument carefully: it sounds an awful lot like Porter's saying that feminism hasn't gone anywhere in the past, or anywhere worthwhile, which is a really reductive and naive thing to say (and is precisely what some older/second wave feminists find so disconcerting about the third wave: the elision of history). To suggest that all the advances that women made in the 1960s and 1970s were not worth anything, that feminism didn't go anywhere, is pretty insulting. Perhaps what she means to say is that feminism isn't over, that there are still things left to be done, which would make a lot more sense and, in my opinion, is very true. If that's what she meant to say, it doesn't come across. How about choosing your words carefully?

If Porter does indeed mean to say that feminism hasn't done anything worthwhile yet or ever, I'm not even sure how to respond to that, considering her ability to even make a documentary in which she and other women ride around London in a double-decker bus nude has a lot to do with previous generations of feminists and what they've done for gender equality.

I hope she misspoke, I really do. Although I was deeply disturbed to look in the comments and see that Porter seemingly agreed with one commenter who wrote, "You have equal rights. Now get over yourselves­. Feminism is really now just about narcissism­: debating the finer points of Brazilian waxing, SlutWalk exhibition­ism for Facebook photos, or academic navel-gazi­ng about one's unused ovaries" (unsurprisingly, this commenter's moniker is "Men's Rights Videos"). Yes, women have more rights now than they ever have, especially in so-called first world countries. But, do we have equal rights? No, not by a long shot.

Should women be able to wax their pubic hair, wear high heels, take joy in their nudity and bodies, be super feminine and still call themselves feminists?

Absolutely.

Should older feminists accept that the younger generation might do things a little differently than they did but that doesn't make them any less feminist?

Again, absolutely.

But does that mean that third wavers or fourth wavers or whatever feminists want to call themselves these days should forget that there were women who came before them who had to fight and yell and break all the rules in order to help build the relative equality (in some areas, but still not all) we enjoy today?

No. No. No. Absolutely not.

A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Thirty-One

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Thirty

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A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Twenty-Eight

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A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Nineteen

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A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Fourteen

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A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Twelve

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A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Seven

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A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Six

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A Feminist Countdown to 2011 ~ Day Two

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Feminist Readings: Aristocratic Women in Medieval France

(Yes, it's a book reviewish column - see the end for rambling about what I think I'm doing.)

Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (1999), edited by Theodore Everglades is a collection of five pieces on, well, exactly those women mentioned in the title. The first concerns one particularly powerful individual, the remainder examines all the women of whom records remain in particular regions of France. It's quite narrow in scope, the intended purpose being to expand scholarship on women living in the 11th through 13th centuries.

In this it succeeds, but the real value of the book to the casual reader is that it provides real, non-trivial examples of important women in the Medieval Era. Let me explain:

'Women in History' v. Historical Women

From the book:

At this level of analysis, the sources often reveal that women who embodied the joining of two families through marriage and child bearing were not merely passive pawns in power relations among groups of men; rather, they were active participant whose actions could affect ... the course of politically significant events.

The influence of feminism on historical thought and history education over the last half-century is fairly obvious. There's been a real attempt to add women to textbooks and discussions, to consider women as historically important figures. There's been criticism of this - not just by those whose patriarchal ideals are being threatened, but by otherwise well-meaning feminists. They claim that women have been oppressed to the extent that they really haven't accomplished much of worth before, say, the 19th century or so, and that we shouldn't try and pretend otherwise.

There's something too this - who hasn't read a sidebar about some minor female figure in an otherwise male-oriented work and wondered why they bothered including it (other than being 'politically correct') It's saddening, really, that they can't find anything better.

And that's where works like Aristocratic Women in Medieval France come in. The work presents, in meticulous detail, the recorded activities of a number of powerful women whose actions had a real effect on lives and events. They disperse money, give legal judgment in disputes, and sign official documents. They act in place of their absent or deceased husbands, maintain a position of power over male relatives, and even hold property in cases where it was previously thought to be an exclusively male privilege. In short, these women were important entirely in their own right.

Now, this book make no connection to larger scale, more general history, but I have no doubt that such a connection could and will be made. But for the purposes of this book there can be no doubt that women played an important role in this period of time.

On the other hand...

There are a couple of things to note: first, the book is only about wealthy women from powerful families - it would be even more interesting to look at the average women (perhaps in relation to aristocratic women). Not the focus of the book, but something to think about. Second, the book itself states that this was a sort of high point for women - after the 13th century, power began to be gathered more an more into the hands of a few patriarchs, who kept their 'lines' intact by way of sole male heirs - effectively shutting women off from sources of societal power.

In the end...

It's easy to be erased. Adela of Blois (for instance) was one of the most well-known figures of her era and locale, but by the standards of patriarchal history, she is unknown and worthless.

And that's what we should learn here. Insisting that women are equally important has to be an ongoing work - and restoring women to their proper place in history (and they do have an important place, not just as side notes) is a vital part of this process.

--
(What's all this? Basically, I spend an inordinately large amount of time reading various feminist/womanist/related books, and I've always been disappointed that out of so much interesting feminist thought and research, so little is actually discussed or even heard of. So, each week I'll take a book at random and summarize it, hopefully both disseminating new ideas and keeping old ones alive. For the academics reading this - I'm not in Women's Studies, I'm just an academic (science, in particular) type with too much time on her hands, so if I get something technical wrong don't roast me, okay?)

Women's Suffrage...it's pop quiz time, y'all!

This semester I'm teaching an Introduction to Women's Studies class in order to buff up my CV and gain some more varied teaching experience. So far, two weeks in, it's been great experience. My students seem generally engaged and invested, and they talk in class without my prompting. I think it'll be a good semester, even if teaching a lecture class (as opposed to the discussion-based classes I've taught before) is a brand new thing for me.

That said, in order to help encourage them to do the readings, I'll be springing some pop quizzes on them here and there over the course of the semester. Tuesday's quiz was about women's suffrage and based on a chapter they read from Louise Michele Newman's book White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (chapter 2: "The Making of a White Female Citizenry: Suffragism, Antisuffragism, and Race").

Anyway, here's the quiz. How would you fare?

1. Define suffrage/suffragist.
2. Define abolition/abolitionist.
3. True or False?: Female anti-suffragists were also against women’s rights in other areas.
4. True or False?: Black men were the most adamant opponents of a woman’s right to vote.
5. True of False? Colorado and Wyoming were two of the first states to allow women the right to vote.
6. True or False?: The 15th amendment gave women the right to vote.
7. True or False?: The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) were really the same organization.
8. True or False?: Some suffragists argued that women should be allowed to vote because their “moral purity” would help rid politics of its corruption.
9. Besides gender and race, name two other markers of identity that came into play in the suffrage movement.
   

USPS honors a first-wave feminist hero

Somehow I completely missed this: in June of this year the US Postal Service issued a new stamp honoring African American feminist activist Anna Julia Cooper. Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper went on to get both a BA and an MA from Oberlin University and, in 1925 at age 67, she became only the fourth African American woman to receive her PhD--from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. She was an incredible woman, and I think it's fantastic that the Postal Service is honoring her as part of their Black Heritage series:

(you can buy the stamp here)

In 1893, Cooper gave an address at the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago. Entitled "Women's Cause is One and Universal," her speech rivals some of the best oratories in the 19th, 20th and 21st century. Here's an excerpt:

The higher fruits of civilization can not be extemporized, neither can they be developed normally, in the brief space of thirty years. It requires the long and painful growth of generations. Yet all through the darkest pe¬riod of the colored women's oppression in this country her yet unwritten history is full of heroic struggle, a struggle against fearful and overwhelming odds, that often ended in a horrible death, to maintain and protect that which woman holds dearer than life. The painful, patient, and silent toil of mothers to gain a free simple title to the bodies of their daughters, the de¬spairing fight, as of an entrapped tigress, to keep hallowed their own persons, would furnish material for epics. That more went down under the flood than stemmed the current is not extraordinary. The majority of our women are not heroines but I do not know that a majority of any race of women are heroines. It is enough for me to know that while in the eyes of the highest tribunal in America she was deemed no more than a chattel, an irresponsible thing, a dull block, to be drawn hither or thither at the volition of an owner, the Afro American woman maintained ideals of womanhood unshamed by any ever conceived. Resting or fermenting in untutored minds, such ideals could not claim a hearing at the bar of the nation. The white woman could least plead for her own emancipation; the black woman, doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent. I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history, and there her destiny evolving.

You can read the rest of Anna Julia Cooper's speech here.

Cooper died in 1964 during the height of the Civil Rights movement and at the incredible age of 105! She's a total inspiration.

On Intellectual Rape

I find it hard to believe that for centuries the contributions of women have been so few and insignificant as to relegate them to the margins of history. Most syllabi today or the people who wrote them obviously disagree. At the risk of seeming petty, a quick tally of the authors represented on my syllabi (10 courses so far) reveals that 12% of the articles or books I was required to read were written by women. Now in my third quarter of a graduate program in International Studies, had I not actively sought out and read women’s work, my “education” would be comprised almost entirely of concepts and theories generated by men. This is an intellectual rape.

What kind of mutiny would occur if men found themselves looking at a reading list comprised entirely of work from women in their discipline? How quickly would we call bullshit if an instructor tried to justify such discrimination by insisting that men had simply been marginal players in their societies and didn’t have much to say anyway? And do we, as women, perpetuate this outrage by acquiescing to the current and woefully inadequate patriarchal model of education?

Just as women in the home have a double work day, women in the academy – if they’re intellectually honest and committed to learning anything – must ingest double the information simply to find themselves among the theories being discussed. To listen to my professors, women haven’t put down the mop or closed their legs long enough to impact international affairs. How dare they list the social, political, and economic discrimination women have endured and leave it at that? How dare they have knowledge of WHY the voices of women were denigrated, excluded, and erased yet still insist men are the world’s “natural” movers and shakers? Until we make a commitment to call them out on their lies and refuse to participate in their delusion, I worry about seeing the kind of feminist transformation that can truly liberate us all.

How we think about ourselves – our history, our desires, our shortcomings – depends on the information we have to work with. My intelligence is insulted when I have to battle the stereotype that women never shut on one hand and the claim that we’ve never said anything worth writing down on the other. As Ani DiFranco said in her poem Grand Canyon, “people, we are standing at ground zero of the feminist revolution . . . it was an inside job, stoic and sly, one we're supposed to forget and downplay and deny.” How much do you really know about Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton? How about Ida Husted Harper or Alice Paul? What about bell hooks or Womanism? How the hell can I situate my American identity in a landscape of nothing but swinging (white) dicks?

The bottom line is that women must record and preserve our own history – we can’t rely on the oppressors to do it for us. When we do, we risk the job not getting done and then wonder why women’s writing falls by the historical wayside. This isn’t some conspiracy theory – the empirical evidence is right here. I challenge you to take a look at the authors your education relied on. Or do an informal survey of course syllabi at ANY university – many are online – to see who gets listened to and read.

The architects of the American women’s suffrage movement noted as much. They suspected their work to win political rights for American women (although mostly the white ones) would be lost to future generations if they didn’t document it. Because of their skepticism, we have The History of Woman Suffrage, consisting of six thick volumes. The first three volumes of the set were compiled by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage in 1886, volume 4 by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper in 1902, and volumes 5 and 6 were compiled by Ida Husted Harper alone and published by The National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1922. But because we have let down our guard, an invaluable source of American political history is nearly inaccessible and has been out of print for years. To my knowledge, the only way to access the material is by purchasing a CD (available, among other places at The Feminist Majority Foundation website). While it’s usefully searchable, I’m ashamed we haven’t ensured the books themselves sit beside other seminal American political documents in our libraries and classrooms.

I don’t know what the solution is. Most days I’m too busy keeping myself from being erased to peel back the layers of history to find my heritage. But Virginia Woolf said “we think back through our mothers if we are women” and I don’t think we’re getting very far as orphans.

That Martha Washington was one hot first lady!

Can someone please explain to me why we should care about Martha Washington more and/or find her more interesting now because historians have revealed how hot she actually was?

From The Washington Post, "Fresh Look at Martha Washington: Less First Frump, More Foxy Lady":

Our image of the mother of our country, vague and insubstantial as it is, is drawn from portraits painted after her death showing a frumpy, dumpy, plump old lady, a fussy jumble of needlework in her lap, wearing what could pass for a shower cap with pink sponge rollers rolled too tight underneath.

But today, 250 years after Martha and George tied the knot, a handful of historians are seeking to revamp the former first lady's fusty image, using the few surviving records of things she wrote, asking forensic anthropologists to do a computerized age-regression portrait of her in her mid-20s and, perhaps most importantly, displaying for the first time in decades the avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that she wore on her wedding day.
[...]
Contrary to popular opinion, even among some historians who should know better, Martha was not fat when she married George. Yes, she liked to read the Bible, but she devoured gothic romance novels, too. She capably ran the five plantations left to her when her first husband died, bargaining with London merchants for the best tobacco prices. And unknown to most, while George was courting her she had another suitor, a Virginia planter with much greater wealth and stature. In a little-known letter, Charles Carter wrote to his brother about what a beauty she was and how he hoped to "arouse a flame in her breast."

I'm not saying we shouldn't care about America's first first lady--in fact, I like the part of the article which describes how she was actually an astute businesswoman--but is the new!surprising!exciting! fact that she was a foxy fashionista really relevant and newsworthy? I guess we should give Martha her due, but the whole article just seems a bit weird to me.

(Thanks to my friend Lauren for the link.)