Wrong Again
Why Naomi Wolf needs to update her knowledge of feminism.
By Kay Steiger
May 4, 2009
Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre (Flickr user smiteme) and author and feminist Betty Friedan (AP Photo/Steven Senne)I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that a review of Helen Gurley Brown, founder of 100 ways to please your man Cosmopolitan magazine, prompted Naomi Wolf, a sort-of feminist writer who we’ve locked horns with before, to proclaim that “sexy” feminism has won out over humorless, hairy armpit feminism.
“[W]hen it comes to women’s rights,” Wolf wrote in this Sunday’s Washington Post, “Americans have clearly matured. What has helped that process along is that stealthily, quietly, second wave feminism — the movement personified by Betty Friedan and her 1963 bestseller, The Feminine Mystique — has been supplanted by ‘third wave’ feminism, with its more upbeat and individualistic signature.”
Much of what Wolf writes suggests she’s far out of touch with what’s going on in feminism today, and she seems to forget that feminists are actually doing things of value these days. The National Women’s Law Center is pushing to make women’s voices heard in the health care debate. The first bill that President Obama signed into law was legislation that helped women sue for pay discrimination, thanks to many women’s coalitions. Not to mention all of the volunteer work women are doing on campus, staffing emergency hotlines to aid victims of domestic violence. As the work of modern feminists shows, there are plenty of women that fall outside the narrow stereotypes Wolf presents.
To say the dichotomy of The Feminine Mystique vs. Cosmo is simplistic would be an understatement. Friedan does not represent all of second wave feminism, and Brown certainly does not represent all of third-wave feminism. Cosmo helps perpetuate rules about gender roles, like that men “should buy meals and trinkets, if not hand over actual cash,” as Wolf writes. Such advice from Brown pushed feminism many steps back.
The closest Wolf comes to accurately describing modern feminism is that she says it is “pluralistic, strives to be multiethnic, is pro-sex and tolerant of other women’s choices.” While these things are all technically true, what Wolf is forgetting is that despite the cultural focus of third-wave feminism (and some have argued that we’re actually beyond the third wave now), what was more important to modern feminism is trying to open up feminism beyond the upper-middle-class white woman. Women are a diverse group of people, and feminism should reflect that. By reducing feminism down to a trite dichotomy, in many ways, Wolf is working to undo some of the great work done in the last few decades.
Possibly the most offensive passage of Wolf’s diatribe is this:
But that very individualism, which has been great for feminism’s rebranding, is also its weakness: It can be fun and frisky, but too often, it’s ahistorical and apolitical. As many older feminists justly point out, the world isn’t going to change because a lot of young women feel confident and personally empowered, if they don’t have grass-roots groups or lobbies to advance woman-friendly policies, help women break through the glass ceiling, develop decent work-family support structures or solidify real political clout.
As someone that came to feminism initially through Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, I find it baffling that Wolf suggests all young feminists are ahistorical and apolitical. In fact, young people are more politically engaged than ever before, with an increase in voter turnout of more than 11 percent over 2000. Exit polls show that voters under 30 made up 18 percent of the voting population last year, and the only demographic group that surpassed women as a whole voting in favor of the pro-choice candidate (56 percent), were young people (66 percent).
Furthermore, by saying that young women need “more theory” to be good feminists is a little like saying that voters can’t be progressive unless they understand the long history of progressivism and the changes it has made over the years. You don’t need to understand political history to have a political opinion and you don’t need to understand feminist theory to be a feminist. Some even object to the word “feminist” and prefer womanist or womynist. By telling women that their take on feminism is illegitimate because they haven’t waded their way through Friedan’s tome negates their experience of young women around the country, many of whom are doing important activist work.
Wolf is also wrong in saying that “the fact is, we know the answers to Western women’s problems: The way is mapped out, the time for theory is pretty much over.” This strips gender studies departments of their importance, much as David Horowitz has been trying to do for decades. If we need gender parity in government, Wall Street, and law firms, than we most certainly need women to be represented in academia.
Wolf also seems to imply that gender parity is within reach and that all we need to do is get off our duffs and actually do it.
We know the laws and the policies we need to achieve full equality. What we lack is a grass-roots movement that will drive the political will. "Lipstick" or lifestyle feminism won’t produce that movement alone.
Yeah, feminists, stop using lipstick. She seems to have forgotten that women are doing important work on issues of the economic recession, health care reform, immigration reform, foreign policy, and many other issues. Wolf is mistaken; feminists aren’t just adjusting their lipstick and talking about sex. They’re actually out there working on gender equality. Give us a little more credit than just saying we’re a reincarnation of Brown’s philosophy of “10 great sex tips.” By trying to slice those fighting for gender equality into stereotypical groups of “second wave” and “third wave” Wolf is doing exactly what anti-feminists have been doing for decades: trying to inflame divisions when women should be working together to achieve common goals.
Kay Steiger is an associate editor of Campus Progress.
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Before you try to get everyone to conclude that Wolf was trying to divide the feminist community I would like to point out that her conclusion was, “Surely we can find a way between the merely personal and the mostly political — a synthesis of Brown and Friedan.” Women do have to live powerful “lipstick feminist” lives (whether there is lipstick involved or not) as well as advocate on women’s issues. I don’t understand why you are trying to inflame divisions by attacking Wolf for “trying to inflame divisions” when really “women should be working together to achieve common goals.”
There are problems with second wave feminism. Like Wolf says in her article, it was overwhelmingly white, educated, and economically privileged. There are problems with third wave feminism. As you said, it can reinforce many of the gender roles and stereotypes we are trying to combat and, as Wolf said, is can be too focused on each individual woman trying to improve her own life at the expense of political activism to advance the lot of all women. And of course, as you, I and Wolf all know, none of these waves are clear-cut or well defined.
I don’t see Wolf’s article as trying to divide the different groups or argue that any one of them have the monopoly on doing feminism the “right way.” I think she is just articulating a movement she has seen in the feminist community and arguing that we need to move away from “flattened… stereotype[s] of either/or femininity” as we have seen in our previous First Ladies, “from Nancy Reagan as adoring Stepford wife to Hillary Clinton as shrill career woman.”
I think you make some valid points but I feel like you do so in a very disingenuous way that does not show much respect for Naomi Wolf’s views and it seems much more likely to “inflame divisions” than Wolf’s article…
— Canyon Bosler - May 5, 12:21 AM - #How would you address politics in terms of what Ariel Levy described as female “raunch culture.” Wolf seems to be criticizing the idea that sexiness is an inherent part of contemporary feminism, which means it is still judged in relation to men; this is peculiar in in theory, but when you read Levy’s accounts of anthropology grad students posing for Girls Gone Wild videos and seventh grade girls in something of an arms race to “dress sluttier,” it’s much more compelling.
— Ethan Stanislawski - May 5, 01:46 PM - #