Be sure to check this out: an armchair discussion between Ellie Smeal and Rebecca Walker, hosted by Women’s Way. And if you go, send me a comment or email and let me know how it was!
intergenerational
Though I more often ponder the through-lines and continuities, the differences between feminisms of different generations sometimes just kinda hit you over the head. Note the difference in these titles:
There’s feministing.com founder Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. (Be sure to check out Rebecca Traister’s interview in Salon this week.)
And there’s former 9-5 director Ellen Bravo’s new book, Taking on the Big Boys: Why Feminism Is Good for Families, Business, and the Nation.
‘Nuf said.
On other fronts, throwing a bone to those of us (ok, us writers) who are obsessed with the question of how other books actually sell, the New York Times reports today on sales figures for a number of recent “mommy books,” including Leslie Bennetts’. (thank you, Laura!) Word on the street on how they sell? They don’t.
It’s a hot week for feminism here in NYC, and particularly for two of my favorite under-30 feminist mentors:
Courtney Martin hits the road with Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, while personal hero and a founder of feministing.com Jessica Valenti goes offline this week with her first book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters – a book she says she wished she had read as a teenager. Damn. Me too.
Excerpts of each are here:
Courtney on AlterNet
Jessica in The Guardian
For those of you not yet addicted to feministing.com, some classic, vintage words from Jess — who gets an undue amount of public flack from conservative detractors and misogynist wackos — may sway you to check it out:
Where criticisms about my loud, opinionated ways might bother me if I wasn’t a feminist, the fact that I am means that I know that there’s nothing wrong with me, but only with a world that doesn’t want women to speak their minds.
Such words have got to sound familiar to “second-wave” veterans. I’ll be eager to see what the response is from an older generation to these new, important voices. Jessica wrote her book because, among other things, she believes that “All women, especially younger women, deserve feminism in their lives – and most don’t have access to the university courses or feminist mentors who might introduce them to it.”
A third book out this week by another next-generation writer I have yet to meet but already admire: Kara Jesella’s How Sassy Changed My Life. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “a behind-the-scenes, warts-and-all look at the magazine’s office culture, including sections on the glossy’s coverage of feminism, celebrity and girl culture….[T]he book—written in a style reminiscent of the magazine itself—is a testament to a publication that changed the face of teen media.” Sounds like a fun romp through the recent past at the very least.
And as if these three offerings weren’t enough for one week, check out this tidbit from Bjork on feminism (courtesy of feministing.com)
Feminism dead my a**.
It may be cliche, but it’s true. Gen Xers of a progressive bent are known to wax nostalgic. Born too late, we feel we somehow “missed out” on the good ole days of badass activism — anti-war teach ins, Civil Rights sit-ins, feminist girlcotts, and the like. But today, when I read about a campus-wide Global Warming Teach In in the Boston Globe, my heart skipped a beat. Check it out – it’s taking place at Framingham University, next week.
As the Globe tells it, students in a ceramics course will be developing concept pieces based on their reactions to a global warming film. Government students will discuss the ongoing political debate and ramifications for public policy. Philosophy students will consider the moral and ethical considerations of how humans treat the Earth. Mathematics students will study the statistical rationale supporting global warming. In sociology professor Virginia Rutter’s class, students will analyze a recent report by the UN panel showing that impoverished nations, which have contributed the least to global warming, would potentially suffer the most from its consequences. Rutter will be asking students to answer the question, “What are reasonable burdens for people to take on?”
Rutter, one of the Teach In’s organizers, tells the Globe:
“We’re always looking for opportunities to connect the concepts and theories to things that are happening in the world, things that help people feel the vitality of things we’re engaged in….[When it comes to global warming, we] don’t have a horse in the race about what policies make sense…But we have an interest in putting it on the table so that as a community we can think about it.”
Sorry, Pam, but Virginia Rutter just became my new favorite sociologist.
As a postscript, maybe yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban on so-called partial birth abortion — an UTTER assault on women’s reproductive health rights — will finally be the prompt that wakes us all up? Sit-ins, teach-ins, girlcotts — bring ’em on. We’re in deep shit here. Be sure to check out Lynn Harris’ coverage on the ruling Salon.
Tonight I’m going to hear Leslie Bennetts interviewed by Elissa Schappell at the New York Public Library. Bennetts is also speaking at a salon I’m a part of, next week. So, to prepare for said events, I excitedly started reading her book, The Feminine Mistake — how can anyone who has written about Betty Friedan pass up a book with such a title? But the prologue itself gives me pause. Not for the reasons expressed by the “stay at home brigade,” as Bennetts calls them in her retort on HuffPost to the barrage of opening critiques she’s received from SAHMs, but on behalf of my generation.
Well-intentioned and heartfelt, Bennett’s writing nevertheless positions younger women as in need of cautionary tales. Some of us, no doubt, do, and Feminine Mistake is full of important information about what happens when opt-out wives get left. But many others of us clamor instead for tales of workplaces that have realized women (AND men) have families. Where are the cautionary tales aimed at corporations about how bottom lines suffer when they fail to retain their women? Or the cautionary tales aimed at young husbands about how miserable they’ll be if they opt out of time at home with the kids?
Thumbing ahead, Bennetts writes about the difficulties of reentering the work force and the penalties women pay for their time out (and the need for crucial changes in the divorce laws). But the tone set early on (and Leslie, please tell me I’m off – I want to be – I’m still in the early chapters) seems to focus on personal decision-making, rather than much-needed structural (aka workplace) change.
Wait – I’m switching to second person, so let’s go with it:
Leslie, you completely have me when you wrote that the real issues behind women’s work/life predicaments have nothing to do with words like “choice” and “values.” But then you write about the “willfully retrograde choice” of women who opt out on the very next page. If you ask me, the “feminine mistake” has been — to borrow a phrase from my elders — a focus on the personal at the expense of the political, the structural. I think you and I will both agree that words like “options” are meaningless until we are talking about viable workplace options — not the “option” to work or not.
A personal postscript: Raised to be my own person and divorced at 35, I have never for a moment expected that a husband would support me for the duration. These young women who keep appearing in print are certainly not the majority. As I thought Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic Policy Research rather convincingly documented, the “opt out” phenomenon named by Lisa Belkin back in 2003 was not hard evidence of a generation bailing on work but rather a dip in women’s labor market participation due to a recession. Why do young mothers, instead, keep getting castigated, warned, and blamed? (I’m thinking of other books here…more soon.)
Well, March came and went, but hey, it’s never too late for a Women’s History Month post, right?
So first, my congrats to the 2007 honorees of National Women’s History Month. Very cool, I thought, that the theme was “Generations of Women Moving History Forward,” and that Third Wave Foundation’s Executive Director Monique Mehta was among the honorees.
And speaking of history, last week I contacted the scholars behind this terrific online resource called “The Second Wave and Beyond.” Check it out. It’s still under development. Lookin forward to seeing it grow.
Previous post aside, I find that I can’t help but somehow join the fray–though I offer these thoughts in the hope of increasing understanding on both sides. In response to the TMC thread, where commentors ask why do young feminists want to be included by established organizations / movements to begin with:
Of COURSE rejection is disappointing to younger women who want in to older women’s clubhouse—and why wouldn’t they want in? These are good jobs, with good benefits, for the most part, in organizations that younger feminists believe in. Something missing from the TMC convo is the fact that what goes on in some feminist organizations goes on in the workplace more generally; lack of mentoring among women is not a problem among feminists alone. Men have been pulling each other up the ladder for centuries; women are newer at it, and perhaps, in an economy of scarcity where there’s still the perception that only so many women can hold top positions in corporations or have their own break-even nonprofit, women have not yet mastered the art of sharing power. I absolutely salute the younger women who are forming clubhouses of their own, but I agree with Patti Binder, who comments:
But is that really the best and most effective message larger organizations have to give younger women? Don’t feel welcome here so go elsewhere and do your own thing?
Again, the feeling of rejection is mutual. WomansSpace, a self-identifed second-waver, comments:
It never occurred to me that your generation wouldn’t even bother to read second wave literature. That is a painful rejection when I can so clearly remember, in a zen sense, thinking about your face, long before it existed….I do not own feminism. I was but a tiny cog and was part of its creation and Ms. Valenti’s understanding and mine are so different and they are different in places where I hurt. I want to see continuity in what I helped start and instead of continuity…. well I see naked, anorexic, long haired women on trapezes.
Ouch. But there IS continuity. It’s just hard to see it amidst all the emotion and commotion–as I write about in my book. I look forward to the day when we stop fighting each other and see our way through to the larger issues that threaten all women’s integrity and well-being.
Time to turn my attention from only-childhood to sisterhood.
I’ve been following the thread on TPC in response to Jessica Valenti’s “Feminist Sorority†and am struck once again by the way feminists are repeating the personal, political, ideological infighting of the past—only this time, with a generational veneer.
I salute Jessica for raising these issues, and I can’t wait for the release of her book (I’m with those who think the cover is savvy, though I understand the critique). It’s the response to her article that concerns me more than the article itself. So much pain, accusation, and hurt—on both sides. Where is this taking us?
Coming back from a talk I gave at Rowan University last week to kick off Women’s History Month, where the audience was part NOW founders, part undergraduates, and part faculty/staff, I’ve been thinking a lot about how young(er) women and veteran feminists can speak to each other in tones that enable their message to be heard. And the need for media-savvy feminists to forge bridges that steer the conversation away from intergenerational catfight and back to the issues we care about in common. I sincerely believe we have more in common than contradiction. And that the ever-widening age gap has the potential to diminish us all.
Though I more often ponder the through-lines and continuities, the differences between feminisms of different generations sometimes just kinda hit you over the head. Note the difference in these titles:
There’s feministing.com founder Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. (Be sure to check out Rebecca Traister’s interview in Salon this week.)
And there’s former 9-5 director Ellen Bravo’s new book, Taking on the Big Boys: Why Feminism Is Good for Families, Business, and the Nation.
‘Nuf said.
On other fronts, throwing a bone to those of us (ok, us writers) who are obsessed with the question of how other books actually sell, the New York Times reports today on sales figures for a number of recent “mommy books,” including Leslie Bennetts’. (thank you, Laura!) Word on the street on how they sell? They don’t.
It’s a hot week for feminism here in NYC, and particularly for two of my favorite under-30 feminist mentors:
Courtney Martin hits the road with Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, while personal hero and a founder of feministing.com Jessica Valenti goes offline this week with her first book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters – a book she says she wished she had read as a teenager. Damn. Me too.
Excerpts of each are here:
Courtney on AlterNet
Jessica in The Guardian
For those of you not yet addicted to feministing.com, some classic, vintage words from Jess — who gets an undue amount of public flack from conservative detractors and misogynist wackos — may sway you to check it out:
Where criticisms about my loud, opinionated ways might bother me if I wasn’t a feminist, the fact that I am means that I know that there’s nothing wrong with me, but only with a world that doesn’t want women to speak their minds.
Such words have got to sound familiar to “second-wave” veterans. I’ll be eager to see what the response is from an older generation to these new, important voices. Jessica wrote her book because, among other things, she believes that “All women, especially younger women, deserve feminism in their lives – and most don’t have access to the university courses or feminist mentors who might introduce them to it.”
A third book out this week by another next-generation writer I have yet to meet but already admire: Kara Jesella’s How Sassy Changed My Life. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “a behind-the-scenes, warts-and-all look at the magazine’s office culture, including sections on the glossy’s coverage of feminism, celebrity and girl culture….[T]he book—written in a style reminiscent of the magazine itself—is a testament to a publication that changed the face of teen media.” Sounds like a fun romp through the recent past at the very least.
And as if these three offerings weren’t enough for one week, check out this tidbit from Bjork on feminism (courtesy of feministing.com)
Feminism dead my a**.
It may be cliche, but it’s true. Gen Xers of a progressive bent are known to wax nostalgic. Born too late, we feel we somehow “missed out” on the good ole days of badass activism — anti-war teach ins, Civil Rights sit-ins, feminist girlcotts, and the like. But today, when I read about a campus-wide Global Warming Teach In in the Boston Globe, my heart skipped a beat. Check it out – it’s taking place at Framingham University, next week.
As the Globe tells it, students in a ceramics course will be developing concept pieces based on their reactions to a global warming film. Government students will discuss the ongoing political debate and ramifications for public policy. Philosophy students will consider the moral and ethical considerations of how humans treat the Earth. Mathematics students will study the statistical rationale supporting global warming. In sociology professor Virginia Rutter’s class, students will analyze a recent report by the UN panel showing that impoverished nations, which have contributed the least to global warming, would potentially suffer the most from its consequences. Rutter will be asking students to answer the question, “What are reasonable burdens for people to take on?”
Rutter, one of the Teach In’s organizers, tells the Globe:
“We’re always looking for opportunities to connect the concepts and theories to things that are happening in the world, things that help people feel the vitality of things we’re engaged in….[When it comes to global warming, we] don’t have a horse in the race about what policies make sense…But we have an interest in putting it on the table so that as a community we can think about it.”
Sorry, Pam, but Virginia Rutter just became my new favorite sociologist.
As a postscript, maybe yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban on so-called partial birth abortion — an UTTER assault on women’s reproductive health rights — will finally be the prompt that wakes us all up? Sit-ins, teach-ins, girlcotts — bring ’em on. We’re in deep shit here. Be sure to check out Lynn Harris’ coverage on the ruling Salon.
Tonight I’m going to hear Leslie Bennetts interviewed by Elissa Schappell at the New York Public Library. Bennetts is also speaking at a salon I’m a part of, next week. So, to prepare for said events, I excitedly started reading her book, The Feminine Mistake — how can anyone who has written about Betty Friedan pass up a book with such a title? But the prologue itself gives me pause. Not for the reasons expressed by the “stay at home brigade,” as Bennetts calls them in her retort on HuffPost to the barrage of opening critiques she’s received from SAHMs, but on behalf of my generation.
Well-intentioned and heartfelt, Bennett’s writing nevertheless positions younger women as in need of cautionary tales. Some of us, no doubt, do, and Feminine Mistake is full of important information about what happens when opt-out wives get left. But many others of us clamor instead for tales of workplaces that have realized women (AND men) have families. Where are the cautionary tales aimed at corporations about how bottom lines suffer when they fail to retain their women? Or the cautionary tales aimed at young husbands about how miserable they’ll be if they opt out of time at home with the kids?
Thumbing ahead, Bennetts writes about the difficulties of reentering the work force and the penalties women pay for their time out (and the need for crucial changes in the divorce laws). But the tone set early on (and Leslie, please tell me I’m off – I want to be – I’m still in the early chapters) seems to focus on personal decision-making, rather than much-needed structural (aka workplace) change.
Wait – I’m switching to second person, so let’s go with it:
Leslie, you completely have me when you wrote that the real issues behind women’s work/life predicaments have nothing to do with words like “choice” and “values.” But then you write about the “willfully retrograde choice” of women who opt out on the very next page. If you ask me, the “feminine mistake” has been — to borrow a phrase from my elders — a focus on the personal at the expense of the political, the structural. I think you and I will both agree that words like “options” are meaningless until we are talking about viable workplace options — not the “option” to work or not.
A personal postscript: Raised to be my own person and divorced at 35, I have never for a moment expected that a husband would support me for the duration. These young women who keep appearing in print are certainly not the majority. As I thought Heather Boushey of the Center for Economic Policy Research rather convincingly documented, the “opt out” phenomenon named by Lisa Belkin back in 2003 was not hard evidence of a generation bailing on work but rather a dip in women’s labor market participation due to a recession. Why do young mothers, instead, keep getting castigated, warned, and blamed? (I’m thinking of other books here…more soon.)
Well, March came and went, but hey, it’s never too late for a Women’s History Month post, right?
So first, my congrats to the 2007 honorees of National Women’s History Month. Very cool, I thought, that the theme was “Generations of Women Moving History Forward,” and that Third Wave Foundation’s Executive Director Monique Mehta was among the honorees.
And speaking of history, last week I contacted the scholars behind this terrific online resource called “The Second Wave and Beyond.” Check it out. It’s still under development. Lookin forward to seeing it grow.
Previous post aside, I find that I can’t help but somehow join the fray–though I offer these thoughts in the hope of increasing understanding on both sides. In response to the TMC thread, where commentors ask why do young feminists want to be included by established organizations / movements to begin with:
Of COURSE rejection is disappointing to younger women who want in to older women’s clubhouse—and why wouldn’t they want in? These are good jobs, with good benefits, for the most part, in organizations that younger feminists believe in. Something missing from the TMC convo is the fact that what goes on in some feminist organizations goes on in the workplace more generally; lack of mentoring among women is not a problem among feminists alone. Men have been pulling each other up the ladder for centuries; women are newer at it, and perhaps, in an economy of scarcity where there’s still the perception that only so many women can hold top positions in corporations or have their own break-even nonprofit, women have not yet mastered the art of sharing power. I absolutely salute the younger women who are forming clubhouses of their own, but I agree with Patti Binder, who comments:
But is that really the best and most effective message larger organizations have to give younger women? Don’t feel welcome here so go elsewhere and do your own thing?
Again, the feeling of rejection is mutual. WomansSpace, a self-identifed second-waver, comments:
It never occurred to me that your generation wouldn’t even bother to read second wave literature. That is a painful rejection when I can so clearly remember, in a zen sense, thinking about your face, long before it existed….I do not own feminism. I was but a tiny cog and was part of its creation and Ms. Valenti’s understanding and mine are so different and they are different in places where I hurt. I want to see continuity in what I helped start and instead of continuity…. well I see naked, anorexic, long haired women on trapezes.
Ouch. But there IS continuity. It’s just hard to see it amidst all the emotion and commotion–as I write about in my book. I look forward to the day when we stop fighting each other and see our way through to the larger issues that threaten all women’s integrity and well-being.
Time to turn my attention from only-childhood to sisterhood.
I’ve been following the thread on TPC in response to Jessica Valenti’s “Feminist Sorority†and am struck once again by the way feminists are repeating the personal, political, ideological infighting of the past—only this time, with a generational veneer.
I salute Jessica for raising these issues, and I can’t wait for the release of her book (I’m with those who think the cover is savvy, though I understand the critique). It’s the response to her article that concerns me more than the article itself. So much pain, accusation, and hurt—on both sides. Where is this taking us?
Coming back from a talk I gave at Rowan University last week to kick off Women’s History Month, where the audience was part NOW founders, part undergraduates, and part faculty/staff, I’ve been thinking a lot about how young(er) women and veteran feminists can speak to each other in tones that enable their message to be heard. And the need for media-savvy feminists to forge bridges that steer the conversation away from intergenerational catfight and back to the issues we care about in common. I sincerely believe we have more in common than contradiction. And that the ever-widening age gap has the potential to diminish us all.
