I remember reading Marilyn French's The Women's Room, her 1977 novel about the world of oppressive, forced domesticity that was the expected lot of women of her generation—French just died at age 79—and being so grateful that world had broken apart because of women like her. Her obits in the Times and the Post show French remained a woman of the second wave of feminism —who saw the institutional oppression by men everywhere and who retained a burning anger about it. Probably she was angry that young woman didn't share her anger. But why should they be incensed about their oppression when they live in a world in which their opportunities are abundant and assumed? As I was reading her obituaries, and feeling that she had become an anachronistic figure, I saw this line quoted from her 1992 book, The War Against Women: "“Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.” She suddenly didn't seem so anachronistic anymore, since every day we read in both the Times and the Post about the inroads the Taliban is making into Pakistan. We are living in a time when women on the other side of the world have to worry about having acid thrown in their faces for wanting to go to school, a time in which a nuclear power is ceding territory to a group which beats, even murders women, for leaving the house unaccompanied by a man. Saudi Arabia does not allow its female citizens to drive. A few years ago they let schoolgirls trapped in a fire burn to death because if the firemen rescued them they'd see the girls not completely covered. The urge to dominate—and obliterate—is frighteningly present.

Tags: Marilyn French, Saudi Arabia, second wave feminism, Taliban

While we are on the subject of elderly female pathbreakers, Emily—and before the 30th anniversary of her ascent to the British prime ministership passes—maybe it’s worth reflecting for a minute or two on the career of Margaret Thatcher. Long before Hillary, decades before Sarah, there was, after all, Maggie: The idea that female politicians can run important countries, make tough decisions, get elected and re-elected to office is not actually all that new.

What is extraordinary about Thatcher, in retrospect, is how unimpressed she was by her own groundbreaking role, and yet how feminine she remained while holding what had been, up until then, an exclusively masculine job. She was not a member of the all-male clubs where the Tory party allegedly made its secret decisions, but she didn’t seem to care. She was often the only woman in the room, but didn’t appear to be in the least intimidated. At the same time, nobody ever mistook her for a man. On the contrary, she had, in the words of then-French president Francois Mitterand, “the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe.” Gorbachev called her the “Iron Lady.” She was immaculately dressed and coiffed, and never wore trousers. She terrified many of the men who worked for her. Once, she famously snapped across the cabinet table at Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer: “Nigel, get a haircut.”

Though sometimes criticized for not helping other women make it in politics, this is not entirely fair: In fact, Thatcher set the stage for the rise of a whole generation of prominent female politicians. Since her prime ministership, women have run the British foreign office, the Home office, the Northern Ireland office, and many other important parts of the government. In the past decade or so, women broadcasters, political columnists and newspaper editors have become commonplace in the U.K.—more so than in the U.S. I can’t help but think Thatcher’s example had a role in that, too. Because she was a conservative, feminists have never wanted to claim her as a role model, and have never celebrated her achievements. But as time goes on, her premiership looks more revolutionary, not less.

Tags: Margaret Thatcher

Apparently, if you launch a website for women in 2009, the most important question is whether or not it's feminist. At least, that's what you'd think, judging by today's launch of the women-oriented website you're reading. Only, the funny thing is, I thought feminism was dead. I mean, didn't we kill it already?

At best, it seems odd to judge a 21st century production by the politics of a decades-old movement, the relevance of which has been dubious for years now. The sense I get reading Jezebel's dismissive, snippy critique, which seems to amount to "you're a bunch of old farts, blppph," or Tracy Clark-Flory's more considered missive is that the only way to judge a female-oriented site is by whether or not it's "feminist." What gives? Aren't we over that already? I could have sworn feminism was cultural road kill, at this point. And isn't it intellectually reductive and culturally retarded to imply that the only site for women worth doing is one that follows an abstract set of political rules upon which no one can agree? It seems to me that "feminist" sites like the aptly-named Feministe are interested in having it both ways. They want all the power their feminist foremothers promised them—and the right to play full-time victims of the patriarchy. Get over it. Get on with it. I hope the feminist mantle doesn't fit Double X. I hope this site is bigger than that. I want to be more than a victim of the patriarchy, go farther than the feminist movement ever did, spend less time reading about women who are wondering if their supposed sisters are doing "the right thing" in terms of antiquated political concepts, and get the hell on with doing it already.

Tags: double x, feminism, Jezebel

Though I was not qualified to be a secretary when I was 25 (nor am I now, 35 years later, based on the super organized executive assistants I've run into since then), I would certainly have been affronted to be mistaken for one as Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote she was when she shared an elevator with a veteran newswoman at the New York Times three years ago. The younger woman was quitting a great job, with nothing lined up, to move to Boston with her fiancé and she took the job confusion, and the older colleague's advice the couple's next compromise should benefit her, as condescending and patronizing. But the remarks were hardly as insulting as the Generation Y writer's ungrateful description of another encounter with the same superior recalled in Double X yesterday, "as I stood there looking at her rumpled suit and dated hair and frown lines, I was overwhelmed with pity."

Mangu-Ward, not yet 30, admits she was able to "breeze into life" in part because of feminist values the older woman had adopted and compromises she refused to make. The senior co-worker ungracefully offered career and education advice that was not relevant to the Yale-educated departing researcher because, by 2006, her prospects were already stellar. She was "free to make professional and romantic choices in a far better world" than when her would-be mentor had started out. Mangu-Ward still has years of energy-filled opportunities rolled out before her including, not insignificantly, newly created media to showcase her work.

The talented but callow writer doesn't say whether she has children though she sniffs at endless discussions on "work-life balance." Still in kindergarten when The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades was released, the recently married journalist has still not arrived at the age when, if you lose a night of sleep, it shows on your face for a week. When the lines of her life's success (perhaps not as "laboriously carved out for herself" as that of the middle-aged feminist), add character and gravitas to her visage, I hope she will have something she's proud of to pass on to future daughters and the young women she will encounter when her elevator is going down.

Tags: post feminism

Our first week at Double X is drawing to a close. And we’ve heard all sorts of responses. We’re not feminist enough. We’re too feminist. We say we’re not feminist but then we talk a lot about feminism. We (and Slate) are ghettoizing women. First, I want to second my co-editors Hanna and Emily in what they wrote yesterday and today about why we wanted to create Double X and its relationship to Slate. Second, I want to take this moment to clarify some things about the disparate points of view you’ll find on the site.

The spirit animating the site is the spirit of debate. We do not edit the blog posts before they go up, or read them over to make sure they all hew to a single party line. And so XXFactor blogger Susannah Breslin, for example, may have one take about feminism, while our essays reflect another. When we at Double X have said that we’ll have a “feminist” viewpoint, we do not mean that this viewpoint will be doctrinaire or singular—or even that every piece will have a “feminist” angle. For example, for our launch, we asked a range of women to answer our question, “What is the primary problem facing women today? What is today’s problem that has no name?” Many of the essayists in our symposium chose to point to the problems with feminism itself. We did not coach the responses, or set out to hack feminism off at the knees. The essays reflected the writer’s own views.

And that’s, in our view, as it should be. We created Double X so that readers and writers would get to hear women’s voices raised in cacophonous debate—not in well-oiled agreement. As editors, we believe in the importance of discussing issues of women’s equality and identity, and we are not afraid of the word itself. But some of our bloggers and contributors might not agree with us. Maybe they’ll be cacophonous and contradictory for a while. So be it. That’s the reality of where we are the moment. Let the arguments continue.

Tags: double x, feminism, feminists

A guest post from Linda Hirshman: 

In responding to my column, “The Trouble With Jezebel,” Jaclyn Friedman writes that I "said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts." 

Friedman says she is paraphrasing. Definition: "to rephrase, summarize, reword, interpret, translate, restate." Only problem: Something like the words used to paraphrase must be there in the first place. I have never used the word slut in anything I have ever written, and, after a lifetime of advocating and defending feminism, hope I never would. And far from accepting the possibility of rape, I urge all women to resist it, including by invoking the power of criminal law enforcement to punish rape and protect other women. I understand that it is not feel-good news to point out the vulnerability of freedom and the ineluctable fact of nature that women are, on the whole, smaller, weaker, and vulnerable in the course of childbirth and nursing and therefore vulnerable to larger, stronger men, much less that they have a responsibility to one another’s safety. I am prepared to defend what I say. But not what I don’t say. No matter how angry you are, there is no reason to groundlessly accuse a woman with 40 years in the feminist movement of calling a whole group of women sluts.

Tags: Jezebel, Linda Hirshman, Rape

Meghan, thanks so much for posting about the importance of female mentorship. I'm no physicist (anymore) but with many friends plus a mom in science, I am especially sensitive to the need for and frequent lack of XX mentorship in these disciplines. We've all heard reports that Americans lag behind in the hard sciences generally—but less reported is the fact that women rarely take on the quant-heavy jobs that do exist, or that tenured female science and engineering faculty are almost nonexistent. Then there are the other, real disadvantages talked about in the Fisman/NBER report.

Some of this, of course, has to do with lifestyle choices (cough, kids) that take female mentors out of the workplace. Some of this has to do with a distinct confidence deficit among junior and mid-level female workers that keep them from being top brass (one former employer told me that the women who interviewed for jobs often had better resumes than the men, but couldn't sell themselves in person, and lost the job). But can't we also blame men in these disciplines who are less willing to mentor young women? Perhaps they are just not that into helping women along; or fearful that accusations of impropriety might fly. But in male-heavy fields, what's wrong with dudes lending a hand?

Enter "Smart Girls At The Party." This may seem like an oblique reference, but somehow, this regular ON Network show—featuring Amy Poehler and friends supporting young women in hilarious, Christopher-Hitchens defying fashion—really speaks to me on the issue of underrepresentation and female mentorship. In this episode, a charmingly gregarious second-grader named Ruby broke it down on friendship, feminism and more, while Poehler and company, veterans of improvisational comedy, provide a real-time example of their craft to the little tot. That is to say they offer an enthusiastic "YES" to her every suggestion—including weeping on demand. Watch:

May Ruby grow up to have a fine career in psychotherapy, or pop stardom.

Tags: feminism, mentors, smart girls at the party, women, women in the workplace

In this month’s Harper’s Bazaar, Naomi Wolf has penned an absurd, overwrought, swooning love letter to Angelina Jolie, the woman who, in Wolf’s analysis, most fully embodies “having it all.” It’s just about impossible to read this piece and simultaneously remember that Wolf is a serious feminist and thinker. She has bent her erudition to the plainly ridiculous, plainly thankless task of explaining that, because Angelina Jolie is a symbol of both goodness and sexiness, she is a better, more complete woman than Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Taylor. Apparently, if Mother Teresa had made time to screw hotties between her busy orphan-caring schedule she would be as awesome, important, admirable and transcendent as Jolie. Seriously, this article is hilarious.

Wolf’s not the first writer to postulate that Angelina Jolie is the world’s most superior female. (For those of you who watch Battlestar Galactica, at least we can be certain she's the world’s most likely cylon). Back in 2007 Esquire ran a cover story on Jolie that drooled, “One could make the argument that she is the most famous woman in the world. Why not, then, just go ahead and make the argument that she is the best woman in the world, in terms of her generosity, her dedication, and her courage?” Rather than respond, “Uhm, Why Not? Are you kidding?!” Wolf has opted to further Esquire’s cause. Jolie is, in Wolf’s estimation, the “’Ego ideal’ for women—a kind of dream figure that allows women to access, through fantasies of their own, possibilities for their own heightened empowerment and liberation.” And here I thought she was just a pretty cool, pretty thoughtful movie star. My mistake.

What is it about Jolie in particular that inspires this sort of heightened drivel? In the presence of a celebrity who is not a totally useless, self-involved sack of shit must magazines start spewing the most deranged hyperbole? Why must Jolie be “the best,” instead of just what she is, a famous person who is aware of the larger, deeply troubled world?

Just for fun, I want to leave you with the paragraph that made me cough up my orange juice:

Then there is the plane. Women are so used to being dependent on others (certainly on men) for where they go, metaphorically, and how they get there. Flying a private plane is the classic metaphor for choosing your own direction; usually, that is a guy thing to do, yet there was Jolie, with her aviator glasses on, taking flying lessons so she could blow the mind of her four-year-old son. That is the ultimate in single-mom chic: Even before she had reconstructed a nuclear (or postnuclear) family with a dad at the head of it, she was reframing single motherhood from a state of lack or insufficiency to a glamorous, unfettered lifestyle choice. Paradoxically, having done so, she makes the choice of a man to help her raise her kids seem like one option among many for a self-directed woman rather than either a completion of a woman or a capitulation.

Did you get that single moms? If you want to be the "height of single mom chic"—And who doesn't!— time to start coughing up the cash for private flying lessons and babysitters. The most superfantastical woman in the universe flies planes and, if we're serious about being women, and serious about being feminists, we all must try to be more like her.

Tags: Angelina Jolie, feminism, Naomi Wolf, Perfect Woman

Lera Loeb, fashion blogger and self-described "mail-order bride," takes to the pages of Glamour to defend her relationship. Given the power a citizen can wield over a foreigner desperate for a green card, we're all familiar with stories of this kind that end badly. But Loeb's marriage is happy, and hers is a story about stigma; encounters with women who ask "Are you allowed to go out alone?" and "Do you have a curfew?" On a deeper level, it's a story about how marriages motivated by economic need—that is, most marriages in the history of mankind—become taboo when the meaning of marriage shifts to shared interests rather than shared production, love rather than poverty. The old model is somehow threatening, much as new forms of marriage are thought to devalue the institution.

There is an incredible scene in this paper (PDF) on immigrant brides by sociologist Pei-Chia Lan, in which a Taiwanese immigration officer sarcastically interrogates a Vietnamese woman coming into the country with her handicapped Taiwanese husband. “Do you actually love him, or are you just doing this for economic reasons?" the official taunts. "You only met him for two days [before getting engaged]! How romantic!" The official was in a position to decide whether this marriage was valid in the eyes of the state, and economic motivations were taken to be somehow faulty, even criminal. As Lan puts it, "The officer applied polarized dichotomies to characterize the intentions of marriage migrants—voluntary moves versus trafficking, marrying for love versus marrying for money, authentic romance versus bogus union ... These presumptive values devalue traditional marriages as an institutional arrangement of extended families for economic or political exchanges."

Loeb defies the dichotomies Lan lays out; she says she loves her husband, and she married him to get the hell out of the Ukraine. Can we accept that she is better off with the freedom to marry for the right of residency, and hope for love later?

Tags: mail-order brides, marriage and commitment

During Michelle Easton’s half-hour speech at the National Conservative Student Conference, the audience responded in unison at all the right moments—cheering when Sarah Palin was referred to as a “gun-toting, moose-hunting former beauty queen," booing when a photo of Gloria Steinem appeared on screen.

Easton sped through a recitation of things that are bad for women (women’s studies classes, the Vagina Monologues, Take Your Daughter to Work Day) and people who aren’t (Palin again). But cracks in the anti-feminist façade appeared as soon as the Q&A started. The first questioner was a young woman who identified herself as a physics major from a small school in Wisconsin. She was conservative, she said, but she thought there were some good things to be learned in women’s studies classes. She wanted to know, “how women can proclaim their feminist ideas when they’re in a Republican environment, without being considered a loony.”

Easton was temporarily flummoxed. “Well,” she said. “I just told you why that’s not a word that I choose to use…” and then rehashed her reasons for hating the word “feminism,” what with its association with bra-burners and man-haters. But she didn’t engage the heart of the question, which wasn’t about vocabulary. It was about why so many conservatives refuse to entertain even the possibility that feminists might be right about some things.

I caught up with Easton’s questioner after the session was over. Her name is Charlotte Evans; she is on her way to becoming the first woman to graduate from Ripon College’s physics program, and she’s all set to join ROTC. This girl is going to be an engineer for the Army—she should have some serious conservative street cred, right?

Wrong. Even though Evans agrees with Easton on most political issues, she’s in the uncomfortable position of knowing that Easton probably doesn’t have much use for her interest in Betty Friedan.

Evans’ desires aren't complicated, but they're conflicting: she wants a good job that she got because she earned it, not because she has two X chromosomes. (Classic conservative, this one!) She wants to be able to get that job in a traditionally male field. (What a feminist!) Because she wants both, she finds herself trapped in conference rooms where she listens to people boo the women she has learned to respect, if not always agree with. That leaves her with another desire: “I want to be able to identify myself as a feminist without being looked down upon.”

Photograph of a woman at the Republican National Convention by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: feminism, Gloria Steinem, Republicans, Sarah Palin