The Most Memorable Feminist Moments of the Decade

This decade has brought us many memorable moments for feminists, starting with Britney Spears’ rise and ending with Jenny Sanford’s exit. Here are the ones that have lingered with our DoubleX contributors. Think of this less as a definitive timeline than a kind of wiki list, with a slightly haphazard, whimsical feel. It is long on journalism and books and short on international events, for example. We decided to use not the standard of “good for women” but rather “memorable.” This produced entries ranging from the heroic to the maddening, Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest to Larry Summers’ gaffe. Several entries landed at both extremes—Sarah Palin most obviously.

Some of our contributors tried to veto suggestions—Ann Coulter’s book was a candidate for elimination, as was the advent of Trader Joe’s, which brings great fast food to the table. But for the most part we left them all in—even Paris Hilton—in the spirit of sparking debate. We counted books and magazine stories, political events, movies and pop culture. Nonetheless, we are sure we missed some. We are thinner, for example, in the early part of the decade. We are counting on you for your superior memories and your strong opinions. Please post all additions, revisions, objections, suggestions in the comments or on our Facebook page [2]. If you add a lot, we will post an updated version of the list after the new year.

May 2000: Britney Spears releases Oops! ... I Did It Again [3], which sold 1 million copies in its first week and marked the peak of the teen girl idol.

September 2000: Susan Faludi writes Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man [4] and defines the modern crisis of masculinity.

November 2000: Judy Martz, Sila Maria Calderon, and Ruth Ann Minner are elected the first female governors of Montana, Puerto Rico, and Delaware.

January 2001: President George W Bush, newly installed, announces he will reinstate the "global gag rule" that bans organizations from receiving USAID funds if they mention “abortion” when counseling women.

May 2001: Barbara Ehrenreich publishes Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America [5], posing as a waitress to shed light on the working poor.

June 2001: Debut of the Bratz dolls, the racially indeterminate, sassy successors to Barbie.

November 2001: U.S. forces help to overthrow the Taliban, which kept Afghan women as virtual prisoners in their homes.

April 2002: Ann Coulter’s book Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right [6] hits No. 1 on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, turning her into an anti-feminist star.

October 2002: Christina Aguilera releases her sexually charged album Stripped [7], arguably killing the squeaky-clean girl image of the pop idol.

November 2002: Linda Lingle, Olene Smith Walker, and Jennifer Granholm are elected the first female governors of Hawaii, Utah, and Michigan.

January 2003: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc writes Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx [8], a saga about a decade in the life of a poor Puerto Rican mother.

March 2003: Right-hand rings are marketed to the single woman who “needs no one's permission to treat herself.”

July 2003: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala becomes the finance minister of Nigeria, doing so much to rescue the nation’s economy that she is mentioned as a potential successor to World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz.

August 2003: Bush extends the global gag rule for family planning abroad to State Department aid.

December 2003: The Simple Life [9] premieres, and Paris Hilton rises to fame as the famous girl with no particular talent.

August 2003: Laura Kipnis writes Against Love: A Polemic [10], dissecting domestic love and praising the single life.

October 2003: Lisa Belkin writes “The Opt-Out Revolution [11],” about educated women who choose to stay home with their children.

November 2003: Congress passes the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.

January 2004: Kathleen Blanco becomes the first female governor of Louisiana. Criticized for her mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, she did not seek re-election.

January 2004: The L Word [12] premieres, making lesbian life hip and mainstream.

February 2004: Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl nip slip stirs debate on sports and sex, and mainstream porn.

February 2004: The final episode of Sex and the City [13] airs. Carrie fails to get married.

March 2004: Caitlin Flanagan writes “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement [14]” about the nanny wars.

April 2004: First reports that the Taliban are re-emerging.

April 2004: Forbes lists Oprah Winfrey as the first black woman billionaire in world history.

July 2004: Teresa Heinz Kerry says Laura Bush never had “a real job.”

October 2004: Wangari Maathai became the first African woman, and the first environmentalist, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace."

November 2004: Voters in 11 states pass bans on same-sex marriage. More states follow suit with ballot measures in 2006 and 2008.

January 2005: Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, says women do not have the same “innate ability” as men in some fields, and several female professors walk out of his talk.

February 2005: Susan Estrich lashes out at Michael Kinsley about the lack of female op-ed writers

February 2005: The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan writes about Condoleezza Rice’s dominatrix boots [15].

July 2005: First BlogHer conference is held, heralding the rise of women’s blogs, including Jezebel, feministing, feministe, and Salon’s Broadsheet.

October 2005: Harriet Miers is nominated for the Supreme Court, then withdraws.

November 2005: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf becomes the first female president of Liberia.

November 2005: Angela Merkel becomes the first female chancellor of Germany.

January 2006: Michelle Bachelet, a single mother of three, is elected the first female president of Chile.

February 2006: Portia Lucrecia Simpson Miller is elected Jamaica’s first female prime minister.

June 2006: Larry Summers resigns as president of Harvard.

August 2006: Plan B birth control goes over-the-counter.

September 2006: Katie Couric anchors CBS Evening News

October 2006: 30 Rock [16] premieres, making Tina Fey a heroine to smart, bespectacled girls everywhere.

January 2007: Nancy Pelosi becomes speaker of the House.

January 2007: Hillary Clinton announces her candidacy for president, saying “I’m in.”

January 2007: Apple announces the iPhone, the first smartphone women buy in greater numbers than men.

January 2007: Oprah Winfrey starts the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls.

February 2007: Harvard appoints Drew Gilpin Faust as president.

February 2007: Bald pictures of Britney Spears appear. This is the nail in the pop-girl coffin.

February 2007: Dutch Muslim feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali publishes her memoir, Infidel [17].

April 2007: Jon and Kate Plus 8 [18] premieres, taking mother mania to a new extreme.

June 2007: Knocked Up [19], the first of Judd Apatow’s bromances, appears, stealing the chick flick from women.

July 2007: Mad Men [20] premieres, putting its spotlights on feminist progress and outlandish curves.

August 2007: Trader Joe’s, which makes packaged food that seems home-cooked widely available, is named one of the top-grossing supermarket chains.

October 2007: Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner becomes Argentina’s first female president.

December 2007: Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto is assassinated

January 2008: Gloria Steinem argues that it’s sexist not to support Hillary.

January 2008: Demi Moore turns 40(ish) and poses in a bikini for V magazine.

February 2008: Hillary wins the Ohio Democratic primary and shows she is serious contender.

March 2008: Silda Wall Spitzer, wife of New York governor Eliot Spitzer, stands by her husband’s side as he announces his weakness for call girls.

April 2008: Miley Cyrus poses wrapped in a bed sheet in Vanity Fair, officially ending her innocence.

June 2008: Hillary makes her concession speech: "Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it."

August 2008: John McCain picks Sarah Palin as his running mate.

September 2008: The Rachel Maddow Show premieres.

September 2008: Rwanda elects the first female-dominated legislature.

September 2008: Palin does her excruciating interview with Katie Couric.

October 2008: Angelina Jolie appears on the cover of W breast-feeding one of her twins.

October 2008: McCain puts women’s health in air quotes, in answering a question about abortion in the final presidential debate.

January 2009: Iceland elects the first openly gay world leader, Johanna Sigurdardottir.

March 2009: Elena Kagan becomes the first female solicitor general.

April 2009: Hanna Rosin writes “The Case Against Breastfeeding [21].”

April 2009: Susan Boyle of Britain’s Got Talent becomes a YouTube sensation with her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” despite her unplucked eyebrows and general lack of TV grooming.

May 2009: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi goes on trial in Burma for violating terms of her house arrest.

May 2009: Ursula Burns becomes CEO of Xerox.

My 2009: Dalia Grybauskaite becomes Lithuania’s first female president.

May 2009: The California Supreme Court upholds Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment that limits marriage as being between a man and a woman.

May 2009: Elizabeth Edwards publishes Resilience [22], her book about coming back from her husband John Edwards’ betrayal.

June 2009: Christina Nehring publishes A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century [23], which takes aim at the companionate marriage.

June 2009: Neda Agha-Soltan is captured on video dying, after having been shot at an Iranian street protests, and becomes the face of the revolution.

June 2009: Obama gives a speech at Cairo University that some view as equivocating on women’s rights, saying: “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality.”

August 2009: Sonia Sotomayor becomes the third female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, after much debate over a speech she made suggesting that a “wise Latina woman” might have better insight into judging than a white man.

September 2009: Meg Whitman announces her candidacy for governor of California.

September 2009: ABC premieres Cougar Town

October 2009: Gail Collins releases When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present [24], a definitive history of the modern feminist movement.

October 2009: Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn (and one man) win the Nobel Prize in medicine, Elinor Ostrom wins in economics, and Herta Muller wins in literature.

November 2009: Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, announces she will run for Senate in California.

December 2009: Lady Gaga meets the queen of England.

December 2009: Jenny Sanford, wife of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, responds to the announcement of her husband’s affair by filing for divorce. Elin Nordegren follows suit in leaving Tiger Woods.