The New Language of Feminism

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be? Read the other responses here. [2]

We’ve still got problems. But these days, we’ve got names for them. We’ve got names coming out the wazoo. Now we just have to figure out how to use them to have a contemporary conversation.

Many of the terms that were handy forty years ago—women’s liberation, the patriarchy, consciousness-raising—now stand as veteran soldiers, too bowed by time to fight. Many no longer accurately describe a world in which graduate schools are equally populated by women and men, and in which birth control and abortion are legal, if not always accessible. Today ladies play sports, sit on the Supreme Court, drive trucks, fight fires, and write Saturday Night Live. They run companies, and govern states and state departments.

But those circumstances don’t mean that there aren’t still battles to be fought—over reproductive health and poverty, education and sexuality, politics and the media, and on and on.

Indeed, one of the challenges before women is how to use the language available to them to reconcile the newness of the world with the continuation of very old conversations. (Friedan’s days at home, after all, did not include pounding out content about “sexting” before breakfast; nor could she click to video of a Pakistani teen being flogged for violating sharia law.) Women learn every day that it is possible to make enormous strides and still find the terrain unnervingly familiar.

The division of domestic labor remains a depressingly vivid example, one that is central to women’s economic independence and professional achievement. Hopefully, we will soon find ways to talk about it without combining the word mommy with the word wars. Many of us now know stay-at-home dads, but toy companies still make television ads [3] in which little girls bake muffins and sing, “I love when my laundry gets so clean/ taking care of my home is a dream dream dream.” If Friedan struggled to articulate the degree to which she felt bound to the vacuum cleaner, a device that was supposed to make her life as a housewife easier, her granddaughters haven’t freed themselves from their own restraints. They’ve just found the words [4] to talk [5]—and disagree [6]—about their sense of Friedan-ian submission [7] to the breast pump [8], a device that was supposed to make their lives as working mothers easier.

Decades after critics pointed out that Friedan’s nameless problem was experienced only by women who were wealthy and white enough to be trapped in their own houses to begin with, we remain engaged in complex exchanges about the intersections of race, class, and gender, even when we talk about things that are brand new, like having Michelle Obama in the White House. Some have wrung our hands [9] over how the First Lady has been celebrated mostly for her maternal and wifely persona, her shapely arms and sartorial sensibilities. But others have pointed out that Obama’s choice to “stay home” at the White House and prioritize motherhood is itself a transgressive [10] one, and that there is progressive [11] pleasure in seeing an African-American woman celebrated for her femininity and as a fashion plate.

Old words like sexism, misogyny, and prejudice remain all too relevant. But in order for them to remain supple, not brittle, the way we use them must evolve. In 2005, I wrote [12] about how badly damaged the word feminism was, tainted not only by the movement’s own fraught history of exclusion, but by successful campaigns to elide it with a vision of hirsute humorlessness. Four years later, you can’t swing a cat in this blogosphere without hitting a feminist blog. They chronicle everything from law [13] to Hollywood [14] to “celebrity, sex and fashion [15],” to gaming [16] to the lingering ambivalence about the word itself [17]. Today, young [18] celebrities [19] crow [20] about their feminism. Those “This is what a feminist looks like [21]” shirts are ubiquitous; HBO is making a pilot about a feminist academic called Women’s Studies.

Wise critics will say that a cable comedy does not a revolution make, and they are correct. Leavening and popularizing the language of gender politics will result (and has already resulted) in a loss of intellectual rigor and political heft. It’s a cost, and perhaps a steep one. But it is what must happen if feminists are to move into the future carrying anything of their foremothers with them. The informality, irreverence, saltiness, and frequently scattered focus of a new, young feminist culture may frustrate some. But it is a crucial development. It makes a broader, more inviting space for feminist conversation—dissenting, angry, hopeful, distracted, superficial, grave, fierce, friendly or funny—that has been muffled for the decades in which young women with a point to make began with the desperately dishonest disavowal, “I’m not a feminist, but…”

Friedan’s problem is not solved. The campaign launched by her peers is not won. But today’s battles must take place at a different pitch than those that were fought forty years ago. We must repurpose old words or come up with new ones. We need to laugh more, at ourselves and at foes. We need to think harder about whose voices are not getting heard. As the recession leaves more men at home, there is a chance to readdress the shifting burdens of childcare and housework, which means adjusting the very definitions and descriptors of masculine and feminine behavior.

And this time, feminists must build a lexicon that they are prepared to defend with confidence and brio against those who will inevitably attempt to turn it against them. As a very modern heir to Betty Friedan said not long ago, bitch is the new black.

Illustration by Deanna Staffo.