Why I'm Proud to Be a Feminist

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]

I can remember as though it were yesterday the moment when I first applied the words second-class citizen to myself, and stared into their ramifications. I had grown up the child of uneducated, Jewish, working-class immigrants in a middle-class, Christian country governed by the educated and the native-born; but these problematic elements of identity seemed as nothing, in 1970 in New York City, compared with what I now perceived to be an unalterable stigma of birth: I had been born into the wrong sex. The world would have to change radically before that would stop mattering.

And it still does. The second wave of American feminism is now in a period of quietude, even of setback. After nearly 40 years of noisy activity on behalf of women's rights, a large part of the country thinks the revolution's been won, another large part thinks what feminists have accomplished amounts to a drop in the bucket, and yet another part remains irredeemably opposed to feminist values. Women half my age, living lives that would have looked unimaginably "liberated" to me when I was young, continue to experience the kind of sexism that wears at the nerves.

If ever we needed proof of the ongoing existence of primitive sexism, we got it in spades during Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidential nomination. She was trashed all over the country-in the papers, on television and on the Internet-solely, repeatedly, insultingly, not as a Washington insider, or as a senator who endorsed the Iraq war, or as a member of a would-be political dynasty, but as a woman. She was routinely characterized as strident and aggressive: criticized on her hair, her clothing, her figure; called an uppity woman on television; and on the Internet one could see a notice that read, "The bitch is back '08", as well as a video of a man at a rally screaming at Clinton, "Iron my shirt."

And then, as though adding insult to injury, along came Sarah Palin.

A shock felt round the country was being administered to anyone who wanted to believe that simple woman-hating was a thing of the past. Here we had an eminently qualified woman contending for a presidential nomination and failing, at least in part because she was demonized as a dragon lady; then we had a shamefully unqualified woman handed a vice presidential nomination, at least in part because she was a walking advertisement for Mrs. America. Taken together, the two events revealed clearly that whatever the gains for women have been over these past years, they are by no means solidly in place.

At the same time, it was thrilling to see thousands upon thousands of women (and men, too) rise up in righteous anger against the sexism inherent in both Clinton's defeat and Palin's ascent. The twin occurrence politicized people who, until that moment, had not thought they had feminist politics. Their protest was a measure of how deeply the idea of equality for women has actually penetrated the culture's shared sensibility, and a salutary reminder that resistance to the idea continues on well into yet another century.

The modern women's movement dates from the 1792 publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [3], the remarkably radical treatise that posited: Women need to use their minds more than they need to be mothers and wives, in the same way that men need to use their minds more than they need to be fathers and husbands. Not instead of, just more than.

Every 50 years since that time, the movement has raised its head, opened its mouth, made yet another effort to have that sentiment heard, absorbed, and acted on. Each time around, its partisans have been renamed-New Women, Odd Women, Free Women, Liberated Women-but in actuality they are always the same women. And while they have had different issues to take up-the right to vote, or divorce, own property, go to medical school-their underlying message has always been the same. The conviction that men by nature take their brains seriously, and women by nature do not, is based not on an inborn reality but on a cultural belief-similar to the ones stigmatizing Jews, blacks, homosexuals-that speaks to our deepest insecurities. It reveals an historic anxiety-over extending to woman recognition of her irreducible humanity-that defies rational understanding.

It is, I think, safe to say that the question of equality for women, each and every time around, opens a Pandora's box of fear, hope, and confusion that is existential in its very nature. Behind the idea that it is natural for women take an equal part in the world-making enterprise lies an internal self-division-a conflict of social will regarding actual egalitarianism-that is, at this moment, far from clarified. But to live one's life in service to that ultimate clarification-whether in a period of quietude or of activism-seems to me a privilege.