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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.
I've never read The Feminine Mystique. Betty Friedan's articulation of "problem that has no name" was an influential snapshot of a particular problem in a particular point of time. But the feminism of the first and second wave has never been the feminism (or the womanism) of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. For example, take the question of whether to work. What some women struggled with as a point of politics, my foremothers had done simply as a matter of survival. Feminism framed the issues in a way that spoke to different women from all walks of life-then presented solutions that tended to favor women of a certain race and class.
I felt this familiar ache when I came to my own feminist understanding at an early age. Frustrated with everything from petty gender slights to larger, more sprawling issues, I was thrilled to find a movement that seemed made for me. Eating up books like Jennifer Baumguardner's and Amy Richard's Manifesta and reading Bust and discovering words and phrases like patriarchy and sexual assault filled me with hope. Finally, words to express what I had been feeling! But the luster of feminism soon started to fade. I read anthology after anthology without hearing from a single woman of color. I started to feel pushed out of conversations when I introduced complicating factors like race or class to feminist analysis. I began feeling a rift forming between myself and other feminists over these issues: the idea that I could speak on issues important to their communities, but they would never deign to return the favor. I started to feel like feminism wasn't for me after all.
This is not an uncommon feeling. Starting with (and probably before) Sojourner Truth's landmark 1851 "Ain't I A Woman" speech to the Combahee River Collective's 1986 statement condemning feminism for racist actions and a lack of understanding of the need for racial solidarity, many women of color-black women, in particular-dip deep into the well of feminism and find the water too tainted with racism and classism to drink.
Feeling alienated, I began dabbling on the outskirts of feminism. I stopped being concerned with this one word, and started truly looking. Where is there work toward true equality and not just equal-opportunity oppression? Where are our rights and our lived experiences being respected? Who is covering new ground, instead of having the same cyclical arguments about the same three issues?
I gravitated to hip-hop feminism, a movement started by the pioneer hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan. In her groundbreaking 1999 effort, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, Morgan captured much of the distaste I felt about mainstream feminism. Calling for "a feminism that fucks with the grays," Morgan was the first to speak to the complex nature of reconciling ideals with day-to-day life. Real life is messy, complicated, full of bargaining and negotiations and a constant need to re-evaluate our carefully considered stances on-well, just about everything. Ambiguity is a part of life, but is so often expelled from the hard stances that feminism supports. Through hip-hop feminism, I found essays that spoke directly to my experience, written by young urban women grappling with everything from misogyny in the lyrics we like to grind to on dance floors to perspectives on choice beyond the yes/no abortion debate to the idea of simultaneously fighting and reclaiming beauty standards in a world that devalues brown skin, kinky hair, and fuller figures.
SNL: Equal Opportunity Objectifiers
Jon Hamm spent most of the Saturday Night Live episode he hosted last night shirtless.
Confessions of a Woman Comedy Writer
Allison Silverman accepts one from New York Women in Film & Television (and tells us why it's rare).
Comments
Feminism
By: paulwilliams | Wed, 09/16/2009 - 17:39
Hm... this post has really changed my perception of feminism... I never understood it though(i mean feminism)
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By: MikeYoung | Sun, 08/30/2009 - 07:12
I don't think. We have different aims and different reasons for being feminists. Online Essay
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I like your ideas. Very
By: samueljaxon | Thu, 07/23/2009 - 05:47
I like your ideas. Very interesting article and helpful for writing research papers on Feminism.
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Third wavers seem to be
By: james090073 | Thu, 07/23/2009 - 04:18
Third wavers seem to be striking out into the multicultural and transnational aspects of feminism, trying to be more welcoming of those who aren't the upper middle class white ladies who kicked off the organized movement.
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Fiorenza has certainly coined
By: james090073 | Thu, 07/23/2009 - 04:18
Fiorenza has certainly coined a more pointed and useable term for the act that results from such a concept, and I look forward to reading her work in regards to women and Christianity.
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@octobia: This column/series
By: klucassm | Thu, 05/14/2009 - 09:22
@octobia: This column/series of responses from contributors is meant to address the question, "what's today's problem with no name?" Betty Friedan coined the term, but having read TFM isn't a prerequisite for having an opinion on women's participation and places in today's society or the current state of feminism.
As a third wave feminist of the Millennial generation (stop calling me a post-feminist Gen Y'er!) the responses I'm seeing from the DoubleX contributors is starting to get on my nerves- and worry me. From Susannah Breslin's "I'm not a feminist because feminism is narrow and passe but I'm not" post in the XX blog to Linda Hirshman's take-down of Jezebel, it's clear that there is even less definition of what feminism is within DoubleX than there is within the movement as a whole.
Latoya Peterson's essay is excellent because she's right that the concept of a single movement is outdated. I think we have a network now. The second wave versus third wave distinction, for example, goes beyond generational lines now to cut into areas of focus and emphasis as well. Second wavers tend to associate their feminist action and outlook with the big political organizations such as NOW and concentrate on legal battles. Third wavers seem to be striking out into the multicultural and transnational aspects of feminism, trying to be more welcoming of those who aren't the upper middle class white ladies who kicked off the organized movement. Not just trying to be accommodating, but actually interested in hearing the perspectives of those people and shifting our own opinions because of it. Neither wave is better than the other, I don't think. We have different aims and different reasons for being feminists. We agree at a core level that within our society women are valued differently and as less than men in ways that are often artificial and frequently harmful, and we want to do things to change that.
a broader feminism
By: octobia | Thu, 05/14/2009 - 08:50
LaToya Peterson makes some excellent points. I notice however, that though she is clearly well-read, beyond my own feminist and sociological reading, she opens her essay by admitting she never read the book she's writing about! What kind of insights can she provide without going to the source? I confess I barely remember it, having read it on its release in paperback a generation or so ago, but I do remember the impact on me and others. As a teenaged woman, it seriously shifted my view of the reality around me, and the experience of women everywhere -- because if the myths of the life I knew were exploded, it seemed to me, then there were other myths that were equally invalid, and other voices who would be tellng the truth in those arenas.
So here is LaToya Peterson's voice, speaking her truth. And I admire that. But it's hardly a new idea that the second wave of feminism spoke loudly to middle and upper class western women. It's also hardly a new idea that we should expand that vision to be deeper, more complex and more widely cast. What I find troubling is the ease with which we dismiss our foremothers' thinking and efforts. Would LaToya be in the position she is in without those leaders? Would any of us? DoubleXX seems to be bent on severing itself from the roots. What a dreary way to claim one's identity!
Kyriarchy
By: Sihaya | Wed, 05/13/2009 - 22:17
"Pioneered by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, kyriarchy illuminates the reality that all oppressed people are not necessarily working toward the same ends. Indeed, sometimes the power structures designed to benefit white heterosexual men are upheld by members of historically marginalized groups hoping one day to ascend to that throne. That power of that transformative idea is monumental."
Yeah, I think Paulo Freire wrote about that in "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" about forty years ago. He wrote that oppressed peoples take on the language of their oppressors when they seek and gain power, and that it's a tough cycle to break. Fiorenza has certainly coined a more pointed and useable term for the act that results from such a concept, and I look forward to reading her work in regards to women and Christianity. Yay, something to read! I can continue to be an armchair blowhard. :)
Another thing the sociologists get into is the idea of layered social identities - we all carry a whole batch of social idenitities, and we all prioritize those identities, including race, creed, family, gender, nationality, etc. Sojourner Truth was defending her feminism in "Ain't I a Woman?," but she was also speaking to quite a few southern suffrage organizations that weren't accepting black women - her race had been prioritized as her identity for her. Sociologists, on the whole, tend to find that women de-prioritize their identity and rights as women in preference for those they find either more important or more defining of their own personal identities.
So yeah, your explanation is brilliant and concise, as far as I'm concerned.