How I Got Bored With Feminism

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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.

Feminism in 2009? At the question, I confess, a certain mental tumult reigns.

On the one side, like one's middle-aged spread: one's middle-aged disillusionment.

Back in the slogan-spouting Sisterhood-Is-Powerful days of the early 1970s, I was in college and as Amazonian and labyris-wielding as they came. (To judge by photographs, frighteningly so.) My feminism—ardent, quixotic, fairly lame-brained—was linked to my budding homosexuality. I actually believed that radical lesbian separatism was a Superb Idea and would necessarily lead to the happy meltdown of the system of male domination. Woman, man, fish, bicycle—that sort of thing. Snake priestesses. All of it wore off, of course—especially as one lived in the world a little and discovered, indeed, that individual women could be just as venal, self-interested, and wicked as individual men, if not more so.

Over the course of the 1980s—despite the fact that I became a scholar-academic who taught and wrote about English and American women writers—I gradually jettisoned any urge to say I was doing "feminist" research. By the 1990s, the term itself had started to turn the students off in a big way and I was getting pretty sick of it too. "Feminism" had come to seem, well . . . just the teeniest bit tiresome. An enthusiasm of one's youth. And even now, as a pawky and jaded 50-something English professor, I remain fairly alienated from the ossified feminist rhetoric that one still finds in university settings. Women's studies programs often strike me as comical Jurassic throwbacks: bizarre cultic redoubts in which small cadres of now-gray-haired secular nuns devote themselves to recreating some swampy dream-past in which Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Ti-Grace Atkinson roamed the earth.

Ironically, my lesbianism had something to do with this disenchantment with mainstream or "institutional" feminism. There was always a difficulty, of course (even in the 70s one had puzzled over it): namely, what one's straight "sisters" were going to do. How would they ever reconcile a putative belief in women's emancipation with what so often seemed an utterly depressing erotic and psychological fealty to men? No doubt the fact that one was often trying—quite literally—to entice these poor benighted ladies away from various annoying husbands or boyfriends and squire them off to Lesbos intensified one's incomprehension and dismay.