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.

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 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 to talk—and disagree—about their sense of Friedan-ian submission to the breast pump, 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 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 one, and that there is progressive pleasure in seeing an African-American woman celebrated for her femininity and as a fashion plate.

Tags: Betty Friedan; feminism;

Rebecca Traister is a senior writer for Salon.com, where she covers women in media and politics. She is at work on a book about women and the 2008 election.

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