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Drowning in the Shallow End: Third Wave Feminism

In the 1990s a new generation of women heralded the dawn of a new feminist era. But does declaring a “new wave” - particularly one that equates individual lifestyle choices with activism, consumer power with feminism, and diversity with racial equality - make for a feminist social movement?

Heather Tirado Gilligan explores this issue through interviews with feminist scholar Jane Elliott, Colorlines managing editor Daisy Hernandez, lesbian filmmaker Aishah Simmons, and Chicana feminist Cherrie Moraga. Gilligan proposes feminists drop the wave metaphor and organize around the less socially palatable but more pressing goal of addressing inequities.

Drowning in the Shallow End

By HEATHER TIRADO GILLIGAN

JULY/AUGUST 2009 CONDUCIVE

I’ve puzzled for most of my adult life about the third wave of feminism, longing for a connection with an organized and active women’s movement that always seemed just beyond my vantage point. I searched diligently for it in my undergraduate and graduate careers, in quests that led me to join women’s groups and co-found a feminist blog. I read countless collections and many first-person essays. And after almost 15 years of searching, I’ve finally come to the disappointing conclusion that the designation third wave is a profound misnomer, and that looking for a groundswell is a fool’s errand. Even as I had that thought last year, calls for the fourth wave began in earnest, though again, as of this writing, no feminist tsunamis are evident.

Feminism has been so utterly focused on the engagement of new generations and the faults of the past that it has for some time misplaced its sense of purpose in the nowAfter a disappointing wade into the shallow third wave, I’ve come to think that the watery metaphor should be tossed out altogether, and our focus aligned away from the coming of the next bout of sisterhood-is-powerful. Instead, we should set our sights on tangible, civic-minded outcomes: documenting and protesting the inequality that still structures women's lives in the United States< and abroad, for example, rather than debating the nature of feminism itself. In this work we can perhaps inspire generations to come, but more importantly, we will create productive action today. Feminism has been so utterly focused on the engagement of new generations and the faults of the past that it has for some time misplaced its sense of purpose in the now.

FIRST WAVES

StantonCroppedSmall Our understanding of feminist movements as waves, and our insistence on a fresh movement every decade, is largely to blame for this stagnation. Calls for a new feminist movement ten years after the self-proclaimed third wave in the 1990s suggest that a wave can simply be summoned and belie the profound social disruption that entitled first and second generation feminists to be deemed movements by history. When the first wave of feminism began in 1848, women could neither hold property nor vote, were denied access to education, were legally subject to their husbands, and were forbidden, by law and social construct, to participate in public life. In this social context women and men gathered at Seneca Falls, New York and Elizabeth Cady Stanton issued the Declaration of Sentiments, announcing on behalf of attendees that women had been subjugated by men since time immemorial, but would be no more. Among the resolutions: " it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise." In 1920, more than seventy years of work after this Declaration was issued, women won the right to vote. Along the way, women across lines of race and class developed organizational structures and groups to fight for social justice. Though they could vote, women were still denied equal access to citizenship in the United States: there were no marital rape laws, nor sexual harassment laws, women could not obtain credit, were not granted equal access to education, were expected to work in secretarial pools or similar pink collar professions, or as domestic labor depending on their race and class status—the list of legal and social constraints on women's equality is too long and exhausting to complete here. Yet, here are two examples of what women accomplished in 1970, according to a timeline in Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open:

Feminists stage sit ins at Newsweek and Ladies Home Journal and file an antidiscrimination suit against Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. The Feminist Press is started.

On August 26, fifty thousand women march to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the suffrage movement in New York. Feminists drape a huge banner over the Statue of Liberty that says "Women of the World Unite." In forty-two states, women participate in the "Strike for Equality."

SuffrageCroppedSmall Rather than situating feminism in the context of this remarkable history, the focus on newness inherent in our current use of the wave metaphor has made feminism vulnerable to consumerism. The quickest way for younger feminists to appear as the next new hot thing has been to call the second wave passé. "Strident feminism can seem out of place — even tacky — in a world where women have come so demonstrably far," sniffs Ana Marie Cox in a 2006 New York Times review of Katha Pollitt's last collection of essays. The passé problem is particularly evident in the third wave's output, as it seeks to truss up feminism as desirable and sell it to women in their thirties and younger by defanging the political edge of the movement, essentially making feminism marketable. Mainstream feminists organizations are also guilty of trussing up feminism for a new age. The Feminist Majority's "This is What a Feminist Looks Like" ad campaign is a key example of this rebranding: feminists are a pretty, multicultural bunch of men and women who just happen to love equal rights. Palatable, true, but this everyperson definition of feminism is so broad as to be meaningless—what action is expected of women as a result of calling themselves a feminist? (besides perhaps a donation to The Feminist Majority). The result of such fuzzy campaigns, says feminist scholar Jane Elliott, author of the recent book Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory, is a level of feminist engagement comparable to green-minded consumers who call themselves environmentalists after buying a bar of herb-infused eco-friendly soap.

Rather than situating feminism in the context of this remarkable history, the focus on newness inherent in our current use of the wave metaphor has made feminism vulnerable to consumerismIf an easy and palatable feminism is antithetical to feminism's real task—to incite major, structural change—then what has been the use of third wave feminism? At this point, its major accomplishment seems to have been selling books and supporting speaking tours of minor celebrities who have attached themselves to the third wave brand. Where earlier generations of feminism formed press collectives to circulate their work to eager audiences, third wavers find themselves at home in major publishing houses, from Random House to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Viewed kindly, the third wave of feminism ensured that women's rights remained an issue in the public's mind, despite these shortcomings. Viewed uncharitably, a position I am inclined to take, the third wave channeled what was left of the women's movement into mainstream banality.

"The [feminist and woman of color] movements came out of activism," explained poet, playwright, and woman of color feminist Cherrie Moraga in an interview for this article. "The movements came out of social protest. So how can you talk about a third wave feminism when there is no viable activism off the page?"

Bridge_Called_My_Back_2 I see the embrace of the third wave by the mainstream as a symptom of a problem that became clear to me only when I made a career change, leaving a temporary faculty position in a women’s studies program to work as a freelance journalist. At a San Francisco event in March 2008, my first story as a reporter, I covered an evening of conversation between third waver Jennifer Baumgardner and San Francisco writer and artist Ginger Wolf. There, Baumgardner casually remarked that as far as feminist books go, Manafista and Look Both Ways, published by FSG, turn a good profit. Baumgardner also noted that as a journalist, rather than an academic, she didn't read much for the research of her books. Instead, in Look Both Ways, a book about the benefits of bisexuality for women, she conducted a handful of interviews—none with women of color—and relied largely on her own experiences. In one exchange onstage, she remarked that she always wanted the most powerful person in the room to like her, as if this were a manifestation of the female condition, regardless of political inclination or social position. By the end of the evening, I was left livid at the self-assured lack of reflexivity coming from the stage.

The (feminist and women of color) movements came out of social protest. So how can you talk about a third wave feminism when there is no viable activism off the page? – Cherrie MoragaFlipping through Manafista after the talk, a book Baumgardner co-wrote with Amy Richards about lip-gloss, girlie culture, and reclaiming our sexuality and our power (the specifics of the process left up to individual reader), I could not help but think: No wonder so many young women were showing up in my literature-based women's studies classes with a slight sneer for feminism, carrying as it did in its popular iteration the intellectual weight of Cosmo. Sentiments like this populate the book: "You were raised on Barbie and soccer? That's cool!" Casual assumptions of women's shared identity are generalized and tossed out too: "Injudicious niceness, which is a socialized disease, often explains why women tend not to demand equality."

As the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother aged 16 when she moved to the Bronx, I’m glad this was not the version of feminism when I was in college. I would have rejected it resoundingly as in no way speaking to the complexity of my life, or the extent of my ambition. My focus was on my education, and paying my rent and my tuition by myself, not on the minidresses and combat boots I wore.

Fauldi To be fair, Baumgardner and Richards' Manafista came on the heels of older and younger (yet mostly white and middle-class) feminists engaging in a public snipe-fest in the late 1990s. For example, Backlash author Susan Faludi and 1990s feminist and author of The Lipstick Proviso Karen Lehrman exchanged a series of cringe-worthy open letters where Faludi accused Lehrman of misunderstanding and misappropriating feminism. Like me, Faludi was livid about lipstick as a defining metaphor in a feminist analysis. In response to Faludi's critique, Lehrman cries foul and defends her "broader" notion of feminism, writing: "It's true that the orthodoxy is breaking up, and other feminist voices are finally being heard. But that's no thanks to you, Susan." Faludi aims for restraint in much of the exchange with Lehrman; other feminists declined to pull their punches in responding to younger women who sought to sex up feminism for a new generation. "Once, feminists dreamed that sexual equality would free women from the dictates of fashion and the mandate to be beautiful," wrote Wendy Kaminer in The American Prospect. "But that was before the rise of bimbo feminism, which heralded tube tops and tiny skirts as symbols of sexual liberation rather than vulnerability--as if women had been oppressed not by employment discrimination or sexual violence but by sensible shoes." In connecting the girl power movement to pro-sex strands of the second wave of feminism, Manafista makes clear that the authors see their lineage as a continuation of the work of an earlier generation, while firmly embracing individualistic politics, in this way offering up an intergenerational common ground. "I chose my choice!" is how Sex and the City's Charlotte famously put it upon quitting her job after marriage.

The quality—and the significance—of work offered by third wave feminism suffers from this intermediary position. For example, both second and third wave feminists are concerned with violence against women. But while second wave feminist Susan Brownmiller's groundbreaking book Against Our Will: Men Women and Rape helped institutionalize legislative and procedural changes and attacked the idea that women “were asking for it,” Jennifer Baumgardner recently began a multimedia public awareness campaign about the continued prevalence of rape to “inspire discussion”. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with public discussions of rape; indeed there is so little wrong with it, so little controversial about it some thirty years after Brownmiller’s game-changing book, I wonder if a third wave campaign is needed to make the point, particularly as it sheds little new light on rape today, other than to point out it still occurs and is still painful, facts noted on an annual basis by the Take Back the Night rallies on college campuses across the U.S.

BACKLASH

These marked contrasts and sharp exchanges between the second and third wave of feminism result from a larger cultural conversation from the turn of the century post-backlash years. The argument engaged in intergenerational spats and the softer approach of the third wave is primarily about popular perceptions of feminists: Are they militant, sexless, and dogmatic or sexy, freethinking, and label-less advocates for equal rights for women (and men)? The problem is, as others including Faludi have noted, this is a false dichotomy. The vision of 1970s feminists as eunuch cranks is not actual history, it's a fantasy produced by the widespread cultural rejection of and ridicule for feminists, perhaps best exemplified by the label feminazi, popularized by Rush Limbaugh' radio show and still widely used to discount any feminist conversation challenging enough to cause discomfort. In this definition, feminism seeks not equality but domination, and feminists are unappealing shrews who systematically stomp out the traditional joys of life: beauty, sex, children, love, and pleasure altogether.

Yet, as the crescendo for anti-feminism built in the 1980s and 1990s, women continued to face very real problems, as noted in Faludi’s Backlash: according to polls conducted at the end of the 1980s, more than 80 percent of women reported unequal pay and job discrimination, complaints of sexual harassment doubled from the 1970s, domestic violence shelters saw a more than 100 percent increase in clients between 1983 and 1987, and sex related murders rose 160 percent from the mid-70s to the mid-80s. Evidence like this shows the women's movement was indisputably unfinished, and the need to press for gender equality wasn't less urgent in the 1980s and 1990s—it was more urgent.

CHOICES

Choice feminism, sometimes also called lifestyle feminism, focuses on such individual practices and choices, hence the central role of first-person narratives in so much of third wave writingRather than dismissing ridiculous claims about the feminists and proceeding with the work at hand, feminists—younger feminists in particular— responded to the caricature of feminists as if it was a reality. To make feminism more appealing and less dogmatic, "choice feminism" arose as a defining element of the third wave, defined by Linda Hirshman in The American Prospect as:

Abandon[ing] the judgmental starting point of the movement in favor of offering women 'choices'… A woman could work, stay home, have 10 children or one, marry or stay single. It all counted as 'feminist' as long as she chose it.

Choice feminism, also called lifestyle feminism, marked a transition from addressing social inequity to a celebration of the individual, focusing so much on personal choices that first-person narrative defines much of third wave writing. Indeed, its genesis was a 1992 first-person article in Ms. Magazine where college sophomore Rebecca Walker, daughter of famed novelist Alice Walker, declared herself the third wave (quite baldly: “I am the third wave,” she wrote).

Walker's dubious honor of being widely recognized as the first third-wave feminist is perhaps the reason that writers of the third wave feel firmly that their take on feminism embodies diversity in a way that second-wave feminism did not. The fact that Walker is the daughter of an African American mother and Jewish father and born of the civil rights movement adds an appealing multicultural tang to the origins of the third wave. Yet rather than addressing the significant differences that separate women and challenge a cohesive women's movement, third wave writers simply draw on diversity to elide the difference between individualism and difference. Manafista, for example, celebrates a multi-racial dinner party early on in the book, detailing the arrival of the authors’ friends from the Mideast, Israel, and the Philippines and the easy flow of conversation, marked by shared concerns rather than difference. "When I got out of college," one friend mused, "I started feeling all of the rage I had been repressing as a good Catholic Filipina growing up in an entirely white suburb." Her experience, sandwiched between reflections on the missionary position and the subversiveness of Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," fits seamlessly with the reflections of all of those in attendance, one individual remark in a mosaic of concerns. Racial oppression in this scenario becomes just one more personal experience on a level playing field of experiences. I call such strange post-racial idylls the "Rachel Getting Married" version of multiculturalism, as that film, with its focus on a well-off family that casually adopted strife-free interracial marriages and friendships, crystallized how multiculturalism becomes a stylish alibi for people living lives drenched with class privilege, but who want nevertheless to understand themselves as bohemian progressives. Diversity here is not a political statement but another enriching lifestyle choice, in line with choice feminism.

The basic problem with this vision of feminism, as Faludi noted in her exchange with Lehrman, is that "for most women, the choices you are talking about are a bourgeois luxury." Women who chose to stay at home or work, to crank out the zines and websites that Manafista touts, even to spend their time reflecting leisurely on their life choices, are for the most part women of a particular class. "My idea of feminism is all about changing underlying socioeconomic conditions," Faludi says pointedly, asking "Is yours?" Lehrman freely admits that it is not, saying that women need equal opportunity, not an equal outcome.

The lack of a broadly imagined social justice continuum in which feminism is placed robs the first person reflections of the third wave of a rightful claim to the slogan "the personal is the political." "Feminism promised that one could become more conscious of the social forces limiting one's life, and that from this new awareness positive change could come. That is what the much-maligned slogan 'the personal is political' meant," Katha Pollitt explains in The Atlantic in 1997. "It's precisely the presence of sisterhood and a women's movement," Faludi argues, "that keeps personal improvement from becoming navel-gazing or consumerism."

Choice feminism's focus is profoundly misplaced, taking up the wrong issues, and not only in its anger directed at earlier feminists. Rather than displacing the idea that feminists are all the same—presumably this was the point of Baumgardner and Richards' description of their dinner party guests—what falls by the wayside is the idea that gender inequality exists, that it affects women disproportionately depending on class status, race, and nationality, and that feminists have a responsibility to address this inequality.

THE THIRD WAVE IS NOT MY CHOICE

I have not met people of color in my age group who identify as third wave feminists- Daisy HernandezI do not mean to tar all feminists of my generation with the same brush; many do not identify as part of the third wave, as I discuss below. There are nuances within the third wave itself that calls for the end of third wave feminism, from writers such as co-founder and publisher of Bitch magazine Lisa Jervis.

"It is easier for feminists ourselves not to pay attention to the real issues that divide us," Elliott argued in our interview. "While there certainly is some feminist disagreement about sexuality [for example], there is very little agreement AT ALL on some of the most pressing issues facing us—for example, how can one political analysis speak to women whose living conditions are so deeply divided by race, ethnicity and class?" Elliott asked. "How can U.S. feminism organize around global issues without becoming an alibi for American imperialism? If we can't offer new approaches to these issues, the real problem with contemporary feminism will be that, despite its zest in testing the truisms of the second wave, it fails to break new ground where we need it the most."

Colonize_This Perhaps the neglect of these serious chasms is why feminists of color and feminists from working class backgrounds dismiss the third wave out of hand. “In my experience, I have not met people of color in my age group who identify as third wave feminists,” said Daisy Hernandez, managing editor of Colorlines and co-editor of Colonize This!, in an interview for this article. “The whole third wave thing—and I’m willing to say that this may be limited of me—but I just really think of that as a white conversation. That’s their thing." Adding that she identifies as a woman of color feminist, Hernandez said much of the discussion of the newness of third wave feminism comes out of an active desire from daughters to separate themselves from the previous generation: “A lot of it is in opposition, a very particular mother-daughter dynamic," Hernandez said, noting many women of color have a very different attachment to the older generation: "We very much see ourselves as proud daughters.” (This is perhaps why Walker, who famously fell out with her mother, noted novelist Alice Walker, felt inclined to proclaim a new movement.)

I never thought of [Rebecca Walker's] vantage point as being very representative- Cherrie MoragaMoraga questions the relevance and legitimacy of the third wave on grounds similar to those indicated by Hernandez. "I never thought of [Walker's] vantage point as being very representative," she said. "Women of color feminism was never about waves," she adds, disassociating her work from the origins of the third wave. Moraga expressed a similar view: "I never thought of [Bridge Called My Back] as third wave feminism."

Other women in their thirties, once eager to sign up for whatever feminism was on offer in the 1990s, express their disappointment with the third wave. "When I was a teenager, I said I was a third wave feminist," said Aishah Simmons, director and producer of "No! The Rape Documentary." "But since I've become an adult, I have not said that I am a third wave feminist." A sense of history and continuity is what Simmons sought in her initial embrace of the term third wave. "I don't feel like we are reminded of feminism," Simmons explained. She contrasted the treatment of feminism in our national culture to the canonization of the civil rights movement, noting that no statues, national holidays, or annual tributes mark feminism in our cultural history. Women's rights are the "result of a hardcore struggle and that isn't out there in the way that the race narrative is," Simmons argued.

But since I've become an adult, I have not said that I am a third wave feminist- Aishah SimmonsThis historical erasure, replaced with a caricature of feminism, is one of the serious challenges posed by the popular backlash against feminism. "I think the major accomplishment of my generation has been in keeping feminism alive in a very difficult political climate," Elliott said. "Although we have had the advantage of the gains second wave feminism made for women, we have also had to face the ascendancy of the neo-cons, the general conservatism created by a declining economy, and the exhaustion and defeatism of the Left."

My take is more pessimistic than Elliott's: rather than reaching a critical tipping point of anger, our generation was redirected. What might have emerged if third wave writers hadn't rushed to respond to the backlash against feminism with partial acquiescence and marshmallow fluff? I ask this question not to lay the blame for women's inequality at the feet of third wave feminists, but rather to urge us not to rush into calls for a new wave of feminism, not to replace the organic and deeply felt with a feminism that is packaged and sold.

FOURTH WAVE

Calls for the fourth wave began in earnest with the demise of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in early 2008 and the blatant, repugnant sexism that so publicly followed her bid for the presidency. Perhaps the most notable call was Amanda Fortini's New York Magazine article "The Feminist Reawakening: Hillary Clinton and the Fourth Wave," which appeared in April 2008 and documented a revival of feminist feeling among thirty-something and older women and on the part of the author herself. "To those women succeeding in a man's world," Fortini writes of the days before Hillary's run, "the problems wrought by sexism seemed to belong to other women." Fortini's description of the attacks that followed Clinton are perhaps more rousing today, as the vitriol that surrounded the former presidential candidate was largely put to rest by her primary loss and subsequent appointment to secretary of state. This, therefore, is a slap of a reminder:

The egregious and by now familiar potshots are too numerous (and tiresome) to recount. A greatest-hits selection provides a measure of the misogyny: There’s Republican axman Roger Stone’s anti-Hillary 527 organization, Citizens United Not Timid, or CUNT. And the Facebook group Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich, which has 44,000-plus members. And the “Hillary Nutcracker” with its "stainless-steel thighs." And Clinton’s Wikipedia page, which, according to The New Republic, is regularly vandalized with bathroom-stall slurs like "slut" and "cuntbag." And the truly horrible YouTube video of a KFC bucket that reads HILLARY MEAL DEAL: 2 FAT THIGHS, 2 SMALL BREASTS, AND A BUNCH OF LEFT WINGS. And Rush Limbaugh worrying whether the country is ready to watch a woman age in the White House (as though nearly every male politician has not emerged portly, wearied, and a grandfatherly shade of gray). And those two boors who shouted, "Iron my shirts!" from the sidelines in New Hampshire…

Calling for a wave does not a movement make, and manufacturing one will only invite us to continue drowning in the shallow endThe undeniable sexism that surrounded Clinton recalls the consciousness raising of yore, yet despite these auspicious beginnings, a fourth wave of feminism cannot help but repeat the mistakes of the third. Calling for a wave does not a movement make, and manufacturing one will only invite us to continue drowning in the shallow end. Broadening the third wave's general focus on women's rights invites the likes of Sarah Palin to brand herself as a quasi-feminist role model, as if "strong woman" and "pro-women" were interchangeable terms. Continuing with the wave metaphor damns us to replicate the same ineffectual model of early twenty-first century feminism. The wave metaphor should not splash along at the expense of the progressive change we still desperately need.

We have long passed the time to stop our navel-gazing as feminists and resume our work on behalf of ourselves and other women; we can wait for and argue about the coming of another wave no longer. Our rights, such as they are, were won by the tireless work of earlier generations of feminists, and obligate us to correct the inequality that continues to structure women's lives, starting right now.

CONDUCIVEMAG.COM

Author Bios:

Heather Tirado Gilligan is a writer based in San Francisco. She has taught literature in English, Women's Studies, and Black Studies departments. For more information on her work, visit her website: heathertgilligan.wordpress.com.

Nikki Jones contributed reporting to this article. Jones is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book, Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence, will be released by Rutgers University Press in October 2009.