Women’s liberation movement in Washington, DC, August 26, 1970.
Women’s liberation movement in Washington, DC, August 26, 1970. Don Carl Steffen/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained
If you have no idea which wave of feminism we’re in right now, read this.
By Constance Grady@constancegrady Updated Jul 20, 2018, 9:57am EDT
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If one thing’s for sure, it’s that the second-wave feminists are at war with the third-wave feminists.
No, wait, the second-wavers are at war with the fourth-wave feminists.
No, it’s not the second-wavers, it’s the Gen X-ers.
Are we still cool with the first-wavers? Are they all racists now?
Is there actually intergenerational fighting about feminist waves? Is that a real thing?
Do we even use the wave metaphor anymore?
As the #MeToo movement barrels forward, as record numbers of women seek office, and as the Women’s March drives the resistance against the Trump administration, feminism is reaching a level of cultural relevance it hasn’t enjoyed in years. It’s now a major object of cultural discourse — which has led to some very confusing conversations because not everyone is familiar with or agrees on the basic terminology of feminism. And one of the most basic and most confusing terms has to do with waves of feminism.
People began talking about feminism as a series of waves in 1968 when a New York Times article by Martha Weinman Lear ran under the headline “The Second Feminist Wave.” “Feminism, which one might have supposed as dead as a Polish question, is again an issue,” Lear wrote. “Proponents call it the Second Feminist Wave, the first having ebbed after the glorious victory of suffrage and disappeared, finally, into the sandbar of Togetherness.”
Introduction: Gender and Work in the Global Economy
Work is an arena in which gendered processes intersect with multiple social inequalities to influence what jobs people have, how they experience those jobs, and whether those jobs provide them with
secure, fulfilling and upwardly mobile careers, or relegate them to insecure, dead-end, dangerous, or
even degrading labor. In the US, hard work is supposed to lead to a whole host of social and material
rewards (i.e., respect, power, a house, a car, a yacht). The context surrounding hard work, for instance
whether that work is paid or unpaid, compensated at a minimum wage or six-figure salary, is gendered
in deep and complex ways. As we mentioned previously, childcare is hard work that is often underpaid
or not paid at all and is most often done by women. Furthermore, even if women do not perform most
of this work themselves, certain career trajectories are forced on them, and they are placed in lower
paying and less prestigious “mommy tracks” whether or not they choose this themselves. We can also
see institutionalized labor inequalities at the global scale by looking at who cares for North American
children when middle-class mothers take on full-time jobs and hire nannies, typically immigrant
women from Eastern Europe and the Global South, to care for their children.
22.
Gender and Work in the US
Now, more than ever, women in the US are participating in the labor force in full-time, year-round
positions.1
This was not always the case. Changes in the economy (namely, the decline of men’s
wages), an increase in single-mothers, and education and job opportunities and cultural shifts created
by feminist movement politics from the 1960s and 1970s have fueled the increase in women’s labor
force participation. Dual-earner homes are much more common than the breadwinner-homemaker
model popularized in the 1950s, in which women stayed home and did unpaid labor (such as laundry,
cooking, childcare, cleaning) while men participated in the paid labor force in jobs that would earn
them enough money to support a spouse and children. It turns out this popular American fantasy, often
spoken of in political “family values” rhetoric, was only ever a reality for some white, middle-class
people, and, for most contemporary households, is now completely out of reach.
Though men and women are participating in the labor force, higher education, and paid work in nearequal numbers, a wage gap between men and women workers remains. On average, women workers
make 77% of what men make. This gap persists even when controlling for educational differences, fulltime work versus part-time work, and year-round versus seasonal occupational statuses. Thus, women
with similar educational backgrounds who work the same number of hours per year as their male counterparts are making 23% less than similarly situated men. So, how can this gap be explained?
Researchers put forth four possible explanations of the gender wage gap: 1) discrimination; 2) occupational segregation; 3) devalued work; and 4) inherent work-family conflicts.
Most people believe discrimination in hiring is a thing of the past. Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act
passed it has been illegal to discriminate in hiring based on race or gender. However, although companies can no longer say “men only” in their hiring advertisements, they can make efforts to recruit men,
such as circulating job ads in men’s social networks and choosing men to interview from the applicant
pool. The same companies can also have non-accommodating family-leave provisions that may discourage women, who they assume are disproportionately more likely to be primary caregivers, from
applying. In addition, discrimination cases are very difficult to prosecute legally since no government
agency monitors general trends and practices, and so individuals must complain about and prove specific instances of discrimination in specific job settings. Hiring discrimination in particular is extremely
difficult to prove in a courtroom, and can thus persist largely unchecked. In addition, even when they
are hired, women working in male-dominated fields often run into a glass ceiling, in that they face difficulties in being promoted to higher-level positions in the organization. One example of the glass ceiling and gender discrimination is the class action lawsuit between Wal-Mart and its female managerial
staff. Although Wal-Mart has hired some women in managerial positions across the country, they also
have informal policies, at the national level, of promoting men faster and paying them at a different
wage scale. While only six women at Wal-Mart initiated the suit, the number of women that would be
affected in this case numbered over 1.5 million. Wal-Mart fought this legal battle over the course of ten
1. Much of the material in this chapter was adapted from a classroom guest lecture by Dale Melcher, given on October 26, 2009.
years (2001-2011). The case was finally decided in June 2011 when the US Supreme Court sided with
the defendant, Wal-Mart, citing the difficulty of considering all women workers in Wal-Mart’s retail
empire as a coherent “class.” They agreed that discrimination against individuals was present, but the
fact that it could not be proven that women, as a class, were discriminated against by the Wal-Mart corporation kept them from being found guilty (Wal-Mart Stores Inc. v. Dukes, et al., 2011). Although
Wal-Mart did nothing to curb its male managers who were clearly and consistently hiring and promoting men over women, this neglect was not enough to convict Wal-Mart of class-action discrimination.
In this example, it becomes apparent that while gender discrimination is illegal it can still happen in
patterned and widespread ways. Additionally, there are a series of factors that make it hard to prosecute
gender discrimination.
“Walmart mall entrance in Pincourt, Quebec, Canada.” by Bull-Doser is in the Public Domain, CC0
Occupational segregation describes a split labor market in which one group is far more likely to
do certain types of work than other groups. Gendered occupational sex segregation describes situations
in which women are more likely to do certain jobs and men others. The jobs women are more likely to
work in have been dubbed “pink-collar” jobs. While “white collar” describes well-paying managerial
work and “blue collar” describes manual labor predominantly done by men with a full range of income
levels depending on skill, “pink collar” describes mostly low-wage, female-dominated positions that
involve services and, often, emotional labor. The term emotional labor, developed by sociologist Arlie
Russell Hochschild (1983), is used to describe work in which, as part of their job, employees must
control and manage their emotions. For instance, a waitress risks being fired by confronting rude and
harassing customers with anger; she must both control her own emotions and help to quell the emotions
91
of angry customers in order to keep her job. Any service-based work that involves interacting with customers (from psychiatrists to food service cashiers) also involves emotional labor. The top three “pinkcollar” occupations dominated by women workers—secretaries, teachers, and nurses—all involve
exceptional amounts of emotional labor.
“An Austrian Airlines flight attendant serving
refreshments to passengers” by Austrian Airlines is
licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Feminized work, or work thought to be “women’s work” is not only underpaid, it is also socially
undervalued, or taken to be worth less than work thought to be “men’s work.” Care work is an area of
the service economy that is feminized, involves intense emotional labor, and is consistently undervalued. Caretakers of children and the elderly are predominantly women. Economist Nancy Folbre (2001)
has argued that care work is undervalued both because women are more likely to do it and because it is
considered to be natural for women to know how to care. Women have traditionally done care work in
the home, raising children and caring for sick and dying relatives, usually for free. Perhaps this is
because women bear children and are stereotyped as naturally more emotionally sensitive than men.
Some feel it is wrong to ever pay for these services and that they should be done altruistically even by
non-family members. Women are stereotyped as having natural caring instincts, and, if these instincts
come naturally, there is no reason to pay well (or pay at all) for this work. In reality, care work requires
learned skills like any other type of work. What is interesting is that when men participate in this work,
and other pink-collar jobs, they actually tend to be paid better and to advance to higher-level positions
faster than comparable women. This phenomenon, in contrast to the glass ceiling, is known as the glass
escalator (Williams, 1992). However, Adia Harvey Wingfield (2009) has applied an intersectional
analysis to the glass escalator concept and found that men of color do not benefit from this system to
the extent that white men do.
Intro to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies 92
“This work” by mimikama is in the Public
Domain, CC0
Finally, the fourth explanation for the gender wage gap has to do with the conflict between work
and family that women are more likely to have to negotiate than men. For instance, women are much
more likely to interrupt their career trajectories to take time off to care for children. This is not an
inherent consequence of childbearing. Many countries offer women (and sometimes men) workers paid
leave time and the ability to return to their jobs with the same salaries and benefits as when they left
them. In contrast, the strongest legal policy protecting people’s jobs in the case of extended leave to
care for the sick or elderly, or take personal time for pregnancy and childcare in the United States is the
Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1996. Under this act, most employers are obligated to allow
their workers to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Unfortunately, few people can afford to be
away from their jobs for so long without a paycheck and this policy remains underutilized. Additionally, only about half of the US work force is eligible for leave under FMLA, because the act only
applies to workers who are employed by companies that have more than 50 employees. On top of that,
many employers are unaware of this act or do not inform their workers that they can take this time off.
Thus, women are more likely to quit full-time jobs and take on part-time jobs while their children are
young. Quitting and rejoining the labor force typically means starting at the bottom in terms of pay and
status at a new company, and this negatively impacts women’s overall earnings even when they return
to full-time work.
93
23.
Gender and the US Welfare State
There are many ways that nations and national policies are gendered. In this section we will focus
on the U.S. welfare state. Here, we do not cover everything pertaining to the welfare state; we clarify
debates and provide examples. Welfare does not only come in its most-recognized form (monthly
income assistance), but also includes subsidized health insurance (Medicare and Medicaid) and childcare, social security, and food subsidies like food stamps. In addition, the U.S. government pays subsidies to corporations, which is called corporate welfare. Most individuals who receive welfare are
stigmatized and construed as undeserving, while the corporations that receive subsidies are seen as
entitled to these. The distribution of welfare in the US is a gendered process in which women, especially mothers, are much more likely to receive assistance than men. Since, at the national level,
women earn less money than men do and often take time away from the labor force, it is more difficult
to maintain a single-parent household on one woman’s income than on one man’s income. This is even
more difficult for women who are working class or poor whose work may not even pay enough to stay
well fed and cared for without additional support from family, friends, or the state.
The Personal Responsibility/Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 effectively
dismantled US welfare policy. As we mentioned previously, the act limits lifetime receipt of welfare to
a maximum of 60 months. In addition, the act includes some gender-specific clauses to address the
political issue of mothers on welfare. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich infamously suggested that children of welfare mothers should be put into orphanages rather than be raised by the
women who birthed them. An incarnation of this sentiment made its way into PRWORA through an
optional state-level clause that would bar mothers who were already on welfare rolls from getting additional money to support any new children (Hays, 2001). This clause, also known as the “family cap
provision,” effectively punishes children for being born and plays into the demeaning and erroneous
stereotype that women on welfare have children in order to get more money from the state. Feminist
political scientist Gwendolyn Mink argues that welfare reform targets poor single mothers and families
of color and contributes to the devaluing of unpaid care-giving work. According to Mink (2009),
through welfare reform, poor single mothers became:
…a separate caste, subject to a separate system of law. Poor single mothers are the only people in America forced by law to work outside the home. They are the only people in America whose decision to bear children are punished by the government…And they are the only mothers in America compelled by law to make
room for biological fathers in their families (Mink 2009: 540).
This example illustrates how state policies devalue the traditionally gendered care work that
women disproportionately perform, target poor women of color as subjects to be regulated, and reinforce heteronormative breadwinner-homemaker gender roles.
In addition, welfare is linked to state policies governing marriage and family life. For example, the
Bush Administration’s Healthy Marriages Initiative, which promoted marriage by providing govern-
ment funding, assumed that marriage reduces poverty. It is true that two incomes are often better than
one. However, not all mothers are heterosexual, or want to be married to the father of their children, or
even married at all. More than that, marriage is no guarantee of financial security, especially people living in impoverished communities where they would likely marry other impoverished people. Most people marry within their current economic class (Gerstel and Sarkisian 2006). Gingrich and others
especially hoped that women would marry the fathers of their children without recognizing that many
women are victims of intimate partner violence. Finally, we are also living in a period in which most
marriages end in divorce. It is clear that this initiative was more about promoting a political ideology
than actually attempting to remedy the social problem of poverty.
Discourses about welfare mothers invoke images that are gendered, classed, racialized, and sexualized.
This phrase speaks to race and sexuality issues as well as gender and class issues. The notions that
women on welfare breed children uncontrollably, never marry, and do not know who fathered their
children are contemporary incarnations of the Jezebel controlling image of Black women as sexually
promiscuous that originated during American slavery (Collins, 2005). This image obscures the fact that
during slavery and after emancipation, white men systematically raped Black women. Although most
people receiving welfare supports are white, and, in particular, most single mothers receiving welfare
are also white, welfare receipt is racialized such that the only images of welfare we seem to see are single mothers of color. As we mentioned before, “the poor” are often framed as amoral, unfamiliar, and
un-American. If instead the receipt of welfare was not stigmatized, but was recognized as something
that families, friends, and neighbors received in various phases of their lives, these stereotypes would
lose traction.
For instance, the mother of one of the authors of this text receives social security for disability checks,
yet is staunchly anti-welfare. This contradiction is sustained by the idea that members of the white middle class do not receive welfare even when they do receive various forms of government support.
Women disproportionately number among those in poverty around the world. The term feminization of
poverty describes the trend in the US and across the globe in which more and more women live in
impoverished conditions, despite the fact that many are working. Women’s unequal access to resources
and the disproportionate responsibility for unpaid work placed on them set up a situation in which
women can either be supported by a breadwinner or struggle to make ends meet. The global economic
crisis and long-standing unequal economic relationships between the Global North—a term that refers
to the world’s wealthier countries—and the Global South—a term that refers to the world’s poorer
countries—have made sustainable breadwinning wages, even among men, hard to attain.
95
24.
Transnational Production and Globalization
Globalization is an oft-cited term that can usefully serve as shorthand. However, this shorthand
runs the risk of lumping together a broad range of complex economic, political, and cultural phenomena. Globalization describes both the benefits and costs of living in a globally connected world. The
Internet was once heralded as the great equalizer in global communications. Certainly, we are now
accustomed to getting news from across the globe from a variety of perspectives. Activists in other
countries, like Egypt and Iran, have famously used social networking websites such as Facebook and
Twitter to report what is happening from the ground, in the absence of formal news sources. Egyptian
activists also utilized these social networking websites to coordinate demonstrations and marches, leading to the Egyptian government to shut down the Internet for several days during the “Arab Spring”
uprisings in early 2011. Globalization makes it possible for social change activists in different countries
to communicate with each other, and for people, information, and products to cross borders, with benefits for some and costs to others. It allows for Massachusetts residents to have fresh fruit in winter, but
lowers the wages of agricultural workers who gather the fruit in tropical countries, supports repressive
government policies in those countries, and increases the carbon footprint of producing and distributing
food. Globalized contexts can lead social movements and state, development and conservation agencies
to influence each other. For example, Colombian activists’ use of neoliberal development discourses
both legitimized the presence of state, development and conservation agencies and influenced these
agencies’ visions and plans (Asher 2009). As such, globalization is not uniformly good or bad, but has
costs and benefits that are experienced differently depending on one’s social location.
Nations of the world are linked in trade relationships. The US depends on resources and capabilities of
other nations to the extent that our economy relies on imports (e.g., oil, cars, food, manufactured
goods). So, how is it that the US economy is still largely profitable? Factories in the US producing
manufactured goods did not simply close down in the face of competition; multinational corporations—corporations that exist across several political borders—made concerted efforts to increase their
profits (Kirk & Okizawa-Rey 2007). One way to massively increase profits is to pay workers less in
wages and benefits. In the US, labor laws and union contracts protect workers from working extensive
hours at a single job, guarantee safe working environments, and set a minimum wage. Thus, American
workers are expensive to corporations. This is why companies based in the US outsource production to
the nations of the Global South where workers’ rights are less protected and workers make less money
for their labor. One consequence of outsourcing is the development of sweatshops (known as
maquiladoras when based in Mexico in particular) in which workers work long hours for little pay and
are restricted from eating or using the restroom while at work (Kirk & Okizawa-Rey 2007). These
workers seldom purchase the goods they assist in producing, often because they could not afford them,
and because the global factories in which they work ship goods to be sold in wealthier countries of the
Global North. These factories predominantly employ young, unmarried women workers in Asia, Latin
America and the Caribbean because they are considered the most docile and obedient groups of work-
ers; that is, corporations consider them less likely to make demands of employers or to unionize (Kirk
& Okizawa-Rey 2007).
“Lindintracuay” by marissaorton is licensed
under CC BY-SA 2.0
Rather than a nation’s workers producing goods, selling those goods back to its people, and keeping profits within the nation’s borders, multinational corporations participate in global commodity
chains. As Cynthia Enloe’s (2008) article “The Globetrotting Sneaker” makes clear, globalization
makes it possible for a shoe corporation based in Country A to extract resources from Country B, produce goods in Country C, sell those goods in Countries D, E, and F, and deposit waste in the landfills of
Country G. Meanwhile, the profits from this production and sales of goods return largely to the corporation, while little goes into the economies of the participating nations (Enloe 2008). Companies like
Nike, Adidas, and Reebok were initially attracted by military regimes in South Korea in the 1980s that
quashed labor unions. Once the workers in South Korea organized successfully, factories moved to
Indonesia (Enloe 2008). This process of moving to remaining areas of cheap labor before workers organize is known as the race to the bottom logic of global factory production.
With the increasing globalization of the economy international institutions have been created. The purpose of these international institutions is, ostensibly, to monitor abuses and assist in the development of
less developed nations through loans from more developed nations. The World Bank provides monetary support for large, capital-intensive projects such as the construction of roads and dams. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) provides loans and facilitates international trade relationships
particularly through structural adjustment programs (SAP). Essentially, in a SAP, a country of the
Global North lends money to another country in the Global South in exchange for resources. For
instance, the US may lend money to Chile to assist with the growth and harvesting of grapes and production of wine. In exchange, the US would acquire grapes and wine from Chile at a discounted rate,
and have control in how Chile spends the money, while Chile repays the initial loan. The problem with
this is that, in many cases, the lending process is circular such that the country accepting the loan
remains constantly indebted to the initial lending nation. For example, a nation may produce most of its
crop to export elsewhere and be unable to feed its own people and therefore require additional loans.
97
Consequences of SAPs are devalued currency, privatized industries, cut social programs and government subsidies, and increasing taxes to fund the development of infrastructure.
Free trade describes a set of institutions, policies, and ideologies, in which the governmental restrictions and regulations are minimal, allowing corporate bodies to engage in cross-border enterprises to
maximize profit. One institution that was created to foster free trade is the World Trade Organization
(WTO), an international unelected body whose mission is to challenge restraints on free trade. Some
countries limit pollution levels in industry; the WTO considers any limits on production as barriers to
free trade. They operate on the theory that unfettered, free market capitalism is the best way to generate
profits. It may be more profitable to pay people minimally and circumvent environmental regulations,
but proponents of free trade do not factor in the human costs to health, safety, and happiness—costs
that cannot be put into dollars and cents. One such free trade agreement is the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994. NAFTA is an agreement between Canada, the US, and Mexico to
promote the unregulated movement of jobs and products. The biggest result of this legislation is the
mass relocation of factories from the US to Mexico in the form of maquiladoras that supply goods at
low prices back to US consumers, resulting in a loss of around 500,000 union jobs in North America
(Zinn 2003). The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) of 2002 expands NAFTA to include the
entire Western hemisphere—except Cuba, due to trade sanctions against its communist government. At
the time of this writing, the impact of these free trade agreements is a hotly contested political issue.
Some people have argued that it resulted in unionized, higher paying jobs, while others have argued
that even with many negative impacts, overall access to jobs, products, and resources has yielded many
improvements. In the face of moves to promote free trade, fair trade movements that support safe
working conditions and sustainable wages have also cropped up, especially in the coffee and chocolate
industries.
The current global economic system is guided by an ideology of neoliberalism. In the contemporary
U.S. context, the term “liberal” is identified with the American Democratic Party, but in terms of political theory, the term liberalism refers to restrictions on state power to prevent government infringement
on individual rights (Grewal and Kaplan 1994), which transcend party affiliations. Economic liberalism, the belief that markets work best without any governmental regulation or interference, describes
the free trade economic policies we discussed above, and should not be confused with the liberalism
associated with the Democratic Party. Neoliberalism is a market-driven approach to economic and
social policy, where capitalism’s profit motive is applied to social policies and programs (like welfare
and taxation), cutting them to increase profits. A crucial project of neoliberalism is the downsizing of
the public sphere and social welfare programs that unions and racial justice activists have fought for
since the early 20th Century. Feminist historian Lisa Duggan (2003) argues that neoliberalism is more
than just the privatization of the economy, but is an ideology that holds that once marginalized groups
(LGBTQ people, people of color, the working-class) have access to mainstream institutions (like marriage and service in the military) and consumption in the free market, they have reached equality with
their privileged peers (straight people, white people, the middle- and upper-classes). Neoliberal ideology therefore assumes that our society has reached a post-civil rights period where social movements
that seek to fundamentally alter mainstream institutions and build up social welfare programs are obsolete. However, as this textbook has shown, mainstream institutions and structures of power often reproduce inequalities.
Intro to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies 98
25.
Racialized, Gendered, and Sexualized Labor in the Global Economy
The structure of the global economy affects people differently not only by the economic situations
of the nations in which they live, but also by gender and race. Predatory trade relationships between
countries roughly reproduce the political situation of colonization in many nations of the Global South.
This has led many to characterize neoliberal economic policies as a form of neocolonialism, or modern
day colonization characterized by exploitation of a nation’s resources and people. Colonialism and neocolonialism are concepts that draw attention to the racialized global inequalities between white, affluent
people of the Global North—historical colonizers—and people of color of the Global South—the historically colonized. Postcolonial theory emerged out of critiques of colonialism, empire, enslavement,
and neocolonial racist-economic oppression more generally, which were advanced by scholars in the
Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas. Postcolonial scholars primarily unpack and critique colonial discourses, depictions of colonized Others, and European scholars’ biased representations of those they
colonized, which they figure as knowledge (for example, see Said 1995 and Spivak 1988). Decoloniality theoretical approaches, emerging chiefly in Latin America, illuminated how colonization invented
the concepts of “the colonized,” “modernity” and “coloniality,” and disrupted the social arrangements,
lives, gender relations, and understandings it invaded, imposing on the colonized European racialized
conceptualizations of male and female (Quijano 2007; Lugones 2007).
Women of color of the Global South are disproportionately impacted by global economic policies. Not
only are women in Asian and Latin American countries much more likely to work in low-wage factory
jobs than men, women are also much more mobile in terms of immigration (Pessar 2005). Women have
more labor-based mobility for low-income factory work in other countries as well as in domestic and
sex work markets. When women immigrate to other nations they often sacrifice care of and contact
with their own children in order to earn money caring for wealthier people’s children as domestic workers; this situation is known as transnational motherhood (Parreñas 2001). Domestic work and sex
work are two sectors of the service economy in which women immigrants participate. Immigrants,
especially undocumented immigrants, have few options in terms of earning money, and economic circumstances are such that undocumented immigrants can make more money within illegal and unregulated markets in nations of the Global North, rather than regulated markets of the formal economy.
Thus, it is not uncommon for women immigrants to participate in informal economies such as domestic
work or sex work that employers and clients do not report in their taxes.
Women immigrants also participate in other parts of the service economy of the Global North. Miliann
Kang (2010) has studied immigrant women who participate in beauty service work, particularly nail
salons. This type of work does not require high amounts of skill or experience and can support women
for whom English is a second language or those who may be undocumented. Like any service job,
work in nail salons involves emotional labor. While clients may see the technician in the beauty salon
as their confidant (like Queen Latifa’s character in Beauty Shop), their relationship is primarily an
unequal labor relationship in which one party is paid not only for the service they perform but also for
their friendly personalities and listening skills. Kang (2010) refers to this type of labor involving both
emotional and physical labor as body labor. To engage in both emotional and physical labor at work is
exhausting. In addition, workers in nail and hair salons work with harsh chemicals that are ultimately
toxic to their health and make them more susceptible to cancer than the general population.
Not only do gendered, racialized, and sexualized differences exist in the US domestic labor market,
leading to differences in work and pay, these differences also characterize the globalized labor market.
Trade relationships between countries and the ideology of neoliberalism that governs them have profound effects on the quality of life of people all over the world. Women bear the brunt of changes to the
global marketplace as factory workers in some countries and domestic, sex, and beauty service workers
in others. Fortunately, fair trade and anti-sweatshop movements as well as indigenous, decolonial, feminist and labor movements are fighting to change these conditions for the better in the face of wellfunded and powerful multinational corporations and global trade organizations.
101
References: Unit IV
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Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21(2): 168–178.
Said, Edward. 1995. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. v. Dukes, et al. 2011. Decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. June
20, 2011. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/10-277.pdf.
Williams, Christine L. 1992. “The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the Female Professions.” Social Problems 39(3): 253-267.
Zinn, Howard. 2003. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York, NY: Harper
Machinists working for Ford Motors attending a Women’s Conference on equal rights on June 28, 1968.
Machinists working for Ford Motors attending a women’s conference on equal rights on June 28, 1968. Bob Aylott/Keystone/Getty Images
The wave metaphor caught on: It became a useful way of linking the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s to the women’s movement of the suffragettes, and to suggest that the women’s libbers weren’t a bizarre historical aberration, as their detractors sneered, but a new chapter in a grand history of women fighting together for their rights. Over time, the wave metaphor became a way to describe and distinguish between different eras and generations of feminism.
It’s not a perfect metaphor. “The wave metaphor tends to have built into it an important metaphorical implication that is historically misleading and not helpful politically,” argued feminist historian Linda Nicholson in 2010. “That implication is that underlying certain historical differences, there is one phenomenon, feminism, that unites gender activism in the history of the United States, and that like a wave, peaks at certain times and recedes at others. In sum, the wave metaphor suggests the idea that gender activism in the history of the United States has been for the most part unified around one set of ideas, and that set of ideas can be called feminism.”
The wave metaphor can be reductive. It can suggest that each wave of feminism is a monolith with a single unified agenda, when in fact the history of feminism is a history of different ideas in wild conflict.
It can reduce each wave to a stereotype and suggest that there’s a sharp division between generations of feminism, when in fact there’s a fairly strong continuity between each wave — and since no wave is a monolith, the theories that are fashionable in one wave are often grounded in the work that someone was doing on the sidelines of a previous wave. And the wave metaphor can suggest that mainstream feminism is the only kind of feminism there is, when feminism is full of splinter movements.
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And as waves pile upon waves in feminist discourse, it’s become unclear that the wave metaphor is useful for understanding where we are right now. “I don’t think we are in a wave right now,” gender studies scholar April Sizemore-Barber told Vox in January. “I think that now feminism is inherently intersectional feminism — we are in a place of multiple feminisms.”
But the wave metaphor is also probably the best tool we have for understanding the history of feminism in the US, where it came from and how it developed. And it’s become a fundamental part of how we talk about feminism — so even if we end up deciding to discard it, it’s worth understanding exactly what we’re discarding.
Here is an overview of the waves of feminism in the US, from the suffragettes to #MeToo. This is a broad overview, and it won’t capture every nuance of the movement in each era. Think of it as a Feminism 101 explainer, here to give you a framework to understand the feminist conversation that’s happening right now, how we got here, and where we go next.
The first wave: 1848 to 1920
People have been suggesting things along the line of “Hmmm, are women maybe human beings?” for all of history, so first-wave feminism doesn’t refer to the first feminist thinkers in history. It refers to the West’s first sustained political movement dedicated to achieving political equality for women: the suffragettes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Woman’s suffrage march in New York City circa 1900.
Woman’s suffrage march in New York City circa 1900. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
For 70 years, the first-wavers would march, lecture, and protest, and face arrest, ridicule, and violence as they fought tooth and nail for the right to vote. As Susan B. Anthony’s biographer Ida Husted Harper would put it, suffrage was the right that, once a woman had won it, “would secure to her all others.”
The first wave basically begins with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848. There, almost 200 women met in a church in upstate New York to discuss “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Attendees discussed their grievances and passed a list of 12 resolutions calling for specific equal rights — including, after much debate, the right to vote.
Cartoon representing feminist speaker denouncing men at the first Women’s Rights Convention in July 1848, in Seneca Falls, NY, where the American feminist movement was launched.
Cartoon representing feminist speaker denouncing men at the first women’s rights convention in July 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, where the American feminist movement was launched. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
The whole thing was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were both active abolitionists. (They met when they were both barred from the floor of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London; no women were allowed.)
At the time, the nascent women’s movement was firmly integrated with the abolitionist movement: The leaders were all abolitionists, and Frederick Douglass spoke at the Seneca Falls Convention, arguing for women’s suffrage. Women of color like Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, and Frances E.W. Harper were major forces in the movement, working not just for women’s suffrage but for universal suffrage.
Portrait of African-American orator, abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth circa 1860; Illustration of Truth preaching to a crowd from a lectern. Hulton Archive; Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images
But despite the immense work of women of color for the women’s movement, the movement of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony eventually established itself as a movement specifically for white women, one that used racial animus as fuel for its work.
The 15th Amendment’s passage in 1870, granting black men the right to vote, became a spur that politicized white women and turned them into suffragettes. Were they truly not going to be granted the vote before former slaves were?
Susan B. Anthony sitting at her desk, circa 1868.
Susan B. Anthony sitting at her desk, circa 1868. Fotosearch/Getty Images
“If educated women are not as fit to decide who shall be the rulers of this country, as ‘field hands,’ then where’s the use of culture, or any brain at all?” demanded one white woman who wrote in to Stanton and Anthony’s newspaper, the Revolution. “One might as well have been ‘born on the plantation.’” Black women were barred from some demonstrations or forced to walk behind white women in others.
Despite its racism, the women’s movement developed radical goals for its members. First-wavers fought not only for white women’s suffrage but also for equal opportunities to education and employment, and for the right to own property.
And as the movement developed, it began to turn to the question of reproductive rights. In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the US, in defiance of a New York state law that forbade the distribution of contraception. She would later go on to establish the clinic that became Planned Parenthood.
In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. (In theory, it granted the right to women of all races, but in practice, it remained difficult for black women to vote, especially in the South.)
Suffragettes hold a jubilee celebrating their victory on August 31, 1920.
Suffragettes hold a jubilee celebrating their victory on August 31, 1920. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
The 19th Amendment was the grand legislative achievement of the first wave. Although individual groups continued to work — for reproductive freedom, for equality in education and employment, for voting rights for black women — the movement as a whole began to splinter. It no longer had a unified goal with strong cultural momentum behind it, and it would not find another until the second wave began to take off in the 1960s.
Further reading: first-wave feminism
A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft (1791)
Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1848)
Ain’t I a Woman? Sojourner Truth (1851)
Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors: Is the Classification Sound? A Discussion on the Laws Concerning the Property of Married Women, Frances Power Cobbe (1868)
Remarks by Susan B. Anthony at her trial for illegal voting (1873)
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929)
Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, edited by Miriam Schneir (1994)
The second wave: 1963 to the 1980s
The second wave of feminism begins with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which came out in 1963. There were prominent feminist thinkers before Friedan who would come to be associated with the second wave — most importantly Simone de Beauvoir, whose Second Sex came out in France in 1949 and in the US in 1953 — but The Feminine Mystique was a phenomenon. It sold 3 million copies in three years.
The Feminine Mystique rails against “the problem that has no name”: the systemic sexism that taught women that their place was in the home and that if they were unhappy as housewives, it was only because they were broken and perverse. “I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor,” Friedan later quipped.
But, she argued, the fault didn’t truly lie with women, but rather with the world that refused to allow them to exercise their creative and intellectual faculties. Women were right to be unhappy; they were being ripped off.
Betty Friedan (top row, fourth from left) with feminists at her home in June 7, 1973. The gathering was described as a session of the International Feminist Conference and included Yoko Ono (second row, center).
Betty Friedan (top row, fourth from left) with feminists at her home in June 7, 1973. The gathering was described as a session of the International Feminist Conference and included Yoko Ono (second row, center). Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
The Feminine Mystique was not revolutionary in its thinking, as many of Friedan’s ideas were already being discussed by academics and feminist intellectuals. Instead, it was revolutionary in its reach. It made its way into the hands of housewives, who gave it to their friends, who passed it along through a whole chain of well-educated middle-class white women with beautiful homes and families. And it gave them permission to be angry.
And once those 3 million readers realized that they were angry, feminism once again had cultural momentum behind it. It had a unifying goal, too: not just political equality, which the first-wavers had fought for, but social equality.
“The personal is political,” said the second-wavers. (The phrase cannot be traced back to any individual woman but was popularized by Carol Hanisch.) They would go on to argue that problems that seemed to be individual and petty — about sex, and relationships, and access to abortions, and domestic labor — were in fact systemic and political, and fundamental to the fight for women’s equality.
So the movement won some major legislative and legal victories: The Equal Pay Act of 1963 theoretically outlawed the gender pay gap; a series of landmark Supreme Court cases through the ’60s and ’70s gave married and unmarried women the right to use birth control; Title IX gave women the right to educational equality; and in 1973, Roe v. Wade guaranteed women reproductive freedom.
Nurse showing a diaphragm to birth control patients, in 1967.
Nurse showing diaphragms to birth control patients, in 1967. Paul Schutzer/LIFE Collection/Getty Images
The second wave worked on getting women the right to hold credit cards under their own names and to apply for mortgages. It worked to outlaw marital rape, to raise awareness about domestic violence and build shelters for women fleeing rape and domestic violence. It worked to name and legislate against sexual harassment in the workplace.
But perhaps just as central was the second wave’s focus on changing the way society thought about women. The second wave cared deeply about the casual, systemic sexism ingrained into society — the belief that women’s highest purposes were domestic and decorative, and the social standards that reinforced that belief — and in naming that sexism and ripping it apart.
The second wave cared about racism too, but it could be clumsy in working with people of color. As the women’s movement developed, it was rooted in the anti-capitalist and anti-racist civil rights movements, but black women increasingly found themselves alienated from the central platforms of the mainstream women’s movement.
The Feminine Mystique and its “problem that has no name” was specifically for white middle-class women: Women who had to work to support themselves experienced their oppression very differently from women who were socially discouraged from working.
Earning the right to work outside the home was not a major concern for black women, many of whom had to work outside the home anyway. And while black women and white women both advocated for reproductive freedom, black women wanted to fight not just for the right to contraception and abortions but also to stop the forced sterilization of people of color and people with disabilities, which was not a priority for the mainstream women’s movement. In response, some black feminists decamped from feminism to create womanism. (“Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” Alice Walker wrote in 1983.)
Women’s Liberation march at Copley Square plaza in Boston on April 17, 1971.
Women’s Liberation march at Copley Square plaza in Boston on April 17, 1971. Charles B. Carey/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Even with its limited scope, second-wave feminism at its height was plenty radical enough to scare people — hence the myth of the bra burners. Despite the popular story, there was no mass burning of bras among second-wave feminists.
But women did gather together in 1968 to protest the Miss America pageant and its demeaning, patriarchal treatment of women. And as part of the protest, participants ceremoniously threw away objects that they considered to be symbols of women’s objectification, including bras and copies of Playboy.
9/7/1968-Atlantic City, NJ-Demonstrators from the National Women’s Liberation Movement picketing the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey on September 7, 1968. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
That the Miss America protest has long lingered in the popular imagination as a bra-burning, and that bra-burning has become a metonym for postwar American feminism, says a lot about the backlash to the second wave that would soon ensue.
In the 1980s, the comfortable conservatism of the Reagan era managed to successfully position second-wave feminists as humorless, hairy-legged shrews who cared only about petty bullshit like bras instead of real problems, probably to distract themselves from the loneliness of their lives, since no man would ever want a (shudder) feminist.
“I don’t think of myself as a feminist,” a young woman told Susan Bolotin in 1982 for the New York Times Magazine. “Not for me, but for the guy next door that would mean that I’m a lesbian and I hate men.”
Another young woman chimed in, agreeing. “Look around and you’ll see some happy women, and then you’ll see all these bitter, bitter women,” she said. “The unhappy women are all feminists. You’ll find very few happy, enthusiastic, relaxed people who are ardent supporters of feminism.”
That image of feminists as angry and man-hating and lonely would become canonical as the second wave began to lose its momentum, and it continues to haunt the way we talk about feminism today. It would also become foundational to the way the third wave would position itself as it emerged.
Further reading: second-wave feminism
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan (1963)
Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, Susan Brownmiller (1975)
Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination, Catharine A. MacKinnon (1979)
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979)
Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, bell hooks (1981)
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, Alice Walker (1983)
Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde (1984)
The third wave: 1991(?) to ????
It is almost impossible to talk with any clarity about the third wave because few people agree on exactly what the third wave is, when it started, or if it’s still going on. “The confusion surrounding what constitutes third wave feminism,” writes feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans, “is in some respects its defining feature.”
But generally, the beginning of the third wave is pegged to two things: the Anita Hill case in 1991, and the emergence of the riot grrrl groups in the music scene of the early 1990s.
In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her at work. Thomas made his way to the Supreme Court anyway, but Hill’s testimony sparked an avalanche of sexual harassment complaints, in much the same way that last fall’s Harvey Weinstein accusations were followed by a litany of sexual misconduct accusations against other powerful men.
Anita Hill testified in the Caucus room of the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on October 11, 1991.
Anita Hill testified in the Caucus room of the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on October 11, 1991. Greg Gibson/AP
And Congress’s decision to send Thomas to the Supreme Court despite Hill’s testimony led to a national conversation about the overrepresentation of men in national leadership roles. The following year, 1992, would be dubbed “the Year of the Woman” after 24 women won seats in the House of Representatives and three more won seats in the Senate.
And for the young women watching the Anita Hill case in real time, it would become an awakening. “I am not a postfeminism feminist,” declared Rebecca Walker (Alice Walker’s daughter) for Ms. after watching Thomas get sworn into the Supreme Court. “I am the Third Wave.”
Thousands of demonstrators gathered for the March for Women’s Lives, sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW), in Washington DC, on April 5, 1992.
Thousands of demonstrators gathered for the March for Women’s Lives, sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW), in Washington DC, on April 5, 1992. Doug Mills/AP
Early third-wave activism tended to involve fighting against workplace sexual harassment and working to increase the number of women in positions of power. Intellectually, it was rooted in the work of theorists of the ’80s: Kimberlé Crenshaw, a scholar of gender and critical race theory who coined the term intersectionality to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect; and Judith Butler, who argued that gender and sex are separate and that gender is performative. Crenshaw and Butler’s combined influence would become foundational to the third wave’s embrace of the fight for trans rights as a fundamental part of intersectional feminism.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw speaks onstage at 2018 Women’s March Los Angeles, California, on January 20, 2018.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw speaks onstage at 2018 Women’s March Los Angeles, California, on January 20, 2018. Amanda Edwards/Getty Images for The Women’s March
Aesthetically, the third wave is deeply influenced by the rise of the riot grrrls, the girl groups who stomped their Doc Martens onto the music scene in the 1990s.
“BECAUSE doing/reading/seeing/hearing cool things that validate and challenge us can help us gain the strength and sense of community that we need in order to figure out how bullshit like racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism, thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism figures in our own lives,” wrote Bikini Kill lead singer Kathleen Hanna in the Riot Grrrl Manifesto in 1991. “BECAUSE we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak.”
The word girl here points to one of the major differences between second- and third-wave feminism. Second-wavers fought to be called women rather than girls: They weren’t children, they were fully grown adults, and they demanded to be treated with according dignity. There should be no more college girls or coeds: only college women, learning alongside college men.
But third-wavers liked being girls. They embraced the word; they wanted to make it empowering, even threatening — hence grrrl. And as it developed, that trend would continue: The third wave would go on to embrace all kinds of ideas and language and aesthetics that the second wave had worked to reject: makeup and high heels and high-femme girliness.
Bikini Kill and Joan Jett (center), 1994.
Bikini Kill and Joan Jett (center), 1994. Steve Eichner/WireImage/Getty Images
In part, the third-wave embrace of girliness was a response to the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s, the one that said the second-wavers were shrill, hairy, and unfeminine and that no man would ever want them. And in part, it was born out of a belief that the rejection of girliness was in itself misogynistic: girliness, third-wavers argued, was not inherently less valuable than masculinity or androgyny.
And it was rooted in a growing belief that effective feminism had to recognize both the dangers and the pleasures of the patriarchal structures that create the beauty standard and that it was pointless to punish and censure individual women for doing things that brought them pleasure.
Third-wave feminism had an entirely different way of talking and thinking than the second wave did — but it also lacked the strong cultural momentum that was behind the grand achievements of the second wave. (Even the Year of Women turned out to be a blip, as the number of women entering national politics plateaued rapidly after 1992.)
The third wave was a diffuse movement without a central goal, and as such, there’s no single piece of legislation or major social change that belongs to the third wave the way the 19th Amendment belongs to the first wave or Roe v. Wade belongs to the second.
Depending on how you count the waves, that might be changing now, as the #MeToo moment develops with no signs of stopping — or we might be kicking off an entirely new wave.
Further reading: third-wave feminism
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler (1990)
The Beauty Myth, Naomi Woolf (1991)
“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991)
“The Riot GRRRL Manifesto,” Kathleen Hanna (1991)
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Susan Faludi (1991)
The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order, edited by Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller (1999)
Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, bell hooks (2000)
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy (2005)
The present day: a fourth wave?
Feminists have been anticipating the arrival of a fourth wave since at least 1986, when a letter writer to the Wilson Quarterly opined that the fourth wave was already building. Internet trolls actually tried to launch their own fourth wave in 2014, planning to create a “pro-sexualization, pro-skinny, anti-fat” feminist movement that the third wave would revile, ultimately miring the entire feminist community in bloody civil war. (It didn’t work out.)
But over the past few years, as #MeToo and Time’s Up pick up momentum, the Women’s March floods Washington with pussy hats every year, and a record number of women prepare to run for office, it’s beginning to seem that the long-heralded fourth wave might actually be here.
Woman’s March in Washington DC, on January 21, 2017.
Woman’s March in Washington DC, on January 21, 2017. The Washington Post/Getty Images
While a lot of media coverage of #MeToo describes it as a movement dominated by third-wave feminism, it actually seems to be centered in a movement that lacks the characteristic diffusion of the third wave. It feels different.
“Maybe the fourth wave is online,” said feminist Jessica Valenti in 2009, and that’s come to be one of the major ideas of fourth-wave feminism. Online is where activists meet and plan their activism, and it’s where feminist discourse and debate takes place. Sometimes fourth-wave activism can even take place on the internet (the “#MeToo” tweets), and sometimes it takes place on the streets (the Women’s March), but it’s conceived and propagated online.
As such, the fourth wave’s beginnings are often loosely pegged to around 2008, when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were firmly entrenched in the cultural fabric and feminist blogs like Jezebel and Feministing were spreading across the web. By 2013, the idea that we had entered a fourth wave was widespread enough that it was getting written up in the Guardian. “What’s happening now feels like something new again,” wrote Kira Cochrane.
Currently, the fourth-wavers are driving the movement behind #MeToo and Time’s Up, but in previous years they were responsible for the cultural impact of projects like Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), in which a rape victim at Columbia University committed to carrying their mattress around campus until the university expelled their rapist.
The trending hashtag #YesAllWomen after the UC Santa Barbara shooting was a fourth-wave campaign, and so was the trending hashtag #StandWithWendy when Wendy Davis filibustered a Texas abortion law. Arguably, the SlutWalks that began in 2011 — in protest of the idea that the way to prevent rape is for women to “stop dressing like sluts” — are fourth-wave campaigns.
Beyoncé in front of a sign that says FEMINIST
Beyoncé declares her feminism at the 2014 VMAs. Michael Buckner/Getty Images
Like all of feminism, the fourth wave is not a monolith. It means different things to different people. But these tentpole positions that Bustle identified as belonging to fourth-wave feminism in 2015 do tend to hold true for a lot of fourth-wavers; namely, that fourth-wave feminism is queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven. (Bustle also claims that fourth-wave feminism is anti-misandry, but given the glee with which fourth-wavers across the internet riff on ironic misandry, that may be more prescriptivist than descriptivist on their part.)
And now the fourth wave has begun to hold our culture’s most powerful men accountable for their behavior. It has begun a radical critique of the systems of power that allow predators to target women with impunity.
Further reading: fourth-wave feminism
The Purity Myth, Jessica Valenti (2009)
How to Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran (2012)
Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit (2014)
We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2014)
Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay (2014)
So is there a generational war between feminists?
As the fourth wave begins to establish itself, and as #MeToo goes on, we’ve begun to develop a narrative that says the fourth wave’s biggest obstacles are its predecessors — the feminists of the second wave.
“The backlash to #MeToo is indeed here,” wrote Jezebel’s Stassa Edwards in January, “and it’s liberal second-wave feminism.”
Writing with a lot less nuance, Katie Way, the reporter who broke the Aziz Ansari story, smeared one of her critics as a “burgundy-lipstick, bad-highlights, second-wave-feminist has-been.”
Signs from the Women’s March in Washington DC, on January 21,2017. Eliza Barclay/Vox; Steve Exum/FilmMagic
And there certainly are second-wave feminists pushing a #MeToo backlash. “If you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent,” second-wave feminist icon Germaine Greer remarked as the accusations about Weinstein mounted, “and it’s too late now to start whingeing about that.” (Greer, who has also said on the record that she doesn’t believe trans women are “real women,” has become something of a poster child for the worst impulses of the second wave. Die a hero or live long enough to become a villain, etc.)
But some of the most prominent voices speaking out against #MeToo, like Katie Roiphe and Bari Weiss, are too young to have been part of the second wave. Roiphe is a Gen X-er who was pushing back against both the second and the third waves in the 1990s and has managed to stick around long enough to push back against the fourth wave today. Weiss, 33, is a millennial. Other prominent #MeToo critics, like Caitlin Flanagan and Daphne Merkin, are old enough to have been around for the second wave but have always been on the conservative end of the spectrum.
“In the 1990s and 2000s, second-wavers were cast as the shrill, militant, man-hating mothers and grandmothers who got in the way of their daughters’ sexual liberation. Now they’re the dull, hidebound relics who are too timid to push for the real revolution,” writes Sady Doyle at Elle. “And of course, while young women have been telling their forebears to shut up and fade into the sunset, older women have been stereotyping and slamming younger activists as feather-headed, boy-crazy pseudo-feminists who squander their mothers’ feminist gains by taking them for granted.”
It is not particularly useful to think of the #MeToo debates as a war between generations of feminists — or, more creepily, as some sort of Freudian Electra complex in action. And the data from our polling shows that these supposed generational gaps largely don’t exist. It is perhaps more useful to think of it as part of what has always been the history of feminism: passionate disagreement between different schools of thought, which history will later smooth out into a single overarching “wave” of discourse (if the wave metaphor holds on that long).
Women’s March in Washington, DC on Saturday January 21, 2017.
Women’s March in Washington, DC on Saturday January 21, 2017. Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The history of feminism is filled with radicals and progressives and liberals and centrists. It’s filled with splinter movements and reactionary counter-movements. That’s part of what it means to be both an intellectual tradition and a social movement, and right now feminism is functioning as both with a gorgeous and monumental vitality. Rather than devouring their own, feminists should recognize the enormous work that each wave has done for the movement, and get ready to keep doing more work.
After all, the past is past. We’re in the middle of the third wave now.
Or is it the fourth?
Women’s March in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2018.
Women’s March in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2018. Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images
