I’m claiming back the term ‘feminist.’
I don’t like what radical feminists have done with it in the last fifty years. They’ve attached it to all sorts of ideas that are anti-men, anti-family, anti-children, and fundamentally anti-women.
I know they’re going to go on using the term, even though they’re no longer entitled, so when I use it, I’m going to attach a couple of descriptors – signposts for readers.
For the tired old second-wave feminists still clinging to the rhetoric of revolution, and today’s third-wave feminists – rebels without a clue – struggling to squeeze themselves into ever-less female ways of being, I’ll stick to the term ‘radical’. Radical feminists. This descriptor is not quite right – what they were saying in the 1950s was radical enough. In 2010 it is discredited, largely abandoned, and definitely old. But ‘radical’ will do.
For me and millions like me, the term is ‘authentic’. Authentic feminists. We believe in equity, not sameness; equality of rights, not the loss of the right to be a woman; equality of opportunity, not narrowing options that reward only male-pattern career paths.
Basic axioms
The basic axioms are not particularly contentious: men and women are equal; men and women are different.
As always, problems arise when you get into detailed definitions.
First-wave feminists – the suffragettes – were very clear about what they meant by ‘equal rights for women’. They sought the right to vote; the right to own property; the right to leave an abusive marriage; the right to win qualifications in professions such as medicine and law. I’m proud to be a New Zealander – a citizen of the first self-governing nation in the world to give women the vote.
Second-wave feminists – those who were active in the 1960s and 70s – saw that the job was only half done. Women had the legal right to do all those things but social pressures tended to constrain them. Second-wave feminists saw a clear need to change social attitudes and even social structures. And there was a need.
To second-wave feminists, then, equality meant being able to do anything that a man did; being able to compete with men on an equal footing. They borrowed from the rhetoric of other civil rights movements, and began to talk about oppression – not just by the patriarchal structures of society (which would, in my view, have been a fair call) but also by individual men – all individual men – against individual women. And they saw marriage and babies – especially babies – as the tools of oppression.
We were in the middle of a gender war, men were the enemy, and our own instincts were their best weapon.
This led to some real silliness in the 1970s. Here are three anecdotes by way of example.
I can remember being roundly abused by a woman at work when I said I would take my husband’s name when we married. She was not much impressed by my response – that I currently had my father’s surname, and I liked my husband to be more than I liked my father.
On another occasion, I went to a ‘feminist consciousness raising’, meeting while my oldest child was at kindergarten. I was pregnant with my third child and accompanied by my second (a son). The organiser expressed an earnest wish that my nearly due child would be a daughter, and explained how ashamed I should be to have a son.
And my husband tells of a friend who opened a door for his (male) companion, then continued to hold it for an approaching woman. She went through the doorway, then rounded on him and slapped his face for presuming to think she was not capable of opening a door.
And what can I say about third-wave feminists? As far as I can tell, there are a number of groups to which the tag might be applied – and they agree on little. One common thread appears to be that independent women are promiscuous (and, by corollary, women who are not promiscuous are not independent).
In illustrating the differences between the sexes, the three waves of feminism all caricatured men, but in quite different ways. To first-wave feminist, men were fundamentally barbarians who could be contained and refined by the civilising power of a woman. To second-wave feminists, men were oppressors and rapists, and women were better off without them. To third-wave feminists, men are bumbling, effete, incompetents, to be used and ignored.
In my next post on authentic feminism, an authentic feminist take on ‘men and women are equal and different’.
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