The Washington Post observed this same tension in its article accompanying data graphs from the Kaiser survey. Post reporters recounted what one college sophomore (and feminist) told her professor when asked for her personal thesis: “Feminism is not a political movement.” For younger generations, wrote the journalists, feminism “stresses personal freedom as much as it does equality.” Call it an extension of choice feminism, a term that rose to worried prominence at the turn of this millennium’s first decade. In a 2010 paper, Michaele L. Ferguson of the University of Colorado at Boulder argues that choice feminism is a response to three common criticisms of feminism: that it is too radical, too exclusionary, and too judgmental. “Ultimately,” she concluded, “the problem with choice feminism is not that it celebrates women’s choices without having a political consciousness. The problem is that, even complemented by a political consciousness, the turn to choice feminism is motivated by a fear of politics.” What good was political consciousness, she asked, if women were afraid to use it?
In addition to seeing feminism as a bad thing, nearly 70 percent of women also saw it as “empowering.” Because what does empowerment mean? Whatever you want it to. It’s a term I’ve heard both feminists and anti-feminists use, each to describe their own movement. “I have a bad case of empowerment fatigue,” Bitch magazine editor, and one of its three founders, Andi Zeisler wrote in “Empowering Down,” a chapter in her 2016 book We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. “As a catchall phrase that can be understood to mean anything from ‘self-esteem-building’ to ‘sexy and feminine,’ to ‘awesome,’ empowerment has become a way to signify a particularly female way of being that’s both gender essentialist—when was the last time you heard, say, a strip aerobics class for men described as ‘empowering’?—and commercially motivated.” She argues that the word has been used to sell and embrace hundreds of contradictory messages, including everything from high heels and cosmetic surgery to having children, being an asshole, buying a gun, and more. “By the time the satirical newspaper The Onion announced ‘Women Now Empowered By Everything a Woman Does,’” she added, “it really did seem that ‘today’s woman lives in a near-constant state of empowerment.’”
As feminism does the necessary work of practicing intersectionality, these pluralities of meanings are both vital and confounding. When I asked a seventeen-year-old named Mia Salvato who lives in northeastern Ohio why she thought her peers could be reluctant to politically rally around feminism, she told me the movement needs its Rosa Parks. “I feel like feminism is so disembodied,” she told me. “There’s not somebody we can look at and say, ‘This is who we’re fighting for. This is what we’re fighting for.’ And, personally, I would like to see that happen, even if it’s a straight, white woman.” So long as it’s someone, she said, that anyone could look to and say, “See, this is the problem.”
It’s a call for focus—a sort of reverse Beyoncé, somebody who doesn’t just make feminism cool because she’s killing it but urgent because she’s losing. We don’t need a champion, necessarily, but somebody to champion, a subtle but distinct difference. And so, depressingly, this is where we return: trying to hurdle over the idea that women have nothing left to win.
Well-intentioned mainstream, white feminism—the kind the second wave and even the third wave have embraced—reminds me of my high school self. I grew up in a now large suburb one quick train ride away from Toronto. My school was big and multicultural, a hodgepodge of different-colored bodies teeming through the hallways, sitting in classrooms, eating at the cafeteria, and running through our sports fields. For two years in a row, our valedictorian was a Black woman. We had a step team. The entire school attended our two-hour Black History Month production every year. My friends’ faces reflected the school’s make-up: a mix of religious, cultural, and racial backgrounds. As I listened to them dish about their families and their lives, I leaned toward our similarities. All our moms annoyed us. We all faced pressure to maintain brainiac status and bring home top marks. We liked the same TV shows. We made the same jokes. In modern parlance, these girls were my ride-or-dies. I saw us as the best girl gang ever.
And we were. Those friendships were real. Some of those girls remain my closest, dearest friends today. But I cringe now at how little I understood then. The diversity of the school wasn’t reflected in Dr. Porter’s gender studies course; only one of my friends took the class with me. Of course, I knew that my friends’ families and communities were unlike mine, yet in so many ways I benevolently and naively shrugged it off. I deliberately chose not to see the biggest differences, and I thought that was a good thing. We are all humans! We are all the same! Look at our colorful mosaic of people! I’m a good white person! You’ve met my high school self; maybe you’re her right now. Hell, I can still be her sometimes. I sincerely, sweetly, and 100 percent wrongly believed I was doing the right thing: championing equality. I was actually discounting their own realities and experiences, and the worlds they lived in when they were not at school. I had taken a person-sized eraser to their selves and, with the best intentions in the world, scrubbed them out.
Mainstream feminism slides down the same slope with its all-for-one, one-size-fits-all approach. The we’re-all-the-same narrative is threaded through our discourse, stitched through our academic papers, public events, and online conversation, hemmed tight into both our history and the statistics we use to battle for better rights. This universality assumes that the unfair system affects all women in the same manner, or that all of our issues, from gay rights to racial discrimination, are divided from each other.
Consider the historical milestones feminism celebrates. We’re fond of saying Canadian women earned the right to vote in federal elections in 1921. We make less of the fact that it was only white women who earned that right. Many women of color weren’t allowed to vote until the late 1940s, and Inuit women only won the right in 1960. We celebrate Canada’s Famous Five for winning equality for privileged white women while making less of the fact that they spewed racism and xenophobia elsewhere. Three of them campaigned for forcible sterilization in Alberta, an act that passed into law in 1928 and was used to mutilate more than four thousand people, mostly women, before it was struck down in 1972.
We bandy about statistics on lower earnings, scant economic representation, violence, rape, and more—some with such frequency that they’ve reached near celebrity status, like the Kim Kardashian of numbers. But we often fail to mention those numbers correspond to straight white women, many of them middle class and able bodied. For women of color, gay women, transgender women, women with disabilities, and so on, those storied and outrageous numbers are often far worse. And yet, time and again, we iron out the nuances, turning feminism into a pressed shirt. No wonder so many women feel left out.
In some ways, the Great Lump-In makes a lot sense: feminists had to eke out basic rights before they could focus on the details, or at least that’s always been the argument. It’s a convenient one. It allows us to forget that many of the women who have led feminism are those able to do so largely because they weren’t the ones on the fringes struggling to survive. But that’s only part of what makes our homogenizing of feminism so inexcusable. Let’s think about it: The more feminism surges toward exclusion, building those moats and drawbridges and whole fortresses around itself, the more it becomes part of the same establishment it’s fought so hard to tear down (or at least gain access to). From where many women sit, the white, established, straight, upper-class, male-dominated society doesn’t look a whole lot different from white, established, straight, upper-class feminism. And why would it? Both are only speaking to, and about, themselves.
At everything from cocktail parties to panel events, I’ve found myself in the company of older feminists who expect me to speak on behalf of my generation and corner me as if I’m a magical unicorn—or a sacrificial lamb. I’m praised for being there and for caring about women’s r
ights, but few women listen to what I have to say. Conversations tend to oscillate between outright dismissiveness, historical lecturing, and demands for answers. One night, I sat in an upscale pizzeria in Toronto (the type of restaurant that pairs your pinot grigio with your pepperoni) with three women, all in their fifties and sixties, who had worked together in the finance industry for decades. Successful, cultured, and firmly rooted in the middle- to upper-middle class, they were well coiffed and well off: hair cut into precision bobs, clothes tailored and neutral, makeup tastefully applied. I adored and admired them. Every winter they bought a “culture package” comprising tickets to the city’s plays, musicals, ballets, operas, and speaker series. Sometimes, when one of the women had a ticket to give up, it was benevolently bestowed upon me, the starving writer. I’d been with them before, but this was the first time we’d ever talked about feminism.
They were delighted to find out that I am a feminist, too. “Good for you,” they said. They told me that, in the 1970s and ’80s, early into their careers, they realized the importance of feminism when they battled to gain equal footing with the men in their offices. They fought hard to have their job titles and salaries reflect the actual work they did. One was almost fired, more than once, for refusing to be the coffee girl at meetings. We laughed uproariously as she recounted how she’d told a boardroom full of men where they could put their cream and sugar. (Guess!) It wasn’t lost on any of us that I was too young to have been alive back then, or that I owed a lot to women like them.
Then the mood shifted. Suddenly, they wanted me to explain how young women could possibly complain when men harassed them in the office, given how they dressed like “sluts.” Well, actually, they wanted me to condemn these supposedly slutty women, as they had. Were they not trying to sleep their way to the top? Did they not realize it was inappropriate to wear a skirt that tight or short? How could these young women expect men to take them seriously when they paraded their cleavage? Did they really expect men not to look? Had the older generation fought so hard to gain a toehold, only for these boob-baring young women to ruin it all? One bomb after another, and I was expected to field them. I felt like I’d been designated Young Feminist, Vice President of Explaining Everything. It was an impossible job. I fumbled a subject change, but they sat patiently undeterred, knives at sharp angles, suspended over their pizza. I imagined the serrated blades as long-nose saw sharks out for blood. It was ridiculous, I know: me conjuring these women as menacing, threatening. But in that moment, it didn’t feel like we were all part of the same sisterhood; it felt like civil war.
I couldn’t translate my generation’s sartorial choices in a way that made sense to my dining companions, not in a way that squared my generation’s aversion to victim blaming and rape culture with their struggle to have men see them as equals in the workplace—hell, to even let them into the workplace. I tried every tactic, every argument. Didn’t every woman deserve a safe, harassment-free work zone, no matter what she wore? Wasn’t it a slippery slope down to “asking for it” territory if we scrutinized work clothes? Did they truly believe all these young women were trying to sleep their way up the corporate ladder? But whatever case I made came back to the question of why. Why were young women dressing like that? Why were they ruining everything? Eventually, frustrated, I gave up. “I have no idea,” I answered tensely, honestly, throwing my fellow young women under the bus. I felt like a fraud.
Later that night, on my way home and pondering the earlier exchange, my mind darted back to an interview I’d done months earlier. I’d asked a feminist about ten years older than me why the sisterhood seemed so fractured. She’d answered immediately and ominously: “Feminists eat their young.”
In the midst of other older women who grilled me, like the women at dinner had, but rarely inquired about what mattered to women my age and younger, I often forgot I had a right to be there, too. I forgot I could call myself a feminist without having to pass a test. Which is to say that I would often run to the washroom and pep-talk myself in the mirror, reminding my red-faced reflection that I was the editor of one of the country’s oldest progressive magazines for eff’s sake. It was my job to have opinions about this shit. This sideline feeling continued to happen into my early thirties, well past the age anyone could realistically mistake me for a spring chicken. And I knew it wasn’t just me. “Age is the single most divisive issue in the women’s rights movement right now,” Ottawa-based Julie Lalonde told me.
When I interviewed her, Lalonde was twenty-nine, with a Governor General’s Award already under her belt for her feminist work. She was also part of several feminist organizations, had spearheaded even more projects, and worked part-time as an anti–violence against women educator. Aside from her GG award, Lalonde was most well known for her role in securing a student-run women’s sexual assault center at Carleton University. Lalonde had returned to the school for her master’s degree after completing a bachelor’s in women’s studies. During her first year back, in 2007, a horrific sexual assault occurred on campus. It took seven years for her to get the student-run support center to open, but she refused to back down. Basically, she was a badass.
She was also keenly, painfully aware of the fractures in the feminist movement and had become disillusioned with academic feminism during her fight for the support center. While she acknowledged women’s studies is what brought her to feminism, she added that she was embarrassed to admit it now. She contended that many tenured professors in the women’s studies department had refused to support the push for the center. They avoided the picket lines and instead urged silence. Lalonde said they told her they feared showing support would harm funding for their department. To her, that idea was outrageous. Even the woman who taught Lalonde’s feminist activism class refused to get involved.
That people with such privilege refused to use it to help those with less or none appalled Lalonde. “I just couldn’t accept it then,” she said, “and I can’t accept it now.” Her entire outlook on the movement changed. She could see the fracture lines. When Lalonde said age is the most divisive thing, she didn’t mean older feminists are duking it out with younger ones, rock ’em, sock ’em style, but that the movement has split along different points of view, old and new. The feminist waves are all crashing into one another, and we’re in turmoil. As much as older feminists can seem surprised and baffled by younger feminists, the lines aren’t strictly generational; they’re ideological. One woman’s feminism can seem as different from another’s in the same way Cheerios barely resemble Lucky Charms—both cereal in name only.
Bitch co-founder Lisa Jervis also argued against the generational divide in a 2004 op-ed. She confessed to loathing the question “Are you in the third wave?” To her, the distinction of which wave she was born into was irrelevant. “We’ve reached the end of the wave terminology’s usefulness,” she wrote. “What was at first a handy-dandy way to refer to feminism’s history and its present and future potential with a single metaphor has become shorthand that invites intellectual laziness, an escape hatch from the hard work of distinguishing between core beliefs and a cultural moment.” By definition, first-wave feminism encompassed the suffrage movement. The second wave was, by comparison, a spark. The women’s liberation movement, as it was known at the time, rose quickly in the 1960s and ’70s, urging equality beyond the right to vote. While the third wave’s start date is murky, it’s generally characterized as pro-sex, pop-culture hungry, man friendly, and, well, young. If you’re under 40, you’re part of it.
The problem, Jervis argued, is that it’s all chronological. Categorizing feminism into waves flattens the differences in feminist ideologies within the same generation and discounts the similarities between different ones, all in one fell swoop. Second-wave feminists become the worst stereotypes: lipstick averse, hairy-legged, celibate man haters. Third-wave feminists become fluffy, crop-top-wearing sex fiends who have historical amnesia. Categorizing makes it easy for the mainstream media to write ala
rmist stories and can create an almost cartoonish divide between generations, amplifying discord. One generation forgets the mothers of the movement; the other dismisses the activism of its daughters. When we buy into the wave theory, we forget common goals, like the fight for abortion rights, equal pay, and ending violence against women.
Jervis and many other feminists who dislike the wave terminology have begged women to recognize the generational divide as “an illusion.” I agree that age doesn’t dictate a woman’s feminist ideology. To assume a woman’s personal politics derive solely from her age—and that the same principle could be blanketed across an entire generation—is absurd and, in itself, sexist. And yet, here we are again. Technology and social media are changing the movement. Younger feminists today are acutely aware of feminism’s intersections with other battles: anti-racism, Islamophobia, anti-poverty, disability rights, transgender rights, sex worker rights. The connection points are many. Perhaps dividing the feminist movement according to age was acutely unfair, but it didn’t stop us and, as a fourth wave now emerges, the movement is having trouble bearing the weight of our differences.
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