Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  By 2020, when we were disheartened by too much mansplaining, we could watch Rachel Maddow or peruse innumerable feminist blogs, all of which exhibit the multiple and discordant points of view that commentators like Roxane Gay were calling for.49 Quirky protests were abounding. The online Crunk Feminist Collective used the neologism crunk—crazy drunk—to define its mission: “we are drunk off the heady theory of feminism that proclaims that another world is possible.” In her Tiny Pricks Project, Diana Weymar and her collaborators protested Trump’s imbecilic statements—“I am a very stable genius”—by embroidering them onto heirloom textiles. The delicacy of the stitches highlights the crudity of the words. The trans feminist Natalie Wynn, hailed as the “Oscar Wilde of YouTube,” created the channel ContraPoints to dispute the agenda of the alt-right.50

  In the meantime, major feminist novelists continue to produce new works in this country and elsewhere. When Margaret Atwood released The Testaments in 2019, it was a newsworthy event—she was featured in haute couture on the front page of the Saturday New York Times “Style” section on September 7, a week before the Sunday review—perhaps especially because the novel held out hope in a bleak time. The madwoman who emerges to right the wrongs against women in the puritanical Gilead of the earlier Handmaid’s Tale turns out to be its prime female architect, Aunt Lydia.

  The Testaments explains why Aunt Lydia signed up to become patriarchy’s enforcer; it includes a secret memoir in which she describes how, when the Commanders were taking over the country, she was rounded up with other female judges and lawyers and herded into a concentration camp. There she was penned up in filthy barracks, forced to witness mass executions, and then isolated in a Thank Tank, where she was tortured until a resolution formed within her: “I will get you back for this. I don’t care how long it takes or how much shit I have to eat in the meantime, but I will do it.”51

  Atwood makes the case that some female enforcers of patriarchy collaborate with the enemy in order to survive and that they may ultimately undermine the misogynist powers they were forced to serve. The Testaments is thus an optimistic book, one that envisions the collapse of patriarchal Gilead and the restoration of the United States of America. To revenge herself against the patriarchs, Aunt Lydia unites Offred’s two daughters to act as messengers relaying information about the nefarious dealings of the Gilead Commanders to the Underground Femaleroad in Canada. Sisterhood, it turns out, is powerful. That her testimonies speak truth to power and that the truth sets America free led the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg to conclude that The Testaments is “utopian,” for in the reign of Trump “truth has lost its political salience.”52

  Popular culture also featured a figure holding out hope in hard times. In a succession of videos especially loved by youthful audiences, Beyoncé and her co-writers delved into the feminist past to revitalize its present and future. Her 2019 film Homecoming, documenting her performance at the Coachella festival in 2018, opens with an epigraph from Toni Morrison: “If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”53 The movie is punctuated throughout by quotations from Nina Simone, Maya Angelou, the children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman, and Alice Walker, some of whom are identified by the colleges they attended because Homecoming highlights the importance of historically Black colleges and universities. The movie’s title, evoking college homecoming parades and the halftime shows at football games, is emphasized by brass marching bands, drum majorettes, and high-rise bleachers on a stage crowded with singers, dancers, and musicians.

  “Without community, there’s no liberation”:54 these words from Audre Lorde flash on the screen toward the climactic conclusion of the film, a sort of bacchanalia with singers, dancers, and Beyoncé dedicating themselves to all women who “opened up the doors.” In the midst of the song “Run the World (Girls),” the voice of the Nigerian American novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie can be heard: “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man.’ ”55 After the song “Say My Name,” Maya Angelou’s voiceover tells us “to make this country more than it is today,” and Beyoncé concludes by launching into her last song, “Love on Top,” singing “Honey, I see the stars.”

  KEEPING THINGS STIRRING

  Moving forward, contemporary artists look backward by summoning voices from feminism’s past. Sometimes they explicitly call on foundational texts. Sometimes they refine tactics to help vulnerable populations deal with patriarchy. With a laugh or a sigh or a shout, American women continue to protest conditions of being that they experience as an affliction or infirmity. All seem motivated by the prophetic intuition expressed in one of the Irish poet Eavan Boland’s last verses: “Our Future Will Become the Past of Other Women.”56

  To safeguard that future, and as a result of feminist consciousness-raising, more and more women were eager to testify to assaults by powerful men. In 2017, thousands of people tweeted #MeToo after the actress Alyssa Milano, complaining of sexual assault from the predatory Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, picked up the phrase from Tarana Burke, who had used it in 2006 to promote empathy for women of color who had experienced sexual abuse. From Rose McGowan and Gwyneth Paltrow to Rosanna Arquette and Cate Blanchett, a range of well-known women raised their voices against Weinstein and joined the #MeToo movement that spread around the world. Harvey Weinstein was convicted of assault and imprisoned in New York. The equally predatory investor Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, was jailed, and (evidently) committed suicide in his cell. At the same time, women accused more “ordinary” figures of sexual harassment or assault. All resoundingly cried out Me Too! It has happened to Me Too, my body has been manhandled, I have been wounded, I am a survivor and I am sore, angry, weary of seeking help to no avail: Me Too!

  “There’s #MeToo in 2017 and 2018. In 2014, there was #YesAll-Women. And in 1991, there was ‘I Believe Anita.’ It can feel like we’ve been defeated . . . but I think that every time we get a little louder, and we get a little closer to making changes that actually need to be made.” So said Moira Donegan, who created a spreadsheet on which women anonymously listed men in the media industry accused of sexual misconduct.57 The success of Susan Choi’s metafictional novel Trust Exercise—which won the 2019 National Book Award—indicates that such issues will continue to shape women’s fiction.

  When Anita Hill appeared at protests against sexual harassment, she recalled that back in 1991, two-thirds of Americans believed she was lying under oath: “I think in today’s atmosphere more people would believe my story, would understand my story.”58 At the close of 2017, Merriam-Webster chose feminism as the word of the year and Newsweek featured “The Silence Breakers” who came forward in numbers to report sexual misconduct as its composite Person of the Year.59

  Chillingly, however, the Anita Hill story was recycled in September 2018, when 51-year-old Christine Blasey Ford testified before the House Judicial Committee that Brett Kavanaugh was not fit for a seat on the Supreme Court. Explaining that she felt it was her “civic duty” to disclose a traumatic experience from her girlhood, Ford told the committee that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when she was 15 and he was 17. At both the Hill/Thomas and the Ford/Kavanaugh hearings, wounded women spoke quietly, struggling to contain their emotions and especially their anger. “There is not a woman alive,” the media analyst Soraya Chemaly noted, “who does not understand that women’s anger is openly reviled.” 60 In response, injurious men reveled in righteous rage.

  From a historical perspective, women have made progress toward equality, but uneven progress that is perpetually threatened. By whom? One answer to this question became evident when the shocking public slaughters witnessed by Americans in the twenty-first century—mass shootings at malls, in bars, at schools, in houses of worship—were perpetrated by white men seeking to salvage what they experienced as an endangered masculinity. No
ted the New York Times in a stunning headline, “A Common Trait among Mass Killers: Hatred toward Women.” 61 Another source of backlash may be the insufficient democratization of higher education. So suggested analyses revealing that most Trump supporters were white people who had not gone to college: “I love the poorly educated,” Trump declared at riotous rallies.62

  When Nora Ephron gave the 1996 commencement speech at Wellesley, she emphasized that progress is perpetually threatened by an “undertow” at work in American culture, cautioning her audience that “American society has a remarkable ability to resist change.” 63 Similarly, Michelle Obama’s 2016 commencement address at the City College of New York warned against those who view “diversity as a threat to be contained rather than as a resource to be tapped.” 64 Implicit in her words: the danger of racism sanctioned by the Trump administration. When in July 2019 President Trump told four congresswomen of color, “the Squad,” to “go back” to the countries they came from—three were born in America and the fourth was a naturalized citizen—that threat came into plain view.65

  One member of the Squad, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would go on to face the cameras while funneling her anger into a cool, lucidly argued speech on the House floor. When AOC stood up to Representative Ted Yoho for calling her “a fucking bitch” on the steps of the Capitol, she noted that this “kind of language is not new,” but it reflects “a culture of lack of impunity, of accepting of violence and violent language against women, and an entire structure of power that supports” it. Defying this “pattern” of “dehumanization,” AOC rightly labeled Representative Yoho’s alleged apology—“I cannot apologize for my passion or for loving my God, my family and my country”—a non-apology before she went on to assert her own values.

  Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters. I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter too. My father, thankfully, is not alive to see how Mr. Yoho treated his daughter. My mother got to see Mr. Yoho’s disrespect on the floor of this House towards me on television and I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.

  Acknowledging that the verbal abuse she refused to accept “happens every day in this country,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared: “It happens when individuals who hold the highest office in this land admit to hurting women and using their language against us all.” 66

  Even before the Squad began to question dehumanizing patterns in the structures of power in Washington, DC, Stacey Abrams became the first African American woman to run for governor as the candidate of a major party. The leader of the minority Democrats in Georgia’s House of Representatives, she took on Georgia’s secretary of state, whose office had systematically disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of mostly minority voters. When she lost by a narrow margin in 2018, rather than legally contest the election Abrams created Fair Fight Action, an organization that would successfully raise public awareness of voter suppression and combat it both in Georgia and nationally.

  Before, during, and after mounting these political challenges, Stacey Abrams was writing and publishing eight romantic spy and crime novels under the pseudonym Selena Montgomery. All of them feature adventurous and attractive black heroines. “Whether I’m writing about an ethno-botanist or a woman who’s raising orphans in South Georgia, the challenge of telling their stories is the same challenge I face as a legislator who has to talk to someone about passing a bill on kinship care, helping grandparents raising grandchildren, or blocking a tax bill because I’m using expertise they don’t realize I have,” Abrams told an interviewer in 2018. “I revel in having been able to be a part of a genre that is read by millions and millions of women, in part because it respects who they are. It respects the diversity of our experiences, and it creates space for broader conversations.” 67 To this same end—to respect diversity and create broader conversations—Stacey Abrams was chosen by the Democratic Party to respond to President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address.

  Trump’s years in the White House intensified many women’s shock at the 2016 election. Toward the end of her autobiography, Michelle Obama recalled her reaction to the Access Hollywood tapes that captured Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. She heard him to be saying “something painfully familiar” and menacing: “I can hurt you and get away with it.” This “expression of hatred” was one that “Every woman I know recognized. . . . Every person who’s ever been made to feel ‘other’ recognized it.” Before the election she protested publicly: “This is not politics as usual. This is disgraceful. It is intolerable.” Afterward she could only “wonder what led so many women, in particular, to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president.” 68

  That same question has troubled us and accounts for our attention to the succession of Serena Joys who have made it their business to urge women to forgo their equal rights. This sort of public (generally white) spokeswoman appears only during those times when there is a vocal feminist movement, for she commits herself to sabotaging it. Think, for instance, of such hard-right figures as Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, and more recently Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. As useful as such figures have been to the Trump administration, we’re all too well aware that it featured a set of high-level masculinist bullies—from Trump himself to Mike Pompeo, Bill Barr, and Mitch McConnell—who made it their business to dismantle the social and environmental safety nets put in place by their predecessors. One indomitable senior woman stood in their way: Nancy Pelosi, who at 80 has scripted for herself a profile in courage.

  Like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi has played a pivotal role in American feminism. As the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, she became the most powerful woman in American politics, second in line of succession to the presidency, and widely considered the most adept at this crucial job since (half a century ago) the legendary Sam Rayburn. Yet she started out in life from the sort of conventional background that Hollywood movies celebrated in the fifties.

  Born in 1940, Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro was the pretty youngest child and only daughter in a well-off Baltimore family. Her father, Thomas D’Alesandro, was a prominent politician who served both in Congress and as the mayor of Baltimore; one of her five brothers was also mayor of Baltimore; and her mother was a political activist in the community. An Italian American, Nancy D’Alesandro seems always to have been comfortable in her ethnicity. After graduating from Trinity College in Baltimore, she married another Italian American, Paul Pelosi, a businessman whom she followed first to New York City and then to San Francisco, where she bore five children in six years and devoted herself to bringing them up as what we’ve come to call a stay-at-home mom.

  Unlike such near contemporaries as Rich and Plath, Pelosi does not seem to have expressed ambivalence toward marriage, maternity, or domesticity. On the contrary, as she parented a gang of lively kids, she developed strategies that would serve her in good stead throughout her political career. Testified her daughter Alexandra on CNN, “She’ll cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding.” Her daughter Christine added that her skill at “coalition politics” was honed in the family, where “with five kids it could be three-on-two, four-on-one,” until she achieved the kind of consensus that works just as well in the House of Representatives.69 And as she herself has noted, a busy mother learns a lot about human nature. When Donald Trump walked out of a meeting in a rage because she wasn’t going to help him get funds for his beloved border wall, she remarked, “I’m the mother of five, grandmother of nine. I know a temper tantrum when I see one.”70

  Even while mothering a houseful of kids, Pelosi began fund-raising for the Democratic Party; she was so skillful that eventually she became the chair of the California Democratic Party and “the most successful nonpresidential fundraiser in U.S. history.”71 From her father, the consummate politician i
n Baltimore’s Little Italy, she had learned to count votes, learned how to run for office. And run she did, once her youngest daughter had graduated from high school. The rest is, in fact, history, as Pelosi rose through the ranks of the House to become, as one observer put it, “the strongest and most effective speaker of modern times.”72

  Recurrently called “a shrew,” “the Wicked Witch of the West,” and “a yenta” by right-wing commentators,73 Pelosi has always understood her place in feminist history. When she was sworn in as Speaker for the first time, in 2007, she exulted, “For our daughters and granddaughters, the sky is the limit, anything is possible for them,” and she later declared, “Think of me as a lioness—you threaten my cubs, you have a problem.”74 Reelected to the Speakership when Democrats reclaimed the House in 2018, she took the oath of office surrounded by a horde of her own grandchildren and a mass of other kids. And once installed, she preached optimism while staunchly opposing Trump and his enablers, but she prepared, too—when it became necessary—for the articles of impeachment that her colleague Adam Schiff would eloquently defend in the Senate.

  Pelosi has her quirks. She has confided to reporters that she has “been eating dark chocolate ice cream for breakfast for as long as I can remember”—two scoops!75 And despite all that sweetness and her sartorial elegance, she is notoriously but coolly vengeful, which is how she keeps her congressional troops in line.

  Consider Tuesday, February 4, 2020. This is the day before a zombified Republican Senate majority will vote to acquit President Trump of the charges sent them by Pelosi and her colleagues in the House. Both senators and representatives are seated before the podium at which Trump is to deliver his State of the Union address, along with Supreme Court justices and distinguished guests. When the president arrives, Pelosi courteously holds out her hand, but he turns away. She is dressed in a tailored suffragist white pantsuit, as are most of the women who are her Democratic colleagues.