your politics must ALWAYS come from loving people first. dunking on people you hate should be the furthest thing from what drives your opinions. because if you don’t love the people you’re allied with, someone else will, and i can’t promise their politics will be as kind as your own are touted to be

SOC 120 Blog 5: We Are Not a Wave, We Are the Ocean

What the heck is a "wave" of feminism? The "first wave" secured women's right to vote. The second gave us access to abortion. Now we're in the third wave and we're doing trans rights. Right? It's more complicated than that. As Constance Grady wrote for Vox in 2018:

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.

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” (Grady, 2018).

So with the understanding that this framework is kind of reductive, let's surf these supposed "waves" a little.

The first wave (1848 to 1920) did indeed centre around women's suffrage for the right to vote. Suffragettes were originally abolitionists, but then got mad when Black men—former slaves—got the vote before them, and Black women were often barred from or forced to walk behind white women during suffrage marches. Margaret Sanger opened the birth control clinic that would become Planned Parenthood during this wave. Women also worked to secure equality in education and employment, though there was a double standard when it came to women in the workplace; Black and brown women were considered less ladylike and more capable of labour, while white women were protected by the white men who held power, considered delicate and expected to stay in the home and raise children. There's some of those differing agendas within the movement.

The second wave (1963 to the 1980s) was called such because it had seemed that feminist activity had died down until Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in '63, sparking a new "wave" of feminist activity. She talked about "the problem that has no name," which was that white middle-class women's "place" was in the home and they were being pathologised if they didn't like being stuck doing housework and childcare.

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 (Grady, 2018).

The phrase "the personal is political" comes from this time; the idea that small things that can seem like individual problems are actually a result of systemic oppression. Systemic sexism is defined as "the belief that women’s highest purposes were domestic and decorative, and the social standards that reinforced that belief" (Grady, 2018). Other things that were fought for during this time include equal pay; access to birth control (and an end to forced sterilisation of Black and disabled women); educational equality; Roe v. Wade and the right to have consensual abortions; political independence rather than being legally subordinate to husbands; working outside the home (for white middle-class women); awareness of and an end to domestic violence and sexual harassment. Some of the same things that women of the first wave were fighting for. Black feminists, however, were starting to get tired of white people obliviously hogging all the limelight; bell hooks "argued that feminism cannot just be a fight to make women equal with men because not all men are equal in a capitalist, racist, homophobic society" (University of Massachusetts, 2017). This started the tradition of Black feminist thought and womanism.

The third wave, starting in the 1990s and inspired by work in the 80s, embraced a lot of stuff that the second wave rejected.

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 (Grady, 2018).

In this time we had the riot grrrl phenomenon on the music scene; the continuation of the fight that started in the 80s for access to medical treatment for HIV/AIDS and the humanisation of queer people; queer politics which emphasise that there are more types of queers than just middle-class white gay men and lesbians; sex-positive feminism advocating for sexual liberation and consent; and transnational feminism, which "highlights the connections between sexism, racism, classism, and imperialism" (University of Massachusetts, 2017). Kimberlé Crenshaw's coining of the term "intersectionality" in the 80s to refer to the intersections between different kinds of oppression (woman AND Black, woman AND disabled, woman AND immigrant, etc.), became the name of the game.

Arguably, we are now in a fourth wave of feminism, an online wave, which "is queer, sex-positive, trans-inclusive, body-positive, and digitally driven" (Grady, 2018). We use hashtags like #MeToo on Twitter and we organise SlutWalks online and we circulate our revolution magazines with hyperlinks rather than paper. We don't have to attend a rally in order to make our presence known, and we don't have to leave the house and gather together in person in order to hear each other's stories and energise each other to act. We're enabled to be lazier, but we're also enabled to do something with minimal energy when we don't have very much due to a medical condition or other disability. We don't have to exhaust ourselves after work by driving or walking to another meeting place, we only have to log on. We face less physical danger online than we do on the streets. We're empowered in different ways than our predecessors were, and we have access to information and audiences in a way they could never have dreamed of.

I won't go into too much detail about the conflicts between generations or "waves" of feminism like Grady does in her Vox article. There will always be squabbling amongst group members. There will always be splinter movements off of the "mainstream" effort. The focus should be on the goal that we all share, that of ending some kind (or all kinds) of oppression. We should be helping each other to achieve that goal and promote real equality, not letting ourselves be divided along temporal, generational, racial, gender, or any other kind of lines. Coalitional feminism is essential—"politics that organizes with other groups based on their shared (but differing) experiences of oppression, rather than their specific identity"—the opposite of identity politics, which revolve around one identity at a time (University of Massachusetts, 2017).

Unity can be difficult when some groups consider their aims fundamentally at odds, but tearing each other down rather than working to tear down the walls that separate the marginalised from the mainstream is just wasted energy. So while the wave structure can be useful when talking about different "main" events in the historical record of feminist activism, ultimately it just attempts to neatly compartmentalise something that has always been vast and complex and noisy. Feminism's nuances are part of its legacy. If there is anything that all feminisms have in common, it is that we have always been a thorn in the side of the establishment.

Vox as a media corporation is a bit left-leaning, but feminism also tends to be left-leaning. Their niche is in explaining political and social goings-on to a lay-public who may not be keeping up with all the news regarding any given topic. Their sources are credible and their reliability is rated highly by Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check.

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Grady, C. (2018, July 20). The waves of feminism, and why people keep fighting over them, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves-explained-first-second-third-fourth

“Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” by University of Massachusetts, 2017. CC BY Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

(http://openbooks.library.umass.edu/introwgss/)