Fifty-three years after Betty Friedan wrote about “the problem that has no name,” the name has a problem. In the United States today, “Feminism” is feminism’s greatest enemy. The movement achieved its original goals but changed its mission in order to persist. In the process, feminism may have lost its path.
The Paranoid Schizophrenic
At its core, feminism is a belief in equal rights for women. From this belief sprang a movement. The movement’s history is usually organized into waves. A sharp ideological divides exists in the modern, third wave, ideology of feminism. Christine Sommers, Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy and author of Who Stole Feminism?, described to the HPR how “there are gender feminists and equality feminists. Equality feminists want for women what she wants for everyone,” and Sommers remarked that this has largely been satisfied, making the twenty-first century something of a “golden age for us women.” Gender feminists, in contrast, “will not take yes for an answer.” Gender feminism stresses what Sommers refers to as “the invisible patriarchy,” the idea that society is constructed in such a way that leads to attitudes that support stratified gender roles.
In its struggle to remain relevant, modern feminism can be described as a paranoid schizophrenic: paranoid from constantly seeing what Sommers called the invisible patriarchy, schizophrenic from the innumerable and unrelated causes it espouses. The National Organization for Women’s website features 24 separate “feminist’ issues, including immigration, welfare, racism, and disability rights. “Feminism” has become a leviathan of special interests; regardless of the rightness of any of these causes, they are simply not related to women and serve to dilute feminism. A movement can only be effective if it has a well-defined direction. For feminism to get the respect it deserves, it must get its priorities straight.
Looking Back for the Future
In light of the current prominence of gender feminists, it is easy to forget that much of the 20th century progress made towards legal equality was brought about by the proponents of a hard-line gender distinction called suffragettes. To some, including Harvey Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University, this ideological challenge to the gender-neutral society is commendable. Mansfield told the HPR, “They believed that giving women the vote was not a right but an advantage to common good.” The first wave feminists from the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century were not advocating suffrage for the sake of equality but for the betterment of society by the representation of women as distinct contributors to society. In this sentiment, Mansfield has a seemingly unlikely sympathizer. Amy Siskind from the New Agenda, a national organization that aims to improve the lives of women and girls by bringing about systemic change in the media, workplace, school and home, told the HPR, “Equality is an entirely different notion than what we stand for.” (Editor’s note: Amy Siskind is the author’s aunt.)
The push for a more gender-neutral society began in second wave of feminism during the 1960s and 1970s. In his book Manliness, Mansfield argues that second wave feminists saw gender as a social construct and felt the need to redefine being a woman. Mansfield describes how feminists imitated men in order to pursue a better lifestyle and in the process degraded “women’s work.”
Mansfield described the push towards gender-neutrality as a “massive” and “amazing success.” The drop in support for feminism over the last few decades can be partly explained by the simple fact that feminism is not as necessary as before. Despite the controversy surrounding issues such as abortion, access to birth control, and women in combat zones, there is little legal distinction today between a man and a woman.
As more women enter the workforce and as society becomes increasingly gender neutral, women must balance the imitation of men with the assumption of a new role in a very different society. The proper balance is not clear: As Siskind told the HPR, “Second wave feminism gave us the car keys but didn’t teach us to drive.” Disagreement within modern feminism between gender neutrality and gender distinction reflects the ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity of the feminist movement and the population it works to benefit.
By consolidating and redefining its priorities, feminism can become a movement in which all women feel invested. For example, feminism can look abroad: while legal equality has largely been achieved in the United States, women in some countries lack many rights that American women now consider inviolable. As Sommers notes, “We had a movement for apartheid in South Africa. Now we have apartheid all over the world.” A refocused feminism could do more to fight that glaring inequality than its current incarnation can.