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Feminism, (Sometimes) I Hardly Know YeSeptember 30, 2007 The last few months I've been thinking a lot about feminism. Feminism is so much a part of me that it's not easy to think about: how much time do I spend thinking about my heart or my brain or the index finger on my right hand? Well, I think about my heart when it's racing, my brain when it's tired, and my index finger when it gets jammed in the truck door. My feminism doesn't race or weary or get jammed between unyielding objects, so maybe that's why I don't think about it much. Or maybe it's more like the air, which I don't think much about either unless it's heavy or dirty or reeking of auto exhaust. Lately, though, I've been bumping up more and more against what other people think feminism is -- "other people" including feminists, non-feminists, and even some anti-feminists -- and, well, it's somewhat like jamming my index finger in the truck door. Usually their definitions bear some resemblance to mine, but often the resemblance is tenuous, like the relationship between a photograph and its three-dimensional subject, or maybe the relationship between the senior class photo and a version that's been cropped so it only has three people in it. Being a writer and an editor, I take words very seriously: if we don't agree on their meanings, communication becomes garbled, distorted, or even impossible. So I went looking for what "feminism" means these days. Among my informants was Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Girls Gone Wild, by Deborah Siegel, which aims to explain feminism's second wave to the third wave and vice versa. It was interesting, and useful, and, though ultimately disappointing, it provided a valuable clue to why other people's understanding of feminism seems so incomplete to me. Siegel's book relies heavily on print sources, especially mainstream print sources. (I started to type "malestream print sources." Somewhere during this quest, the word "malestream" has either entered or been restored to my vocabulary.) From its beginning, my own feminism has been print-inspired, print-sustained, and print-dependent for sure, but it's always had another dimension: my workaday life. Women's liberation, as it was mostly known when/where I first encountered it, was in part our collective attempt to make sense of events we had no names or explanations for. Like three female college students, all antiwar activists, trying to figure out just why we didn't like the now-notorious anti-draft poster of sisters Joan Baez, Mimi Fariña, and Pauline Marden saying "Girls say yes to guys who say no." (Shortly after we identified the source of our dislike, the guys told us we were overreacting.) Or the dean of the School of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University telling an audience of dozens that the reason the school lacked credibility was that 60 percent of the enrollment was female: no one ever said such a thing about the School of Foreign Service, whose enrollment was about 85 percent male. Anyway, I could go on, and on, and on, and in the process write the first half of my autobiography. The point is that my feminism has been part of my life since I was 18. When you live something as well as reading about it, you know just how complex it is, and how hard it is to generalize about it. You also have a sense that it's yours as well as other people's. It's not something that parents, teachers, priests, politicians, or the media are stuffing down your throat. You've got other options besides "swallow" and "throw up." Out in the big world, plenty of people seem to believe that feminism is primarily about individual women getting whatever they want, and maybe about supporting certain individual women in their quest for certain kinds of prominence. (In case you were wondering, it is highly unlikely that I'll ever do anything to support Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidency.) It isn't. It's about identifying and dismantling the barriers that confront women as a class. The barriers can be laws, traditions, or attitudes, and they vary from place to place and across time. Some of the attitudes are gasp! in our own heads. As those barriers are identified and dismantled, more and more women will have more and more options -- but that doesn't mean that every choice we make is a feminist choice, even if feminism helped make the choosing possible. P.S. This is probably the first in an irregular bloggish series that will wander all over the map of my life. Stay tuned, but don't hold your breath.
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