Lipstick liberation

Part 4

by Yvonne Abraham

Unwittingly or not, third-wave writers give the strong impression that the world is now kind to women, thereby ceding important ground to critics of feminism, and to those who would undo the gains of the second wave. By moving feminism's agenda from politics and economics to bedrooms and cosmetics counters, third-wave writers effectively sidestep many of the serious problems that still beset women, and undermine attempts to fix them.

There's no denying that women's lives have improved more in one generation than they did over the previous century. Nor is it unreasonable to expect those women who can take more responsibility for their own lives and happiness to do so. However, if second-wave feminists are overly pessimistic about women in the '90s, third-wave writers are overly optimistic.

If you were to take a snapshot of women in America even now, it wouldn't be a pretty picture. White women still earn only 71 cents for every dollar a white man earns. Over 95 percent of this country's top executives are still white men. Domestic abuse is the leading cause of injury for women between 15 and 44, and 1.8 million women were seriously assaulted by men in the last 12 months. Over 90,000 rapes are reported each year. Many women still have inadequate access to birth control, and face insurmountable obstacles to abortion. For some women, none of the old problems have gone away, despite feminism's huge victories.

Indeed, talk to any feminist activist and she'll tell you that things have actually been sliding for women lately: state legislatures all over the country have limited access to abortion for minors, setting parental consent and waiting-period rules. Welfare-reform legislation affects women far more than men, imposing family caps without adequately providing for good birth control, and work requirements without child care for many women.

"Where is it that we've entered the promised land," Susan Faludi scoffs, "other than in our choice of lipstick?"

And, contrary to what their popular image suggests, most feminists do deal with those kinds of problems. NOW, that bulwark of second-wave feminism, and a favorite piñata of post-ideological feminists, spends much of its energies helping women for whom lingerie guilt is a long way off. The Boston office gets about 20 calls a week from women seeking counsel because they're being sexually harassed at work, or are losing too much in a divorce, or being paid too little compared to male equivalents. NOW's Toni Troop and her colleagues are also lobbying private companies to extend domestic-partner benefits to employees, and to accommodate working mothers with flextime and other work arrangements.

And Emily's List, the political-action committee begun almost 12 years ago, is working to further enfranchise women, raising money -- these days, lots of it -- to get women elected to office. There are nine women in the US Senate (and 91 men), and only 51 women in the 435-member House. "If we relied on the traditional structures in place," says Karin Johanson, communications director for the PAC, "we wouldn't even have that many women in office." Women senators and legislators have won increased funding for research into breast cancer, fought welfare-reform legislation, and opposed assaults on women's reproductive freedoms.

And both organizations are healthy. NOW's membership, which surged after the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy, has remained steady at 200,000. Emily's List, which women joined in droves after those hearings, has grown to 66,000 members. Although the marginal extremes of traditional feminism may well bear little connection to real women's lives, the rest of the movement still plays an important role in them.

Yet, many third-wave critiques of feminism remain fixated on those extremes. In other words, Roiphe, Lehrman, Denfeld, & Company have taken the silly fringes, academic edges, and media stereotypes of the women's movement, balled them up into a big ol' hairy-legged straw woman, and are beating away. "Lehrman, like a lot of women her age, was raised on a particular brand of feminism which wasn't really feminism, but pop culture's version of feminism," says Faludi, who has gone head-to-head with Lehrman recently, most notably in the online magazine Slate. "It's the consumer-culture idea that you can have it all. She feels feminism has cheated her because she can't be the Aviance woman, where you come home looking ravishing and fry up the bacon. There's this disconnect between what feminism is about and what it became once it was mediated through TV screens."

"I confess," writes Gloria Steinem in her foreword to To Be Real, "that there are moments in these pages when I -- and perhaps other readers over thirty-five -- feel like a sitting dog being told to sit." Motherhood, lipstick, and miniskirts have always been a part of the women's movement, she notes.

But since they've shifted their emphasis from the public world of politics and social problems and onto women's private lives, third-wave writers are predisposed to diminish, or overlook, the important political- and social-activism work feminists do, and to concentrate instead on their intrusion into women's personal lives.

By painting traditional feminists as a kind of PC police force, they inadvertently perpetuate the stereotypes that continue to alienate women from feminism. And they provide extra ammunition for the Rush Limbaughs of the world, who don't discriminate between second- and third-wave feminists.

Certainly, there are third-wave writers who still see the political as vital to feminism. "In our personal lives, we're finding things are much more fuzzy and complicated," Rebecca Walker says, "but in the world, there's nothing fuzzy and complicated about the welfare bill." Walker's Third Wave activist group continues along the more traditional lines of a NOW or an Emily's List. "Thank God," says Walker. "Otherwise I'd be screwed -- and skewered."

Ditto Naomi Wolf. Despite her shift from too-simple second-wave feminism, Wolf is more heavily involved politically now than ever, having advised White House policymakers on women's issues, and worked to improve the situations of women refugees and prostitutes.

However. All of those are-men-really-that-bad-all-I-really-need-is-a-good-one Esquire stories add up to something, and, like it or not, third-wave feminists helped to put them there. The logical extension of even the most respectful third-wave writing is The Lipstick Proviso, in which Lehrman makes the mind-boggling observation that "The huge main problem with contemporary feminism is that it has attached itself to a political agenda." (She also gladly concedes that "Activism supporting abortion rights and battered women and rape-crisis work is incredibly important, and we need to do more of it." Go figure.)

Welfare reform, which affects so many more women than men, is "outside the scope of feminism," she says. "The problem that poor women exist is not a problem of feminism," she continues, "it's a problem of class. The point of feminism is equality of opportunity for women, not equality of result."

But class problems and women's problems are inextricable. What to do when political acts affect women far more adversely than men? That welfare reform has effectively nixed equality of opportunity for some women recipients -- by, say, relegating them to minimum-wage jobs indefinitely -- has apparently not occurred to Lehrman.

Because it sucks the politics -- and therefore women's most intractable problems -- out of feminism, Lehrman's work dovetails perfectly with the current political climate in this country. "It's part of a larger dynamic in the culture," says Faludi, "in which people are urged to turn their eyes away from political concerns, and inward, and not in a spiritual way, either. Forget about the political revolutionary pursuits: just have a revolution with your Nike sneakers. It takes all the language of political rhetoric and hollows it out."

It occurs to few in the third wave to see feminism's decline in the context of America's retreat from all kinds of labels and politics since the Republican landslide of 1994. It's not just feminism that's a dirty word these days. "Liberal" is having such a rough time of it that even our Democrat president has trouble saying the word, choosing instead wishy-washy, jello terms like "the politics of meaning" and various and sundry verses from Isaiah. Maybe it's not just feminism that's out of sync with today's world: it's the idea of holding any political philosophy at all.

Part 5

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.