Since I posted yesterday on this excerpt from Courtney Martin’s new book, I’ve been thinking more about this one phrase of hers that troubled me:
We are the daughters of feminists who said, “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”
On the one hand, I recognize the truth here — so many young women do hear the first message as the second. And Martin is right that for a particular generation of feminists — those raised in the 1960s and 1970s, the mothers of today’s young perfectionists — the “you can be anything” message was absolute gospel. But (and I say this not having read the entire book yet, only this excerpt) I’m worried that casual readers might come away with the impression that organized feminism is somehow chiefly to blame for the crushing, exhausting burdens our little sisters now carry in their hearts and in their bodies.
I worry about this interpretation because it’s one I sometimes hear from my more conservative students in my women’s studies course. These young women are keenly aware of the pressure to be thin and beautiful, independent and multi-faceted. Like their sisters, they are often raw and tired and frustrated. But somehow they’ve picked up the impression that feminism is to blame for their exhaustion. They come into the course with a sense of the past (picked up from both the mainstream and conservative media) that is idealized and sanitized. And their sense is that not so long ago (usually, they point to the supposed halcyon days of the 1950s), women had fewer pressures. One young woman wrote in her journal a year or two ago (I remember her words fairly vividly, though this is surely a paraphrase):
I wish I lived fifty years ago. I would then only have to be a wife and a mother. I could be curvy, like Marilyn, instead of super-thin. I wouldn’t have to worry about both a relationship and a career. I wouldn’t have to cope with the mixed message of “love is all you need to be happy” and “don’t rely on a man, stay single and free.” I wouldn’t feel so much pressure to please everybody, instead I could just focus on pleasing my husband and my children. Yes, I would have much less freedom to do things, but I would have so much more freedom from pressure. And maybe this course will prove me wrong, but it seems to me that feminism, by asking us to do everything men do as well as what women do, has made things worse for us.
(By the way, perhaps in honor of FDR, I often talk about “freedom from” and “freedom to” in the context of feminist history. That dyad comes up early in the course, and my students get sick of hearing about it.)
My student — and perhaps Courtney Martin, though I can’t gauge the latter’s intent until I read the whole darned book — makes a serious and common mistake. On the one hand, many young women today have no authentic sense of just how rigid, stifling, and fundamentally unsatisfying domesticity was for millions of American women two generations ago. I give them excerpts from The Feminine Mystique, but many of them remain captivated by the fantasy that a good marriage and healthy children (perhaps with a nice house, white picket fence, and so forth) is all that any woman needs for deep and enduring happiness. While they admit to considerable cynicism about the chances of finding “a good guy”, many of them speak wistfully and nostalgically of a golden age when women could be softer, rounder, and less pressured to perform in the classroom and the boardroom. Trying to convince them that that “golden age” existed only for a privileged and fortunate few is sometimes hard work. Some folks just don’t want their bubbles burst.
I call these students my “if/then” kids, because so many of them say something like “IF I met the right guy, THEN I would consider getting married and staying home with the kids. It’s what I’d really like to do, but I just don’t think I’m likely to find someone. But if I did, then…” If/then thinking depresses me no end, because it seems to suggest that women’s pursuit of independence is only a response to the lack of honorable, decent, reliable men. If/then thinking suggests that “if only more men were reliable and willing to settle down and stay committed, then feminism wouldn’t be necessary.” It suggests that the goals of the women’s movement were developed entirely in response to bad male behavior, and though there is some historic truth to this, the “if/then” analysis completely underestimates what many feminists (including this one) argue is the healthy and perfectly natural desire for women to be self-determining agents in every aspect of their lives.
So back to the point about feminism and pressure. It’s absolutely true that feminists have told young women “You can be whatever you want to be.” It is absolutely true that the feminist movement has opened up extraordinary possibilities for women, possibilities that simply would not otherwise have existed. And it is true that with more choices there comes the inevitable pressure to make a choice; that’s part and parcel of growing up But no feminist I know now or in the past forty years has pushed the “superwoman” complex onto her daughters! That complex is pushed by a variety of decidedly non-feminist forces (big media, the consumer products industry, big fashion) which realized that women’s spending patterns are heavily driven by insecurity. A woman who is happy in her own skin is inclined, all things considered, to spend a good deal less on clothes, make-up, accessories, diet pills, and so forth. Women’s anxiety and corporate profits are clearly, almost inextricably linked at this point.
Feminists did, as Martin says, tell their daughters “You can be all that you want to be.” But it was Vogue and Elle, MTV and the WB that told those same young women, “yes, you can be anything you like, but here’s our narrowly defined, elusive, unobtainable ideal. Come chase it!” The magazines and the televison programs learned that cloaking their marketing in a thin veneer of feminist rhetoric made it exciting, edgy, palatable. And not surprisingly, many young women today feel alienated by the language of female empowerment because for as long as they’ve been alive, that language has been used to sell them something else that is “indispensable”. They confuse authentic feminism, which is desperately concerned with women’s happiness and self-determination, with a corporate culture that skillfully appropriated that language of personal fulfillment merely to increase its own profits. They don’t fully trust the message because the message has been stolen.
It is undeniable that young women are under colossal emotional pressure these days. The guilt about food, the guilt about failing to people-please, the guilt about letting down everyone around them; it’s all crushing. And it’s true that many of these overworked and anxious young women wouldn’t have the same pressure to succeed if there hadn’t been a feminist movement. But the anxiety they feel isn’t rooted in women’s liberation, it’s rooted in young women’s susceptability to the overwhelming pressure from media and market forces, forces that see a bottomless gold mine in the increased buying power of women. But that buying power will only lead to corporate profits if young women can be kept anxious, unsatisfied, and filled with self-loathing.
I disagree completely. No surprise.
As long as you have feminists - and I am sure I don’t have to name names - who declare that women who choose not to pursue a career are somehow wasting their education, or betraying women in some way, Feminism has to shoulder some of the blame.
And they have to shoulder it not because they openly agree with it, but that their timidity in rebuking in in the sternest and most unambiguous terms lends it credence.
Silence gives assent, Hugo - and it’s an example of the people-pleasing ingrained in women that you so often deplore that causes this silent assent and complicity. Honestly, man, how can women - feminists - stand up to “the establishment” if they can’t even stand up to each other?
Gonz, there are relatively few feminist voices who shame other women who choose not to pursuue a career outside the home I have no problem in condemning those who do engage in this. (I haven’t reviewed Leslie Bennets new work, which makes this case, but based on what I’ve read, I’m none too pleased.)
I think you really got to an important issue, Hugo, when you said pressure to make a choice is just part of growing up. But isn’t the obligation to consider the impact of one’s choices on others also part of being an adult? And if so, why would it not be legitimate for feminists to critique women’s choices for their impact on other women? I understand if you don’t agree with the content of the critique, but why should the discussion be off-limits?
Z, the problem lies in how that conversation happens. There are communal responsibilities we all have — but what constitutes “poor choices” by other women is always a subject we have to approach with great care. Both the hijab and the miniskirt are regularly condemned as “hurting other women” by folks with an axe to grind. Our default position ought to be respect for the virtue of each woman’s choice except in those cases where there is clear and overwhelming evidence of harm, the sort of harm that is universally evident.
And it’s a worthy discussion, but maybe a bit off thread topic.
Maybe it takes an old broad like myself to REMIND everyone, but: Feminism has NOTHING to do with any sort of demand for thinness, fashion, or “beauty”. One of the driving ideas of second-wave Feminism is that your body is Perfectly OK the WAY GOD MADE IT. You do not and should not have to torture or decorate your flesh to make it attractive to men.
Unfortunately (and you yourself are something of a case of this Hugo) instead of females feeling free to dismiss these constructs form their minds (bodily “perfection”), the opposite happened: males took it upon themsleves to mimic the “feminine” behavior of constantly evaluating their bodies (and finding them wanting).
But I am unfair to say they took it upon themselves; they were CONVINCED of it by, yes, CORPORATE AMERICA, that makes tons of money off the enterprise of making everyone feel unworthy, just as you point out.
I will never stop being disappointed and saddened by the fact that, instead of all Americans feeling free to dress confortably and feel fine being just as they are, (you know, WITH secondary sexual characteristics, like pubic hair!), everyone has to feel shitty about how they look and wear uncomfortable clothes and be judged almost ENTIRELY by their appearance.
The problem you outline of young women feeling that they must do EVERYTHING is also a patriarchal corporatacracy construct: corporate and business culture demand that females do everything simultaneously. All the corporate culture would have to do is allow females ten years or so out of a lifetime to reproduce and see to the young, without harsh financial punishment. But they keep the punishment card in play, to the detriment of our society. Our culture is NOT about best outcomes; it is about keeping females powerless and overworked, and wringing every last penny out of the working people.
Ignoring the endless comments whining about how feminists have deprived men their god-given right to a houseslave.
I like Kamy Wicoff’s take. She calls us the “sandwich” generation, in that we were raised both with feminist expectations and in a patriarchy. Thus, we get the feminine training to be everything to everyone and feminism ends up getting used against us to make us tap dance even harder.
Part of it is that women have more opportunities but the amount of social esteem we get has not caught up. So you can go to school and get a job, but you enter these areas knowing that everyone is prejudiced to think you lesser than your male peers. When I was a girl, my father said to me, “You’re going to have to work twice as hard to be taken as half as good.” He was right, but the result is that I’ve absorbed the idea that unless I can be perfect at all points in time, everything I have I will lose. There might be something to the idea that perfectionism is a guard against sexist degradation. For instance, keeping your weight down no matter what the cost is what you have to do to prevent men who are threatened by you from undermining you with comments about your weight. But if you’re conventionally attractive, know that will be used against you as well. (Look at all the attacks on Jessica Valenti.) So you have to be stunningly intelligent to put that to rest. And god forbid you ever get flustered, or you will be stereotyped as some sort of chick lit-esque nitwit.
(I haven’t reviewed Leslie Bennets new work, which makes this case, but based on what I’ve read, I’m none too pleased.)
Excellent. Elaborate on that. Break the “Nixon Doctrine*” that seems to infect just about every aspect of public progressive discourse.
I managed to raise my daughter (After having to undo the damage her mother did to her) and she’s earned a Master’s Degree, and has weathered well the first couple years of her marriage by teaching her it is alright to decide who’s opinions truly matter, and saying “Screw you” to anyone else who tries to lay crap on her - just like I taught my son.
*Nixon Doctrine: Thou Shalt Not Criticize a Fellow Republican.
Good post, Hugo. Corporate forces are always interested in repackaging our identities and selling them back to us. They do it with sexuality*: they do it with gender: they do it with identity politics. Feminism gets sold as a sort of GirlPowerAttitood thing - usually pictured as a “kick-ass heroine” kicking some man in the balls. Or as the token ’smart’ woman in a series, who is always right, yet in some indefinable way makes you think “she’s really annoying.” Oh yes, that’s because she’s usually portrayed as humourless and smug, an “I told you so” sort. Sisters doing it for themselves gets translated in the media to: sisters doing it to show all the men that they are clever girls and boys suck etc
THIS is the culture that has given us “Boys suck - throw rocks at them” T-shirts. It isn’t feminism. It’s a smear campaign against feminism.
*Because it takes a queer eye to determine the best shaving products a man can get
I’ll admit that I’ve never seen it as much of a choice… though I enjoy cooking, the rest of the housework is so boring that I’d be homicidal within a few days.
But that buying power will only lead to corporate profits if young women can be kept anxious, unsatisfied, and filled with self-loathing.
I’ve developed a habit of systematically avoiding and eliminating advertising from my life, and it has helped quite a bit. All they care about is getting into my purse, after all.
“I give them excerpts from The Feminine Mystique, but many of them remain captivated by the fantasy that a good marriage and healthy children (perhaps with a nice house, white picket fence, and so forth) is all that any woman needs for deep and enduring happiness.” - Hugo Schwyzer
Not to tell you how to teach your class, but why isn’t the entire book required reading? Perhaps this might flesh out your students’ perception of what the 50s were really like, what feminism really is and why it is still necessary. It can also give them an idea of what awaits them should they decide to “opt out” later when they have kids.
I read it by chance in late high school/early college in the late 80s early 90s. My local library was selling old books really really cheap (like $1 and $.50) and recognizing the title I picked it up. It sat on my bookshelf for a couple of years I remember until I decided to actually read it (along with Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, if that matters). Even then I had to mine my knowledge of history in order to understand it. Requiring present college students to read it might require a brief history lesson in order to explain the historical context of the book but I think it will be worthwhile.
As an aside, in high school English class, we had to read “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen which in a way is a proto-feminist play. I don’t know if most other high school kids have to read it but it could also help make the point without using controversial names like “Betty Friedan” and “Gloria Steinem”.
I don’t know if my reading the entirety of The Feminine Mystique has anything to do with this but today I unabashedly call myself a feminist, a real feminist, when asked. It seems to me that too many women in their 20s and younger think being a feminist means not shaving your armpits and burning bras. That needs to be dispelled with a quickness. Reading The Feminine Mystique in its entirety might help that happen.
Treifalicious, they’ve already got four major books to read, and I’m pushing the limits of what’s expected in an introductory community college class where a substantial percentage of students are non-native speakers…
I do teach the “Doll’s House” in my humanities course for precisely this reason.
“they’ve already got four major books to read” - HS
Out of curiosity, which four books are those?
Amanda said: “Ignoring the endless comments whining about how feminists have deprived men their god-given right to a houseslave.”
Amanda sums up the typical one-sided approach to historical feminism: She and those of her ilk simply don’t ‘get it’ that back in the ‘good old days’ life was no Swiss Picnic for men either. Some women (but notably, *not* Betty Friedan) might have been “houseslaves” but their husbands were similarly wage slaves, beasts of burden and cannon fodder on the fields of France, Belgium, Germany, China, the Phillipines, Okinawa, Korea, Viet Nam, etc. So, to use Amanda’s terminology, we now have women “whining” about being fat, being taken seriously (whether or not they’ve actually earned it), being stressed-out about the demands of work/family balance (something men have been doing for many generations), etc. Meanwhile men remain wage slaves, beasts of burden and cannon fodder, only now nobody appreciates their many sacrifices. No wonder many men are withdrawing from society at large.
Thanks for nothing feminism.
I’ll say it again: Men have been balancing work and family for many generations - the issue of “domestic slave” is indeed a lie, as Martin and people like her are learning. If feminists weren’t so angry, prideful and bitter they might just be able to learn something from men, but hey, I won’t hold my breath.
Mr. Bad, you’re done on this thread. You know the rules: bashing feminism and playing the “it was worse for men” card gets you knocked out pronto. I’ll let this comment stand, but will delete all further ones from you in this thread regardless of their content.
Treifalicious, I use Brumberg’s “Body Project”, Lynn Phillips “Flirting with Danger”, Ellen Dubois “Through Women’s Eyes”, Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale.”
Wow. Teaching at the college level must be grand. I seriously considered academia as a career choice but decided against it, partially because I grasped how hard it is to get tenure in the Humanities, not to mention scholarship money (as I did not have the money or the luxury of such generous parents to fund a PhD in the Humanitoes - like some of my friends in Harvard grad programs. The people who had it best were people doing grad degrees in hard sciences. Universities basically paid them to study and teach as opposed to them paying the university) and perhaps the biggest reason - because I knew I would be moving to Israel, where there are only 5 universities and it is even harder to get tenure.
Sigh. I suppose it’s one of those “nice work if you can get it” things - like being a rock star or something.
“While they admit to considerable cynicism about the chances of finding “a good guy”, many of them speak wistfully and nostalgically of a golden age when women could be softer, rounder, and less pressured to perform in the classroom and the boardroom.”
Feminism did have a real role in all this though. I’m not sure it can just be disclaimed as ‘not my sort of feminism’, it has pretty deep roots in the movement.
Women have been encouraged into the workplace mainly through the idea that if you become a housewife you risk ending up (a) being beaten and unable to escape because of your dependency, or (b) being abandoned and left in poverty. Now this social changes has resulted in relationships being less much stable than they were - more divorces, fewer marriages. So the changes of being abandoned, have gone up and in turn increased the presure to work. This has forclosed some options - like the ones these women talk about.
Feminism used a threat to get women working, and their entry to the workforce caused this threat to become more dire. I don’t have a problem with this. I think women should be expected to do economically productive work, just like men have been, and think that cultural change is a great achievement of feminism. I don’t have any sympathy with women who aspire to be housewives, but I can see why if you did want this you’d be pissed off.
Feminism used a threat to get women working, and their entry to the workforce caused this threat to become more dire.
I think it’s inaccurate to say that feminism used a threat. Instead, feminism publicized the facts that women who had minimal economic independence were at the mercy of their wage earning husbands and already faced various threats. It sought to get rid of sexist laws and customs that prevented women from practicing certain professions, securing bank loans without their husbands, etc. The goal was not so much “get those women working” as “as human beings, women ought to have the same rights in the workforce and in economic life as men do”.
Hugo, when you become a father, you will learn very quickly that “I’m giving you a time out because you’ve done this for the 289,394th time, but if you do it AGAIN you’ll be sorry!” is not any more effective on children than on trolls.
Indeed, Gonzman is right, though not in the way he thinks. Feminism did absorb a lot of the patriarchal message–traditional “women’s work” is silly and of no real value, and the true measure of value is the size of your paycheck and the prestige your job has in the opinion of men. Linda Hirschman may be a wackaloon, but she is dead right when she says that neither society nor the marketplace truly values childrearing.
I wonder how much of this issue is developmentally embedded. Both in the individual sense, and in a societal sense–adolescent minds are not adult minds, least of all in terms of sexuality, except that our entire sexual culture sometimes seems rather adolescent.
In different ways, we all hold different ideals, but we don’t generally think about the complexity of those ideals. The distinction between “I want you to be actualized” and “I want you to be perfect” is a very subtle one, and our history of trying to communicate it to teenagers is not encouraging, even leaving MTV aside.
Although, I suppose being “actualized” requires a lot of self-knowledge, which is hard to come by for most of us at that point in our lives.
Oh, and I wanted to say something about the yearn to return to the 50s. Reading Sylvia Plath’s journals cured me of that. (Yes, she’s white, middle class etc but actually a lot of the pressures she felt as ‘a successful woman’ - i.e. a woman who was college educated - seem to be very similar to many, many women’s insecurities today)
The “good-old days” mentality complete baffles me when ANYONE does it.
Gonzoman may be annoying as all heck, and self-serving to the nth degree, but he does point out one good thing: having a houseslave was no picnic for a guy, even if he got one. If you had a servant, not a partner, you were alone. You were isolated; you didn’t have someone to share your burdens, you had someone to foist your burdens on and/or another burden.
Why would we want to go BACK in time? Divorce is better than a marriage that sucks, affirmative action is better than quotas (remember, quotas originally LIMITED the number of minorities), and suing is better than dying because it was more cost-effective to seal up a mine shaft than go get them.
The “good old days” sucked in everyway they could have.
You wrote “A woman who is happy in her own skin is inclined, all things considered, to spend a good deal less on clothes, make-up, accessories, diet pills, and so forth.”
I disagree with you. Your working assumption is the female default position is to want to dress poorly, not use make-up, not use accessories, not be slim and attractive, etc. This seems more like clinical depression to me. Flash back to young girls having happy childhoods. Most like the things you claim well adjusted women don’t. As they age and if they remain happy they’re likely to continue to like them. Yes, sometimes this is carried too far as with diet pill abuse but there are way more women who are so “OK” with themselves that they are 100 pounds overweight with the associated medical problems.
Nerissa,
Spending a good deal less on clothes is not the same thing as “to want to dress poorly,” nor is spending less on make-up the same as “not using make-up”. Spending less means SPENDING LESS and hopefully spending on what makes us more happy and making wiser choices in our spending habits.
Many writers have already established points relating to how women’s spending patterns are driven by insecurity, insecurity promoted by “…a variety of decidedly non-feminist forces (big media, the consumer products industry, big fashion.” I think that is Hugo’s point.
Also, as far as the “slim and attractive,” goes…there are plenty of women who are attractive who don’t look like super models and many of those women carry around extra weight, or should I say they would be considered in the normal weight range, they just don’t resemble models or actresses. Medical problems can happen to skinny people–it’s called genetics. I don’t see where Hugo stated that women are so “OK” with themselves that they are 100 lbs overweight wih the associated medical problems. I say, if they are okay with their weight…GOOD FOR THEM. Life is difficult enough without other people dictating how one should look or feel about themselves.
Nerissa,
That is sort of an odd position to take. I spend way less on clothes than my best friend does - she shops in boutiques where you never find pants under $100 or shirts under $80. When I shop, I only hit the sale rack or use the oodles of coupons the Gap and Express sends me that lets me get things much less than the full retail price. I also use consignment stores to find beautiful, gently-used designer clothing for a tiny fraction of its original cost. Just because I’m being thriftier than my best friend is does not mean I’m dressing less attractively than she is. I’m currently wearing the most gorgeous beige pants that I fell in love with that I got on the clearance rack at White House Black Market - original retail was $80, I paid $30. If you looked at me and said I was dressing poorly today, I’d have to laugh and figure you’re just a snob.
I use makeup every day. I love makeup. I also consider each and every makeup purchase I make and determine if I already have similar colors. I don’t purchase Chanel and Dior makeup, but instead find brands that are much cheaper that don’t sacrifice quality.
I’m happy in my own body - the things I put on it don’t make me who I am. Because I’m happy in my own skin, the institutions that Karen brought up can’t prey on my insecurities to make me spend more than I really should.