Hugo Schwyzer

I’m a little bleary-eyed this Tuesday morning. The cold I was fighting off all of last week settled on me with some force on Saturday, and it still lingers today. The onset of illness did not prevent my wife and me from taking a much-needed “short break” (as the English would say) — we gave ourselves 24 hours at a nearby hotel. No cell phones, no computers, just lots of rest and time for each other. We’ve been going non-stop at one thing or another since late August, and we needed a quick recharge before settling into the holiday frenzy that now looms.

Though his site is not work-safe for all, Figleaf has some very kind (and interesting) things to say about my recent post on a “passionately feminist” marriage.

And I’ve just finished Astrid Henry’s Not my Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third Wave Feminism (I learned about the Henry book from Courtney Martin at Feminsting.) The book explores the “mother-daughter” model to describe the conflict between two successive waves of feminism: the Second Wave of the 1960s and early ’70s and the Third Wave that began to emerge in the early 1990s. Feminists of the Second Wave (everyone from Betty Friedan to Shulamith Firestone) were born between 1920-1955; the Third Wave roughly corresponds to “Generation X” (1964-1981). Some folks, of course, now speak of a Fourth Wave. To outsiders, it all gets very confusing. Though imperfect, the Wikipedia definitions of Second and Third Wave feminism are helpful.

My mother was — and still is - in many respects a classic “Second Wave” feminist. Born in 1937, she graduated from Vassar in 1959, back when it was still an all-women’s college. She was influenced by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and, later, Betty Friedan. My mother was active in the League of Women Voters, and joined the National Organization for Women more or less upon its 1966 inception. Throughout my early childhood, Ms. Magazine was on the coffee table. My mother had an enormous influence on my sense of what feminism was; indeed, even after all of these years of teaching women’s studies, when someone asks me for a mental image of a feminist I still see my mother, circa 1975: short hair, black wool turtleneck, smoking Vantage cigarettes, sitting at her desk in her study reading Hobbes. (I realize that in that image I have of Mom, she’s younger than I am now.)

Henry’s point is fairly straightforward: beginning in the early 1990s with writers as different as Katie Roiphe, Rene Denfield, and Naomi Wolf, feminists of “my” generation (born in the 1960s and early ’70s) began to publish a series of critical attacks on their “mother’s” feminism. This generation — my generation — shared the Second Wave commitment to women’s equality, but were eager to rebel against what they saw as certain feminist orthodoxies. Where an earlier generation of feminists embraced collective action, this new generation — or so it is often argued — favored the pursuit of individual happiness. Where an earlier generation of feminists was mistrustful of open displays of sexuality, worrying about the ways in which a sexualized culture exploited women, the Third Wavers embraced women’s sexual agency, talking frankly about desire and pleasure in ways that made their mothers uncomfortable. Where Second Wavers protested against porn, Third Wavers took a more nuanced approach, at times vigorously defending its redemptive potential. You get the idea. To over-generalize (something that Astrid Henry does try to avoid), Third Wave feminism at its most simplistic boiled down to a doctrine that saw “choice” as an ultimate good. It mattered less what was being chosen (or why) than that women had choices. That’s not fair to a great many young feminists who have written critically about “choice” (not as pro-lifers, mind you, but as theorists troubled by the idea that choices can ever be exercised outside of social constructs). It remains, however, a popular conception of the distinction between Third and Second Wavers.

Henry exposes a key problem in the writings of certain Third Wavers:

Younger feminists (Roiphe, Denfield, Wolf, etc.) often resists second-wave feminism through rebelling against an “internalized feminist governor”, one that may have very little relation to any particular feminist… this governor often goes unnamed and is just called “feminism”, an amorphous category that includes both everything and nothing.

Hah. That rang true. Henry’s book is filled with helpful insights into this generational conflict, even as she - at least at times — oversells the depth of the divide.

As the pro-feminist son of a feminist single mother, one of my more challenging ideological and theoretical journeys has been developing my own feminism. For most of my childhood, my mother’s life was the template for how I understood women. Even as I went through puberty and my first romantic and sexual relationships with women, my mother’s views of the world — and, in particular, of feminism — remained dominant. When I went off to college and started taking women’s studies courses in the mid-1980s, my professors at Berkeley were women my mother’s age.

Particularly in the upper-division classes I took on women’s studies, I noticed that at times a generational split would emerge between some of my female classmates and an older woman professor. It’s been twenty years, so the details of the arguments are hazy, but I remember feeling almost indignantly protective of the feminist instructors. My feminism was still very much in formation, but I knew that I believed in cross-generational solidarity. I came into these seminars to imbibe feminism from those who, like my mother, had fought on the front lines of the 1960s. I assumed that most of my female classmates wanted the same thing. Though I was happy to quibble about minor phlosophical points, I thought of a feminist classroom as being a place where an older feminist carefully steeped her students in the ideology and tactics of a movement. A certain amount of give-and-take was to be expected, but what I saw at times bordered on a kind of contemptuous rebellion, as if my classmates in the Reagan era were convinced that in some ways, this older generation that had come of age in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations just didn’t “get it” at all.

A lot of that inter-generational conflict, of course, lay in the perception on the part of the younger women that the older generation were trying to impose “victimization” upon them. I’ll never forget a discussion — one that still shows up in my classes — in which we were, not surprisingly, discussing Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin made the case that the very language of heterosexual intercourse reflected its oppressiveness: “penetrate”, “enter”, “screw” were words of domination and control. A classmate, quoting Shere Hite, said “Yeah, but all you have to do to get rid of that mindset is change the vocabulary of sex to ‘engulf’, ‘envelop’, ’surround.’ Then women have all the power. It’s not reality Dworkin is talking about, it’s language!” This was back before Roiphe and Wolf had published their books, but some of my classmates (circa 1987-88) were already convinced that their “mothers” (Dworkin was a key “mom” figure even then) were trying to convince them that the world was more oppressive to women than it actually was.

As I took more and more gender studies courses and began to get involved in activism, I began to develop my own sense of what it meant to be a feminist. It never, however, involved rejecting my mother’s feminism, even as I eventually adopted positions that were markedly different from hers. Because I was a man, I didn’t worry about “becoming” my mother in a way that I think at least some women worry about turning into their moms. Biology, if nothing else, meant that both my mother and I knew our lives and our experiences would be very distinct. The feminism she gave me was the feminism a mother ought to give to a son: a call to reject privilege wherever possible and to be an active participant in the egalitarian struggle. But we both knew that our worldviews would end up being very different because our bodies and our acculturations were so different. As a result, I was free — free in a way that some of my female peers raised by feminist moms apparently were not — to accept or reject my mother’s politics without rancor.

In any event, I recommend Henry’s book with enthusiasm, particularly for those who are troubled by the often bitter internecine battles inside this big tent we call feminism.