At a very young age was made familiar with the word
“feminism”. It was made clear to
me it was a positive term to be embraced, if it had certain connotations. At the time those “connotations” were
more of things like bra-burning, radical behaviors that might not be embraced
by everybody. What was not clear to me, until relatively recently, was the
exclusivity of the term. That is that the kind of feminism that I had been
brought up on, rights to one’s own body/reproductive rights, promotion of women
in the workplace, equal pay and the like, were a particular brand of feminism,
specifically the white, middle-class kind.
I have always been around people of color, in schools, in my
community, in my workplace. I have always taken seriously the issues of racism,
and in college became familiar with reproductive issues beyond birth control
and abortion, i.e. forced sterilization of women of color. However as I left
college for a professional career my attention to these issues waned in my conscience. I should add that I have worked in
female-dominated environments with substantial minority representation (if not
in positions of power). If on occasion I paid attention to feminist issues, and
noted that the people were represented were overwhelming white my inherent
tendency was to think it was an oversight. That maybe the women of color who
also were involved with the struggle were busy that day. That there was not a
systemic attempt to keep women of color, and issues most important to them, off
the agenda. When the term “intersectionality” become a thing, I was a little
confused. Were we not all on the same page already?
A few weeks ago the hash tag #whitesolidarityforwhitewomen,
started by Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) became a thing. Most of the tweets under
this hash tag could be described as complaints about white, middle-class
feminism and the media outlets that support it, as well as ways women of color
are marginalized, in society, in the media, and even in the activist groups
that supposedly support them. Regardless
of the critiques themselves the fact that there was such an overwhelming
response to such a thing should give white women pause. Clearly, many women of color felt they
were not being represented, that the “whiteness” of many women’s groups was not
by accident, but by design, whether it was conscious or not. Clearly, if there
is such a thing as feminist movement it is already divided, if so many women
feel they are outside it.
There was an unfortunate tendency for some to complain,
essentially, that the critiques were not “fair”. Can I just say I do not think
any racial group uses the word “fair” more than white people? I think that it
comes from the (imaginary) world that most white people live –where everybody
is treated equally regardless of race, creed, and social status. The world
where everybody has a chance to “climb the economic ladder”-it just takes hard
work and education don’t you know! I feel that people of color, particularly
women, tend to not talk about “fairness” but justice, what is right and what is
deserved. It has to be fought for, it is rarely given.
You cannot help whom you are, where you come from. We all
have benefited from who came before us, some of us much more than others. But,
that doesn’t mean you can’t pay attention, and listen to others. If in this
year of 2013, post-Trayvon Martian, post-Kiera Wilmot, you can say that “race”
is trivial (as one tweet that came across my timeline did) I can’t help you. If
you can look at the numbers regarding drug arrests, prison populations,
recognizing that for every black man in prison there is at least one black
woman suffering, I can’t help you. If you look at the losses of jobs and wealth
in the great recession, so much more for people of color than white people, no
tweet or hash tag is going to make sense to you. All of us who consider
ourselves “women”, (regardless of actual anatomy) share many things in common,
but if we cannot realize the different experiences we have as shaped by other
factors, what is the purpose in “solidarity’?
Which brings me around to the point of this post, is the
forth wave of “feminism” not to be “feminism” at all? The way” feminism” has
been traditionally articulated, has an agenda that could be considered
“corporate”, and as result has only been really embraced by a certain group of
women. The idea seemed to be if we got enough women in positions of power—not
to fight the corporate model but to change it by taking it over, to “lean in” this
would uplift women.
Leaving aside for a moment the issue that for most women,
the dominant concern is survival, how has this worked? I would state for the record, that it has not. The most
important issues to this cohort, (middle to upper-class women) reproductive
issues, employment options (flexible work, paid maternity leave, childcare
options) have changed little in the past twenty years. Work-life “balance," the
middle-class woman’s mantra, is as elusive as ever. The response of the Sheryl
Sandburg’s of the world seems to be, well we just to do a little more, to “lean
in” and we can fix it, and really we can. The reality is, lifting up comes from
below, and it does not trickle down.
The corporate model is not compatible with humanity; it
values profit, the transfer of the public to private in the name of “efficiency”
and “competiveness”. The corporate model leaves the handful of people who were not
able to jump on that boat remaining at the shore, fighting over the scraps that
are left. The women who have risen in this system generally embrace it—you
actually have to do this if you are to rise—and beyond tooling around the edges these women are not interested in changing it. Therefore one could make the argument that
you could have women in 90% of CEO
positions, and little would change.
This lack of change could also be seen in the recent article
“Opting
out”. The purpose of this article was to interview women who has “opted out”
to stay with their kids, 10 years later, to see how things had changed, or not. What
women found difficult was not their children per se, they all had all appreciated the chance to be home when their kids were young, but dealing with
the (lack of) sharing of household duties with their husbands, and the
difficulty of returning to work. The response to this from a predictable right-wing source, Meg McArdle, was basically oh that’s just
the way it is. If you want to be at the top, male or female, you need to put
the hours in—that’s the way the system works. But the writer of the piece quite
specifically points out that the “elites” of her group had no problems
returning to work. The women who had problems were not looking for the corner
office, they were not looking for “career plums”, they were just looking to get
work that was in the neighborhood of where they had been. They understood they
had stepped off the train; they just wanted to get back on. The idea is one
should be able to return to work roughly where one left off, maybe a little
behind if things have changed but roughly in the same spot. But these women,
frequently, were just looking for work, any kind of work where they could make enough to justify being away from their kids.
What they found was significantly below what they had before, which predictably
resulted in increased stress on the whole family.
The best way to solve the problems articulated in this
article is not a endless round of dumb-ass questions/discussions regarding
stay-at-home moms versus working moms, is daycare harmful to children, what do
women have to do to get ahead etc. The best way to solve these problems is to
enact policies that provide for full employment and reduce economic equality.
The dramatic changes that have occurred in the workplace
since the “recovery” began-less benefits, increases in part-time work (when
people want full-time work), the relentless wage drop/stagnation, the complete disregard for employee health-are occurring
because corporate American can do it.
There is no housing bubble, it’s a
little harder to make money out of nothing through “financialization” but
corporate America still needs to support the 1%. That support is coming
directly from the 99% in these changes in the labor market. Even so
unemployment is high, as a result there are always workers ready to fill
spots—unemployment is high in every job area. When you hear nonsense about a
“skills-gap” that’s corporate America trying to cut wages. As a result inequity
under the Obama administration has accelerated
and grown larger.
In addition to full employment there needs to be a continued
push for single payer health-care in some kind of form, and guaranteed income. We can raise the minimum wage, and support the fast food workers fight for fifteen movement. In short, could spend a lot of time persuading companies to “do the right thing” or we
could say fuck it, we are going to make sure people have
enough to live on, and be able to go to the hospital when they need to, without
worrying about going bankrupt. We
have the money, it’s not technology’s fault either.
If we are serious about engaging women fully, it starts with economic equality issues, which naturally dovetail with others. While considering anniversary of the March on Washington Michelle Alexander made a recent statement regarding the need to "connect the dots between poverty, racism, militarism and materialism". Focusing on economic equality, pushing for "a radical structuring of society"will do more for feminism than anything else. We could all do with "getting out of (our) lanes" and demanding a brave new world where we all valued, women most of all.