The Caucus for a New Political Science was founded in 1967. Lyndon Johnson was president of the United States. The US was fighting a cold war with a country that no longer exists and a hot war that was not called a war but a “conflict.” It was the year that Che Guevara, Woody Guthrie, and John Coltrane died. Thurgood Marshall was appointed as the first African American Supreme Court Justice. There were riots in Detroit. China got the bomb. Rolling Stone magazine published its first issue, and Frank Sinatra's song “Strangers in the Night” won the Grammy.
The triumphs and disappointments of the late 1960s defined an age in which the post-war years morphed into one of the most progressive eras this nation has ever known. The second wave of feminism was new. NOW had only recently been formed in 1966, just on the heels of the publication of Betty Friedan's 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. By 1968 grass roots feminist organizations had risen from the ranks of labor and socialist activism, anti-war, and anti-racist movements. Feminism was a response to the fact that women and men almost literally inhabited different worlds. Law firms routinely rejected female applicants. Professional schools had quotas stipulating how many women could enter. “Help wanted” ads were organized into columns for males and females, a practice that was legal until 1973.Footnote1 Until the 1963 passage of the Equal Pay Act, it was lawful to organize pay scales by gender. Women could not serve on juries in many states until 1975.Footnote2 Most of the elite universities only admitted men. It was not uncommon for employers to refuse to hire married women, who were also often denied entry to medical and other professional schools. Women hid pregnancies to keep their jobs because, until 1978, it was legal in many places not to hire them. Most states did not consider rape in marriage to be a crime. The concept of sexual harassment did not exist. And, of course, abortion and contraception were, for the most part, illegal.
These are merely a tiny sample of the things that second-wave feminism changed. Pure and simple, women now have far greater access to the worlds of work and politics and are treated with greater dignity in 2007 because of some 40 years of feminist activism. This would be an enormous accomplishment in and of itself. But there is more. While the second wave changed legal and economic structures, its most unique accomplishment may be its creation of a politics of personal life and sexuality, and its intuitive understanding of the ideological importance of language and representation.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote that the gendered world of actual men and women rested upon the hierarchical organization of the masculine and the feminine. She argued that this ensured an integrated power structure based on a dualistic gender framework in which law, commerce, symbols, signs, language, and thought formed a fabric of cultural meaning wherein women were invariably found lacking. As Beauvoir wrote in describing this structure, “the terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality, the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas women represent only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.”Footnote3 Women, Beauvoir wrote, were trapped in a cage of the “eternal feminine,”Footnote4 a femininity with no true empirical referent wherein women were measured against a series of often contradictory abstractions. Beauvoir argued that this allowed the cultural meaning of Woman to be conflated with the meaning of sex. She wrote, “For him she is sex. Absolute sex. No less.”Footnote5
Before feminism posed an alternative, the eternal feminine was the hegemonic norm and was routinely deployed to separate the home from the world. The former was the place of the feminine; a less powerful, if occasionally cozy prison for all that was woman and all that was feminine. In the space-age sixties, this dichotomy extended even into outer space. As one NASA official remarked in testifying against the proposed use of female astronauts, “I think we all look forward to the time when women will be a part of our space flight team for when this time arrives, it will mean that man will really have found a home in space — for the woman is the personification of the home.”Footnote6
It is in the context of the easy deployment of the myth of the eternal feminine that Lyndon Johnson was able to characterize the Great Society and the Vietnam War as two kinds of women. As LBJ told his biographer Doris Kearns about his “Great Society”: in the first year, “she'd begin to crawl,” in the second year, “she'd begin to walk, and the year after that, she'd be off and running, all the time growing bigger and fatter and healthier. And when she grew up, I figured she's be so big and beautiful that the American people couldn't help but fall in love with her.”Footnote7 The Great Society, Johnson's plump, daughter/mother/wife who would be America's beloved, stood in stark contrast to his representation of Vietnam. He tells Kearns, “If I left the woman I really loved – the Great Society – in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home.”Footnote8 Here the objectifying gaze of the male to the female is used by Johnson to cast himself as, on the one hand, a devoted father and husband to the domestic programs he casts as his feminine children, and, on the other, he becomes a resentful and adulterous husband lured away from home by the Asian “bitch of a war.”
In addition to relying on the myth of the eternal feminine, the example illustrates the intersection of race and the feminine in the way that it figures one woman as wholesome and American, just as it “Others” Vietnam, thus using the gaze of the male in service to the gaze of the colonizer. Feminism has fought a multi-front battle, not just arguing for equal treatment in every institution where women exist (which is all of them), but also against the deployment of the rhetorics of a mythic feminine that had so often been used to reinforce the links between imperialism, gender, race, sexuality, and class.
In understanding the importance of attacking the patriarchal representation and meaning of woman and the feminine, the second wave was particularly unique and significant in understanding that sex could be used as a weapon and that sexuality and intimate life were arenas for political struggle. Surely, this is clear in feminist activism for free access to birth control and abortion and in its critique of pornography, but the connection is also visible in other ways. Anti-miscegenation laws of the period, for instance, used gender and sexuality to police racial boundaries. In requiring sexual and romantic activity to be intra-race, such laws attempted to bind desire by limiting sexual and romantic connection to that which reinforced a racist ideology of separatism and white supremacy.
As daughters of the second wave, we are at our best when we can see the connections between civil rights, Stonewall, Judy Garland, the Combahee River Collective, Shulamith Firestone, and the war in Iraq, because as critical theorists we know that it is not possible to analyze gender, race, colonialism, or capitalism without taking the whole context of the life-world into account. Feminism has taught us that this includes not only governmental and economic structures but also personal life and representation.
Marx famously wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. And so in 2007, we have Bush “le petit,” another Texan fighting another war in a different Orientalized land. Instead of the presidential daughters Luci and Lynda, we have Jenna and Barbara. Instead of the Great Society, we have “no child left behind” and “workfare.” Instead of prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment and moves to end capital punishment, we have a burgeoning prison-industrial complex that disproportionately affects black men. Instead of the Bay of Pigs, we have Guantánamo. Instead of Thurgood Marshall, we have Clarence Thomas. Instead of cold war paranoia and COINTELPRO, we have the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and a new and more frightening version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Feminist theory and activism, which has so richly engaged in a multi-front politics around law, work, representation, sexuality, and personal life, has always been challenged with the threat of a rollback of women's rights. It began as early as the mid-1970s with the backlashes against the ERA and abortion. In fact, it can be argued that feminist critiques of patriarchy and traditionalism became one of the major rallying points for the New Right. Nixon's “silent majority” was mobilized by the Reagan “revolution” around a racially coded rhetoric of anti-welfare, free-market ideology combined with a rigorous defense of the traditional, patriarchal family. The romantic longing for a 1950s style America that had never existed in the first place was displayed against a backdrop of what right-wing radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh took to calling “femi-nazis”—women who had bucked their traditional roles as mothers and sex objects and who couldn't take a joke. Yet, even in the context of a right-wing referendum on the ethos of the 1960s (including feminism, the counterculture, civil rights, prison reform, environmentalism, and so on), feminist victory is evidenced in the fact that even the right had to cede the fact that the role of women had permanently changed. It was Ronald Reagan, after all, who appointed Sandra Day O'Connor. One cannot help but notice begrudging nods to female equality that show the relaxed boundaries between the genders. Examples of women in high-ranking positions in the Bush administration, for example, are evidence of the inability to completely dismiss feminism. I think it is important to count such examples as a kind of victory, inadequate though they may be.
However, this kind of victory presents new challenges. For while the right has been forced to capitulate to the reality of women's increased rights and freedoms, it has also continued to explicitly and vehemently oppose feminism and to work to prevent further inroads. More subtly, it has mobilized arguments for certain constructions of women's liberation that it has then used to its own advantage. In this regard, Iris Young has argued that the “logic of masculine protection” of women continues to be deployed to justify a deepening of the national security state. Masculine protectionism enables the domestic face of the security state to keep “those under protection under necessary control.”Footnote9 Young goes on to show how Bush's initial marketing strategy for garnering support for the bombing of Afghanistan, deployed the language of women's rights to rally Americans against the Taliban. Young presents a compelling case that the language of women's liberation was used effectively to link “the terrorist attacks with the oppression of women and thus, by implication, the war on terrorism and the liberation of women.”Footnote10 In this way, though public support for the liberation of women is acknowledged by the right (that is, by Bush) as a good, it is then used as part of an argument for increased militarization and a beefed up security state, things few feminists would support.
In the same vein, Tim Kaufman-Osborn has shown how the female military presence has been used in exceedingly complex ways to exploit and reproduce an essentialized notion of gender that then functions as tool of war, torture, racism, and imprisonment. His excellent analysis of the scandal surrounding the 2003 release of photographs of US Private Lynndie England, who was shown holding the leash of a dog-collared male Islamic captive, is a case in point. In discussing one of the photos and its reception in the United States, Kaufman-Osborn is able to point to a variety of ways in which it causes gender trouble and becomes a catalyst for discussions about cultural anxieties about the shifting terrain of gender. Kaufman-Osborn observes that the photograph toppled a certain brand of feminists' notions of female moral superiority, while also allowing anti-feminists to use it to illustrate the dangers of feminism. In another way, the photo shows a woman in an active combat role illustrating in and of itself a transformed (though highly problematic) notion of the American female. One would be hard pressed to find a female American combatant in similar photos during, say, Vietnam. The multiple meanings of the photographs are illustrated by a variety of public reactions to them. Feminist Barbara Ehrenreich said the photographs “broke her heart.” Footnote11 While the president of Center for Military Readiness, Elaine Donnelly, “asserted that the photographs of England with leash in hand is ‘exactly what feminists have dreamed of for years.’”Footnote12 Kaufman-Osborn concludes that we should be exploring “the differential production of masculinity and femininity, as well as the ways in which specific performances sometimes unsettle foundational illusions about the dependence of gender on sex.”Footnote13 While Lynndie England represents something like female parity with men (at least on the level of cruelty and presence in the military in other than a pink-collar role), Abu Ghraib itself represents the self-conscious use of what he calls the “logic of emasculation.” That is, it is a “disciplinary technique” to “strip prisoners of their masculine gender identity and turn them into caricatures of terrified and often infantilized femininity.”Footnote14 Kaufman-Osborn's highly nuanced reading illustrates the complex ways in which gender and sex continue to be negotiated in cultural practices and modes of interpretation in our post-second wave reality.
Post-second wave though we may be, feminist activism is still necessary in a world of fetal rights, girls gone wild, sexual harassment, and escalating sexualized violence against women. Moreover, the international character of women's oppression in the military, war, global economies, sweat shops, the international sex trade, internet pornography, and countless other issues make this activism even more complex and imperative. And though feminism's death has been prematurely touted in conservative circles, Mary Hawkesworth counters that global feminist activism poses a vital counterpoint to the neoliberal agenda. Hawkesworth writes that “neoliberal globalism and global feminism have devised similar multilevel formulae for success in achieving systemic changes, targeting transnational organizations, national governments and individual consciousnesses as sites of transformation.”Footnote15 Yet the feminist strategy differs in its vision for the future insofar as it “seeks to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, the complex inequities and inequalities characteristic of race and gender-based oppression,” by expanding state programs for health, education, welfare, employment, law, governance, and equitable interpersonal relations.Footnote16 Hawkesworth argues that the attempt to bury feminism by repeating, like a mantra, it is dead it is dead it is dead merely shows how texts about death are also meaning-makers. “These textual accounts of death serve as allegorical signs for something else, a means of identifying a perceived danger in need of elimination, a way for community to define itself through those it symbolically chooses to kill.”Footnote17
And so the struggle continues, but the conditions under which we struggle have changed. We now have a widely accepted language of women's equality and diversity as well as a variety of relatively recent changes in law and social custom that give women more real equality than we had 40 years ago. And we have an activist movement against feminism that uses feminism's own language to increase militarism and inequality. On the plus side, we have seen several generations of students who have taken women's studies courses that now almost always include courses on sexuality, women of color, and globalization. Feminist studies are mainstreamed into virtually every discipline in the academy. Political parties and candidates no longer ignore women's issues but must respond to them, whether positively or negatively. The fact is that the concept of “women's interests” is permanently on the table. Of course, we cannot be content with legalistic, empty notions of equality as ends in themselves, but must instead strive, as feminists and social democrats do, for ever more concretized notions of equality and freedom at all levels where the gender hierarchy is operative.
Notes
1 Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Human Relations Commission, 413 U.S. 376 (1973).
2 Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522 (1975).
3 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, transl. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. xxi.
4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, transl. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 253.
5 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, transl. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. xxii.
6 Margaret A. Weitekamp, “Astronautrix and the Magnificent Male,” in Avital Bloch and Lauri Umansky (eds), Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960's (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 23.
7 Quoted in M. J. Heale, The Sixties in America: History, Politics and Protest (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), p. 67.
8 M. J. Heale, The Sixties in America: History, Politics and Protest (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), p. 68.
9 Iris Marion Young, “The Logic of Masculine Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State,” in Michaele L. Ferguson and Lori Jo Marso (eds), W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 132.
10 Iris Marion Young, “The Logic of Masculine Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State,” in Michaele L. Ferguson and Lori Jo Marso (eds), W Stands for Women: How the George W. Bush Presidency Shaped a New Politics of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 134.
11 Kaufman-Osborn uses Barbara Ehrenreich's reaction to the photos in which she confessed that they “broke her heart,” as she had hoped that women in the military would make it more humane. Discussed in Tim Kaufman-Obsborn, “Gender Trouble at Abu-Ghraib?” in Ferguson and Marso, op. cit., p. 145.
12 Kaufman-Osborn uses Barbara Ehrenreich's reaction to the photos in which she confessed that they “broke her heart,” as she had hoped that women in the military would make it more humane. Discussed in Tim Kaufman-Obsborn, “Gender Trouble at Abu-Ghraib?” in Ferguson and Marso, op. cit., p. 143.
13 Kaufman-Osborn uses Barbara Ehrenreich's reaction to the photos in which she confessed that they “broke her heart,” as she had hoped that women in the military would make it more humane. Discussed in Tim Kaufman-Obsborn, “Gender Trouble at Abu-Ghraib?” in Ferguson and Marso, op. cit., p. 149.
14 Kaufman-Osborn uses Barbara Ehrenreich's reaction to the photos in which she confessed that they “broke her heart,” as she had hoped that women in the military would make it more humane. Discussed in Tim Kaufman-Obsborn, “Gender Trouble at Abu-Ghraib?” in Ferguson and Marso, op. cit.
15 Mary Hawkesworth, “Feminists Versus Feminization: Confronting the War Logics of the George W. Bush Administration,” in Ferguson and Marso, op. cit., p. 165.
16 Mary Hawkesworth, “Feminists Versus Feminization: Confronting the War Logics of the George W. Bush Administration,” in Ferguson and Marso, op. cit., p. 166.
17 Mary Hawkesworth, “Feminists Versus Feminization: Confronting the War Logics of the George W. Bush Administration,” in Ferguson and Marso, op. cit., p. 171. See also Mary Hawkesworth, “The Semiotics of Premature Burial: Feminism in a Post-feminist Age,” Signs 29:4 (2004): 961–986.