Harvard University Press Blog

Stop Blaming Feminists: The Feminist Movement We Should Remember

In Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family, a spirited defense of feminism, Kirsten Swinth argues that the lack of support for working mothers is less a failure of second-wave feminism than a rejection by reactionaries of the sweeping changes they campaigned for. Here, she dispels some common myths that plague the history of the feminist movement.

Feminism is cool in the age of Donald Trump. The movement is surging. #MeToo, women in Congress, and massive women’s marches are all signs of a new feminist moment. One would think we would be looking to feminist foremothers for inspiration. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Instead, pervasive, sometimes pernicious myths about the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s keep rearing their head.

For the feminist movement we need in the Trump era, these myths must be banished. Bad history blocks urgently needed gains. Today’s distorting myths systematically blame feminist foremothers, rather than their opponents or media misrepresentations, for the predicaments we face today. The facts tell a different story: of a diverse, progressive women’s movement, brimming with visionary solutions for the inequality women faced in workplaces as well as in intimate relationships. If we are to make progress on these issues, we need to hear their voices and take up the mantle of their struggles once again.

So let’s get the facts straight.

Fact #1: Feminists were horrified at the media invention of the liberated woman “having it all” by dint of efficient life management. In reality, feminists fought for changes in family and workplaces to make sure that having a family and having a job could be an option for every woman, just as it had been for men. They believed that society had to change the rules of the game in both workplace and family life in order for equality to truly exist. They demanded a national system of childcare and guaranteed incomes for mothers (especially poor mothers) to care for their children. They fought for equal childcare and housework with men, even writing “marriage contracts” to pin recalcitrant men down to their promises to share the load. Their vision was broad and deep—requiring society and systems to change as much as individuals.

Fact #2: Feminists of all stripes and backgrounds made universal, 24-hour, community-controlled childcare a rallying cry of the movement. The absence of a national childcare system today is often chalked up to feminists’ lack of interest in the issue. This is simply not true. In coalition with civil rights and labor groups, feminists nearly achieved a national childcare system in 1971, until conservatives persuaded Richard Nixon to veto legislation approved by Congress. Even then, that did not stop feminists. A grassroots do-it-yourself ethos spread across the country as feminists passed around tattered manuals on how to start your own daycare center, complete with designs for tot-sized furniture. Childcare centers grew by almost a third nationally between 1970 and 1976.

Fact #3: Feminists of color were leaders, indeed among the vanguard, on many feminist issues. African American feminists in the welfare-rights movement fought for a universal basic income so mothers could care for their children without being forced to work. Domestic workers, largely African American, led a feminist fight to recognize the value of household labor by demanding the minimum wage for nannies, house cleaners, and other household employees. Women of color were leaders in major national organizations like the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), as well as of the National Black Feminist Organization and the Third World Women’s Alliance. Shirley Chisholm and LaDonna Harris were, for example, among the founders of the NWPC which pledged to fight “sexism, racism, institutional violence and poverty” at its founding in 1971. Well-justified frustrations at the insensitivity of many white feminists to the needs of women of color should not erase the leadership and critical contributions of feminists of color to a rich, varied movement.

Fact #4: Feminist activists of the 1960s and 1970s led creative, vibrant campaigns to value housework and caring for children. Feminists saw firsthand the vulnerability of homemakers all around them, particularly with skyrocketing divorce rates in the 1970s. Anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly attacked them for being anti-family and hating housewives, but her charge was unfounded. Women’s rights activists proposed steps still touted today as essential. They calculated the value of household labor and argued that it should count in the gross national product. Feminist legislators and lawyers fought to ensure homemakers had basic rights, like the security of an independent social security account for retirement and a fair share of family property at divorce. The National Organization for Women issued a Homemakers Bill of Rights.

Fact #5: Feminists did not fail and leave us in the pickle we live with today. They were defeated. What they dreamed of achieving was visionary, and ahead of its time. Their opponents found the changes women’s rights activists proposed threatening. If enacted, family relationships and workplace hierarchies would all be upended. These opponents therefore mobilized and successfully countered many feminist proposals. Yet when we look at what feminists really fought for, we see a road map for our own time—a comprehensive vision for changing home and workplace, for involving society in supporting childcare and guaranteeing parental time with children, while accommodating workers with family responsibilities (that is, all of us).

We have foremothers to turn to for inspiration. Edith Barksdale Sloan led domestic workers in their fight for higher wages and better working conditions. Members of the New York Wages for Housework Committee taught us that housework has economic value. Ida Phillips of Florida took her case all the way to the Supreme Court to win the right for mothers not to be denied a job simply because they had children.

By promoting pernicious myths about feminism that have no basis in fact, we do conservatives’ work for them. It’s time to stop blaming feminists and instead to pick up where they left off.

The Oral History of a Black Homeland

A dominant narrative of black life in the twentieth century is the Great Migration, the response to oppression and dispossession in the rural South that propelled millions of African Americans to leave the land. In A Mind to Stay, though, historian Syd Nathans focuses on those who remained in the South and fought to hold on, not just for themselves but also for those who might someday return. The book is the story of a single plantation that became a homeland to formerly enslaved people, and by focusing on one place and the black families that dwelt there, Nathans illuminates the changing meaning of land and landowning to successive generations of rural African Americans. In the brief excerpt below, Nathans recalls his early hopes of uncovering an oral tradition telling this history, and recalls a first fateful trip to Alabama in the summer of 1978.

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I had trained as a nineteenth-century political historian. I knew how to use archives, to quote from letters and newspapers, to test claims, to confirm or question “facts.” I’d done a biography. However, I had no formal training in doing interviews; I didn’t own a tape recorder. I was learning oral history by osmosis, excited and envious as colleagues used the approach to capture the story of under-chronicled Americans. In the mid-1970s, oral history had found a great popularizer and exponent in Alex Haley, whose epic account of his family history from Africa to Tennessee to freedom and into the twentieth century had become a runaway bestseller and record-breaking television series. Roots inspired extraordinary possibilities for oral history and for the recovery of the African American past. Could an archival historian be part of that?

Coincidences opened the way. I got invited to be an advisor to the opening of a new historic site just outside of my hometown, Durham, North Carolina. The state had acquired a plantation founded in the eighteenth century. Called Stagville, the plantation’s buildings had remained in use from the 1780s to the 1930s. The 1787 “big house” had survived—unusual, but hardly unique. The surviving 1850s slave quarters were definitely unusual, a startling row of two-story wooden dwellings, four of them. Truly exceptional was the presence in the area of people who had dwelt in those buildings as tenants in the early twentieth century, who could tell about their lives there and share tales of their forebears. A young historian was on the case, modeling the marriage of oral and archival investigation to map the genealogy and uncover the stories of black families in bondage and freedom.

A second coincidence furthered and focused my quest. The same year that Alex Haley published Roots, historian Herbert Gutman published a book that addressed the issue of the impact of bondage on the black family. In The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Gutman challenged the prevailing view that forced sale, forced migration, and forced sex had subverted the attachment to family on the part of enslaved men and women. Not oral history but the records of the planters themselves provided the sources for his study. Brilliantly he used the planters’ annual lists of enslaved people—inventories made for tax purposes and internal censuses—to discern that clusters of names persisted year in and year out. They were family groups. Not only that, but enslaved blacks named children after parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles. The naming patterns and the maintenance of family clusters over the years suggested that attachment to family endured despite bondage. Among the records he relied on most heavily were hundreds of lists of people belonging to the owners of Stagville—the Bennehan and Cameron families of North Carolina’s Piedmont region.

Finding Time for American Families

Heather Boushey’s Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict is a study of changing patterns of work in America and the pressures that longer hours place on families and individuals. Boushey dedicated the book to “all those too busy to read this book, in the hope that it reaches those with the power to find and return our lost time.” Having just been named chief economist for Hillary Clinton’s transition planning team, Boushey’s own access to that power seems on the rise. That’s good news for American families.

Boushey’s work both in Finding Time and as Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth is about taking work-family policy off the Style pages and into the realm of serious economic issues. In fact, she hates the term “work-family policy,” which brings to mind working mothers and child care. “Compared with traditional male issues,” she writes, “work-family policy doesn’t sound serious. It sounds like something that should take a backseat to real economic matters. As a result, politicians tend to trot out their positions on work-family issues when courting female voters ahead of elections, only to forget them after the victory lap.”

It’s this very dynamic that results in scenes like Ivanka Trump delivering a Republican National Convention speech touting her father’s commitment to providing relief for working families in terms no one could recall ever hearing from the candidate himself.

In contrast, Boushey shows that the kinds of policy changes she recommends—all currently in place in various parts of the country—are crucial to America’s economic well-being.

Researchers studying the kinds of policies that families and households need to make ends meet, and in turn what businesses need from their employees, have some surprising findings to share. Across a range of different social science traditions, methods, and topics, they find that addressing sources of anxiety inside the home has a profound impact on what happens outside the home, including in the larger economy, and can affect the current and future competitiveness of American firms and workers. That’s why I prefer the term work-life policies. This phrase reminds us of the intimate connection between the hours we clock for a job and the off-the-job hours that support strong families and a strong economy.

Finding Time is focused on core economic questions: If we sought to alleviate family economic insecurity today, what would our agenda look like? Would our efforts be good or bad for the economy overall? Rather than submitting to the bog of partisan squabbles over “handouts,” Boushey urges us to think about how keeping people gainfully employed while they care for their families benefits the economy overall. It’s in that vein that she presents solutions to everyday economic problems facing workers across four areas: Here (at home), There (at work), Care, and Fair.

Why the Supreme Court's Marriage Decision Won’t Be the Next Roe v. Wade

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, many have looked to the Roe v. Wade ruling in an effort to forecast the cultural and political impact of federally sanctioned same-sex marriage. But as Mary Ziegler shows in After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, the narrative that now surrounds that decision and its effects overly simplifies what was a very fluid situation, projecting today’s polarities further back in time than the history supports. Below, Ziegler outlines the folly in declaring Obergefell the next Roe when we still have such trouble understanding the first.

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Critics of the Supreme Court’s recent marriage equality decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, have predicted that it will be the next Roe v. Wade. Indeed, comparison of Obergefell and Roe has become almost mandatory for Republican presidential candidates and conservative activists.

Some use the analogy to criticize the Court for short-circuiting political debate about marriage in the states. Others clearly want the Court to worry about the consequences of striking down marriage bans in so many states. Politicians turn to these arguments because they might appeal to voters otherwise supportive of marriage equality. If Obergefell is indeed the next Roe, the Court may have once again escalated the culture wars, making it harder for Americans to agree on issues of sexuality or gender, much less on same-sex marriage itself.

Are the Court’s critics right? At first blush, the comparison between Roe and Obergefell seems unconvincing. While the nation remains divided about abortion, polls have shown increasing support for marriage equality, particularly among younger Americans. For many, the moral issues also seem easily distinguishable. Pro-life Americans argue that a woman’s decision to choose abortion harms a person not included in the decision. Longstanding agreements about fetal personhood aside, the argument that abortion is not a purely self-regarding act is much easier to make than any related claim about marriage equality.

Gay Marriage and Gay Culture

“Same-sex desire alone does not equal gayness. In order to be gay, a man has to learn to relate to the world around him in a distinctive way.” So writes David Halperin in How To Be Gay, expressing the contentious notion behind his controversial University of Michigan course of the same name. “‘Gay,’” he continues, “refers not just to something you are, but also to something you do... Gayness, then, is not a state or condition. It’s a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, it is a practice.” American gay male life, he argues, is reflective of “a common culture” and “shared sense of self” that must be acquired, a “characteristic relation to mainstream culture” that must be “discovered” by gay male subjects who “resist the summons to experience the world in heterosexual and heteronormative ways.”

To Halperin, gay culture is something of value, able to enhance or enrich the perspective of people of any sexual orientation. But for Halperin, as for others, the gay rights movement seemed to have prioritized “normality” in ways that both denied and jeopardized gay culture, perhaps nowhere more so than in the effort to legalize gay marriage. With the U.S. Supreme Court having deemed same-sex marriage a right, we look to Halperin’s take on what “gay marriage” might mean for “gay culture.”

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When gay people are deprived of a common, communal existence, of a social world of their own, the keynote of gay politics ceases to be resistance to heterosexual oppression and becomes, instead, assimilation—that is, accommodation to the mainstream, the drive to social acceptance and integration into society as a whole. It’s all about the need to fit in, to adapt yourself to the locality in which you already happen to be living and working. Issues like gay military service or marriage equality, which had formerly been about access to benefits, distributive justice, and the removal of discriminatory barriers, now become struggles over the symbolism of social belonging. They are reframed to center around social recognition, the definition of citizenship, the meaning of patriotism, the practice of religious worship, the idea of family. There are still important material demands behind such struggles for inclusion, but they tend to be subordinated, at least in the rhetoric of the movement, to the goals of assimilation and conformity.

In such a context, gay culture seems an increasingly bizarre, insubstantial, intangible, nebulous, irrelevant notion. It is the sign of a failure (or refusal) to assimilate. What would gay people want nowadays with a separate culture anyway? Such a thing might have made sense in the Bad Old Days of social oppression and exclusion. Now it is simply a barrier to progress. It impedes the achievement of assimilation. No wonder we keep asking, with barely suppressed impatience, why gay culture doesn’t simply disappear. Surely social acceptance and integration will spell the end of gay culture. Since gay people are no longer so oppressed, there is little reason for them to band together in separate social groups, let alone to form distinct cultural communities. The assimilation of gay people into straight society has put an end to all that. Gay culture is a vestige from an earlier time. It is archaic, obsolete. Gay culture has no future.

These predictions, I believe, overlook a crucial consideration. Social acceptance, the decriminalization of gay sex, the legalization of homosexual social and sexual institutions, the removal of barriers to same-sex marriage, to military service, to the priesthood and psychoanalysis, along with other previously off-limits professions, should not be confused with the end of sexual normativity, let alone the collapse of heterosexual dominance.

After Roe

Today, the 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, thousands will gather in Washington to partake in the March for Life, an annual demonstration against “the greatest human rights violation of our time.” The March is but one of countless expressions of the common understanding of Roe as a signal event in the formation of America’s political and cultural divide. As legal scholar Mary Ziegler argues in After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, though, by paying attention so exclusively to the Supreme Court we have lost a much richer story about the evolution of abortion politics. “Rather than remaining preoccupied by the Court’s actions,” she writes, “competing social movements had to navigate the realignment of both major political parties, the mobilization of the Religious Right and the New Right, the changing politics of population control and civil rights, and the popularization of neoliberalism.”

After Roe, to be published this spring, traces these forces through the decade following the Roe decision, informed by oral histories taken from over 100 of the activists and advocates who comprised those social movements. 

An adapted excerpt from Ziegler’s Foreword appears below.

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The conventional wisdom holds that the Roe opinion provoked a major grassroots pro-life challenge to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. For the abortion-rights movement, the story goes, Roe discouraged efforts to develop a broader and more equitable agenda that advanced all women’s interest in accessing contraception, child care, and health care and in avoiding sterilization abuse.

Historians, Supreme Court justices, and legal scholars with disparate normative views on abortion have united in their criticism of Roe’s broader societal impact: the opinion supposedly short-circuited a previously innovative dialogue between competing movements about what abortion rights ought to mean. Roe purportedly pushed American movement politics toward the “clash of absolutes” famously described by Laurence Tribe, as activists fought bitterly about the Equal Rights Amendment, contraception, and women’s role in the American polity. By focusing so heavily on the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision, however, scholars have exaggerated the importance of judicial intervention. In putting the Court at the center of the story, we have lost sight of equally important contributions made by the politicians, lobbyists, and grassroots activists who shaped the clash of absolutes Tribe discusses.

Events and activism since 1973 have transformed and multiplied the meanings of “Roe.” Opposing activists deployed Roe in ways calculated to change the course of abortion politics. Within the abortion-rights movement, feminists used Roe as a reminder that abortion was a women’s issue. At times, some movement members saw Roe as a symbol of the dangers of a single-issue agenda. In fundraising campaigns and efforts to mobilize new supporters, activists on opposing sides of the abortion wars reinterpreted the Roe decision in order to shape public consciousness of what the Court had said and whether its opinion deserved support.

A History of Loss

Between the late eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families, friends, and communities without any available avenue for return. As historian Allyson Hobbs explains in A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, scholars have traditionally paid far more attention to what was gained by passing as white than what was lost by leaving a black racial identity behind. Her book, she writes, “is an effort to recover those lives,” to write the history of passing as a history of loss.

That recovery was particularly challenging, given that Hobbs’s aim was to document a phenomenon that, by definition, was intended to be clandestine:

Conventional wisdom is that few sources exist because those who passed carefully covered their tracks and left no record of their transgression, and that writing about passing is an undertaking fit for novelists, poets, playwrights, and literary critics, but not historians. To reveal the history of passing, the historian must seek out unconventional sources that vary at different historical moments, both in the evidence presented and in the consequences of the act. The textured accounts of family histories cast the personal losses of passing in the starkest relief whereas other types of sources bring a blurred history into sharp focus.

Stories of passing can be found in “the private and innermost spaces of African American lives,” discovered as unintended but unmistakable threads through family histories that offer firsthand accounts of the interruptions, gaps, and omissions created by a relative’s decision to pass. As Hobbs discussed with NPR’s “Code Switch” for an All Things Considered segment yesterday, she was able to uncover many of these somtimes-haunting stories through the course of the decade of research behind A Chosen Exile.

Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe

There’s a certain fluidity to politics, a reliable sense that sooner or later, for better or for worse, the scene will change. Political tactics usually follow those waves; even the most stubborn of actors will eventually abandon a practice that’s become irrelevant. But what happens when the tactic is a human being? What becomes of a family born in symbolism when the day’s semiotics has shifted?

Such questions underlie the fascinating story of the entertainer Josephine Baker and her multi-racial family of twelve adopted children. As do questions about the nature of race itself, and a paradoxical need to strictly delineate its boundaries while performing their obsolescence. As presented by Matthew Pratt Guterl in Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, Baker’s eccentric quest also makes us consider fame, and how it enables oddity while simultaneously dismissing its meaning.

In the video below, Guterl introduces Baker and her brood:

 

You can read more about Josephine Baker as Angelina-antecedent at Slate.

Won't You Be Mine, Little Honeysuckle Vine?

Back when researchers for the Dictionary of American Regional English went tramping across this great land in search of every last shade of local color, DARE Survey Question AA3 asked respondents to offer up “nicknames or affectionate names for a sweetheart.” And did they ever.

The top handful of responses are to be expected: darling, dear, sweetie, baby, sweetheart, sugar, beau. But on this Valentine’s Day let’s dig a bit, via www.daredictionary.com, where subscribed users can view every answer to every question of the original DARE survey. Some gems, in fun particular order:

bunny duck
my dern-most bedamnable
tootsie-wootsie
honey bucket
butterballs
sweet patootie
boopsie
lovie bumpkins
honey bear
creepo
lambie pie
sugar lump
lovie-dove
little honeysuckle vine
snooks

Lots of love in this country. Lots of funny talkin love’.

There’s also lots of love out there for DARE, which is used by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. And, as it happens, right now DARE wants to hear from you about how you’d use the new www.daredictionary.com. An invitation from Simon Winchester, who sits on the DARE Board of Visitors:

For all you word-lovers, dictionary mavens, and lexicographers manqués, here’s a doozy of a prize.

Win a free three-year subscription to the digital version of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE): the monumental, six-volume, half-a-century-in-the-making treasure house of American-as-she-is-spoke throughout this immense (and linguistically immensely varied) nation.

We need from you just 500 well-chosen words, fashioned into an essay of elegance, logic, and persuasive power that will answer the simple question: how would you use DARE to enrich and improve your writing?

Draft your contribution, hone it, make it sing, and you will have a chance to win online access to the dictionary of your dreams!

What better offer have you had today?

Head on over to the DARE site for contest guidelines. You’ve got til April 30th.

Now go do something nice for your sugar puddin’.

When Hedgehog Met Guinea Pig

 

And so, like Frog and Toad before them, Hedgehog and Guinea Pig join in beautiful friendship.

Starring:

• Justice for Hedgehogs, by Ronald Dworkin
• A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology, by Jim Endersby
• Prairie Dogs: Communication and Community in an Animal Society, by Con Slobodchikoff, Bianca S. Perla, and Jennifer Verdolin