For the past few months I’ve been talking in bits and pieces about the new wave of feminism that Hillary Clinton’s campaign jump-started. The thrill of seeing a woman reach for the presidency, combined with the trauma of seeing that dream despoiled by the latent sexism and misogyny in our society, has sparked a feminist awareness more acute than anything we’ve experienced since the 1970s.
Events have moved so quickly that what seemed impossible six months ago is suddenly here. As recently as February of this year, I was reminiscing about the Second Wave, despairing over the Third Wave, and wondering if there would ever even be a Fourth Wave:
The feminist circles I was exposed to in the 70s were made up of women of all races and nationalities and backgrounds. What we talked about, what fascinated all of us, were the commonalities between us. A middle-class Jewish girl and a Lakota woman comparing notes. A privileged wife and a prostitute realizing that they were both fucking for their supper. Black women and white women talking urgently together about their menfolk, about the “race traitor” business and that whole godawful clusterfuck.
And through it all the realization that if women were ever going to be liberated, it would be because we’d done it ourselves, working together as women. That we couldn’t rely on any other justice movement to do it for us. Not humanism, not Marxism, not pacifism, not the civil rights movement — nothing. Because no matter how hard women worked or how much they threw their hearts into those other quests for liberation, at the end of the day it was mostly just the men who got free.
Yep, we knew all that then. And those days are gone. Gone, gone, gone. Gone, she said. Gone.
I have no idea how to bring them back. But I think we need to try. I think if feminism is going to have a fourth wave — if the dream of women as fully human is to survive into the permanent consciousness of the species instead of being embalmed as a quaint relic of the 20th century — then we’d better figure it out.
That was February. Much happened in the ensuing months, and by June of this amazing election year I was writing of a new wave of feminism in the land. Even women who hadn’t personally supported Hillary for president were nonetheless appalled by the way she’d been treated. The sexism and misogyny on display in the media was nauseating. The second-class treatment Hillary received from her own party was shocking.
The “Trashing of Hillary,” as I’ve called it, was the lit match — but there was already a pile of tender just waiting to catch fire. Women are sick of sexism, sick of the culture of misogyny that seems to be growing more callous by the day. They’re tired of the toothlessness of “establishment” feminism (NOW, NARAL). And they’re exasperated with the appeasement strategy that seems to be the stock-in-trade of so many Third Wave feminists. Both toothlessness and appeasement are the result of the backlash, of course; we all understand that feminism has had a hard row to hoe these past couple of decades. But a new day is dawning.
I like to refer to this growing Fourth Wave as the Second Wave Squared because it is, in so many respects, reminiscent of what happened in the 1970s. It isn’t academic feminism, it isn’t a politically pure ideology, and it isn’t restricted to a small homogeneous subset of women. It’s a big, messy, grassroots phenomenon that crosses all boundaries.
And that thrills me.
One of the projects I’m working on is emblematic of this renewed spirit of ecumenicism: The New Agenda, a non-partisan group that’s committed to increasing women’s power, status, and representation in every area of society. I’ll write about that more in my next post.
Posted by Violet in Second Wave Squared
