Speaking of Feminism: Today's Activists on the Past, Present, and Future of the U.S. Women's Movement

Introduction

Who needs feminism? In the spring of 2012 my students asked that simple question, and then we watched, astounded, as the world answered. What started as a class project at Duke University exploded into a transnational social media campaign. People on campus quads, in homes, and in offices around the world held up signs declaring I need feminism because . . . , completing the phrase with their own answers scrawled in marker on whiteboards or pieces of paper. Thousands posted photos of themselves with their signs on social media, and tens of thousands more liked the Who Needs Feminism Facebook page, followed the Tumblr site, and tweeted their approval. Others disparaged the photos in tones that ranged from silly to violent.¹

The energy behind Who Needs Feminism was the same heady mix of righteous anger and joyful creativity that has always shaped feminist activism. The context for my students’ work in 2012 was the war on women, when Republican state legislatures unleashed a rash of antiabortion bills in the run-up to that year’s elections; Missouri representative Todd Akin made his infamous remark about legitimate rape not causing pregnancy; and right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh vilified activist Sandra Fluke on air, calling her a whore for arguing that insurance should cover birth control.²

Experiencing the Who Needs Feminism phenomenon alongside my students altered my sense of the vitality of feminism and its particular importance to young women and men at that point in time not only in America but around the globe. As a women’s historian and a feminist, I knew a lot about the women’s activism that had occurred in the past and about the fundamental issues that were still in play. But Who Needs Feminism thrust me deeper into the realm of social media and opened my eyes to a vast world of online activism whose participants were drawing on history but also creatively dealing with the realities of their present. Moreover, it revealed to me the nature of the simultaneous, intense backlash against women’s progress that finds particularly venomous expression in the relative anonymity of social media. That experience awakened my curiosity; this book is the result of my desire to learn more about feminists and the state of the movement today.

As an oral historian, I recognized the power of in-depth interviews for understanding past movements.³ I set out to apply the same tool to explore the activism going on around me in the present. Between 2014 and 2016, I collected in-depth oral history interviews with feminist activists in six different locales: Atlanta, Georgia; Washington, D.C.; the Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota; New York City; and Northern California—all urban locations where there are strong feminist networks and significant numbers of feminist organizations.⁴

In this book, I present a collection of those conversations, edited down into short stories. They offer us highly personal, even intimate, reflections on the individual lives and careers of today’s self-identified feminists, with a kind of granular detail and reflective quality that is unique to oral history. Oral history interviews allow people not only to describe events that were important to them in the past but also to reflect on how and why they made the choices they did. Interviewees discuss how individuals—perhaps parents, siblings, friends, or teachers—shaped their lives and outlooks. They admit mistakes, they mourn, they cry, and they display anger and also forgiveness. Some look back with pride on their success and hard work, others more with wonder at their luck or at the surprising turns their lives took. The interview process allows people time to gather their thoughts, to go back and correct themselves, to reflect with the interviewer on issues with which they are grappling. Thoughtful, full of both emotion and deeply strategic thinking, these interviews offer a way for us to hear deeper, more meaningful stories than those that emerge on Twitter or in newspaper articles rehashing the Is she or isn’t she a feminist? argument.⁵ The emphasis in these interviews is on understanding how people make sense of their own paths to feminist activism, the work that they do, the contexts in which they live, and how those contexts shape their thoughts and actions.

These activists’ stories give readers a powerful way to understand feminism: by getting to know individual feminists. For young people growing up in communities or families where the word feminist is a caricature and a slur, these interviews will shed light on who real feminists are and what they care about. For older people wondering whether feminism today is any different from the movement with which they grew up, these interviews will illustrate significant continuities alongside interesting shifts. For those who want to know how to build a feminist life and career, these activists chart a variety of helpful paths. For activists who want to learn about the issues that still require energy and attention and hard work from feminism, these interviews provide a wealth of detail and hint at road maps for the future. These interviews will also serve as essential primary documents for historians and other researchers years and decades from now who want to understand what feminists at the dawn of the twenty-first century cared about and how they did their work.

So whom did I interview? They are people, mostly women, who earn their living through or center their major activist commitments and actions on feminist work. Some of my interviewees have national reputations; many others may be well known in their communities but will not be familiar to most readers. They include nonprofit leaders, writers, journalists, philanthropists, a labor unionist, budding politicians, media professionals, and students. They share a fundamental belief that women still face barriers and challenges based on their gender and that laws, policies, attitudes, and behaviors need to change in order for society to reach the goal of gender equity. They are committed to working toward that goal. Most of them comfortably claim the label feminist; a few offer the perspectives of people who advocate for women’s rights and empowerment but do not necessarily identify easily with the feminist movement per se.

I interviewed people who came of age during and after the 1980s, when, during Ronald Reagan’s rise to power and the ascendancy of the Right, we witnessed a backlash against the gains made by feminist activists in the 1960s and 1970s. I wanted to know more about the activists who, despite growing up during and after that backlash, have been carrying on the feminist movement. I wanted to know what it means to them to carry on that movement today. What do they care about? How do they undertake the task? How do they relate to previous generations of feminists and to each other? How have the political, economic, and technological shifts of the past thirty years shaped their experiences, their goals, and their strategies? What inspires them? Are they optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

This book begins to fill an important gap in the scholarship—very little has been written so far, outside of popular media, about the feminist movement in the twenty-first century. Thanks to women’s historians, we have learned a great deal about the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century woman’s movement that officially launched in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, seeking property rights for married women and higher education and voting rights for all women, among other demands.⁶ Excellent scholarship has also described and analyzed what happened when the 1960s and 1970s unleashed the second wave, what appeared to be a sudden mushrooming of women’s organizations, consciousness-raising groups, street demonstrations, and publications demanding equal access to jobs, equal protection under the laws, and women’s liberation from societal strictures about femininity and family life.⁷ When I started this project, most syllabi for women’s history courses ended around 1995, relying on books written about fifteen years earlier about and by feminists of the 1980s and 1990s who called themselves the third wave and claimed to represent a new, improved version of feminism.⁸ Second-wave feminists had believed they were more attentive to race, class, and sexuality than their foremothers; likewise, in the 1990s, third-wave feminists claimed new understanding. Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to explain how race, class, sexuality, and other distinguishing characteristics intersect in individual lives, creating different experiences of oppression even among a group that shares a gender identity, like women. The word became a staple of third-wave feminist discourse, along with a new emphasis on the politics of the body, gender, and sexuality.⁹ Looking around me in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I set out to see what, if anything, had changed since the 1990s.

Historians argue over whether the wave metaphor is helpful, but as Nancy Hewitt has shown, it has lodged itself firmly in the way people write about and teach the feminist movement and is hard to ignore. Hewitt brilliantly suggests recasting the image of oceanic waves—seemingly arising from unseen natural forces to obliterate and replace those that came before—as one of radio waves instead, allowing us to trace echoes from one century to the next, understanding that signals coexist, overlap, and intersect.¹⁰ Certainly Hewitt’s description is closer to the way many of the activists I interviewed see the world. Writer Soraya Chemaly said, I’m in my late forties and I take from every wave that I need to.¹¹ Many narrators pointed to their teachers or their mothers and suggested that because they learned so much about feminism from them, they felt connected to the ideas of an earlier generation. Several who are familiar with how historians had written about women’s history argued that waves might be a useful academic construct, but it did not figure prominently in their own on-the-ground experiences outside the classroom. While the idea of waves might help describe the past, they suggested, it contradicts effective movement building in the present by dividing people. In ways that would likely resonate with Hewitt and others like her, they assert that it is more important to recognize the achievements of those who came before and identify the goals they shared with those who are still active. I saw no big embrace of the wave metaphor for today; while a few said that they had, at one time, identified with the third wave, none of them claimed to be part of a fourth wave, a term occasionally used to describe the new phenomenon of online feminist activism.¹² I do not suggest that we are in some kind of new wave today, and neither do my interviewees. But these interviews do help us begin to see and understand the terrain of feminism in the twenty-first century.

Years from now, historians are likely to identify the rise of the internet as a profound moment of change in our culture. Part of my mission was to see how it reshaped feminist activism. According to one of my interviewees, Elisa Camahort Page—founder of BlogHer, the first national conference for female bloggers—male observers in the 1990s assumed that women would not flock to the World Wide Web. Investors really said women won’t use the internet . . . but we now know that women are the predominant users of most of the social platforms out there. All these guys in hoodies owe their billion-dollar valuations to women for sure.¹³ Nearly all of the feminists I interviewed use the tools of social media and the internet, to a greater or lesser degree, to undertake their work. There is little sense among these activists of a strict division between online activism and grassroots or political activism. These leaders discuss the need to combine online work with face-to-face gatherings or in-the-streets actions; their sense is that neither can succeed without the other now.

Although the internet enables global activism by instantaneously sharing information and mobilizing outrage, my interviewees conveyed a palpable sense of anger and worry about the myriad ways it also opens up a new arena where women’s rights and feminist progress are pushed back. Whether they are anonymous online misogynist trolls or well-known media bullies like Rush Limbaugh, those who seek to punish women for taking a stand in the public sphere have found new avenues on social media. The people I interviewed describe the huge personal toll for individuals who may routinely deal with violent threats of rape and murder; they also discuss the cost to the movement as a whole when activists drop out or young women choose not to engage out of fear. Indeed, as the internet becomes a more and more important arena for activist work—a new kind of public sphere—it becomes not only a tool for feminist activism but also itself an essential focus of it. Several of these activists describe nascent global initiatives aimed at making social media safer for women through regulation, enforcement of policies, and coalition building among activists around the world.

Social media provides a bullhorn for people with many different points of view. The resulting challenges that arise in the feminist movement are not all external. My interviewees agree that most of the damage has been done by those on the political right. However, when I interviewed them, many also expressed disappointment and anger at the level of criticism feminists have leveled at each other, especially on social media. They disagreed about the root cause of the tension and whether it was significantly different than what had happened in the past or in other social movements, but they all agreed that the cost—to individuals and to the progress of the movement as a whole—was high. Several of them expressed a profound sense of grievance over the fact that they chose to dedicate their lives to the movement—working long hours, forgoing large salaries, making important contributions to the lives of all women—and yet found themselves attacked online by other feminists for words or actions that failed to live up to a politically correct ideal. They suggested that social media can mask the level of sacrifice required to make a living through feminist activism: you can have a polished website and thousands of followers on Twitter but still be living in cramped quarters, worrying about money, health insurance, and your physical safety. While some admitted that harsh critiques served an important purpose in making them more aware of their own privilege or ignorance, most voiced a strong opinion that feminists would be better served by focusing their outrage on real enemies, like those on the right who have the power to shape laws and policies through politics or media.

When I was interviewing, tensions were high within the movement, and that was clear in my interviews. Of course, tensions within the feminist movement—or any social movement—are nothing new. Women’s rights activists have struggled with internal conflicts since the beginning, and feminism is not the only social movement that faces internecine debates over strategy or approach, nor is it the only one in which tempers flare. In our conversation, journalist Rebecca Traister noted that feminism is perhaps more susceptible to [conflict] because it’s such a massive part of the population, and almost everybody in that population has different other allegiances; it’s because of the intersectionality of feminism, which is something we need to emphasize but also one of the things that makes it fragile as a cohesive movement.¹⁴

Seen in another light, dramatic Twitter wars that flare up online illustrate an aspect of the movement’s success. Today it matters who gets media attention, because there might be professional consequences—who gets a column, who gets a book contract, who gets speaking engagements. There is a larger professional feminist pie now, and people fight over the slices. Those with higher online profiles garner more attention, which can lead to more money, a possibility that only exists because of new opportunities and audiences for women’s ideas and words. But that does not soften the impact of the battles. Some of my interviewees asserted that the toxic tone was particularly bad on Twitter, where people try to gain attention by tearing others down.¹⁵ They noted that the blogosphere was full of people who are trying to build a personal brand and whose individual agendas outweigh their commitment to movement building and allies.

While these interviews demonstrate the challenges faced by the feminist movement and the difficulties that can get in the way of productive dialogue, they also illustrate the progress being made by activists who are grappling with complex and painful issues. While the media at the time of the interviews tended to focus on infighting among feminists, the tone of these long interviews is significantly different than what one might have read in popular articles or seen online during the same period. Anger, frustration, and disappointment certainly appear. But there is also clear commitment to inclusivity and analysis that does not assume all people who identify as women experience that identity the same way. These interviews reveal a willingness on the part of many organizations and individuals to reckon with past mistakes and learn from them and to forgive others who might make missteps. For instance, narrators describe learning not to try to speak for communities of people and learning to make sure that those who sit at decision-making tables represent a variety of viewpoints. Although some of my interviewees are defensive or angry at times, overall they come across as generous, creative, passionate people who were seeking improvements in the lives of all, not fame or individual gain.

One thing the activists I talked to shared was a boldness of vision for how the world could be better. To get there, they focused on different but overlapping goals: They were trying to change cultural messages that teach girls that their main value is their sexuality, and they were trying to provide girls with a sense of empowerment and tools for self-actualization. They were fighting against street harassment and online bullying, which prevent women from occupying public spaces comfortably. They were working to stop sexual assault on college campuses and helping victims organize and heal. They were pushing for LGBTQ rights, seeking resources for poor women and women of color, and protecting all women from violence. They were helping immigrant and refugee women adjust to new lives in America and empowering them to advocate on their own behalves. They provided spaces for women to express their opinions and sought to get more women to contribute their voices to major media forums and to run for public office, and they persuaded the media to discuss gender in politics and public life. They sought to protect abortion and reproductive rights and to expand notions of reproductive justice. They were trying to support women students, faculty, and staff on college campuses and to change university curricula and policies to better serve women’s interests. They funded grassroots feminist projects and aimed to reshape philanthropy in ways that support such efforts. They used the labor movement to help women with pocketbook issues and used the political system to pass laws to make that easier. Taken together, their strategies, approaches, and visions reveal much about how the feminist movement operates.

In addition to shedding light on the movement as a whole, these interviews also provide access to inspiring individuals who help us see how activism unfolds across the arc of a life. The paths my interviewees followed to working in the women’s movement reveal a far more complex story than the widespread assumption that feminists are all white, middle-class, and college educated. While many of these activists came from middle-class backgrounds and discovered feminism in college, that was certainly not true for all. I interviewed women whose families came to America as refugees fleeing war-torn countries; whose single working mothers struggled to provide for their children; and one who barely escaped the consequences of drugs and crime that ravished her Minneapolis neighborhood in the 1990s. For some women, activism with and on behalf of women in their own communities came long before any theoretical adherence to broader feminist concerns or a desire to join a movement.

These life narratives provide us with a way to see how feminist lives intertwine with the political and social contexts in which they unfold. While I found many commonalities among my interviewees, I also discovered intriguing differences between older and younger women. None of the women I interviewed was past her early fifties, and none had reached the end of her career. They were not looking back on a finished story; they were all very much in the midst of their activist lives. But there are differences, for instance, between the women who were in their late forties or early fifties and the youngest women in this book, some of whom were not much older than the older women’s daughters. I have grouped these narratives into cohorts based on age; I hope that presenting them in this way allows the reader to get a sense of how feminist work fits into lives differently over the life-span and how it is shaped by the political and social milieu in which one’s life unfolds.

Part I focuses on women who, in their forties or early fifties when I interviewed them, came of age in the 1980s, during what Susan Faludi termed the backlash against feminists’ gains of the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁶ These women entered the world of work at a time when there were almost no models for a professional feminist. As a result, none of them assumed that she would make a living working on behalf of women’s issues. Indeed, in many cases they helped create the contexts in which that became possible. Looking back at how their careers have evolved and the changes they have witnessed in society, they are able to provide a longer view, one that often sees cycles repeating themselves.

For those activists in their thirties when I interviewed them, presented here in part II, generation and age proved to be a recurring theme in their narratives. This was especially true for the directors of nonprofit organizations, often tasked with building bridges between older feminists, who now have money and time to volunteer, and younger activists, who are essential to the vitality of the organizations and the movement as a whole. Some of the challenge revolves around social media, which has been a real problem for established organizations; they have operated for decades with long lists of snail mail addresses, printed newsletters, and donors used to handwritten thank-you notes. Leaders of these organizations have had to figure out how to transition to social media without alienating their oldest and most loyal supporters. But the social media challenge highlights a more fundamental question about who is in charge and gets to decide what the organization should focus on and how it should operate. We are used to thinking of the sandwich generation in terms of family—middle-aged adults balancing the needs of older parents and young children—but many of these women are experiencing similar dynamics at work.¹⁷

Questions about the relationships between older and younger activists also emerge in newer organizations that focus on girls: How do adults support girls’ activism and empower them to advocate on behalf of themselves? How do girls navigate the challenge of growing out of the movement that formed such an important part of their activist identities? Some of the young women in part III, most of whom were in their twenties when we talked, started out as girl activists and are trying to figure out how to carry those commitments forward. Shaped deeply by student loans and the shock of watching parents and friends go through the recession of 2008, these younger feminists carry a profound sense of economic anxiety that often affects the choices they make about how to engage in professional careers. Coming of age after 9/11, they have grown up with a different sense of the world—warier, more cynical—than those who were already adults when that horror befell the United States and its social and geopolitical consequences began to unfold.

This book showcases powerful, complicated, beautiful stories of individual lives that, taken together, help shed light on a movement. Through these narratives, we grasp the feminist movement’s intricacies and the hard work it takes to sustain it. We see the causes involved, the strategies being employed, the stumbling blocks, and the successes. These interviews allow us to see the women’s movement at a particular point in time—a moment which, looking back, appears to have been on the cusp of something new. Reflecting on their work in the two years before the 2016 election, these activists reveal their frustrations and their guarded optimism; discuss the networks they created, the skills they learned, and the coalitions they built; and make known their boundless determination to keep moving forward. The building blocks they laid would prove profoundly important in the future that was just around the corner. These narratives reveal how major new developments like the 2017 Women’s March on Washington and the #MeToo movement could flourish so quickly, seemingly coming out of nowhere but in fact drawing on the lessons learned from and connections built by women like those in these pages.

Like the people who create them, movements grow, change, shift, and are remembered and carried forward by new generations. This book seeks to document an important moment in the feminist movement by sharing twenty-five remarkable people’s own recollections of their experiences, goals, hopes, sorrows, frustrations, and joys. There are many more stories worth telling, and I hope the ones presented here will inspire others to record and share their narratives. I also hope the pages that follow can shed light on how the feminist movement operates today, provide compelling examples of how activist lives unfold, and offer inspiration to those who are looking for ways to get involved.

Part One: Activists in Their Forties

The seven women in this section were born in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the burgeoning feminist movement. Their early lives were shaped by the fact that their parents were living through the changes of that era. The stories they tell are inflected not only with discussions about the impact of feminism on their own upbringings but with interpretations of how the movement shaped their mothers’ lives as well. Some of these women are now mothers themselves of daughters who range in age from babies to full-grown adults, and they reflect on whether or not the world now is a better place for young women than when they were growing up.

Coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, these interviewees reached maturity during the rise of Reagan Republicanism and what Susan Faludi termed the backlash against feminism. Journalist and writer Rebecca Traister remembers there being very little feminist activity on her college campus; her own feminist outrage was sparked by Katie Roiphe’s infamous book The Morning After, which argued that young women’s expressions of concern about date rape were false. Writer and media activist Soraya Chemaly was the only one of my interviewees in this age cohort to graduate from a women’s studies program; she was in the first class of the women’s studies program at Georgetown University. While the notion of third-wave feminism started to gain traction in the early 1990s, none of these women found that to be a particularly useful label for themselves. Several echoed Traister’s assertion that the term is a media way of making categorical distinctions that are fundamentally meaningless.¹

Unlike some of the younger activists in this book, none of these women set out at the beginning of their careers to be professional feminists; it never crossed their minds as a possibility. There was no feminist beat when Traister was a young journalist in New York City; she would create that niche herself in her thirties. Chemaly, an outspoken child with a critical eye who went on to start a feminist journal at Georgetown in the 1980s, shifted from journalism to business in order to make a better living. It wasn’t until her forties that she felt compelled to rejoin the feminist fray—and found a new space to do so. Elisa Camahort Page of California drew on a long career in the business and tech world to launch BlogHer in 2005—an organization aimed at creating opportunities for women engaged in the world of blogging and, later, social media. Katie Orenstein was not involved in any political activity in college. Her experiences in journalism sharpened her view of the challenges facing women and minorities, and she set out to make change. Orenstein does not think of herself as helping women. Instead she draws on the tools and language of the business world and argues that she is investing in underrepresented brainpower, women’s brainpower, for the payoff, which in this case is a strengthened democracy.²

About half of the women in this chapter have been involved in one way or another with the intersecting worlds of journalism, academia, social media, and business, and half—all of them women of color—have worked in direct-service and nonprofit organizations. Joanne Smith, who founded and runs Girls for Gender Equity in Brooklyn, sees a divide between black feminists who work online and those who work on the ground directly helping girls and women. Both Tara Hall of Atlanta, who ran a program for refugee women, and Patina Park, who works with Native American women in Minneapolis, have long worked on behalf of women’s rights and empowerment but hesitate to embrace an identity as a feminist. Hall, age forty-five, says, I really never thought about it. I just do what I do.³ As a young woman, Park took a job at an abortion clinic because it was convenient, and that led her to become a passionate defender of women’s right to choose. But in her Native American community, she does not find feminism a useful framework for the work she does—it is not a word or a way of thinking that resonates much with the women she serves.⁴

With long careers and experience in a variety of contexts, these women help us understand how feminism has changed over the past twenty years, where the movement is headed, and some of the reasons why even those who undertake its work do not always embrace it wholeheartedly.

Soraya Chemaly

Writer and Activist, Director, Women’s Media Center Speech Project, Washington, D.C.

I definitely repeatedly bump into older feminist women—usually white—whom I know and respect, who really think there’s no young feminism, and it’s because they’re not steeped in the internet, and they’re not part of this culture. But there’s so much happening that you can’t even wrap your brain around it.

I met with Soraya Chemaly in the sunny kitchen of her Georgetown townhouse in Washington, D.C. We sat at her small table, under a striking painting—a large, bright orange-red rose on a turquoise background—in a heavy gilt frame. At one point in Chemaly’s life, after her twins were born, her doctor had suggested she take up a hobby in order to help deal with stress. Without any formal art training, Chemaly picked up a brush and painted every night. One day a publisher saw one of her paintings and asked to license it; soon 350 retailers around the country were buying her products. Chemaly says, Honestly, this isn’t great art. It’s decorative, happy paintings, and people really needed happy things. It was after 9/11, and I think that any kind of bright, happy, joyous thing kind of made people feel good. After the economic crash of 2008, though, half of the retailers went out of business and she turned her attention to other endeavors.

Chemaly grew up in the Bahamas. Her family—originally from Jordan, England, and Lebanon—had settled in the Caribbean. They were an entrepreneurial family—her father ran a successful import-export business—and she led a life of privilege in the complicated racial, ethnic, sexual, and political terrain of the Bahamas. She was an observant, curious child who reveled in her grandfather’s extensive library—until her grandmother caught her reading a book about Greek art and declared the paintings on the vases pornographic. Chemaly’s sense of outrage over gender inequality grew in part from her recognition of her grandparents’ unhappy marriage, including the fact that her beloved grandfather apparently had other marriages in other countries. He once said, You know, you’re a pretty girl. Not as pretty as your mother, but you’re a pretty girl, and so you’ll find a nice young man who will take care of you. Chemaly burst out laughing and said, No, I’m going to school, thanks, and I’m going to take care of myself. He asked, Why? That’s so much harder. And she said, Well, so that if I have to, if I married and he’s like you, I can divorce him.

After starting a feminist magazine at conservative, Catholic Georgetown University in the 1980s, Chemaly moved into the world of publishing after graduation. Frustrated by the lack of pay in writing and editing, she eventually crossed over into the business end of the field. She worked in the new media division at the Gannett publishing company, where she tried to get executives to understand the impending impact of their swiftly changing world, but all these newspapers thought that the internet was kind of a joke, something kids played with. So she moved to the Claritas marketing company, where eventually she became a senior corporate vice president.

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