THE NEW REPUBLIC DAILY - Gender September 14, 2014

Feminism Has Conquered the Cul ture. Now

Comes the Hard Part A debate on this
unprecedented opportunity
By Rebecca Traister & Judith Shulevitz
Hi Judith,
I dont think that in my lifetime (Im 39) Ive ever seen public, popular feminist discourse more robust
than it is now. When I was in high school, college, and first in the professional world, feminismor
any open interest in what was once called the womens movementwas totally scorned. I was raised
in deep backlash days. Sassy-style feminism lurked on the margins, but there was little larger
acknowledgment by my peers, and certainly not within mainstream popular culture or in politics, that
gender inequity remained a relevant issue. When I was in college in the mid 90s, you could be
attending the vegan potluck for the Campus Leftists, and if you asked whether anyone there identified
as a feminist, not a hand would go up. It felt like the stereotype of the hirsute, humorless activist had
fully won out in the wake of the Second Wave.
These days, I never stop being stunned by the number of young women I see wearing THIS IS WHAT
A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE t-shirts. I know one high school student who recently read aloud a class
essay on the gendered double standards of hooking up, another who acts in a feminist theater troupe. I
should clarify that these young women are not the daughters of Feminist Friends I met at Feminist
Education Camp: Theyre just teens who have grown up in the early twenty-first century. And tuned-in
young women dontjust dwell in Brooklyn and Berkeley. In Dunkerton, Iowa, a couple of years ago,
high school students protested a preacher whod told them to stay virgins lest they have mud on their
wedding dresses. At Duke, a class of undergraduates founded a blog called Who Needs Feminism?
that receives contributions from around the world.
The conversation is getting broader, deeper, and more diverse every year. And a good deal of the credit
for this goes to... the Internet, of course! Young people, no matter who they are or where they live, can
simply follow a link to a story at Jezebel or Clutch or Feministing or Crunk Feminist Collective, and
maybe that story is about Beyonc, or about a protest over a transgender student being stripped of the
title of Homecoming King, or about abortion restrictions in their state, and they find themselves
immersed in media that applies a gendered lens to the world they live in.
And because the media has become more participatory, they can enter the exchanges themselves. The
result is raucous tussling over what feminism means in a contemporary context. Sure, sometimes its a
maddening mash-up of activism and journalism, quick-tempered 140-character exchanges, and more
huffing and puffing than action. But cacophony is endemic to social movements, and can be
productive.
The Internet allowed for the through-the-night mass viewership of Wendy Daviss Texas filibuster. It
enabled the fund-raising efforts to support Shanesha Taylor, the Arizona woman who was arrested in
March for leaving her kids in her car while she was at a job interview. A few years ago, after the Susan
G. Komen foundation declared that it would not provide grants to Planned Parenthood, a massive
online protest led it to reverse its position.
Meanwhile, there has been the rise of big-name women (and men) who make feminism central to what
theyre selling. I hesitate to even bring up her name, so acrimonious are the divisions around her, but
were clearly going to go there eventually, so we should talk about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg
and Lean In, her book about workplace inequity. And about Beyonc, who in August danced in front of
a giant, lit-up FEMINIST banner at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), with Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichies definition of feminism playing in the backgroundan image I never could have conjured as
a young person in the Im not a feminist, but ... universe. There are comedians like Tina Fey, a
Hollywood macher who has noted, among other things, that the definition of crazy in show business
is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore, and there are male
entertainers, from Louis CK to John Oliver, who speak often and incisively about gender.
Then there are the women working within other formerly exclusively male arenas. Three on the
Supreme Court! They may be stuck in a numerically futile position, but all are eager to loudly rebuke
and amend the dangerous decisions made by some of their male colleagues. There are women in
Congress, including Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Rosa DeLauro, who are presenting
legislation about paid family leave, college rape, and sexual assault in the military, while state
legislators such as Ohios great Nina Turner crusade against restrictions on voting and reproductive
rights.
Of course that gets us to the seriously bad stuff, which I believe is tied directly to womens increasing
influence. We live in a world of ever-tightening constriction, in corporate America and in state
legislatures, of the very libertiesenfranchisement, reproductive health careon which women have
built their contemporary power. The growing class chasm means that Americas women are offered
starkly divergent scales of possibility. Some profit hugely from postSecond Wave economic,
educational, and professional opportunities; others are pushed ever further from their rights as full
citizens.
Speaking of which, I cant end this missive without acknowledging this circumstance: The two people
embarking on this exchange are white, educated, middle-class women who live in New York City. In
this, we are demonstrating the ways in which public feminism has developed far too little, and are
emblematic of many of the mechanisms that keep big-platform feminism narrower than it should be.
Which brings us to a bigger question: Is this moment actually taking us somewhere new? Is it progress?

Associated Press.
A 1970 march for equality.
Dear Rebecca,
Im sorry to say so, but I dont agree that the state of the conversation about feminism is grounds for
optimism. I mean, sure, its better to have the beautiful people think the word feminist is cool than to
have them sneer at it. And there is something thrilling about watching Beyonc stand militantly in front
of a lit-up backsplash of the term at the VMAsthough its also jarring to have the word reduced to a
fetish object by a high priestess of the misogynistic cult that is American pop music, especially when
she has just finished a pole-dancing number.
But feminist Internet discourse doesnt do much for me, no matter how robust it may be or how much
money it gins up for the people and causes that happen to have gone viral on any particular day. People
talkand talkabout everything on the Internet, but that doesnt mean the talk changes anything. Too
much online feminist conversation bounces around in a giant echo chamber, a cacophony of exegeses
of exegeses of exegeses, each offering a diminishing return to time invested in reading. (Thats my
perspective.) On the other hand, its fair to say that a smaller portion of such writing is indeed very
good. (Thats probably your perspective.) This is the eternal proportion of crap to real thinking on just
about every subject in just about every medium in the world. So, to paraphrase the rabbi in an old joke:
Maybe were both right.
Let me explain what I mean by good and bad. Good: One of my favorite feminist bloggers, Jessica
Grose of Slate, who does sustained enterprise-reporting and bases her opinions on thoughtfully curated
studies and data. Bad: ideological-purity-policing hashtag activism, as outlined in Michelle Goldbergs
excellent Feminisms Toxic Twitter Wars in The Nation this January. Goldberg describes the
preparations for a 2012 conference at Barnard on online feminism. Critics attacked its sponsors for
holding the conference in New York and not paying for nonNew Yorkers to attend, for not addressing
this issue or that one. The hostile tweets and online comments got so vitriolic, wrote Goldberg, so
full of bad faith and stubborn misinformation, that it felt like some sort of Maoist hazing. Goldberg
ends with a lament from Anna Holmes, late of Jezebel, now of Fusion: The womens blogosphere, said
Holmes, feels like a much more insular, protective, brittle environment than it did before. Its really
depressing. ... It makes me think I got out at the right time.
Lets turn to feminism itself. Ive read your note twice, and Im still not sure what you think its main
causes should be. I think its necessary to prioritize, rather than just express general optimism or
pessimism. A heroine of mine, Martha Nussbaum, writes that, if you care about human flourishing (a
term she uses as shorthand for such things as access to health care and education, political and personal
empowerment, a capacity to cultivate ones creativity, and so on), then you have to ask: Among the
many things human beings might develop the capacity to do, which are the really valuable ones, which
are the ones that a minimally just society will endeavor to nurture and support? Another heroine is the
political scientist Theda Skocpol, an expert on the politics of social change, who has shown, among
other things, how much nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women did to lay the groundwork for
the welfare state. I asked her what she thought about the welter of feminist issues abroad in the land,
and she said, Politics is about deciding what youre going to emphasize.
So let me lay out what I think we should emphasize. These issues are all bound up in each other, but for
the sake of simplicity Ill take them one by one.
1. Sexual violence. I think weve done a pretty good job fighting it in this country. I dont know how to
quantify this impression, but it seems to me that rape has never been as widely condemned as it is in the
United States today. Obviously, too many people are still too confused about what rape is and too many
women still dont feel safe reporting it to the police.
But heres something Ive been noticing about the campus rape scandal, the most recent focus of media
outrage. Most universities do a remarkably bad job of delivering fair treatment to everyone involved
victims and defendants. The entire process is fuzzy and arbitrary and all too easily swayed by external
considerations, such as sparing the university from embarrassment. I dont mean to dismiss the ugliness
of frat-house rape; Im just worried because I dont hear a lot of talk about the rights of the accused.
Due process is a feminist issue too, because if we dont insist that rape be defined very clearly (as it is
not on some campuses) and prosecuted fairly, we may find ourselves party to some pretty egregious
stuff. All you have to do is remember how rape charges were used to persecute black men in the Jim
Crow South to be able to imagine what overzealous and poorly regulated rape prosecutions could lead
to.
Meanwhile, sexual violence remains horrific in many other parts of the globe, and that seems a more
significant impediment to female equality than campus rape. Yes, you can sense inklings of awareness
here and there; the local as well as international outcries about the gang rape of a student in India and
the sexual assaults on Tahrir Square were heartening to witness. But, for instance, according to the
United Nations 2014 Human Development Report, African women are nearly twice as likely to be the
victims of sexual violence as women in low- and middle-income Europe. The report also points out that
mass rape is increasingly common as a weapon of war. I wish I heard as much about that in the U.S.
blogosphere.
2. Lack of equal opportunity for women. Equal pay for equal work, gender bias, objectification, the
leaning in, the leaning outtheres lots to say about all of these, but also no end of chatter about them,
so Im going to gloss over them for now. Ill just say that I dont think that successful individuals who
happen to be female will or can do much to help women in the workplace and in politics, since the
barriers to equality are more structural than personal. (I should exclude from this generalization women
in positions to introduce laws or make judicial decisions.)
3. Systematic discrimination against caregivers. Ive put this last, but I actually think it ranks first in
importance. And Im going to admit to some sneaking solidarity with the women of the 90s. Im sort
of sick of the word feminism. If I had my way, wed replace it with something less gender-specific,
like caregiverism. Thats ugly, I know. Wed have to come up with something better. But feminist,
to me, falls short of the meaning that Adichie describes in the clip played by Beyonc: the social,
political, and economic equality of the sexes. We wont achieve that kind of equality just by telling
girls they, too, can be ambitious, as Adichie does. We have to go much deeper. We have to make it
unacceptable to denigrate the work of care, which means challenging a hierarchy of values that goes
back at least to the Ancient Greeks.
Feminists should become caregiverists as a way of establishing that the invisibility and unprotected
status of caregivers is by no means only a womens issue. It is at the very least a national one: The stark
difference in the quality of the child care available to the poor and the rich perpetuates inequality and
makes a mockery of the American ideal of meritocracy. Work-life balance (that odious euphemism!)
must also be seen as part of a larger structural problem. Limiting work hours used to be one of the great
causes of the labor movement; even as the working day has grown longer and longer, this issue has
dropped off the agendafor many reasons, among them the globalization of finance and just-in-time
manufacturing, both of which make it hard to impose standard schedules. Nonetheless, without this
broader perspective, we tend to think of our solutions to the problem of undone domestic labor as
personal dilemmasopting out, opting inrather than as Hobsons choices imposed on us by a
shrinking amount of time available to do chores. Meanwhile, women who opt out pay a high price for
the privilege. Ann Crittenden, in The Price of Motherhood, explains that college-educated mothers pay
more than $1 million in a mommy taxthe earnings they lose while they pump out new little sources
of labor and raise them by the sweat of their unpaid brows. (The figure is surely higher now; that book
came out in 2001.)
I could (and will) get more specific about why I think caregiving should rise to the top of the list, but
for now, Ill turn this over to you.

Eugene Gordon/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images.
Gloria Steinem (right).

Hi Judith,
Im not sure we disagree about the challenges facing women and men today. Where we differ is in our
attitudes to whats being done to tackle them.
Lets start with the Internet: You write that the talk-talk-talk of online feminism doesnt do much for
you. Fair enough! I acknowledged a degree of that frustration in my initial note. But I find it
unproductive and frankly silly to wholly dismiss the value of the feminist Internet, especially since the
Web may not make your toes tap, but it is the communicative tool of the generations following us;
writing off the exchanges happening there is both disrespectful and risky. No matter how irritated
youor Imay be by some of the empty-calorie content of social media, its a tool that has been
crucial to real-world political events, from the Arab Spring to Barack Obamas election.
Your conviction that online feminist discourse isnt worth much is a breezy dismissal of an awfully
large and multifaceted phenomenon. In any social movement, there are approaches that provoke
frustration; I had qualms about the usefulness of Slutwalks, for example. But your generalized scorn
entirely writes off the value of contemporary organizing (as in the North Carolina exercise in civil
disobedience known as Moral Mondays or the push-back against Komen) and of the airing of
individual stories that shed light on issues related to gender, race, and class. What happened to
Shanesha Taylor, for exampleone of the viral causes / people you view as random and
uninterestingis symptomatic of the very inequities faced by the caregivers, mothers, and workers
who you name as the number-one priority of feminism.
You voice confusion at my failure to lay out my own list of priorities. That wasnt accidental.
Feminism is a massive project; I dont believe in the utility of ranking its aims. My view of its broadest
goal is closest to your second priority: equality of opportunity. But inequality of opportunity is
experienced in many ways: lack of child care, family leave, and equal pay protections; sexual and
domestic violence; gendered, racial, and class prejudices within education; absence of respect for both
paid and unpaid domestic labor, which you so correctly highlight; lack of equal representation in
government and in positions of professional power; messages of diminishment sent by the
entertainment industries; limits on access to reproductive health care; unjust policing practices and
violence against people of color; the rock-bottom minimum wage and middle-class wage stagnation.
The list is endless. These are all feminist issues, and there is no one person, group, or cause that is
going to satisfactorily address them all.
Which is why I am dubious about pronouncements about what feminism should be concentrating on.
It leads to the How can you worry about X when Y is so much more pressing? rhetorical dodge.
Usually, I find, X and Y are both pressing in their own ways. Ive been suspicious of this move ever
since the feminist leader Eleanor Smeal asked me, some years ago, why Id focus a story on the role of
morality within the abortion battle when women were dying from fistula around the world. Yes, women
suffer from fistula. But how morality has been framed within the abortion debate is also important; its
part of the rhetoric that has led to the shuttering of clinics around the United States a decade later.
You seem to be deploying this tactic when you suggest that, while sexual violence in the United States
is a problem, rape has never been as widely condemned as it is in the United States today, and that
there should be more focus on international sexual violence. That evaluation doesnt really take us, or
feminism, anywhere productive. I mean: Sure, sexual violence is a persistently horrific problem around
the world and rape has never been as widely condemned as it is in the United States today. But thats a
pitifully low bar, given that marital rape was legal in many states a few decades ago, and that the
Centers for Disease Control have reported that one in five women have been raped in their lifetime;
reported numbers are often higher for women of color. Sexual violence has not been adequately
redressed, in the United States or abroad.
We agree about protecting the rights of the accused. Im married to a criminal defense attorney who has
defended many an alleged rapist and am keenly aware of problematic policing and prosecutorial
practices. But again (fistula), its possible to care simultaneously about teaching men not to rape and
about ensuring that those accused of any crime receive the full protections of our legal system. I dont
need to cast back to the Jim Crow South to imagine the unjust punishment of questionably accused
individuals; I need simply pay attention to the rate and manner in which African American men are
arrested and imprisoned in 2014.
You write of your wish that coverage of international sexual violence and rape got as much ink as
campus sexual assault, with a nod to inklings of awareness about the Delhi gang rape and assaults in
Tahrir Square. Im surprised by your impression that even the shallow world of popular media is silent
on these questions. Sexual violence around the world is a focus of an enormous amount of media and
political attention. This summer, at a global summit on sexual violence, Hillary Clinton spoke of how
rape and other forms of sexual violence are not inevitable in war, and we can end this scourge.
Delegates from 150 countries signed a pledge to end impunity for wartime rape. Make no mistake:
Ending sexual violence as a war crime is a Sisyphean task, no matter how many activists, leaders, or
celebrities (Angelina Jolie was a co-organizer of the summit) work away at it. But in your pessimism,
Im afraid youre missing a lot of the contemporary conversation.
I have both patience and sympathy for your argument against the notion that successful individuals
who happen to be female will or can do much to help women in the workplace and in politics, since the
barriers to equality are more structural than personal. And yet even though the barriers are structural,
that doesnt mean that individuals dont have any role to play. Big-name branding is not the be-all of a
feminist revival, but the capitalist pole-dancers occupy mighty pop pulpits and their voices carry. Id
rather have those voices talking about feminism than not talking about it. By all means, lets hash out
the inconsistencies surrounding those figures: Its healthy to consider the fact that a woman who puts
FEMINIST in lights also informs men that, if they liked it, they should have put a ring on it. And yet
past battles were fought by leaders just as beset by problematic contradictions (see, for example, the
racism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or the homophobia and white middle-class myopia of Betty
Friedan).
In turn, Im also surprised by your lack of interest in the way the Internet might destigmatize feminism
for young people. Surely some of these young people will leave feminism behind or disavow it. But
others will become the activists, reformers, laborers, lawmakers, scientists, and businesspeople who
shape the future. If theyre emerging from a youthful culture that has offered them (and their peers)
some feminist context, they are far more likely to enjoy support for their work.
Further, Im not convinced that trotting out examples of how bad things are for women is a compelling
argument against the health of contemporary feminist discourse. Yes, things are bad for women (and
men) for many reasons related to gender and power. Thats precisely why its so crucial that more
people are talking about feminism, even if theyre just talking.
But I dont buy that its just talk. Paid family leave used to be a third-rail issue. Today, we may be ages
from federal legislation, but on Labor Day weekend, California became the second state to pass paid-
sick-day legislation. Next year, New York could follow California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island in
offering paid family leave, surely among the most crucial of policy advances.
Look, its important to acknowledge that plenty is grim and not devolve into empty-headed
cheerleading. But its also important to acknowledge expansions of possibility, lest we get mired in a
sense of futilitywhich never got any social movement anywhere.

Buyenlarge/Getty Images.
Suffragettes circa 1900.

Dear Rebecca,
You say optimism, I say pessimismlets move on. Id love to know where you think we should go
from here. I know youre dubious about pronouncing on what feminism should be concentrating
on, but I cant believe you yourself dont pick and choose off the menu of causes you so thoughtfully
and encyclopedically offer. I do believe in ranking them; to your assertion that prioritizing some
feminist issues above others amounts to a rhetorical dodge, Id reply that it can be an exercise in
imposing philosophical rigorand political focus.
Remember the Whos down in Whoville, from Horton Hears a Who, and the mean kangaroos who
doubted their existence? Call a big meeting. Get everyone out. Make every Who holler! Make every
Who shout! The point is that they had to do it together, with a single objective in view. If you dont,
every Who is going to end up in a beezle-nut stew!

Hi Judith,
No, Im not wild about ranking priorities. But I agree that we are plagued by a lack of any clear-cut
agenda. Earlier generations of activists have had some real legislative bulls-eyes to shoot for:
abolition, suffrage, legal abortion. Elaine Showalter recently noted that a mass movement requires a
clear goal, compelling enough to unite people across the dividing lines of race, class, age, religion,
sexual orientation and ethnicity, and persuade them to work collectively to achieve it. The goal must be
concrete and attainable, even if its ideological underpinnings are complex or contradictory. Sure, no
problem, Elaine! Lets get on that. But seriously, she has a point. So here goes:
Federally mandated paid family leave (and sick-day legislation): The nations failure to provide
economic security to those who need time away from paid work to care for new children or ailing
family members is both uncivilized and embarrassing.
Federally subsidized child care: Do not call me crazy; I am idealistic. Americans need accessible,
affordable, quality day care to make both professional and familial universes more functional and
humane.
Federal equal pay protection: Obviously.
Raise the minimum wage: It could be done now, and it would have a direct impact on millions of
Americans.
Repeal Hyde: Legislatively, this is one massive national project that I would encourage feminists of
every persuasion to get behind. It surely doesnt feel attainable right now, but nor did gay marriage 15
years ago. So Im going with this one from the heart: One of the keys to socio-economic justice for
American women across all classes and races is to remove the provision that has, since 1976, barred the
use of federal funds to pay for abortion for women in need, including Medicaid recipients.
Heading into more symbolic realms, we should:
Pass the Equal Rights Amendment. I know, I know: Its only 24 words, but those words are so sensible
that its just nutsy that they are not in our Constitution. And the defeat of the ERA became so symbolic
of the cessation of feminist advance that its adoption would send a message of resilience.
Elect a feminist woman president. I am not suggesting that feminists must rally around Hillary Clinton
in 2016, nor issuing any kind of ovarian imperative to support a woman, any woman. Im merely
suggesting that the fact that weve only had men in the White House is no inconsequential thingand
that should feminists encounter a candidate with whom they largely agree, and should that candidate
also be female, then a movement to make her president would be powerful and potentially unifying.
And while I know that an individual atop a screwed-up government can only do so much, research
suggests that the election of one female politician makes it more likely that voters will support female
politicians in the future, which in turn inspires more women to get into politics, yadda, yadda. Again:
Im not saying it has to be Hillary.
Having laid out these big goals, I want to return to an exploration of why, so far, the well-intentioned
energy of youthful feminism has been so diffuse and unfocused. One reason is that the Internet has
permitted the conversations to become more diverse, thus increasing the number of perspectives: a
good thing! But the less-good aspect is one that you edge toward in your earlier distinctions between
good feminist media vs. bad feminist media. The writers you cited affirmativelyGrose,
Goldberg, and Holmesare, like the two of us, paid to think about these issues. Many young activists
and writers are paid little or nothing for their advocacy work while laboring elsewhere to make a living.
After all, Twitter is democratizing precisely because it invites everyone to produce content for no
money!
Were roughly the same age, Judith, positioned between the Second Wave, which preceded us, and the
crowd of youngsters behind us. Perhaps its the scant decade between usor maybe just our individual
inclinationsthat leaves you slightly more attuned to the skepticism I hear voiced by our elders and me
slightly more sympathetic to the scattershot exuberance of the Internet kids. But mostly we both enjoy a
good and distant view of both sides of a generational chasm. And heres a pragmatic reality that that
view makes clear: Young people dont have moneyto support their journalism or organizing or to
build infrastructure. What money there is in feminism is both in the hands of older womenwho, for
some of the very comprehensible reasons you outline, remain wary of the loosey-goosiness of young
feminismand in the hands of wealthy women, like, say Beyonc and Sheryl Sandberg, figures whom
many critics would like to chase out of feminism.
To which I say: Please, ladies of all ages and capitalist profiles, dont go anywhere! Lets sit down and
warmly discuss how we might all get along better! Because the movement needs energy from some of
you, Web savvy from others, and cash from everyone who has some to spare. So if we could all just
hear each other out, maybe then we could focus on some tangible goals.

Associated Press.
Sandra Day OConnor, Sister Terry Dodge, Oprah Winfrey, and Maria Shriver.



Dear Rebecca,
Theres a lot to grapple with here, but time is short because I have work-life-balance problems of my
own todayearly school dismissal, childrens dentistry, the pesky critters will have teethand I cant
resist your provocation. So tell me. When have young activists and writers ever had money? For that
matter, when have middle-aged ones, unless theyre philanthropist- activists like Arianna Huffington or
corporate feminists like Sheryl Sandberg?
If you want action, you organize. Thats not new. You form pressure groups, take to the streets, work
within the system or outside it. Money certainly helps make all this happen, but it has never been
plentiful for outsiders trying to effect change.
Too much online feminist conversation bounces around in a giant echo chamber, a cacophony of
exegeses of exegeses of exegeses.
If you want an open mike for womens opinions, theres the Internet. Thats also democracy in action,
as you have so eloquently argued, plus of course its emancipatingly free. Yes, it has become harder to
make a living as a writer of the sort we both admireby the way, we have the Internet to blame for
thatand yet I dont feel as sorry for up-and-coming journalists as you do, since established ones are
also losing their jobs. In any case, it has never been possible to make much of a living writing essays or
books about political ideas: Almost everyone has almost always needed grants or day jobs for that.
For their part, yes, activists used to have unions to bankroll them, and no, unions arent what they used
to be, but in this age of professionalized public-interest foundations, agencies, lobbying groups, etc.,
would-be activists still have access to decent paychecks. They didnt, for example, during the
Progressive Era, which arose as a reaction to the Gilded Age, the period in U.S. history most like ours
in its extreme social inequality and immobility. Some of its most influential writer / activists were born
into rural poverty (Ida Tarbell) or to families bankrupted, say, by a fathers alcoholism (the crusading
novelist Upton Sinclair.) Al Smith, four-time New York governor and the very exemplar of the reform
politician (despite those ties to Tammany Hall) was born and raised on the Lower East Side, the son of
Irish immigrants who left school to work at age 13. Sure, its harder to agitate when you start at the
bottom, but the key to being politically effective is to be loud, not rich.

Hi Judith,
A few things, starting with your question about when have activists ever had money: Money and class
have often directly played into activism, in ways that have not always been pretty. In everything from
fashions (short hair and dresses) to social freedoms (women walking unaccompanied on streets),
marriage patterns, and economic independence, it has often been poor women and women of color who
have pioneered revolutionary behaviors, usually out of economic necessity. But its often not until
white middle-class women ape those behaviors (which turn out to be liberating) that they become
discernible as revolutionary.
For instance: In the 1920s, the black writer Elise McDougald wrote about the liberating aspects of paid
labor in new fields for black women in Harlem; a decade later, the black lawyer Sadie Alexander
eloquently laid out the many benefits of female work outside the home. Yet it was 30 years later that
Betty Friedan, a white middle-class woman addressing similar arguments to a white middle-class
audience, was credited with kicking off feminisms Second Wave. (Im not endorsing this model, but
rather countering your notion that past advances have existed outside a context of wealth.)
Often, it has been financially comfortable people who are most able to lend their time to organizing and
opining, and not to scraping by. And I dont mean to simply tag women here: Karl Marx was middle
class; Martin Luther King Jr. was middle class; the Port Huron Statement begins with a description of
Students for a Democratic Society activists bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in
universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
Of course, movements have also been led by people whose experiences of subjugation shaped their
activismFrederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Hughesand by those whose devotion to
agitation over money-making has left them struggling. But the nations economic structures have
changed. Shulamith Firestone died in 2012 in her East Village apartment, which she rented for around
$400 a month. It is no longer possible to live in the East Village for $400 a monthor East Bushwick,
for that matter.
Things are bad right now for millennialsthe very people who are freshly invested in popularizing
feminism. Young people enter adulthood hobbled by unprecedented student debt, facing a paucity of
jobs and lowered earnings and even worse prospects should they forgo college; theyre living with their
parents, are economically barred from many of the cities that make organizing more possible.
Youre right that the Internet permits a new form of gatheringI think now youre making my
argument about its usefulness back at me! But lets consider the efficacy of noise-making without
funding today. The Supreme Court has just gutted the Voting Rights Act and created a postCitizens
United world in which voting has become harder and literally purchasing representative power has
become easier. The impoverishment of youthful agitators is not same-as-it-ever-was La Bohmeism.
Its a structurally supported impediment to altering the dynamics of power.
So now whos pessimistic? Though let me recover a smidgen of sunniness by saying that I believe that
the restriction of freedoms for women, people of color, and poor people are the death throes of the old
status quo. But its ridiculous to pretend that money and influence have been incidental to social
movements: Theyve been pretty central. Thats partly why its important that we not throw the
capitalists out with the bathwater.
Speaking of money and class, Ive been thinking about policy advances: how theyve worked in the
past and about the likelihood that future concrete achievements will be offered up only alongside
deeply destructive compromises. The 14th and 15th Amendments granted black men, but not women of
any color, the franchise, creating a terrible rift between abolitionists and suffragists who had long
worked in tandem. Fifty years later, Carrie Chapman Catt, the head of the National American Woman
Suffrage Association, supported Woodrow Wilsons entry into World War I, enraging her pacifist
feminist allies, but probably ensuring the eventual passage of the 19th Amendment, which would allow
them the vote.
Were we to imagine a future that included federal paid-family-leave legislationto pick an example
we both believe to be vitalwed have to imagine the tolls that might be exacted in its passage.
Consider that, when California recently passed its paid-sick-day legislation, it left out home health care
workers. And remember that, when Social Security was created in 1935, it excluded domestic and
agricultural workers. Its not hard to envision a future paid-leave act that cuts out Americans who need
it the most: shift workers, minimum-wage earners, home health care professionals. Such legislation
could be a boon to gender equality for millions of Americans, but it could simultaneously crowbar open
an even deeper class (and race) chasm between those it benefits and those it leaves out.
How do we move forward without simply walking straight into a repetition of history, in which
victories tear apart the coalitions that make them possible? Is it feminist support of more economic
populists like Elizabeth Warren? An intensive commitment to voting rights, to ensure that the
government actually represents the diverse population it serves? How else can we realisticallyand
optimisticallyprepare ourselves to get the work done without incurring major losses?

STR/AFP/Getty Images.
Activists protest then-IMF-head Dominique Strauss-Kahn after he is accused of rape in 2011.

Dear Rebecca,
Let me tell you a story. During World War II, day care centers filled the land. You know why: America
needed women to do the jobs formerly done by the men now fighting overseas. Newspaper stories
about children left in cars and chained to trailer homes, along with the congressional testimony of
female union members, convinced the government to fund the day care programs that would allow
mothers to go to work. Congress passed the Lanham Act in 1940. It ultimately paid for 3,102 centers
that enrolled around 600,000 childrennot nearly enough centers, but nothing like it had ever been
seen before.
The Lanham Act was not meant to be permanent, and in 1946, Congress ended its funding and most of
the centers shut down immediately. In some places, however, the centers did not close. One such place
was Philadelphia, because the mothers of that city wrote letters and petitioned and erupted in protests to
keep at least 20 centers open. If something isnt done by next Thursday, a woman declared at one
City Council meeting, we will have 200 women, with the children, in the balconies of the City
Councils chambers. The women kept the centers alive for two more years. In 1948, when the city
decided not to allocate any more money, 150 sign-wielding mothers buttonholed councilmembers at
City Hall. The police kicked them out, but the women got a permit and returned. They had public
sentiment on their sidenever before have readers exhibited such overwhelmingly strong support for
a measure, wrote Philadelphias The Bulletinand by 1949, they had won an imperfect victory. The
mayor agreed to fund the centers out of the budget from his own office. He couldnt get the
councilmembers to give public day care a single dollar out of the municipal budget. Nonetheless, ten
centers operated well into the 1960s.
Who were these women? asks historian Elizabeth Rose, who tells this story in Mothers Job: The
History of Day Care, 18901960. They always identified themselves as working mothers who used
the child care centers ... and none of their leaders seem to have been publicly prominent in Philadelphia
in subsequent years. Rose speculates that they were recruited through the centers parents
associations and met during pick-up and drop-off.
It would make a great movie, dont you think? And it tells me that change doesnt require professional
middle-class activists. (Dont get me wrong: Im not saying they cant be the ones leading the way. Im
just saying they dont have to be.) More than middle-class approbation, change requires rage,
persistence, and on-the-ground organization. A thriving network of civic associations available for
mobilization doesnt hurt, either.
This is one reason I do not agree that federally subsidized day care is far-fetched or idealistic. (We have
already come so close to getting itthink of the Comprehensive Child Development Bill of 1971,
which would have funded universal day care had Richard Nixon not vetoed it.) I feel fairly sanguine
that we could secure maternalist, if not strictly speaking feminist, social welfare policies in this
country. But getting such legislation passed will require shoe leather and grit and tapping into existing
pressure groups more than it will depend on elites talking to elites. It will come from grassroots
organizations being willing to make compromises and unlikely alliances to get the necessary votes.
What kind of strange bedfellows might these be? Maybe Hispanic Catholics. Maybe evangelical church
groups. Maybe the Bob Caseys of this world, or other Democratic candidates who fall afoul of Emilys
List by not taking the right position on abortion but who are electable and have views about health care,
day care, and family leave that could help millions of women. I dont mean to give short shrift to
reproductive rights; goodness knows my life has been predicated on them. But if weve got to choose
for now, I choose health care, day care, and family leave. For now.
One bedfellow I personally cant stand, but you can, because you realize, correctly, that we have to take
our friends where we find them: the ever-present Sheryl Sandberg and her brand of Davos feminism.
Even if the COO of Facebook sounds completely tone-deaf when she brags about improving parking
for pregnant employees, even if the so-called Lean In movement is a sham dreamed up by her book
publicist, if she highlights the problem of unequal pay for equal work, well then, OK. Would the
exclusion of mostly minority home health care workers and others at the low end of the pay scale from
paid-sick-leave legislation be grotesque, unjust? Absolutely. Should we take the legislation if we can
get it? Absolutely. We build from there.
I wonder whether, in the end, weve met in the middle: You sounded a whole lot more Eeyorish in your
last entry than when you started, and as we go on, I find myself developing a Charlie-Brown-like hope-
against-hope for change in my lifetime. You chuckle at Elaine Showalter when she says feminists need
an attainable goal that will unify us across all our dividing lines, but I think shes right, and I think
caregiverism might well be that goal. What do I want? Would I like women to stop having to pay that
mommy tax? Would I like to stop paying it? Hell yes. Would I be satisfied, for now, with a deeply
compromised version of a federal paid-leave bill or with state-by-state rather than federal funding for
day care? Yes. (What is Bill DeBlasios universal pre-K if not New York Citys baby step in that
direction?) We have to do what we can to make it possible for men as well as women to work and raise
families at the same time, and we have to do it in the name of social equality and economic growth, not
just in the name of feminism. This is the big unfinished business of the womens movement,
Crittenden once said. Its a long way off, obviously, but yes, Rebecca, lets get on it.
Judith Shulevitz and Rebecca Traister are
senior editors at The New Republic.

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