You've Lost Your Way, Baby

How organized feminism has made itself irrelevant

Catherine Seipp from the October 2002 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

All this was especially bizarre because abortion has been a nonissue in California dating back to six years before Roe. Ronald Reagan, of all people, signed into law the most liberal abortion rights act in the country in 1967, when he was California?s governor. The law made abortion completely legal for any reason in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy -- well into the second trimester. (Roe calls for some restrictions after the first 13 weeks.) Since the beginning of this year, women don?t even need a prescription to get emergency postcoital contraception from California pharmacies. Yet the feminist movement seems determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

When President Bush expanded a government health care program to include pregnant women in February, he classified the fetus as an "unborn child" eligible for health care. The feminist Web site Women?s Enews made this its "Outrage of the Week." But if the result is that poor pregnant women get prenatal care, is that such a terrible thing? More women would like free medical care from the government than would like an abortion, but you?d never know it from listening to feminist organizations.

Instead they provide dramatic but misleading statistics, such as the fact that some 80 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion providers. This says as much about the state of rural health care as it does about abortion: Most of the 3,143 counties in the U.S. are thinly populated "nonmetropolitan" counties, as the Census puts it, and almost half have no obstetricians or gynecologists at all. If classifying the fetus as an unborn child makes it easier for poor women to get health care, it seems strange for feminists, of all people, to be outraged.

Granted, you can?t expect abortion rights activists to want a fetus described as anything but a fetus. But this seems to be more a matter of semantics than an omen of abortion restrictions to come. Feminist groups were similarly up in arms last year because of the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which increased penalties against criminals who attacked pregnant women. But the law specifically exempted legal abortion, and one criminal law professor told The New Republic that he saw nothing in it "that would undermine Roe v. Wade." The protests against such semantic transgressions seem hysterical in the most basic sense of the word.

Foot-In-Mouth Disease

Another major problem with the women?s movement, aside from its mindless fealty to leftism and obsession with abortion, is that its spokeswomen just haven?t sounded very smart lately. The moribund situation of the movement?s flagship magazine Ms. is just the most obvious example. For another, turn to Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers. Last winter she railed against the notion of liberal bias in the media, arguing in The Boston Globe that leaders of the tiny (600-member) Independent Women?s Forum (IWF), a conservative women?s group, appear on talk shows and the op-ed pages of major newspapers regularly, while NOW and FMF leaders don?t.

Rivers brought up a good point, even if it wasn?t exactly the one she was trying to make. Mainstream media are generally sympathetic to the NOW and FMF platforms. They are also unsympathetic to IWF. So if feminist leaders aren?t appearing on the op-ed pages, the most likely reason is that they?ve failed to provide a fresh or convincing argument.

That feminism seems to have lost its voice can be seen in the recent implosions of Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi, who reigned during the ?90s as the movement?s major intellectual media darlings. But if they came in with a bang in 1991 -- Wolf with The Beauty Myth and Faludi with Backlash -- they?ve gone out with a whimper. The decline of Faludi began in 1998, when the British novel Bridget Jones?s Diary, which was very popular with women, if not with feminists, arrived in the U.S. (It was first published in the U.K. in 1996.) The novel?s running joke was that Bridget was always meaning to read Backlash, but just kept getting bored. A media icon?s days are numbered once she?s perceived as simultaneously worthy and dreary.

Still, the severe media backlash against Faludi and her last book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999), was remarkable. If Backlash revived American feminism, Stiffed began hammering the nails into the coffin. The premise of Stiffed was that men were "in crisis," "in agony," and that something must be done.

Like what? Like "learning to wage a battle against no enemy," Faludi suggested vaguely (and with one hand clapping, no doubt). That was pretty much it, except that the argument was extended for some 600 pages. Even those generally on Faludi?s side got impatient. "She should have said she was talking about class," Judith Shulevitz wrote grumpily in The New York Times. "She said she was talking about gender." Despite the sort of massive publicity send-off authors dream about, including a 5,000-word excerpt in Newsweek, the book sank without a trace.

Even deadlier was the reaction last fall to Naomi Wolf?s Misconceptions, a mesmerizingly nutty polemic about what she calls "the hidden truths behind giving birth in America today." (That?s compared to the sheer delight of giving birth in the rest of the world, of course.) The bland trade journal Publishers Weekly, which hardly has an anti-feminist ax to grind, irritatedly dismissed the book as "a weirdly out-of-touch bid for personal attention."

Now that the standard polite flip-through of the neighbors? hospital baby pictures means viewing a bloody color close-up of baby?s emerging head and mom?s genitalia, you may wonder just what truths about giving birth are still hidden. But perhaps you had no idea that pregnant women "in our culture" (to use Wolf?s favorite phrase) often have Cesareans, even when they?d hoped not to; that they are typically exhausted and sometimes feel like they?re losing their minds; that new moms still get up more than new dads to deal with howling infants in the middle of the night; or that maternity clothes tend to be unstylish, with a cruel lack of selection in Western wear.

Yes, she?s serious about that one. "You could not be a cowgirl and a mother," Wolf observes glumly, describing another day "mourning the loss of the young woman I had been" while rifling the racks at the mall. "You could not be a heartbreaker and a mother....You could not, in our culture, easily pair motherhood with many other alluring archetypes."

As opposed to what other culture? Are there really maternity shops selling Annie Get Your Gun outfits in Iraq or India? But Wolf remains starry-eyed about the obstetrical wonders of the non-American world. In Europe and Belize, she instructs one annoyed obstetrician, episiotomies are less necessary because midwives massage the perineal area with warm oil. There?s hardly anywhere on the planet, in fact (except the bad old U.S.A.), that Wolf doesn?t imagine as a garden of perineum-massaging delights.

"In Greece, Guatemala, Burma, China, Japan, Malaysia and Lebanon," she tells us, "women who have given birth are expected to do little more than lie in bed" for a long, leisurely postpartum. And in Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen -- to cite another statement that sounds good but makes little sense. "Cross-culturally," Wolf continues, "women?s pregnancy is marked by ceremony: a festive meal in China, a visit to a Shinto shrine in Japan, a blessing in Malaysia." Or maybe by a stoning in Nigeria if they?re pregnant and unmarried, or a forced march to the abortion clinic in China if they?re pregnant with another daughter instead of a son. But Wolf doesn?t get into any of that. To quote Publishers Weekly again, "What stands out with embarrassing clarity is [Wolf?s] emphasis on the sufferings of a privileged minority."

Precisely. One of the minor casualties of 9/11 was patience for listening to privileged Americans complain, in distinctly anti-American terms, about their privileged American lives. If feminism doesn?t want to completely wear out women?s patience -- and men?s, too -- it had better find a new agenda. Perhaps one that is, to start with, less blatantly foolish, and more engaged with the issues that women regularly tell pollsters they care most about: crime, the economy, child care, balancing work and motherhood, their children?s schools. It might help if organized feminism recognized that, among other things, legal equality already exists. If feminism wants to become vital again, it must first acknowledge the successes that it helped to achieve.