Naming the waves
A reader has been asking me about the second and third waves of feminism, and my energetic agreement with Meghan Murphy’s rebuke of knee-jerk disdain for the second wave. The reader was wondering about my insistence that the third wave did not invent intersectionality, because he had read in many places that it had – that is, that 2 wave just didn’t know from intersectionality until 3 wave came along.
Nope. 2 wave was aware of the issue of being too white and middle class all along. There were huge arguments and splits over the issue all along. There were huge arguments over lesbians’ place in the movement all along.
That’s not to say that 2 wave was brilliant at it or that it got nothing wrong, it’s just to say that it wasn’t clueless about it, and it didn’t have to wait for 1980 or 2010 to realize that race and class matter. (It was a bit slow on the sexual orientation part – it was weirdly squicked by lesbians.)
So this primer on intersectionality from Routledge seems off the mark to me.
Second-wave feminism is associated with the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. While seeing themselves as inheritors of the politics of the first wave which focused primarily on legal obstacles to women’s rights, second-wave feminists began concentrating on less “official” barriers to gender equality, addressing issues like sexuality, reproductive rights, women’s roles and labor in the home, and patriarchal culture. Finally, what is called third-wave feminism is generally associated with feminist politics and movements that began in the 1980s and continue on to today. Third-wave feminism emerged out of a critique of the politics of the second wave, as many feminists felt that earlier generations had over-generalized the experiences of white, middle-class, heterosexual women and ignored (and even suppressed) the viewpoints of women of color, the poor, gay, lesbian, and transgender people, and women from the non-Western world. Third-wave feminists have critiqued essential or universal notions of womanhood, and focus on issues of racism, homophobia, and Eurocentrism as part of their feminist agenda.
Ennnnnnnh…yes and no. Yes some 2 wavers ignored all those viewpoints, but not all did, and the issue was much discussed. These things are cumulative, so feminism does a better job of it now, but there’s no reason to assume that 2 wave feminists just suddenly froze solid in 1980 while everyone else progressed. Guess what: 2 wave feminists are part of 3 wave feminism, too. There was no break in between. There was a break of sorts between 1 and 2, but not between 2 and 3. Feminism never went underground between 2 and 3 the way it did during the 30s and 40s and 50s, so 2 and 3 are basically the same movement.
Feminist social theory has influenced and been influenced by the agendas and struggles of each of these waves. “First-wave” theorists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Susan B. Anthony were influential for their focus on how women’s lack of legal rights contributed to their social demotion, exclusion, and suffering. “Second-wave” theorists like Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin were prominent for their focus on women’s sexuality, reproduction, and the social consequences of living in a patriarchal culture. And “third-wave” theorists like Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak are significant for critiquing the idea of a universal experience of womanhood and drawing attention to the sexually, economically, and racially excluded.
If you’re lumping Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin together as essentially similar theorists, you’re doing something wrong.
This seems to be an issue that surrounds almost all social issues today, the rejecting of the earlier work done by people who are now older. Our sustainability coordinator informed me that the idea of sustainability did not exist until the Millennials invented it. WTF? Almost all of the major environmental legislation was passed in the 1970s, and signed by Richard Nixon, long before a single Millennial had been born. Other things I have heard claimed for invention by this generation: Civil Rights. Gay Rights. Anti-War Activism. Anti-racism. Avant Garde Theatre. The cell phone.
At least I haven’t (yet) heard anyone claim the Millennials invented the universe.
I guess we need a new movement – the Dear Millenials, You Did Not Invent All The Things movement.
They didn’t invent Understanding History.
Yet.
Sustainability was invented enough before Millennials that it had been coopted and made meaningless by 1992’s Earth Summit in Rio.
Chris – I would agree with that 100%. As someone who teaches Environmental Science to college freshmen, I have a lot to say about current sustainability theory.
Heh. My business ethics class just did a little thing about sustainability and we were each supposed to bring in a company and show what they were doing for sustainability. It seemed to me that some companies were genuinely working on minimizing their impact on the environment at every level, while others pretty much were trying to get credit for doing things like encouraging employees to bicycle and buying a few carbon off-sets.
And since I returned to school, I spend a lot of time among Millennials. I’ve noticed a slight tendency to gullibility in that age group. If they are told something like “Our company provides sustainability in our use of resources” or “Second Wave Feminism wasn’t intersectional” they don’t ask questions like, “If you are offsetting the carbon from your factory, what are you doing about the carbon used by your giant fleet of trucks?” or “Why do there seem to be several black feminist authors writing in the 1970s?”
Questioning what you’re told is something we humans learn as we GET OLDER.
That’s one reason people who have GOTTEN OLDER are not invariably more wrong and stupid than people who haven’t yet.
Alice Walker began as a contributing editor for Ms. Magazine in the 1970s. She continued with them after she coined the term “womanism”
Samantha Vimes @7 – that’s exsctly what I’ve observed. Oh, see, we’ve just spent a lot of money on recycling bins, so we are really committed to sustainability. Never mind that we drive everywhere we go, in great big huge pickup trucks, and encourage everyone to have seven children so our schools have enough butts in the seats to keep going, because it isn’t worthwhile to teach only 20 students in a class. Oh, and feminism? Look, our science department is 3/4 women! No gender problems here.
Never mind that the women are treated differently than the men, and get a lot less respect. Hey, they’re here, we hired them, obviously we are fully feminist. We can feel free to make sexist jokes and have the women cook for parties, because we have so many of them we must not have a problem. That’s feminism, right?
Grrrrr, argh, this erasure and dismissal of the earlier feminist movements is so frustrating (and has been going on for decades now–I ran into it in my doctoral courses in the early 1990s).
Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara are two of the better known African American women who were active in progressive movements including feminism during the “Second Wave” (which is ONE theoretical construct which can be used to categorize parts of feminist history but is neither objective nor completely accurate).
Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, an African American lawyer worked and wrote with Robin Morgan.
Yes, the 1970s feminists movements (which were not homogeneous even before the “Sex Wars” of the 1980s–N.O.W. was seen as mainstream/conservative by some of the radical younger women like Morgan who were doing direct protests and street theatre instead of trying to reform the legal system) were racist–like every other white dominated group at the time.
But there were feminist women of color and womanists active and protesting that racism whose are being completely erased by this “no intersectionality until Third Wave Feminism.”
Third Wave feminism originated in the 1970s work by Kimberlee Crenshaw and other Black feminists and womanists.
The racism existed, BUT ignoring the work of the important women of color is a major problem.
One of the earliest books on Black Women’s Studies wa published in 1982: Gloria Hull, Barbara Christian, and Barbara Smith’s All the Men are Black, All the Women are White, but Some of Us are Brave
This Bridge Called My Back edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga was published in 1981.
This is a thing in movements. There’s a recent article titled “Foodies Can Succeed Where Environmentalists Failed.” People are creating a revisionist history in which environmentalists were always privileged white men who only ever cared about preserving national monuments and the like.