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How not to repeat history: Students from the
Women's Studies Program at Tulane
University.
Photograph by Justine Kurland

VIDEO
SPECIAL
Panel Discussion
at Lincoln Center
TIMELINE
Women in the
United States
BOOKS
SPECIALS
Featured Author:
Betty Friedan
Featured Author:
Germaine Greer
IN THIS
ISSUE
A Social Glacier
Roars
The Millennial
Woman
The Rest of the
Story
Baby in a Box
Through
Women's Eyes,
Finally
First Person
Female
The Greatest
Leap
Interior Territory
Power Suffering
The Truth About
Sex
35: Younger and
Freer
Irritating
Women
'When I Was
Little, in 1995'
The Future Is Ours to Lose
Without historical awareness, women could still believe that
their fate rests in their cleavage and in their stars. By NAOMI WOLF
tanding at the turn of the
millennium, how odd it
seems that women, the majority of
the human species, have not, over
the course of so many centuries,
intervened successfully once and
for all on their own behalf. That is,
until you consider that women
have been trained to see
themselves as having no
relationship to history, and no
claim upon it. Feminism can be
defined as women's ability to think
about their subjugated role in history, and then to do something about it.
The 21st century will see the End of Inequality -- but only if women
absorb the habit of historical self-awareness, becoming a mass of people
who, rather than do it all, decide at last to change it all. The future is ours
to lose.
Since there has always been some scattered awareness that women's low
status was unfair, you could say that there has always been a women's
movement. And just as you could say that there has always been a
women's movement, you could also say that there has always been a
backlash. It is truly striking how often Western humanity has taken the
leap forward into more egalitarian, rational and democratic models of
society and government, and made the decision -- for a decision it had to
be -- to leave women out. At every turn, with a heroic effort of the will to
ignore the obvious path of justice, men were granted, and granted
themselves, more and more equality, and women of all races were left in
history's tidewater.
Once again, we are at a turning point. This decade has seen one new
landmark after another: the Family and Medical Leave Act; a feminist
sitting on the Supreme Court; a woman in charge of American foreign
!"#$"%& '()*+,-,.)*/0*1,.0*-2*320)
#"4 56.-7).0879-:;)08<2;"=:>.6.9";6?6@:7)";:==)77:,;";#"A2=B8(-;=
Naomi Wolf, author of "The
Beauty Myth" and
"Promiscuities," is currently
writing a book about birth.
You Had to Be
There
On Language:
Genderese
Listening to
Men, Then and
Now
The Sound of
the Virtual Voice
A Man's Place
But What Would
Martha Say?
Women in Song
Good
Housekeeping
RELATED
SITES
Valerie Solanas's
1967 "Scum
(Society to Cut
Up Men)
Manifesto"
N.O.W.
Statement of
Purpose (1966)
Jane Addam's
"Twenty Years at
Hull House"
Louisa May
Alcott's "Little
Women"
Shirley
Chisholm's "Equal
Rights for
Women" speech
to the House of
Representatives,
May 21, 1969
Votes for
Women's Suffrage,
From the Library
of Congress
Margaret Fuller's
"Woman in the
Nineteenth
Century
OTHER
MILLENNIUM
ISSUES
The Best of the
Millennium
WOMEN: THE
SHADOW
STORY OF
THE
MILLENNIUM
Table of
Contents
policies that now include opposition to clitoridectomy. Indeed, feminism
has become mainstream: Betty Friedan has met Betsy Ross; Barbie's ads
now read "Dream With Your Eyes Wide Open" and "Be Your Own
Hero." Oprah is talking about how to walk out of an abusive marriage,
and Tori Amos and Fran Drescher speak out in the celebrity press about
sexual assault. This flood tide could either crest further to change the
landscape forever, or it could recede once again. This is what historians
call an "open moment," and women have blown such moments in the
past. What determines the outcome is the level of historical awareness we
reach before the tide inevitably turns.
There are four ways that our culture militates against historical
consciousness in women. One is the steady omission of women from
history's first draft, the news. Women, Men and Media, a national
watchdog project, reports that women are featured in only 15 percent of
the front-page news -- and then usually as victims or perpetrators of crime
or misconduct. It is not because no one is interested in what women are
doing that this ceiling of visibility is kept so low; nor is it a conscious
conspiracy. But if tomorrow the editors in chief and publishers of national
news media were to see front sections dominated by 53 percent female
newsmakers, they would not shout, Stop the presses! Too many women!
Rather, there would be the impression that somehow these publications
had, by featuring newsmakers who are part of a majority, marginalized
themselves. So women's advances take place with little day-by-day, let
alone month-by-month, popular analysis.
The second pressure, which complements the
omission of women from historical culture, is
the omission of history from women's culture.
One example: under its previous editor, Ruth
Whitney, Glamour magazine ran a political
column. Bonnie Fuller, a new editor fresh
from Cosmopolitan, has deleted this monthly column and added a
horoscope. It's a shift from real-time -- historical-political time -- back into
that dependent, dreamy, timeless state of Women's Time. In Women's
Time, your fate is not in your own hands as an agent of historical change.
Rather -- Hey, are you a Pisces? Why bother running down your Manolo
Blahniks to do something as mousy as voting? Your fate is in your
cleavage, and in the stars.
Emerging naturally from this is the third pressure: the recurrent ideological
theme that if women take themselves seriously they will lose femininity
and, therefore, social status. If what they do, think, worry about and long
for doesn't matter, surely it's not important that history pays them attention.
The fourth pressure is forgetfulness. Young women I have met on real
college campuses think sex discrimination is a thing of the past. Or that the
struggle for the vote lasted maybe 10 years, not more than 70. Or that
women got the vote when African-Americans did. Or that it has always
been legal to get an abortion in America. They are stunned to discover that
in their mothers' lifetimes women could not get credit on their own. They
are amazed to learn that it was African-American middle-class women's
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clubs that led the movement against lynching. They didn't know that
women chained themselves to the gates of Congress, or went on hunger
strikes and were force-fed -- so that young women far into the future could
take their rights for granted. These young women are shocked, in other
words, to find that they have a history.
As a result, women remain dependent on other models of "revolution" for
their own. They must catch the taste and techniques of activism like a hit
song of the month wafting through the air. So one sees women slumbering
and then "waking up" every 30 years or so; periods of feminism always
follow periods of agitation by women on behalf of other, more respectable
causes.
This past century shows how fragile conscious feminism has been. The
1910's, with their wave of populist reform, saw the crescendo of women's
push for the vote. But the year before it was granted, in 1919, the term
"post-feminist" had already expediently been coined. By the 20's, pop
culture was once again ridiculing the suffragists' generations as being man-
hating old battle-axes, irrelevant and out of touch with "today's women."
A long sleep followed, with fitful waking. After Betty Friedan's 1963
book helped middle-class white women identify the causes of their deeper
malaise, the magical 15 years, from 1965 to 1980, began, representing a
high point of historical self-awareness for Western women. Again, other
movements had to set the stage: the anti-war movement, the free-speech
movement and the hippie movement all contributed to the idea that it was
all right to break free of social roles. The civil rights movement trained a
generation of African-American activists. The 70's were astonishing: the
statutes against sex discrimination labeled Title VII and Title IX; Shirley
Chisholm's 1972 race for the Democratic Presidential nomination. That
era, personified by Steinem and Jong, NOW and the National Women's
Political Caucus, showed what could happen for women when, as an
energized mass in a democracy, they wanted change badly enough to
make noise about it.
The predictable backlash came, as it always does; the evil 80's were a time
of shoulder pads, silicone and retrenchment. Again -- so quickly, so
thoroughly -- women "forgot." A Time/CNN poll found that only 33
percent of women called themselves feminists -- and only 16 percent of
college-age women. "Guilt" and "the Mommy Track" were the
catchwords of the day. Once again, feminists were represented as hairy-
legged man-hating shrews.
The heartbreak of those times was in seeing newly clueless young women
come of age. Once, when I visited Yale as a speaker, a brilliant young
Asian-American student joined her male debating society peers in loudly
ridiculing feminism. Later, when we were alone for a moment, she
confided that she didn't really believe what she said -- but the guys were in
charge of the club and she just wanted to get along with them. "Besides,"
she had said, as if parroting some women's magazine, "women my age
just have to accept that we can't have it all." It was as if all those words --
flextime, family leave, egalitarian marriage -- had vanished, taking with
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them the ways in which that young woman could have reconsidered her
life.
Enter the explosive 90's. Women are now the most important voting mass
in America. "Women's Issues" dominate the agenda. The word
"feminism" is as taboo as ever, but does it matter if you call yourself a
feminist if you are living feminism? And American women are doing that,
considering the number of their new businesses, and their new judgeships,
new elected officials and new spending power. Feminism today is not a
label; it's a way of life.
But here's the catch: if we remain indifferent to history, we risk losing it
all. The bad old days are always ready to knock at your door, sisters:
while you're packing your briefcase or getting into your truck, feeling
confident, having thrown out the mailing from that advocacy group, you
could just find that you can't get a legal abortion anymore; or that your
boss knows that those sexual harassment statutes can be managed with a
wink and a nod.
Women who are ignorant of their own history forget the main lessons,
like: Here's how you mobilize; being nice is never as good as getting
leverage; the nature-nurture debate has been going on forever, and neither
side is going to win; your representatives pay attention when you use your
money, your voice and your will. And voting millions can provide the
will.
Maybe we will learn at last. Maybe we will create institutions that are
willing to share influence with younger women coming up, rather than
hoarding power for one generation. Maybe we will learn to honor our
heroines and role models while they are still alive: maybe Gloria Steinem
and Shirley Chisholm will get their commemorative stamps and parades in
their own lifetimes, so our daughters will grow up with some one to turn
to more powerful in their imaginations than Kate Moss and Calista
Flockhart. Maybe we will learn at last that dissent and disagreement
among women across the political spectrum is a sign of our diversity and
strength. Maybe we will turn from the horoscope page to the
Congressional Quarterly, and understand at last that our salvation lies not
in our stars, but in ourselves.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company