Who Took Away My Feminism?

Americans have turned against feminism thanks to the efforts of self-anointed feminist activists and, with the current administration’s campaign against DEI, women will back decades.

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I remember a public service spot from back in the early days of Second Wave Feminism that spoke—indeed shouted—to me. It showed a job interview from the perspective of a successful candidate, looking across the desk to the employer who intones: ‘Your resume is impressive, you passed all your tests with flying colors, you’re just the person we want: welcome aboard!’ The camera pans to the smiling applicant whose face drops when he adds: ‘Of course we start all our girls in the typing pool’.

When I got tenure, I made a dozen copies of my tenure letter, most of which I secreted in safe places; on one I superimposed, in red marker, ‘Safe from the typing pool—forever!’ and hung it over my desk. There was nothing wrong with being a typist, but a woman shouldn’t have to get tenure to avoid being one—unless that was what she wanted to be. That was feminism.

But the feminist foremothers a generation older than me soon turned their attention to other matters and the ad disappeared: they had gotten the jobs they wanted in management and the professions and moved on. I was still on my way to the other side of the employer’s desk and didn’t want to be a typist but wasn’t sure about management or the professions. Auto mechanics and appliance repair appealed to me, but they weren’t within the realm of possibility. That was a good thing because I am much happier as a tenured full professor than I would have been fixing cars or washing machines. Still, it meant that for me there were no tolerable fallback positions. If I didn’t make it into the unisex labor market for jobs in management and the professions, ‘women’s jobs’ were my only option: I was working without a net.

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The Second Wave Feminist foremothers didn’t care. Beginning with the progenitrix, Betty Friedan (Smith College, 1942) they were posh: auto mechanics and appliance repair weren’t on their radar. Besides there was push-back. Feminists were accused of ‘just wanting to be like men’—and not being very good at it.

In response, Second Wave 2.0 went online in 1982 with the publication of Carol Gilligan’s study of children’s moral development In a Different Voice.

‘In the book, Gilligan criticized Kohlberg's stages of moral development of children. Kohlberg's data showed that girls on average reached a lower level of moral development than boys did…Gilligan stated that the scoring method Kohlberg used tended to favor a principled way of reasoning (one more common to boys) over a moral argumentation concentrating on relations, which would be more amenable to girls…"Justice is ultimate moral maturity for adolescents (usually male) who see themselves as autonomous. Care is the ultimate responsibility of adolescents (usually female) who see themselves as linked to others."‘

Gilligan’s methodology and results were almost immediately challenged, but the ‘ethic of care’ was picked up by the nascent gender studies industry and took off. The idea was that since women did less well than men according to Kohlberg’s standard of moral development there must be something wrong with the standard. Women spoke in a different voice that was just as good, if not better. Women’s problem wasn’t difference but subordination and oppression.

This was an old story that came down from the Ur-Mother of Second Wave Feminism, Simone de Beauvoir (Ecole Normale Superieure), who was even posher than Gilligan (Swarthmore) and, like Gilligan and Friedan, did not worry about being relegated to the typing pool or consider appliance repair a better option. 2.0 Second Wave feminists appropriated the Marxist template de Beauvoir had exploited in her feminist analysis according to which people were divided into oppressors and the oppressed—a good fit for class struggle, for which it was intended, and for colonialism and racism, but not so much for male-female relations. Afghan women were certainly oppressed—but were Betty Friedan’s middle-class housewives who suffered the ‘problem that has no name’? Moreover, if women were oppressed, there must be oppressors—presumably non-women, that is men, which fit the Taliban but hardly the husbands of Friedan’s bored housewives. The story of oppression was not only false: it was gratuitously offensive, alienated people of good will, discredited feminism, and sunk the Equal Rights Amendment which had earlier been viewed as an innocuous, feel-good affirmation of fairness for women.

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The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed in 1923 as an addendum to 19^th Amendment to the US Constitution ratified three years earlier, which gave women the right to vote. By the mid-20^th century it was viewed as all of a piece with civil rights legislation mandating fair treatment for minorities. It was supported by Republicans, including presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, First Lady Betty Ford and, remarkably, Senator Strom Thurmond, and by all major civil rights organizations including the NAACP, National Council of Negro Women, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and National Association of Negro Business.

But by the 1970s feminism had become encrusted with a variety of issues and ideologies that obscured its core purpose, viz. to see to it that women had fair access to jobs, credit, political participation, and other social goods. The ERA, by the late 20^th century, was taken to promote a range of policies and practices that many Americans found objectionable. First there was abortion. The ERA, of course, had nothing to say about abortion since men had never enjoyed the right to abortion. The Religious Right however proclaimed that the ERA not only licensed abortion but would force women out of the home and into the labor force, mandate that all children be deposited in state-run nurseries from birth, and shut down churches. The ERA, of course, had nothing to say about domestic or ecclesiastical arrangements either. But Americans were not convinced and the ERA died.

By the 21^st century, the ERA was long dead and feminism had become a dirty word—not only for conservatives, who had visions of women in Soviet-issue overalls marching into factories while babies were warehoused in state-run nurseries, but young women who declared that they were ‘not feminists but…’ The ‘but’ clause usually involved having sex with men. Feminism had become freighted with the analysis of women’s situation according to which to be a woman, redefined by ‘feminist philosophers’ as a social category, was to occupy a subordinate social position and be oppressed by men.

This was crazy but it got crazier when Feminism 2.0 adopted all sexuality issues as ipso facto feminist issues and trans rights became a core commitment. The connection to feminism was tenuous. The aim of feminism, which got the vote for women in 1920 and saw to it that women weren’t routinely started in the typing pool, was to see to it that women were treated fairly—not to determine who counted as a woman.

I’ve argued elsewhere (‘Sex Reassignment and Gender Misfits’, Journal of Controversial Ideas, forthcoming) that trans women should count as women and not be excluded from ‘women’s spaces’. I support LGBT+ rights; I am firmly pro-choice and committed to most of the political positions 2.0 Feminists support. I am not a conservative feminist or a conservative of any kind. But I believe in a division of labor: these are not feminist issues and by taking them on 2.0 feminists not only killed the ERA and sunk feminism but looked away from the workplace issues that demanded attention. No one, least of 2.0 Feminists, even noticed the 2011 class action suit filed against Walmart for sex discrimination on behalf of 1.5 million women, which was overturned on a technicality. 2.0 Feminists had gotten their posh jobs and weren’t interested; besides, the Walmart workers were largely working-class.

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In the US and elsewhere in Western Europe and the Anglosphere, things are much better for women than they were when I was a girl. Women with college degrees aren’t routinely started in the typing pool, sexual harassment is no longer a joke, and dress codes have been relaxed: pantyhose are out and women can now wear pants in most professional settings—though stilettos are still de rigeur on the campaign trail.

But occupational sex segregation is still the norm for jobs that don’t require a college degree: less than 3 percent of appliance repair technicians and auto mechanics are women, and the roughly 2/3 of women in the US who aren’t college graduates are, for the most part, locked into pink-collar jobs in the service sector. The natural experiment of WWII, when millions of women happily took Rosie Riveter jobs in factories, shipyards and manufacturing plants suggests that this does not reflect an aversion to traditional ‘men’s jobs’.

I’ve gotten my posh job and will pass on appliance repair. But I’m a gut level modal realist and the nearby possible world where I, or my counterpart, am typing and filing is too close for comfort. That could easily have been me and would have been me if feminism hadn’t made headway before 2.0 Feminists took away my feminism.

Locke says that everyone has the liberty to speak as he likes and attach what intelligible sounds he pleases to whatever ideas he pleases: you are at liberty to attach call whatever you please ‘feminism’. Feminism as I understand it, however, really isn’t that complicated and shouldn’t be controversial. The goal is to bring it about that women aren’t prevented from getting what they want or forced to do what they don’t want just because they’re women. And, as a corollary, that men aren’t prevented from getting what they want or forced to do what they don’t want just because they’re men. Does anyone object to that?