Conscious Choice Seattle: The Womanists Among Us

February 2006 | Cover Report

The Womanists Among Us

Gender roles have shifted and women’s status in society has markedly changed. But the struggle for women’s rights is not over, just more complex

By Silja J.A. Talvi

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard or read the phrase, “Feminism is dead”. I wouldn’t exactly be a millionaire, but I’d certainly have a far amount of disposable income to feed my lipstick habit.

These days, the “F-Word” is more likely to provoke ire or a look of displeasure than one of enthusiastic embrace—even among women themselves. The association of feminism with strident, humorless, antagonistic women’s militancy is hardly representative of what the movement represents or the women who are still proud of calling themselves feminists—or‘womanists,’ a term first popularized by Alice Walker.

Feminism is most succinctly defined as, “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes,” as well as, “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests”. Or, to put in the words of one of my favorite bumper stickers: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people too.”

Radical, indeed.

Decades of women’s activism, anti-discrimination legislation and feminist scholarship have not only increased opportunities of all kinds for girls and women in the U.S. (and elsewhere), but have helped women to more fully understand why and how their own roles in society were molded, shaped and often forced into place.

Most modern-day American women have a wide range of choices which were simply unavailable to them a mere half-century ago. Among the paths: careers, education, business, athletics, relationships (including the choice to remain single or childless), sexuality, appearance and all manners of lifestyles. The degree to which all of the above is available pivots on a variety of factors including class, color and ethnicity, plus immediate social and religious environment.

New and improved

Women’s lives here in the U.S. have improved in countless ways, and we have the bravery and persistence of our feminist predecessors to thank for that. From my standpoint as a girl-child born in 1970—I straddled both the second- and third-wave feminist movements—it’s been hard to watch women grow so utterly comfortable with their own access, status and/or material possession. It seems that they either can’t relate to or know precious little of the hard-fought historic battles for women’s rights.

And if so many of the‘sisters’ out there aren’t feelin’ it, it is no small wonder that fewer men I come across these days are comfortable calling themselves feminists (or as strong supporters of women’s rights).

One conversation that I recently had with two strangers, a man in his late 30s and his mid-20s girlfriend, brought home just how some attitudes have regressed.

“Are you one of those man-hating feminists?” the man blurted out in the middle of what I had been enjoying, up to that point, as a spontaneous discussion about gender roles.

His female friend stared at me blankly.

I was so taken aback that I didn’t even know where or how to begin to answer for a moment.. After I left the discussion, I tried to remember the last time someone actually accused me of hating men.

It happened during a successful, two-week strike I helped to lead back in 1990 to keep Mills College as a single-sex undergraduate institution. Our peaceful but disruptive campus shutdown in Oakland, Calif., attracted attention from television talk shows and newspapers from coast to coast. Knowing the power of the media we set up a communications office and went to town. Shortly thereafter, we had to call a strategic meeting to try to figure out how to deal with all the idiotic reporters who kept asking us “why we hated men so much.”

Men as allies

The inherent value and empowering potential of single-sex education, of course, has nothing to do with hating men.

(It’s worth noting that a number of men—the friends, boyfriends, and relatives of Mills students--actually showed up during the strike to participate in civil disobedience and generally support our “occupation” of the campus.)

We were quick to realize how threatening our strike felt to many people although there was no actual threat to anybody or anything. We were a bunch of young women exercising our social and political power for the sake of securing a future for this kind of women’s education. That, in and of itself, was apparently threatening enough.

The quality of girls and women’s education is important. And yet it’s just one of a host of new and existing women’s issues that still require attention.

Consider, for instance, a report from the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces, “Women in an Insecure World”. This report reveals that somewhere between 1.5 to 3 million women and girls are killed or‘disappear’ around the world each year, owing to gender-based violence (including dowry deaths, sex trafficking, infanticide, sexual and domestic violence). In the 21st century, inadequate health care results in another 600,000 deaths of women during childbirth, and two million girls are subject to genital mutilation each year.

Over half of the people in the world are women and yet, in most parts of the world, women are considered and treated as second- class human beings.

Small wonder, then, that thousands upon thousands of pages have been devoted to the subject of women’s roles in society. It’s all the more reason, after all this time, for thousands more to be devoted to the subject, again and again, until the basic notion that women deserve to live in the world as equal citizens with shared fundamental rights and liberties.

It’s hard to deny that American women do enjoy a kind of liberty and freedom not experienced in the so-called “second” and “third” worlds. But we also live in a nation with some of the highest rape, child molestation and domestic violence rates in the world, to say nothing of our rates of drug and alcohol addiction among women and men alike. Average wage earnings have declined steadily over the past four years for American women, and more women find themselves in the ranks of the homeless, uninsured and/or incarcerated than ever before.

To boot, the U.S. remains the only industrialized nation that has failed to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW. Our country is in dubious company with such nations as Iran, North Korea and Somalia.

It’s important to stress that legal legitimization or treaties prohibiting discrimination do not guarantee equality, but they are absolutely necessary steps. As women, most of us already have a handle on that delicately balanced proposition of what it means to face discrimination, objectification and forms of misogyny in society, still trying to emerge from those experiences as whole and resilient beings.

Looking back to look forward

If women don’t understand our collective past, we’re unlikely to truly understand how we’ve arrived here today. And we’re unlikely to have a sense of where we’re headed.

It is important for us to grasp that men, too, are struggling with their own identity issues, with the labels and roles that they are supposed to fit into. Books like Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man have helped to articulate the existing discomfort and struggle to re-define what it is to be a man, to be “masculine,” or, for that matter, to live outside the boundaries of female and male gender roles altogether.

To be sure, these struggles are not identical to those of women, but they are absolutely interrelated. As Faludi and others contend, our success in forging the next frontier in gender relations depends on our willingness to see the existing limitations and oppressive facets of existing gender roles, and to engage each other from that framework.

Truly, there’s no telling what we could accomplish if we were willing to take up this challenge, and here’s to those of us who have already stepped up to do so.

Silja J.A. Talvi is an award-winning journalist and writes the Conscious Column for this magazine every month, including this special edition as the keynote piece of our women’s issue.

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