Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (35 page)

Such sensibilities underlay the success of Riot Grrrls music and
Sassy
magazine, founded in 1988 for girls aged 14-19.
Sassy’s
frank articles about sex and birth control provoked a Moral Majority boycott, however, which forced many advertisers to withdraw and the magazine to be sold. It rapidly recovered its readership, and by the early 1990s had a circulation of 650,000, but
Sassy’s
coverage of sexual issues had been toned down.
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By 1994 it had become just another “teen magazine.”

Riot Grrrls, on the other hand, represented an underground movement of young women in the alternative rock music scene, less vulnerable to mainstream control than
Sassy
. It began in the punk rock scene in Olympia, Washington in 1991, when girls decided to invade the mosh pit, the very crowded space near the stage where members of the audience (mostly men) dance in an often violent crush. Girls would form groups and make their way into the dance pit, protecting each other. The next step was to claim the public space of the stage itself with “angry grrrl” bands like Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. Their movement spread quickly through band tours, fanzines (self-published, ephemeral journals), and word-of-mouth networks. In July 1992, they held a weeklong Riot Grrrl Convention in Washington, D.C, where “women gathered together for workshops on topics including sexuality, rape, unlearning racism, domestic violence, and self-defense.” Participant Melissa Klein wrote that Riot Grrrl feminism constituted “a new feminism, a new kind of activism emphasizing our generation’s cynical and disenfranchised temperament, born of distaste for the reactionary politics and rat-race economics of the 1980s…. I see punk, like the antiwar and civil rights movements before it, as a place where young women learned or solidified radical means of analyzing the world and then applied
these powers of analysis to their own lives, only to realize that, as girls, they felt disenfranchised within their own supposedly ‘alternative’ community.”
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Around the same time, the Native Tongues movement within gangsta rap/hip-hop music challenged the overt misogyny of rap. Rap groups like NWA had splashed into the mainstream in 1989-1990 with powerful rhythms and rage-filled language, offering violent revenge fantasies not only against perpetrators of racial and economic injustice but also against women and feminists: “this so-called women’s lib/ I’ll retire it./ That’s why I’m a walking threat.”
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Especially for young, African-American women, female artists like Queen Latifah and Monie Love and all-male rap groups like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul offered a new kind of validation. In her sophomore year at Harvard, Elisa Davis recalled, “when I was introduced to Latifah in 1990, Afrocentric racial consciousness and progressive gender politics joined hands in hip hop….” “Hip Hop gave me a language that made my black womanhood coherent to myself and the world….”
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The new feminist upsurge focused primarily on cultural issues. In the world of mainstream art, Guerrilla Girls, formed in 1985, developed chapters in several major cities and continued their poster and public demonstration campaign to expose the exclusion of women and minorities. Their newsletter, Hot Flashes:
“All the Sexism, Racism, and Homophobia that Fits, We Complain About,”
began in 1993 with an evaluation of the
New York Times
coverage of women in art.
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The second issue, published the following year, carried a banner headline: “Guerrilla Girls Predict That Museums in the East Will Have a White Male Winter. And a White Male Spring, Summer and Fall.”
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At the same time they expanded their poster campaign beyond the world of art to include such issues as homelessness, the environment, and AIDS.
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The Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) was a direct action group started by artists in the aftermath of the Hill-Thomas hearings but drawing on the experience of other groups, such as Guerrilla Girls, ACT UP (1987-1989), and Queer Nation. Founded in January 1992 in New York City, WAC meetings drew 450-500 by early summer with this mission statement: “WAC is an open alliance of women committed
to DIRECT ACTION on issues affecting the rights of all women…. WAC insists on economic parity and representation for all women, and an end to homophobia, racism, religious prejudice and violence against women. We insist on every woman’s right to quality health care, child care and reproductive freedom. We will exercise our full creative power to launch a visible and remarkable resistance.”
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WAC’s success at conducting more than 30 tightly organized actions in its first year sparked chapters in cities across the country. WAC’s slogan to “act now and philosophize later” was clearly energizing to hundreds of women eager to “do something.” Their “WAC Attacks,” conducted with consummate media savvy, generated significant coverage. They developed a logo of a watching eye and a blue dot evoking the blue dot used by TV newscasts to hide the identity of rape victims. Dressed in black, backed by a drum corps, and using posters with clear, frequently ironic messages, they regularly made prime-time TV news. On Mother’s Day 1992, WAC draped the Grand Central Station train schedule board with a pink banner that said “It’s Mother’s Day: $30 billion owed in child support.” Similar messages were erected at the 1992 Democratic Convention, “O say can you see, 10 million more women voters than men,” and the 1992 Gay Rights Parade, “WAC is here, some are queer.” At demonstrations, drum corps drummed while WAC members whistled and chanted: “We’re WAC, we won’t go back” “Off our backs! On our feet! We refuse to be discreet!” “We’re women, we’re angry, we vote!” As one participant, Anna Blume, said in 1992, “I’ve done a lot of radical things in my life, but WAC sometimes gives me nightmares. Hundreds of angry women in a room deciding to fight back is a phenomenon. Women aren’t supposed to do what we’ve been doing.”
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The new assertiveness showed up in more traditional venues as well. Mary Ann Lundy, Associate Director for Churchwide Planning for the Presbyterian Church, dreamed in 1988 of “a global theological colloquium” to honor the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Decade: Churches in Solidarity with Women. By 1990 she had persuaded a group in Minnesota to host a gathering that would celebrate the feminist theological insights circulating for nearly two decades. “Re-Imagining” they called it. Held in November 1993, the Re-Imagining
Gathering drew a crowd of 2,000 and turned away hundreds more. For several days women—and a few men—absorbed themselves in reimagining ideas about God, incorporating female as well as male metaphors and challenging the patriarchal assumptions embedded in Christian tradition. They listened to feminist theologians and then debated theological ideas at roundtables. They celebrated femaleness by sharing milk and honey and praying to Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom used in several Biblical references to God. Most of those who attended described the conference with words like homecoming, release from isolation, and breaking silence.
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Planners of the gathering, however, had never thought of it as “radical.” After all, feminist theologians began rethinking the patriarchal images of God in the 1970s. Indeed, compared to feminist New Age spirituality, they were definitely conservative in their insistence on wrestling with rather than rejecting their tradition. So, they were unprepared for the reaction they drew. Conservative religious papers sent reporters who published accounts of the conference. To their minds referring to God as “She” was heresy, goddess worship. Experimental ritual was pagan. That mainstream denominations had provided some support and staff time “ignited the fear and fury of the religious right. Suddenly, what had been a dangerous but marginalized movement was encroaching on home territory—and many conservatives rose up to stop it.”
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Hate mail, death threats, and roiling controversy in the religious press cowed denominational leaders. Several key organizers of the conference, including Mary Ann Lundy, lost their jobs.
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Shocked and horrified by the intensity of the hostile response, the organizers decided that the only thing to do was to hold more such gatherings, to see themselves as a movement.
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Predictably, the emergence of a new feminist assertiveness in the late 1980s and early 1990s coincided with a crescendo of antifeminist attacks. What had started in the mid-1980s as a coordinated and well-funded effort to focus the conservative political agenda on cultural issues exploded in 1990-1991 into a popular media campaign against “political correctness,” including multiculturalism, women’s studies, ethnic studies, curriculum reform, and affirmative action.
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In 1990
there were 656 articles on “political correctness” in the print media and 3,989 in 1991.
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They constituted a right-wing assault on ideas flowing from the social movements of the 1960s and policies, like affirmative action, designed to rectify historic inequities. Their target was academia, where such ideas had been able to flourish even in conservative times and where curricula now included women, racial minorities, and attention to the voices and the historical experience of peoples around the world. Certainly there were examples of leftist political purism and efforts to silence other views. By working and reworking a small number of incidents, however, the media blitz generated an impression that all of higher education was consumed with conflict and further that the “politically correct multiculturalists” were in a position to stifle all dissent. President George Bush gave his imprimatur to this perception at a University of Michigan commencement address in May 1991. “Political extremists roam the land,” he charged, “abusing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race.”
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Leading journals told the same story with headlines like “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct,” “The Storm over the University,” “The Academy’s New Ayatollahs,” “High Noon at the PC Corral,” and “Upside Down in the Groves of Academe.”
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Such hyperbole effectively obscured the reality that 3-10 percent of universities and colleges experienced controversies over “political correctness” concerns regarding classes or invited speakers, but 36 percent of all institutions of higher education reported incidents of intolerance related to race, gender, or sexual preference.
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This was the context into which a new generation of “feminist antifeminists” launched their critique. When Sally Quinn opined that “feminism as we have known it is dead,” she laid the cause at the feet of “feminists who felt having babies was not the politically correct thing to do,” leaving women to “feel betrayed and lied to because trying to live a politically correct personal life doesn’t always work….” In her view, in fact, such a life would be “unnatural.”
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Christina Hoff Sommers, characterized in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
as a “key player in the national debates on ‘political correctness’ and the curriculum” similarly charged that “feminism is relendessly hostile to the family” and that
women’s studies programs are like “a powerful cult.”
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“The plain truth is: the feminist leaders have no troops. While the gender gap proved to be a feminist myth, the gap dividing the feminists from the women they claim to speak for is no myth and is worth pondering.”
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Charging that “much of what students learn in women’s studies classes is not disciplined scholarship but feminist ideology,” Sommers warned her readers that “the New Feminism has been rapidly colonizing and ‘transforming’ the American university.”
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Camille Paglia, scornful of feminist “whining” about sexual harassment, glass ceilings, and the difficulty of balancing motherhood with a high-powered career, had equal venom for the postmodern turn in feminist literary theory. “Today’s academic leftists are strutting wannabes, timorous nerds who missed the 60s while they were grade-grubbing in the library and brown-nosing the senior faculty. Their politics came to them late, secondhand, and special delivery via the Parisian import craze of the 70s.”
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Sommers, Paglia, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese tore into the women’s movement for its individualism (Fox-Genovese), puritanism (Paglia), and rage (Sommers) with books like
Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women
. For all their differences, they shared a sharp edge of personal grievance toward what they viewed as a feminist establishment. Each had been embroiled in battles with other feminist scholars. Camille Paglia made no bones about having been “… expelled from the feminist movement.”
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Sommers, after describing feminist critiques of Naomi Wolf’s book
Fire with Fire
remarked bitterly, “Get used to this, Ms. Wolf. You’ll soon be finding out how it feels to be called antifeminist simply because you refuse to regard men as the enemy and women as their hapless victims.”
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it is ironic that they describe an all-powerful cultlike Mafia of feminist scholars when the experience of many students in the 1980s was that their faculty were too worried about being successful in academia to be activists.
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These critics also touched on a set of ongoing debates
within
feminism that traced back at least to the Barnard Conference in 1980 and probably before that as well. The accusation that feminists were obsessed with women as victims had a kernel of truth. Some were. Rhetorical excesses showed up, as they always had, in the parts of the movement still seeking absolutes.
Feminist activism in the eighties and early nineties, for example, was especially visible around the issue of reproductive choice and violence against women, and key theorists of the latter, such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, did indeed emphasize victimization over agency. For them, most if not all heterosexual sex was comparable to rape, and like all charismatic leaders, they inspired followers to proclaim their views as the one true feminism. This had two consequences: on the one hand many activists withdrew from the discussion, choosing to work on specific issues far from the polemical debates.
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On the other, critics could accept their claims at face value and use the words of a few to characterize feminism as a whole. Katie Roiphe, a graduate student at Princeton, wrote a youthful polemic against “rape crisis feminism,” noting that she and her classmates at Princeton had not felt in danger of being raped and dismissing women who claimed to have been raped by acquaintances as failing to accept responsibility for their own safety and sexuality.
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Critics like Roiphe undermined the many true stories of rape; they also overlooked the simultaneous existence of highly assertive forms of feminist activism, such as Guerrilla Girls, and issues like comparable worth or women’s growing electoral power as expressed in Emily’s List that did not lend themselves to marches and demonstrations. It is also interesting to note that campus activism in the early 1990s drew attention to the problem of date rape, but by the late 1990s it was equal parts sexual assertiveness and antiviolence. Eve Ensler’s play
The Vagina Monologues
has played on hundreds of campuses since 1998. In typical consciousness-raising fashion, this one-woman show consists of interviews with a variety of women about “down there” that range from joyful sexual self-discovery to rape. Paula Kamen observed that “These events typically attract massive sold-out audiences that rival the size of those seen at major sporting events, such as with the attendance of a thousand at Duke University and two thousand at Oregon State in Corvallis in February 2001.”
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Criticisms of feminism also pointed to the continuing power of identity politics and racial division exemplified in the National Women’s Studies Association’s self-destruction in 1990. A personnel issue within the national office became the mechanism for an all-out assault on the
association at its annual meeting in 1990. A small minority of the Coordinating Council dissented from the decision to fire a black staff member, on the grounds that to do so was racist. They then disrupted the 1990 Annual Conference in Akron, Ohio, taking over the microphone of every plenary session to denounce the racism of NWSA and to make “nonnegotiable” demands that she be reinstated with $75,000 in back pay and damages and that NWSA fire its Executive Director, Karen Musil. When the Delegate Assembly refused to be railroaded, some members of the Women of Color caucus staged a walkout.
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After that, the association was virtually paralyzed. Rhetorical attacks on the “white leadership” and “white dominated power structure” of NWSA successfully “bleached out” the women of color who were active in leadership positions. Protestors called themselves the Women of Color caucus, yet many women of color objected to their tactics and protested later that they had been “bullied and shouted down.”
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Feminist journals printed both charges and responses but, on the whole, tended to give greater credence to the protesters than to the NWSA leadership.
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Once again, personalized politics held sway. The claim of victimization, especially on the grounds of race, was deemed unassailable. Unwilling to offer public support to their leadership, the Coordinating Council watched the entire staff resign within months. Soon NWSA was a shadow of its former self and more than 6 years of work evaporated.
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