If you haven’t heard, some staffers at Newsweek recently assessed the state of feminism, and, as Jezebel (see also) and Girldrive point out, they did so entirely through the lens of how upper-middle-class white women, most of whom work or have worked at Newsweek, felt about it. (I have to admit I did enjoy Courtney at Feministing’s response.)
You know, I feel for the writers of this piece somewhat, who have responded with some surprise:
Well hot damn, Jezebel. We thought we knew you! We thought that you, like Salon, and New York Magazine, and even the Women’s Media Center, would see our piece as a brave weapon in a struggle that’s not over. And, like all those places and others, we thought you’d take at least some pleasure in Newsweek’s willingness to look critically at itself, and see something positive in the fact that we convinced our editors to let us write about sexism at Newsweek in the pages of Newsweek—something that has never, ever happened before (and something, we might add, that took months and months and months of extensive reporting and editing to make happen). But man, it’s like you’re actively trying to find something to criticize. How is it that we’ve got the old guard championing the piece, and the young new wave—of which we’re a part—tries to discredit it with left-field accusations of racism?
Generally, I’m not that fond of the way they formulated this response; listing all the things that are Great About You rather than engaging with the meat of the criticism is rarely a successful tactic. And in general, “you’re just looking for something to criticize” is just defensive. (It may be true, but why is it a bad impulse to test ideas?) But I can see that there was a time and place in which I might have written it myself, along with the original article. Because when you start out with this whole feminism thing – and I don’t say that condescendingly, the article itself opens with a confession that the need for feminism was not always so obvious for the author – it can be tempting to get drunk on it and then consider yourself qualified to issue pronouncements. And then you get the blowback, because it turns out that there are lots of people out there who are also invested in the advancement of women who don’t identify with the things you identify with in feminism, and suddenly, you’re on the stove burner when you thought we were all in this together.
That said! The critique being advanced here – that it is, frankly, at least a little odd to write about “sexism at work” in the modern age without quoting a single woman of colour, or hell, a woman who doesn’t have what people would call a “white-collar” job, is pretty fair. And yes, that is true even if your story hook is what happened on your own workplace way back when. Because as any good opinion writer knows, unless your story is straight reporting – which the Newsweek story isn’t – the hook is only there to take you into the greater societal theme. And since women of colour are an integral part of the greater “early 21st century equality in the workplace” theme, I don’t think you can simply shrug and say it was just beyond the scope of the discussion. It’s that kind of maneuver that sort of writes women of colour out of feminism in the most insidious way possible – sometimes exclusion by silent omission is worse than explicit expulsion.
I mean, interestingly, in another response, the Newsweek writers mention that the lawyer who took up the original Newsweek case was actually Eleanor Holmes Norton – a black woman. Again, I feel for these writers, because they’ve now invoked the “my best friend/lawyer (ha!) is black” argument, and apparently without regard to substance, because there are no quotes or anything from Holmes Norton herself in the article. She got written out of what sounds like probably is her own damn story, and the reasons why, sadly, can’t be explained without reference to the erasure of women of colour in feminism. Because whatever else you want to say about it – that ain’t good journalism.
(Also! I recommend this woman‘s tumblred responses to the Newsweek folk.)
This critique can cut all ways, of course. Sometimes – and to be clear I am not talking about this particular case here, but being abstract – people get so riled up about that history of erasure that they actually manage to do some erasing themselves. Audre Lorde, Holmes Norton, Shirley Chisholm, hell, Yoko Ono – all of these women were integral to the so-called “white” second wave of feminism insofar as they were visible participants in the conversation. And this is even true for something like sexual harassment, which has been, for better or for worse, identified as a white woman’s cause from time to time – but major developments in the case law have occurred upon suit by women of colour, including Mechelle Vinson and Lillian Garland. The presence and importance of these women does not in any way absolve the problematic history of the exclusion of women of colour, of course. They are not trump cards. But they do suggest that there is nuance here that deserves exploring, including class – because I’ve got to tell you, the experiences described in this article aren’t how the rural poor (but nonetheless white) branch of my family experience sexism either.
Unfortunately that’s not what the Newsweek piece does, in any event. And I’m beginning to wonder, myself, if it’s even possible to pay attention to nuance if what you are is a journalist writing for a general interest magazine and you’re trying to say something definitive about the movement. I mean, there was that crazy Times article from the other day, and Courtney tried it, and I still saw a lot of problems with it (see here), and it just seems like this whole assumed ability to collapse the thoughts of hundreds upon hundreds of women (and I’m only counting really committed feminist activists in that number which is a problem to start with) into 1500 words is probably… not the best thing if what you’re really interested in is feminism. Because I think at its best, what feminism can be is a conversation about what it would mean to construct a politics that benefits all women/defeats white supremacist patriarchy, rather than an answer about what it means to do all these things.
But the key to that, of course, is making sure that all voices are at an equal volume in that context, and that’s what keeps things tricky, because definitionally, they aren’t. Economically-advantaged white women get more volume for reasons they’ve admittedly no a priori control over but which are nonetheless inimical to what a politics of all women would have to look like, and it behooves us to do as much as we can to share that wealth, even if it means broadening our subjects. I don’t know that any of us do that perfectly, of course, but it is an obligation that we need to do a better job of taking up.
That response is disappointing. Why did they have to be so knee-jerk and defensive? Couldn’t they address the issue head on? Ultimately I think it betrays a condescending attitude toward their readership.
They should have maybe called it “Feminism At Work At Newsweek If You Are Pretty High Up And Don’t Have To Clean, Do Technical Things, Or Physically Make Anything.”
I second your call for a moratorium, but don’t believe for a second that this issue is going to go away. Probably ever.
I think the problem is that the authors start out thinking and writing about feminism and the life conditions of women in their neck of the woods, and somehow it almost always turns into This is What’s Up With Women Everywhere and This is What Feminism™ Looks Like. Of course, it’s sort of human nature to try to tell totalizing metanarratives like this, but thoughtful people should fight the urge, and acknowledge to themselves that they can address the issues in their lives and describe the lay of the land from their vantage point, but not much more than that. To do more than that is to make the assumption that your life and your experience and your company are somehow universal microcosms of The Way Things Are, which is incredibly narcissistic. To which my students ask “so then we’re all just little ants running around thinking that we’re more significant than we really are?” Yeah, sorta. If that’s how you want to look at it…
We just got this issue yesterday, and my thought on seeing the photo was, “Geez, can’t they find even one woman of color who works there?”
I think that as a narrative, it’s valuable, as all oral histories are. And yeah, it’s great that they were able to print this story (which, I imagine, is the, um, whitewashed version). I’m not sure that they needed to extrapolate from their story to the world at large though. But it would be great if we could see similar stories from companies large and small on a regular basis, to show progress and keep up the pressure on those that are not doing what they should.
The story seems to be: I, an intelligent, upper-middle-class White girl, saw no need for feminism, until I went to work and realized that no one was letting me rule the world. In response to this tragedy, I became a Feminist, and now I own your Feminism! What? You were using this? To do stuff? I don’t understand, you’re not being clear. *stuffs fingers in ears* Lalalalala.
“Economically-advantaged white women get more volume for reasons they’ve admittedly no a priori control over but which are nonetheless inimical to what a politics of all women would have to look like, and it behooves us to do as much as we can to share that wealth, even if it means broadening our subjects.”
Great sentence!
So, I really like what you say here, and I’m totally on board with the critique of the Newsweek article (which is about the level of progressive-ism that one might expect from Newsweek, of all magazines).
But I’m confused about the title–is it meant to be ironic? Isn’t this article itself a set of (important) claims about the state of feminism? Don’t critiques by women of color, and working class women of feminism itself make feminism better/more effective at doing what it’s supposed to do? I actually think it’s *crucial* to keep talking about the state of feminism, and I think this article is a contribution to that conversation.
philosophyerin, the title is meant to indicate something narrower than you imagine. I’m not claiming that people shouldn’t make critiques. What I’m talking about is the fact that these boiled-down-to-fit-column-space observations about the “movement” (which personally I don’t think exists as an actual cohesive entity in social reality, but that’s a whole other post), which usually end up trashing and/or erasing some subsection of women (and not just women of colour but also young women, women having fun, trans women, moms, etc etc) in order to have a story hook – these are not helpful. I mean, they give us plenty of things to rant about in the blogosphere but they don’t actually advance what strikes me as the real question here, which is how someone interested in a better world, a fairer world in which everyone’s human status is on more stable ground, actually goes about building that world, and doing so without standing on the backs of other kinds of people/women.
“Because when you start out with this whole feminism thing – and I don’t say that condescendingly, the article itself opens with a confession that the need for feminism was not always so obvious for the author – it can be tempting to get drunk on it and then consider yourself qualified to issue pronouncements. And then you get the blowback, because it turns out that there are lots of people out there who are also invested in the advancement of women who don’t identify with the things you identify with in feminism, and suddenly, you’re on the stove burner when you thought we were all in this together.”
::hums; looks at the ground; shuffles feet::
Yes I do strongly identify with this scenario, why do you ask?
Really great post, and I appreciate everyone’s thoughtfulness. My less than in-depth contribution: the Newsweek article and others like it always make me think of the mouse chorus in the movie “Babe.”
Three little mouse voices squeaking “The Way Things Are.”
erm, don’t mean to compare the writers to tiny mice, more that Grand Pronouncements so often fall short, that it seems silly to make them at all.
Maybe I completely misinterpreted the Newsweek article because I read it less as a “State of Feminism Today” than a “This Was My Feminism Coming-of-Age Tale.” That could be because I, as a young, privileged white woman, recognized a part of myself in those young Newsweek authors. I didn’t see the point of feminism either when I was younger and it was life experience (albeit, a very different one) that made me realize that feminism is incredibly important today.
Those three young writers are coming from a specific point of view talking about their personal experiences and I don’t think anyone should begrudge them the opportunity to do so.
But I think Nona over at GirlDrive (http://www.girl-drive.com/2010/03/whats-wrong-with-this-feminist-picture/) had an excellent response to the article. She wrote that out of the 10 people quoted in the article, not one of them was a woman of color.
I think the writers’ color and class blindness was unintentional. I mean, they were writing largely about their experiences coming from a white privileged background.
In any case, their piece does remind us that we need to make a concerted effort in including a myriad of voices, not just the ones from a similar background. I don’t think you can always make every voice equal, but you can try harder to include different voices.
In the end, I applaud those young writers for speaking out about how feminism is important and necessary. It’s a step in the right direction, anyway.
“…these boiled-down-to-fit-column-space observations about the “movement”…which usually end up trashing and/or erasing some subsection of women (and not just women of colour but also young women, women having fun, trans women, moms, etc etc) in order to have a story hook – these are not helpful.”
Agreed. Totally.
But I wonder if suggesting that this legitimate concern is tantamount to a call for a moratorium on articles about the state of feminism is really accurate or helpful. Because as you suggest, the point isn’t to stop talking about what feminism could be doing better, but to stop presuming that one’s own concerns are the only ones that matter. It seems to me that equating these two is a problem, since it could be easily taken up in a way that is all-too-common in the feminist blogosphere: that lady said there’s something wrong with the way I’m doing/thinking about feminism, therefore she sucks/is an elitist/is vapid/is paranoid.
My point isn’t that *you* are saying this, of course; it’s that I’m concerned that characterizing your legitimate criticisms as illustrating the need for a moratorium on conversations about feminism(s) could easily put us in a mindset that actually makes us LESS receptive to the sorts of important concerns you raise here.
@philosophyerin:
I guess I have come to the conclusion, and I’ll admit it’s a recent one for me, that formulating these “critiques” in terms of “conversations about feminism(s)”or the state thereof aren’t actually useful in terms of empowering and/or enfranchising “Other” kinds of women or hell, “Other” kinds of people generally. They usually devolve into heavily race/class privileged feminists slinging shit at other race/class privileged feminists about who’s the best ally of whatever marginalized population happens to be the cause du jour. Which does very little for the marginalized population other than get them to watch themselves again become a sort of football for other people to play with. It has always seemed to me that if you really, truly care about marginal populations, you publish their work; you talk about it in the context of what they themselves say about it; and you stop making it all about how you’re a fantastic ally. Maybe they will consider you one as a result, and maybe they won’t, but all these pieces motivated by anxiety over the Best Feminism really wear thin, because it is, for lack of a better phrase, an economically privileged white girl’s game to keep having these fights, and that’s definitionally exclusive. And you need to suck it up regarding your own ego in that regard.
Put differently, to me this is the difference between saying that we’re happy to accept critique and making ourselves actually deal with critique. I understand your concern completely, but I think that there have been enough go-rounds on this question of the “state of feminism” to show that these arguments are very rarely about actually remedying this problem of what a truly liberatory politics would look like and more about people fighting over leadership. And leadership battles, at the end of the day, are not that important to me.