I didn’t agree with much that Jessica Valenti wrote in her argument about the gap between older feminists and younger feminists (something that I’ve never experienced myself; I’ve had nothing but support and genoristy from older feminists). I felt that she treated older feminists as a homogenous group, as if all older feminists should take responsibility for the few who behaved rudely towards younger women. It’s exactly the same kind of thinking that leads some older feminists to be dismissive of younger women. Yes it’s wrong if an older woman takes an inane ignorant comment as a symbol of ‘young people today’. But it’s just as wrong for Jessica to take the comments of a few older women as standing for a generation of activists.
That’s not what I want to write about. I’ll acknowledge that I’ve had a bad day, but what Jessica wrote at the end of her piece made me really angry:
But the public face of feminism is institutional—Ms. Magazine, Feminist Majority Foundation, NOW—they’re what the world thinks of when they think of feminism.
As someone from the world, I have to tell her she’s wrong. Maybe Americans think of Ms. Magazine, Feminist Majority Foundation and NOW when they think of feminism. Although I would hope that women have more specific experiences of feminism, they think of the battered women’s centre their friend went to, their union’s women structure, their college women’s facilities, the local welfare rights organisation, or the rape crisis line they called.
Outside your country? Most of us don’t even know what the Feminist Majority Foundation is, nor do we care. We actually have feminism out here too. Our organisations, our magazines, the way we organise, and the issues that are most important to us, they’re not exactly the same as it is in the US. We don’t think of US institutions when we think of feminism, we think of what’s happened locally, the battles we’ve fought and won, and the battles we’ve fought and lost.
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Word.
Then again, I’m another New Zealander, so I’m from the same bit of “the world” that Maia is.
I have to say, though, the feminist who had the biggest influence on me was my mother, and she didn’t say “you weren’t there”, she didn’t even say “you can’t wear makeup, it’s not feminist” or “you have to spend your life fighting for women’s rights”. No, she told me to stand up for myself, to know how to say no, she told me yes, Lynet, you’re good at maths and scoffed at the idea that my being a girl would have any relevance to that. She told me here’s a mirror, three-year-old-Lynet, this is your vulva, these are your labia, this is your clitoris. She told me no, Lynet, you can’t have a Barbie Doll, but yes, Lynet, you can play with makeup. She said here, Lynet, you’re sixteen, this is a book about women’s experience of sex (which I shelved spine-back and didn’t read until I was eighteen). She told me, Lynet, you can shave your armpits if you want, I did for a while – but you don’t have to. She taught me to be strong and capable, and by so doing she ensured I’d be as feminist as I need to be.
I chose not to shave my armpits, by the way. And I think, when you’re a mother teaching your daughters, you can afford to be more “choice feminist”, because you have the subtle influence that can make that choice more independent of societal norms.
I’m an American feminist and I’ve heard of NOW and Ms. Magazine, but not the other one. And they certainly aren’t what i think of when I think of feminism. And yes, American’s are incredibly ethnocentric and US focused. It’s indoctrinated in us from the time we are children and we have to fight hard to get a world focus. American feminists aren’t necessarily any less ethnocentric or us focused than the rest of Americans… But it’s well worth the fight.
I’m sorry Jessica feels that way and that she upset you – you have every reason to be upset by that and call her on it. It’s the only way she will learn to think outside our isolated nation state.
I promise not all American feminists are so ethnocentric :)
Although I rarely agree with much of what Maia has to say I think she nailed this one .Americans tend to think that their vision is shared by the rest of the world. American feminism has much in common with feminists in other parts of the world. However, their experiences differ as a result of historical and social differences. One is not necessarily better than the other. As an American who has traveled the world it s not lost on me how parochial we can be.
I don’t think that Americans are the only humans in the world who assume everyone thinks the same as they do. Isn’t this a natural tendency? And don’t Americans get credit for being a relatively open people?
Elana,
no this is not really a natural tendency. It is pretty much a result of Americans being able to get away with being unconcerned about the rest of the world by virtue of being citizens of the most powerful country on earth.
Elena Writes:
March 1st, 2007 at 8:42 am
I don’t think that Americans are the only humans in the world who assume everyone thinks the same as they do. Isn’t this a natural tendency?
No . Americans are relatively isolated from different views. You can travel between Britain, France, Germany and any number of countries within a few hours and experience a unique perspective.Euros tend to confront and be confronted by contrasting views much more frequently.
Ah, the infamous American self-centeredness. After a trip to Japan a couple of summers ago with a bunch of Venture Scouts, I became firmly convinced that travel outside of the country would do most Americans a world of good.
It seems to me that part of it is the nature of the country. It’s large, being about 4800 Km East-West by 1600 Km North-South, and essentially everyone speaks the same language. Few people have a reason to leave the country, and if you want to take a vacation somewhere with a different climate you pretty much don’t need to leave the country to do it. Canada isn’t (superifically) all that much different from the U.S. for an American visitor (I can even spend my American money in the stores), and Mexico is not all that attractive a destination for many people for a lot of reasons. Going to any other country is expensive because of the ocean barriers. Also, going to a country with a different language provides another barrier since, in the general course of an American’s life, they have no exposure to any other language (except perhaps Mexican Spanish).
The other part is that America is so powerful that most international news is presented as either us reacting to another country’s actions or that other country reacting to us. It kind of gives people a “America-centric” view of the world. When non-American-centric news is shown, it’s most often along the lines of “these people are killing each other over religion/ethnicity/something that happened 300 years before American was created”, which does not paint a very intelligent view of the world.
When I went to Japan, someone pointed out to me that none of our group knew who the current Japanese Prime Minister was (to my shame, although I did remember his predecessor), but all of them knew who the President of the United States was, and not just because they knew we were coming and wanted to be polite. Sure, you can watch BBC News on Cable, but damn few native-born Americans do. It’s not entertaining, for one thing.
Eh. The US is the center of gravity of the world. We won’t be there forever, but we are there now. It’s gotta be irritating for the people in orbit, but that’s the reality.
I think Michael is right; we are less aware of other countries. A lot of it is the result of geography: most folks can’t easily leave the country, whereas it’s really no biggy to travel between countries in Europe and many parts of Asia.
Because most folks don’t interact with other countries, and because we’re powerful enough that we don’t constantly reassess our position on the basis of other countries’ policies, there’s a lot of foreign apathy.
To add to RonF’s comment, even travelling outside the US can feel like you’re still there if you don’t leave the tourist traps. I’m Canadian, and when I took a trip to Belize, I felt like I was in the states because they had Americanized everything for the comfort of the majority of tourists. I mentioned it in one restaurant we went to, so they changed the music to their own preference and spiced up the food for us. They thought we would have prefered it to feel like “home”!
Maia,
I second my friend Kate L. I didn’t catch that point that you noted–probably my own ethnocentrism causing that.
However, I was so pissed at all of the nonsense by that point I was a little hot headed. That is such nonsense. (Jessica’s post not Maia’s)
Maia–I agree wholeheartedly–most women I know do not think of any of those groups either or if they do, they think of them with derision. and we’re all from the u.s.
her comments really sat with me the wrong way, and I wound up writing a convoluted post where I tried to make a connection between her and food–which wound up making about the same amount of sense as her connecting older women to sorority exclusions.
you got straight to the point here, and tell it like it is. Those organizations mean nothing to a lot of women for a reason–and while this age war has something to do with it, a lot of it also has to do with the fact that these groups continue to march on past the same women that have been excluded by feminist orgs since the beginning–woc, disabled women, non-citizens, etc.
THANK YOU!
Well to be fair, my piece was about American feminism…
And just FYI, I’ve worked for both international and national women’s organizations and I have to say that when working with older feminists NOT from the U.S., my experiences were much different. I think that the mainstream movement here is very much about maintaining the current power structure, which was what I was trying to express in my post.
Jessica,
Re-read the block quote in Maia’s post. You specifically say “the world” Maybe you meant “your world” as in the US, but you can’t blame the rest of us for you being imprecise.
When people talk about institutionalized feminism, it’s usually about the U.S. and when people talk about of institutionalized feminism in the U.S., they think of institutions like Ms., NOW and Gloria Steinem.
Ms., NOW and the Feminist Majority would be invigorated by including young feminists, women of color, poor women, GLBT women and disabled women.
Jessica if you were talking about America why didn’t you say: “But the public face of feminism is institutional—Ms. Magazine, Feminist Majority Foundation, NOW—they’re what Americans think of when they think of feminism.”
DD, If you asked about feminism and described it as organizing for womens rights, do you really think that a woman in Saudi Arabia, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, or Germany would jump to the conclusion that American feminist organizations represent feminism to them. Do you think they would even be aware of any American feminist organizations? I find that highly unlikely.
Finally. I live in the UK, and Western though it is, there is still a world of difference between the US and the UK. Therefore the issues I have to deal with as a woman and as a feminst are not exactly the same here. Each of us, not only in different countries. It’s fair enough that you may mean feminism in the US, but it’s important to remember that it is a global problem.
Please don’t call us ‘Euros’. Just because countries are closer, does not mean you don’t get many, many people who never leave their own borders.
And Robert, the US isn’t the be-all and end-all of the world. People in most countries have plenty of issues to deal with that are nothing to do with the US. That is not to say that they are not affected by the US, they are. But the extent is not that greatly felt in most people’s everyday lives. And if you studied anything about gravity, you’ll know that the smaller body also affects the larger body. So if the US affects everyone else, it’s a safe bet that everyone else affects the US.
Donna J,
That’s still not the question at hand. Women worldwide don’t think these institututions represent them. Most American women don’t think Ms. and NOW represent them. Look carefully at the quote again:
The public face of feminism is institutional. The most public feminist movement has been American. And people worldwide think of Gloria Steinem, Ms. and NOW when they refer to the public face of institutional feminism. Most people worldwide don’t think feminism represents them at all. They may say “Look what those American feminists did to OUR women,” etc. Again, the quote was about the public face of feminism and public feminist institutions not whether or not women worldwide felt represented by them.
I support Feministing and Jessica Valenti who wrote her Master’s thesis at Rutgers on postcolonial feminism and writes the UN Dispatch for feminist news and think she is a qualified representative of American and global feminism today.
An American representative of global feminism, sorry, not a representative of global feminism.
Amen. Wierd how America centric things can get – when I think of the public face of feminism I think of the Fawcett Library, but that’s because I’m British and went to school in London. It would never occur to me to think that feminists in, say, Autralia would make the same association.
I’d say that women’s shelters and rape crisis centers are the public face of the movement to the extent that there is a public face. I’d also say some individuals are the public face – Steinem, Greer. Many people feel more comfortable with a face than an institution.
I agree with Jessica to a certain extent that the generational conflict is stronger in the US than everywhere else, though I’m not sure why that should be the case. I just know that I felt that conflict less in the UK than I do here, and when living in the Middle East and Asia I didn’t feel any real generational conflict between feminists at all.
Perhaps if women in other countries were asked to name the institution they think of to represent feminism they might name American organizations, but I still think that is a stretch since I really doubt they would be aware of what is happening here as much as Americans seem to think they do. I’d say that britgirlsf has a better idea of what international women would say, women’s shelters, rape crisis centers, those women or groups of women who agitated for or are agitating now for things like voting rights in their own countries.
Blind support isn’t a good thing and I’m not sure that citing someone’s curiculum vitae is the best way to advance the discussion either. You do know that Dubya is a graduate of both Yale and Harvard? I find it especially annoying since we are both women of color when lack of educational opportunities is regularly used to dismiss POC. I’m concerned that you are saying that writing a thesis on postcolonialism at a prestigious American university makes JV better able to discuss what women in other countries think about feminism or any other issue than actual women in those countries who may have even lived for generations with colonialism and it’s effects.
Donna J – I’ve lived all over the place and in my experience outside of the US and Western Europe most women probably think of the grassroots activist stuff when they think of feminism, if they even think of feminism by that name at all.
As far as a general sense of Jessica’s article…definately America-centric and colonial in it’s viewpoint, but I think unintentionally so.
Donna Darko you are wrong. People who don’t know anything about feminism don’t pay attention to the institutions of US feminism, and people who know about feminism woud think about their local institutions first.
New Zealand is pretty influenced by America, and we speak the same language, and I’m fairly certain the most feminists here haven’t heard of Feminist Majority Foundation, haven’t read Ms, and haven’t thought of NOW from one year to the rest.
hmmm. I’m still thinking on what Jessica wrote about the generational gap thing, but I wholeheartedly agree with Maia on the america-centric thing. we really need to stop talking about feminism as an american construct and start recognizing that women have been organizing to protest unfair treatment long before white suffragists hit the scene – and remember that historically, it was mostly women of colour doing this work. I’m half considering chucking the ‘feminism’ label and going with something a bit more encompassing, like ‘women’s rights’ instead.
I’m probably speaking from what I’ve read on the web which has mostly condemnations of American feminism and Gloria Steinem by non-Americans.
I’m talking about intellectual interests. Samhita Mukhopadhyay is also passionate about transnational feminisms.
Thanks for this, Maia: this illustrates one of the very big reasons that trying to have debate/discussion with a lot of these people is so frustrating: they DO think the USA is the “centre of gravity” and that the rest of us are merely “in their orbit,” which makes them absolutely blind to the fact that the rest of us actually have entire worlds of culture and experience orbiting around us.
Yeah, we are aware of a good bit of what’s orbiting around America (and, BTW, most of us tend to be more aware of what’s going on in a number of cultures than Americans are), but it is NOT what we dwell on most of the time…..being far too busy paying attention to what’s going on around us.
Jessica, Robert: don’t suppose that just because you aren’t aware that what goes on with us, that means there is in fact nothing other than what you bestow upon us. Just because you don’t see it does not in any way mean it doesn’t exist.
I’m mostly thinking of my own experience. I lived in Canada for 5+ years and during that time I was only vaguely aware of political happenings in the US and now that I am back in the US, I am only vaguely aware of political happenings in Canada. I know I am not the be all end all of human experience, but I still wouldn’t be surprised to know that most people are like this; aware of their surroundings and not so much what is happening somewhere else.
I wasn’t sure were you were going with the support and credentials post. It always worries me when I see people try to put academics over experience since I think both have their place in the discussion.
Saturn orbits the Sun, crys, but it still has its own moon and ring system. It’s just smaller, and – gravitationally speaking – not as important.
already the thought of the existance of a “global feminism” is utterly wrong. the goals of feminists around the world are certainly different – sure, the general aim of equality is a common factor, but as soon as you get less abstract and more to the point, opinions vary widely between feminists of different countries.
ps: i am german, i have never heard of these american ladies and i have lived in several european countries, those names never turned up anywhere. to me the face of feminism is Alice Schwarzer THE most prominent living German feminist.
Donna I have to disagree vehemently on this with you. The most publicized face may be NOW and Ms. but it’s not the most public.
And Robert Well Saturn may be smaller and gravitationally not as important but it it spins out.
Earth still screwed.
And thats the problem here. People think big=most important= only thing that matters.
If when you worked internationally the experience was different then older feminist aren’t keeping younger feminists out.
It’s a small specific group you want member ship to and to make your desire for membership seem more i necessary it becomes THE face OF THE WORLD.
Except it’s BARELY the face of it’s own country’s movement. Most feminist theory that resonated with young women I know , is outside the mainstream.
Most of the condemnations I read about feminism come form American women who feel sorely underrepresented.
And to say that their what the world thinks of is either terribly imprecise , terribly arrogant, or terribly misinformed.
I don’t even think of them when I think of American feminism because this institutional speaking for feminism has done SO LITTLE for me.
And I live here.
So I can only imagine how galling it must be to read someone complain about exclusion and use the specter of the importance of these orgs
As in ” you want to really represent I have to be let it to TRULY make it a representative movement”
meanwhile the supposedly represented are going
WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE ANYWAY?
Feminism is definitely exclusive. It’s racist, classist, ablist, homophobic, ageist, transphobic, etc. etc. etc. It should represent all women. Feminism ideally represents all people. I want it to be inclusive. What Jessica wrote about is NOW however nonrepresentative it is. It excludes young women and women of color. If she wants to be included in NOW, it won’t do any harm. It needs to include ALL women but I don’t see how this hurts. It’s just more dialogue and dialogue is good. I’m with you on the exclusiveness. Feminism in 2007 should lead the way and be truly revolutionary and radical. Show everyone how it’s done. Katha and NOW should do the right thing and be truly revolutionary.
But I don’t think she did she wrote about how SHE felt unincluded and rather than draw it out she used examples that related to only her and then said ” young women”
Dialogue i s good but that’s not honest dialogue. It HAS to be precise . Holding her to a standard is dialogue as to and frankly for a lot of us NOW,Jessica, Feminist Majority
Don’t meet the standard
and until they do we don’t want to be lumped in when they try and prove points with each other.
It’s not that she complained or that she wrote but other folks experiences were used to back her up when her writing demonstrated little concern for making those experiences known in the essay but willing to use their weight to tangle with these mystic elders
Right “young women” should be ALL YOUNG WOMEN. I agree with you there. It’s time for feminism to be all-inclusive. It’s fucking 2007. They should be truly revolutionary and lead the way. So should all these white male progressives “leaders”.
Actually, Howard Dean had the right idea but he’s been shunned by the Democratic leadership since November,
Oddly enough, just last night in the writing class I teach here in Saudi Arabia, I mentioned Gloria Steinem and, although five of the seven Saudi women knew who she was, just one of the expat women did! Feminism is world-wide. It goes by different names – and sometimes isn’t even recognized for what it is – but it is alive and well outside MS Magazine and the boundaries of my native America. And to that I say Ilhumdu’Allah!
After many many interactions with American feminists, I’m not all that shocked by a) the article itself, b) people defending it. Americans have a lot to learn about how they are positioned and perceived as citizens of the hegemonic power. Of course this doesn’t apply equally to all Americans or all American feminists, but it’s no surprise that feminists of colour get that the US doesn’t equal the world. I read the article, and I didn’t see Jessica specify that she was only addressing American feminism (if she did, could someone please point that out?) just saying “feminism” and assuming that your audience knows that you’re talking about American feminism is illustrative of the probelm here. And it seems pretty uniquely American to say “this is how the world sees things,” and than protest that you weren’t really talking about the world, just America.
What people aren’t getting is that for those of us who don’t live in the US, we’re essentially being told that we don’t have a place at the table. The public institutional face of feminism in Canada is not NOW or the Feminist Majority Foundation, or MS magazine. Canadian women and our issues are not a part of the mandate of these organizations. This is the message that women of colour get, and poor women, women with disabilities and everyone else who is not included get.
If Jessica agrees that these organizations are exclusive, why is it so important that she be a part of them? Why is it more important that she be included than all the other women who have been doing this work, creating our own organizations and magazines, and conferences without the kind of funding and public recognition that NOW, MS, and FMF (and those that they support) get?
Kate L. , good point. It was a slip of the keys and def should have read “Americans.”
Blackamazon:
I used other people’s experiences as I could–the folks’ experiences I wrote about asked that I NOT include details, their names, etc, because many of them have full time jobs in mainstream fem orgs.