THINK FOR A MINUTE. Who were you before this wave of feminism began?
Trying to remember our way back into past realities, past rooms, past beliefs is a first step toward measuring the depth of change. Sharing those measures—in the same way we have learned to share problems and solutions—is probably the most bias-proof way of eliciting our own history. After all, if people of diverse experience and age and background begin to see patterns of similarity emerge from changes in our lives and even in the words we use, then we are probably on the track of an accurate historical pattern. If we write down those changes as we have experienced them, then history may cease to be limited mainly to the documented acts of national leaders, or to the interpretations of scholars proving a particular theory. We can begin to create a women’s history, and a people’s history, that is accurate and accessible.
New words and phrases are one organic measure of change. They capture transformations of perception and sometimes of reality itself.
Now, we have terms like sexual harassment and battered women. A few years ago, they were just called life.
Now, we are becoming the men we wanted to marry. Once, women were trained to marry a doctor, not be one.
Now, placing women’s in front of words like center or newspaper, network or rock band, indicates a positive choice. Before feminism, it was a put-down.
Now, we’ve made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. Once, even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.
In 1972, a NASA official’s view of women’s function in space was “sexual diversion” [on] “long-duration flights such as Mars.” Now, women are simply “astronauts.”
Until recently, an older woman on campus was an oddity. Now, so many women have returned for a college education once denied them that the median age of the female undergraduate is twenty-seven years old. Colleges are community resources, with a new definition of “students.”
Until the 1970s, most colleges had never heard of Women’s Studies. Now, there are tens of thousands of such courses on more than a thousand campuses.
A few years ago, moving up the economic ladder for women meant becoming a doctor not a nurse, a boss not a secretary: a token not a movement. Now, nurses are striking, secretaries are organizing, there is an uprising in the pink-collar ghetto, and jobs are no longer valued just because men do them.
Art used to be definable as what men created. Crafts were made by women and natives. Only recently have we discovered they are the same, thus bringing craft techniques into art, and art into everyday life.
Now, anti-equality politicians in both parties worry about the women’s vote or the gender gap. Until the 1980s, political experts said there was no such thing.
In the 1970s, policemen were protesting against the very idea of working with women. Now, females serve in every major city and the policeman has become the police officer.
In the 1960s, Americans talked about white women who controlled the economy or black women who were matriarchs, thus sugarcoating powerlessness with the myth of power. Only two decades later, more than 70 percent of men and women agree that sex discrimination exists—and that it’s wrong.
Until the 1970s, women had to choose between Miss or Mrs., thus identifying themselves by marital status in a way men did not. Now, more than a third of American women support Ms. as an alternative, an exact parallel of Mr., and so do government publications, business, and the media.
Pre-feminism, rape was the only crime in which the victim was put on trial. Today, the laws of evidence have been changed, and sexual assault in all degrees is understood as a crime of violence.
Now, some lesbians have kept their jobs and custody of their children, and have even been elected to public office—all without having to lie or hide. A decade ago, lesbian was a secret word and lesbian mother was thought to be a contradiction in terms.
A few years ago, pregnant women were often forced to leave jobs permanently, and paternity leave or parental leave wasn’t even a phrase. Now, pregnancy can be considered legally as a routine work disability, and some national companies plus a few unions offer a form of leave to new fathers as well.
Much of this newness is putting accuracy into existing language—for instance, changing congressmen to congresspeople, or MEN WORKING to PEOPLE WORKING—though even those changes spell major differences in power. But new coinage is also needed to capture new hopes.
Before the current wave of feminism, for instance, we were still discussing population control, the enlightened answer to the population explosion. Both were negative phrases, the first implying the necessity of an outside force, and the second suggesting endless impersonal breeding. Though feminists were expected to come down on the side of population control, one of its underlying assumptions was that women themselves could not possibly be given the power to achieve it. Liberal men who were the population “experts” assumed that women gained security or were fulfilled only through motherhood; and so would bear too many babies if given the power to make the choice (unless, of course, they could achieve a higher degree of literacy and education, thus becoming more rational: more like men). On the other hand, very religious or conservative males—who often seemed intent on increasing the numbers of the faithful—treated women as potentially sex-obsessed creatures who would use contraception to avoid childbirth totally, behave sinfully, and thus weaken the patriarchal family and civilization itself.
In the seventies, however, feminism transformed the terms of discussion by popularizing reproductive freedom as a phrase and as a basic human right. This umbrella term includes safe contraception and abortion, as well as freedom from coerced sterilization (of women or of men) and decent health care during pregnancy and birth. In other words, reproductive freedom stated the right of the individual to decide to have or not to have a child. Though obviously a right that is more important to women, it also protects men. Furthermore, it allowed the building of new trust and coalitions between white women and women of color, in this country and elsewhere, who had rightly suspected that the power implied by population control would be directed at some groups more than others.
To the surprise of liberal population experts, the choice of reproductive freedom has been exercised eagerly by women wherever it was even marginally allowed. Population journals began to feature mystified articles about the declining rate of population growth, even in many areas of the world where the rate of illiteracy among women is still tragically high. A 1979 United Nations women’s conference of East and West Europe concluded that women were not only limiting their pregnancies for their own health reasons, but were, statistically speaking, on something of a “baby strike,” perhaps because of double-role problems; that is, the burden of working both outside and inside the home. Some countries recommended the remedy of encouraging men to share child rearing and relieve women’s burdens, but other more authoritarian governments simply tried to ensure compulsory childbearing by suppressing contraception and abortion. Since some U.S. government experts were speaking of our “unsatisfactorily low birthrate” quite openly by 1979—and some rightwing anti-abortion leaders were openly fearful that cultural differences in birthrates would make the United States “a non-white country”—the question for the future is clear: Will reproductive freedom make childbirth and child rearing a valuable, rewarded function that is supported and aided by the community (as feminists advocate)? Or simply functions that are forced on women, especially racially “desirable” women (as the anti-equality rightwing advocates)?
Obviously, reproductive freedom is simply a way of stating what feminism has been advancing for thousands of years. Witches and gypsies were freedom fighters for women because they taught contraception and abortion. It was mainly this knowledge that made them anathema to patriarchs of the past. In the worldwide wave of feminism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, advocating “birth control” or “fertility control,” even for married women, was enough to jail many feminist crusaders.
But the modern contribution is to elevate reproductive freedom to a universal human right, at least as basic as freedom of speech or assembly. Regardless of marital status, racist need to limit or increase certain populations, or nationalistic goals of having more or fewer soldiers and workers, individual women have the right to decide the use of our own bodies. Men who want children must at least find women willing to bear them; that seems little enough to ask. And governments that want increased rates of population growth must resort to such humane measures as reducing infant mortality rates, improving health care during pregnancy, sharing the work of child rearing through child care and equal parenthood, and lengthening people’s lives.
Obviously, this reproductive veto power on the part of women is exactly what male supremacists fear most. That’s why their authoritarian impulse is so clearly against any sexuality not directed toward childbirth within the patriarchal family (that is, against extramarital sex, homosexuality and lesbianism, as well as contraception and abortion). This understanding helped feminists to see why the adversaries of such apparently contradictory concerns as contraception and homosexuality are almost always the same. It also helped us to stand together on the side of any consenting, freely chosen sexuality as a rightful form of human expression.
In recent years, words like lover (whether referring to someone of the same or different gender), sexual preference, and gay rights have begun to be commonly used. Homophobia was invented to describe the irrational fear of sexual expression between people of the same gender, a fear so common in the past that it needed no name. There was also a challenge of such rote phrases as man-hating lesbian. As Rita Mae Brown pointed out, it’s not lesbians who hate men, but women who depend on men and are thus more likely to be hurt and angry.
In the 1960s, any sex outside marriage was called the Sexual Revolution, a nonfeminist phrase that simply meant women’s increased availability on men’s terms. By the end of the seventies, feminism had brought an understanding that liberation meant the power to make a choice; that sexuality, for women or men, should be neither forbidden nor forced. With that in mind, words like virgin, celibacy, autonomy, faithfulness, and commitment took on a positive meaning. Such blameful words as frigid and nymphomaniac were being replaced by nonjudgmental ones like preorgasmic and sexually active. Indeed, nymphomaniac, a medically nonexistent term, had often been used to condemn any woman who enjoyed sex or made sexual demands.
It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standard that implies). A handful of women have even exchanged their patriarchal names for matriarchal ones (“Mary Ruthchild”), or followed the black movement tradition of replacing former owners’ names with place names or letters (for instance, “Judy Chicago” or “Laura X”). Many tried to solve the dilemma of naming with the reformist step of just adding their husband’s name (“Mary Smith Jones”), but that remained an unequal mark of marriage unless their husbands took both names, too.
Hardly anyone has yet succeeded in interrupting the patriarchal flow of naming children: they are still given their father’s name only, or their mother’s name as the dispensable one in the middle. It remains for the future to legalize an egalitarian choice, as some European countries have done, by giving children both parents’ names, thus indicating their real parentage (and eliminating the need for such constant explanations as, “This is my daughter by my first marriage,” or “This is my son by my second”). They could choose their own adult name, whether a parental or totally new one, when they are old enough to get a Social Security card or register to vote. After all, each of us should be able to name ourselves. The power of naming goes very deep.
As an adjective, pro-choice began to replace pro-abortion, the latter being a media-created term that implied advocacy of abortion, as opposed to support for it as a legal choice. To include the word abortion as an honorable one, there were other phrases like safe and legal abortion. And a decade that had begun with the necessity of proving the Freudian-dictated vaginal orgasm to be neurologically nonexistent, plus explaining the clitoral orgasm to be literally true, finally ended up more equally with just orgasm (no adjectives necessary) being more talked about—and experienced.
The feminist spirit has reclaimed some words with defiance and humor. Witch, bitch, dyke, and other formerly pejorative epithets started to turn up in the brave names of small feminist groups. A few women artists dubbed their new female imagery cunt art in celebration of the discovery that not all sexual symbols were phallic. Humor encouraged the invention of jockocracy to describe a certain male obsession with athletics and victory; also loserism as a rueful recognition of women’s cultural discomfort with anything as “un-feminine” as success. Supermom and Superwoman were words that relieved us all by identifying the Perfect Wife and Mother, plus the Perfect Career Woman, as humanly impossible goals.
Women’s Lib or Women’s Libber were trivializing terms that feminists argued against. (Would we say “Algerian Lib”? “Black Libber”?) Their use has diminished, but not disappeared.
The nature of work has been a major area of new understanding, beginning with the word itself. Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style. Though still alarmingly common, the term is being protested, especially by homemakers, who work harder than any other class of workers, and are still called people who “don’t work.” Feminists tend to speak of work inside the home or outside the home, of salaried or unsalaried workers. Attributing a financial value to work in the home would go a long way toward making marriage an equal partnership and ending the semantic slavery inherent in the phrase women who don’t work. It would also begin to untangle the double-role problem of millions of women who work both inside and outside the home. Defining human maintenance and home care as a job in itself, clarifies that men can and should do it as well as women.
Equal pay for equal work, the concept with which we entered the sixties, fell short of helping women in the mostly female, nonunionized jobs of the pink-collar ghetto—another new term. Blue-collar workers, who are overwhelmingly male, usually earn far more than workers in mostly female jobs. What did equal pay do for the nurse, for instance, who was getting the same low salary as the woman working next to her? Equal pay for comparable work has become the new goal, and comparability studies have been done on the many jobs done largely by men that require less education and fewer skills but still get more pay than jobs done largely by women.
Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective—women’s bank, women’s music, women’s studies, women’s caucus. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of credit worthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics. Such groups also experimented with new structures. Whether out of a conscious belief that hierarchy was rooted in patriarchy or an unconscious discomfort with authority, women’s groups often changed vertical organization into a more lateral one. Collective, communal, supportive, constituency, and skill sharing were more likely to be heard than organizational chart, credentials, or chain of command. Though such new forms were often condemned as impractical, their ability to make individuals more productive—combined with the current productivity crisis of traditional, hierarchical forms in industry—have caused some management consultants to look at them as possible models.
In short, truth-telling and the creation of alternate institutions have begun to delineate and give value to a women’s culture, a set of perspectives that differs from the more traditional, masculine ones, not because of biology but because of the depth of gender conditioning. We need to learn, but so do men. Together, we can create a culture that combines the most useful and creative features of each.
Power is being redefined. Women often explain with care that we mean power to control our lives, but not to dominate others.
Language has also been used to shift some of the burden back where it belongs. Alimony is sometimes referred to as back salary or reparations. If even the U.S. Labor Department counts the replacement value of one homemaker’s work at a minimum of eighteen thousand dollars a year, why shouldn’t a wife be entitled to some back salary? Similarly, many feminists stopped pleading with corporations and professional groups for contributions and started to ask for reparations for past damages done to women. Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Native American Studies, and the like were often referred to as remedial studies in order to put the blame where it belonged and to show that such courses must one day be integrated into the basic curriculum for everyone—into human history. The self-description of the authoritarian, anti-equality backlash as profamily caused many feminists to take great care about using the plural, families, in order to show that there are many different family forms. The patriarchal nuclear one acceptable to the right wing (father as breadwinner, woman at home with children) excludes about 85 percent of all American households. Understanding what the right wing means by “family” helps to understand why, in their view, all guarantees of individual rights to women and children are antifamily, from the Equal Rights Amendment to laws against child abuse.
Of course, one importance of words is their power to exclude. Man, mankind, and the family of man have made women feel left out, usually with good reason. People, humanity, and humankind are more inclusive. So are rewrites like “Peace on Earth, Good Will to People.” Feminists tried to educate by asking men to imagine receiving a Spinster of Arts or Mistress of Science degree, and then working hard for a sistership. Wouldn’t they feel a little left out?
Racial minorities, both women and men, have sometimes been defined in the negative as nonwhite (would we speak of white people as nonblack?), and in any case, those who are counted as minorities in this country are actually the majority in the world. In order to be more accurate and cross-cultural, feminists often adopted the description of people of color. For a while, Fourth World was also used as a way of describing the commonality of all women in the patriarchal world, regardless of race, but that term was taken over as a label for the poorest, nonindustrialized countries that did not get included as developing or Third World. To continue this reference, women are now sometimes self-described as the Fifth World—the half of the population that tends to be used as cheap labor and to have the least control over capital or technology, wherever we are.
In order to reach each other across barriers, feminists have tried to be sensitive to our own linguistically divisive habits: for instance, the racist habit of using images of darkness or blackness as negative (the dark side of human nature, a black heart, blackmail) and whiteness as positive (a white lie, white magic, fair-haired boy). If one group requires an adjective (an Asian-American poet), so do all (a European-American teacher).
Similarly, qualified was a word only deemed necessary when describing “out” groups, as if white men were qualified by their birth. They remained the adult, the professional (worker, doctor, poet), while the rest of us still needed a kind of qualifier that often dis-qualified (woman worker, black doctor, lady poet).
The difficult efforts to make language more accurate often include the invention of such alternatives as chairperson or spokesperson. Clearly, only a single-sex organization can have a position of chairman or chairwoman. An integrated organization needs to have a position that can be occupied by any of its members—thus, chairperson or better yet, just chair. Given the imbalance of power, however, these gender-free words are sometimes used to neuter women and leave men as the status quo. Thus, a woman might be a spokesperson, but a man remained a spokesman. Females might become people, but men remained men.
Women sometimes collaborated with our own exclusion by trying to slap to gender-free words too soon. Humanism was a special temptation (as in, “Don’t be threatened, feminists are really just talking about humanism”). Androgyny also raised the hope that female and male cultures could be perfectly blended but because the female side of the equation has yet to be affirmed, androgyny usually tilted toward the male. As a concept, it also raised anxiety levels by conjuring up a unisex or desexed vision, the very opposite of the individuality and freedom that feminism has in mind.
Whether in life or language, integration without equal power means going right back to our usual slots in the hierarchy. Once that is learned, we will be less likely to let fear of conflict force us into a pretended unity with “mankind,” or even into a false unity as “womankind.” This lesson helps to clarify the need for consciousness-raising through specific language. “Judges will be elected on their merits,” for instance, is a perfectly okay sentence. The only problem is that we’re all accustomed to visualizing male judges, and a gender-free sentence may do nothing to jog our consciousness. For a while, we may need sentences like “a judge will be elected on her or his merits” to force us to recognize that women judges do exist, just as we may need to enumerate by race in order to make diversity visible.
Another symbolic confusion was the invention of male chauvinist pig, a hybrid produced by trying to combine feminism with leftist rhetoric, which was often antifeminist in itself: in this case, a willingness to reduce adversaries to something less than human as a first step toward justifying violence against them. (Years of being chicks, dogs, and cows may have led to some understandable desire to turn the tables, but it also taught us what dehumanization feels like.) Police had been pigs in the sixties—as in “Off the Pigs!”—so all prejudiced men became the same for a while; a period that has mercifully passed.
In fact, male chauvinist itself is a problem. Since chauvinist referred to a superpatriot, all we were saying was that this was a man obsessed with loyalty to his country. Instead, many feminist writers began to use male supremacist as a more accurate description of the problem at hand. Some male supremacists took advantage of the earlier error by wearing ties and pins proclaiming, “I am a male chauvinist pig.” This was an indication, of course, of the lack of seriousness with which sexism is treated. Few of those men would so cheerfully proclaim, “I am an anti-Semite” or “I am a racist.”
Battered women is a phrase that named major, long-hidden violence. It helped us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets. Sexual harassment on the job also exposed a form of intimidation that about a third of all women workers suffer. Naming it allowed women to come forward and legal remedies to be created. By identifying pornography (literally, “writing about female slavery”) as the preaching of woman hatred, and thus quite different from erotica, with its connotation of love and mutuality, there was also the beginning of an understanding that pornography is a major way in which violence and dominance are taught and legitimized; that it is as socially harmful as Nazi literature is to Jews or Klan literature is to blacks.
Even female sexual slavery (once known by the nineteenth-century racist term white slavery because it was the only form of slavery to which whites were also subjected) has been exposed by this wave of feminism. We now know it flourishes in many cities where prostitution and pornography are big business and facts of international life.
In response to such realizations of injustice, it’s no wonder that radicalism began to lose some of its equation with excess or unreasonableness. By exposing the injustice of the sexual caste system and its role as a root of other “natural” injustices based on race and class, radical feminism laid the groundwork for a common cause among diverse women. And by challenging this masculine-feminine, dominant-passive structure as the chief cause and justification of violence, it also proved that radicalism can not only take nonviolent forms, but is the only way to challenge the origins of violence itself.
These new feminist connections among women are very tenuous, but worldwide. Feminism was international—and antinational—during its last massive advance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (If we call that “the first wave,” it’s only because we live in such a young country. The feminist revolution has been a contagious and progressive recurrence in history for thousands of years.) The last wave won for many women of the world a legal identity as human beings, not the possessions of others. Now we seek to complete that step for all women, and to gain legal equality, too. But there will be many more waves of feminism before male-supremacist cultures give way.
In this wave, words and consciousness have forged ahead, so reality can follow. Measuring the distance between the new and the old evokes the unique part of history that lives in each of us.
—1979 and 1982
A dozen years later, there are many readers who can no longer answer the question, “Who were you before this wave of feminism began?” They were simply born into some degree of feminist consciousness, and their higher expectations, their lack of the female cultural problem known as terminal gratitude, are necessary for the long path ahead.
For instance: Yes, many more women are becoming the men they wanted to marry, but too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry. That leaves most women with two jobs, one outside the home and one in it, a problem that poor women always had, but that is now shared by middle-class women—which means that together, we ought to be able to solve it. At a deeper level, many of us have raised our daughters more like our sons, but too few have raised our sons more like our daughters. Until men are socialized to raise children and care for the home as much as women are, this double burden will continue to restrict women, deprive children of nurturing fathers, and perpetuate gender roles.
In many areas, there is now more recognition of ways that polarized, either/or choices, modeled on dividing human nature into “feminine” and “masculine,” are disappearing or uniting into and, nonhierarchical, full-circle paradigm. In science, the new physics and chaos theory have blown apart our old linear, mechanistic, and hierarchical assumptions. They have helped us think about linking, not ranking. Feminist scientists offer us field dependency: the understanding that nothing can be studied out of its context. In sexuality, the assumption that a person must be either heterosexual or homosexual has begun to loosen up enough to honor both the ancient tradition of bisexuality and the new one of individuals who themselves are transgender and cross what once seemed an immutable line. Many groups within the lesbian and gay movement now add these two words to their descriptions. People in couples are also more likely to speak of each other as partner or life partner, a relationship that goes beyond the limited connotation of lover. Homophobic has been joined by heterosexist, a way of describing a person or entity that places heterosexuality at the center, or assumes that all other sexualities are peripheral or nonexistent. At the same time, sexual preference is frequently replaced by the term sexual identity, a way of including both those who feel they were born with a particular sexuality and those who feel they chose it.
Even heterosexuality is changing its language, with married couples preferring to say partner, too, rather than the culturally loaded terms of husband and wife. Others are trying to change the passive/dominant terms of sexuality by suggesting a word like envelopment to replace penetration or at least abandoning the old slang that implied sex was about conquering.
We’re also looking at the way language has allowed the victim to be identified, but not the victimizer. In addition to talking about how many women have been raped, for instance, we’ve begun to talk about how many men rape. In addition to talking about why women don’t or can’t leave a violent situation, we’re beginning to question why men are violent. The term domestic violence itself has begun to seem trivializing and inadequate, as if it were a lesser kind of violence. Since violence in the home is actually the training ground and origin of most other violence, whether it is criminal behavior or many assumptions of foreign policy, original violence is one suggested alternative. In these dozen years, hate crimes have finally begun to include crimes against women as well as those directed at people of a particular race, religion, ethnicity or sexuality; all the categories that have been taken more seriously in the past because they also include men. Terrorism is now also applied to the bombing of abortion clinics, not just to acts that are perceived as political by a masculine definition.
Feminist academics have brought into feminism an imitative but perhaps necessary group of words. Deconstruction is the act of divorcing something from its original context and meaning. Phrases like the production of women’s agency are substituted for empowerment; problematize instead of simply talking about problems and what creates them; and even feminist praxis when feminist practice would do just as well. Academic and other generalized language often obfuscates, distances, and removes insight and information from readers who need them most, but perhaps this is all necessary to get taken seriously and tenured in an academic world.
On the other hand, “politically correct,” a term that originated as a self-deprecating and humorous way to describe movement efforts to be inclusive, has become very serious as groups that prefer exclusion have turned it into an accusation.
If there was any doubt about the importance of language, it has been put to rest by an anti-equality right wing that is insisting again on using unwed mother and illegitimate children instead of single mother and children. As the representative of the only world religion to have permanent observer status in the United Nations, the Vatican has set out to oppose reproductive rights and reproductive health as phrases, and even to challenge the use of the word gender in U.N. documents. Clearly, the decision of what words we may use determines what dreams we are able to express.
Consider the changes already made or still to come in your own language. They are a good indication of where we are and where we need to go.
—1995