Feminism May Be Nearing Her Expiration Date
LatestMaybe nobody cares if Katy “Cupcakes” Perry is a feminist. But if Marissa Mayer, by all accounts a brilliant, successful woman and CEO of a globally recognized brand, doesn’t really wanna hang her hat where feminism lives, and neither do younger women, is the problem us? Or them? Or does this continued resistance to embrace the term make it worth considering that the movement, or the word, or both, as they’re inextricably linked, be laid to rest? Or at least pulled apart, reconfigured, rebranded, and renamed? Let’s take a gander.
Argument:
In a Slate piece by Hanna Rosin, she asks if the term feminist is even useful anymore:
If someone as smart and successful as Mayer, someone who tours the country speaking to young women, can’t comfortably call herself a feminist, then maybedon we need to take her objection seriously. Maybe there is a reason why that PBS documentary was so much better on the history than it was on the modern era. Maybe feminism is a term too freighted with history and it’s time to move on.
Evidence:
Top powerful lady Marissa Mayer isn’t a feminist. She has bigger problems to solve, like the ones in the company she’s running, then to make sure every choice she makes is good for “the sisterhood.” Women like Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg may embrace feminism more, and while she gives in her new book “excellent advice, but it’s not the stuff of a consciousness-raising movement.”
Writes Rosin:
Think about it from a purely tactical standpoint. Mayer is exactly the kind of person feminists should want on their team. She is a young CEO in an industry dominated by men-an industry that in many people’s minds stands for the future. Unlike many extremely successful female executives, she has not sacrificed a family life; she is married and has a baby. Yet she has been treated with so much scorn: First women criticized her for saying she did not want to take a maternity leave. Then last week she was mocked for her memo to Yahoo employees that she no longer wanted them to work remotely.
Both these cases highlight the philosophical differences between movement feminists and Mayer. Her critics believe in collective action. Mayer shouldn’t give up her maternity leave because she is setting a bad example, by teaching employers to expect unreasonable levels of commitment from working mothers. What’s good for one sister has to be good for them all. Same for remote work. Yahoo may have some specific corporate reason why calling everyone back to the office is critical at the moment, but Mayer shouldn’t do that because, again, as a strategy, it sets a bad precedent. Mayer, however, does not live in a world where collective action makes sense. She lives in a radical meritocracy, where ideas and strategies survive because they are useful, or successful, or forward thinking in some way.
Furthermore, even young fresh recruits aren’t exactly scrambling to call themselves feminists, either. She writes:
Recently I was part of a panel on the 50th anniversary of the Feminine Mystique. A big part of the discussion centered on why young women today don’t want to call themselves feminists, which dismayed the other panelists. Afterward a high-school girl in the audience stood up to ask a question. She said that in her progressive school the girls were “creaming” the boys at virtually everything. She said they were better at sports and got better grades and ran all the extracurricular clubs. But the one thing she and her friends could not get anyone to do was join the feminist club. The answer to her particular predicament seemed obvious to me, the old feminist, although it felt impolite to say it at the time: My daughter, it’s time to kick you out of the house and then shut the house down. You need to build your own house now.
Big Caveat:
But this doesn’t mean these women aren’t “for equal rights”!