Yes, it’s a little bit funny when a woman who holds a top position says all the women should take a lesson from her and not worry so much about being so perfect at all the things, but hey, who knows better than the lady at the top what the price of perfection is?
When I first read about Debora Spar’s new book, Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection, I thought, here is another book laying the problems of feminism at younger feminist’s feet. Really, this NPR piece kind of made me feel that way at first — even the headline, that “Today’s ‘Wonder Women’ Must Reframe Feminism” — feels like we’re being told that we are thinking of ourselves too much and not enough of the bigger issues:
Spar’s new book is Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. In it, she calls for a new feminist agenda, though she is quick to admit that she wasn’t interested in feminism when she was young, and managed to get through college without taking a single women’s studies class. Her book draws on her own experiences as a professor, a mother of three and a wife of 25 years.
She tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross about the misinterpretation of feminism by a younger generation, and the pressures women face.
But to Spar’s credit, she really owns her own privilege and her own misinterpretation of the movement as more personal promise than promise to pay it forward.
From a NYT piece:
“My generation made a mistake,” Ms. Spar writes. “We took the struggles and the victories of feminism and interpreted them somehow as a pathway to personal perfection. We privatized feminism and focused only on our dreams and our own inevitable frustrations.”
In the NPR interview, it’s noted that Spar consciously avoided feminism and didn’t take any women’s studies classes in college:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
