In the Wake of a Dark Day: The Unifying Power of Community Amongst Women
Feminine history is but linear. Our time, as opposed to a straight line flowing in one direction, is one that exists concurrently: past, present, and future winding in harmony with one another, a concerted, layered effort dipping only to blend together.
The world does not move in tandem, and pockets of similar demographics experience contradictory phenomena. Progress has been made: Poland ousted their long-standing right wing government at the end of 2023; the Scandinavian countries rode a “green wave” in last Spring’s EU election; Bangladesh removed their dictator; India’s Modi has been weakened with his party becoming a minority in parliament; Bolsonaro has been barred from office in Brazil; and same-sex marriage has both been legalized in Estonia and is set to become legal in Thailand by 2025.
Conversely, Afghan women have entered into an era of antediluvian, punitive silence; the U.N. Human Rights Council determined that 70% of fatalities in Gaza were women and children; and right-wing slides have been made by Western powers in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. Coordinated fascist efforts are actively working to pollute the globe.
On the home front, rather paradoxically, the Internet’s young peoples’ culture — originating from the United States’ immensely pervasive soft power — is loud and unabashedly female. 2024 has seen an outpouring of love that feminists of waves past could only dream to witness on such a world stage. Not only have young women taken to movements that “decenter men” and commend South Korea’s ever diminishing birth rate in conjunction with the 4B movement, but popular culture has almost exclusively become the culture of young women.
From music (to illustrate, Ariana Grande’s status as the first artist to have five albums with multiple songs surpass 1 billion streams on Spotify) to literature (romance is the highest-earning genre of fiction at present, with a 52.4% increase in print sales in 2022), in the words of online commentator Mina Le, “we are deep in the depths of ‘Girl Internet.’ Girls are girling, hot girls are walking, girls are blogging, dinner is girl, forty-year-old men are baby girls: we are in a girl economy.” This newfound female freedom is, ultimately, the catalyst for the overwhelming pushback manifest as the stripping of rights granted to second-wave feminists.
In a historic “reverse gender gap,” Melissa Deckman has noted that the partisan gap between young men and women has almost doubled in the past 25 years, as men skew more conservative than even past generations, and women are now the most progressive group in American history yet. This is part of a much larger phenomenon: women are outperforming men in education by a number of statistics, earn as much or more than men in some US cities, and are more likely to own homes than their male counterparts.
Women are freer than ever before, and men are leveraging previously withheld political power to reaffirm patriarchy’s wretched grasp. Still, as asserted by Titiou Lecoq in her bestseller book, “Les Grandes Oubliées. Pourquoi l’Histoire a effacé les femmes” (The Great Forgotten Ones: Why History Erased Women), “même pendant les périodes les plus marquées par la haine des femmes, il y a eu des femmes pour lutter. Pour parler, écrire, créer. Les femmes ne se sont jamais tues.”
“Even during times most marked by widespread hatred for women, there have been women who have fought back. Who speak, who write, who create. Women have never been silent.”
— Titiou Lecoq, Les Grandes Oubliées. Pourquoi l’Histoire a effacé les femmes
Beyond speaking, writing, and creating, women are finding community in one another. In the court of public, female opinion, being anything but a “girl’s girl” is the gravest of sins. Not only does this bake intersectionality into the very ethos of today’s feminism, but it demonstrates rather precisely how Internet virality is fifth wave feminism’s greatest tool in combatting manufactured misogyny.
There are limitations, of course: without negating the importance of hundreds of thousands of likes, — as opposed to mere numbers, these are, after all, representations of people behind screens — concentrated bubbles of opinion form on an increasingly large scale due mainly to algorithms pushing content in the most favorable of directions. Furthermore, ideology does rather little by way of immediate relief for those in dire straits. Thinkpieces on gender politics as exhibited in the newest season of Love is Blind will not save the lives of those Gazan women.
Be that as it may, our evolving societies are fueled by thought. If Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could inspire the suffragettes, the length of time between the release of Wollstonecraft’s magnum opus and tangible, effected change matters far less than the eventual impact.
Although we can’t say we’ve seen revolutionary reception to écriture feminine — or ‘women’s writing,’ as per Hélène Cixous’ theory — comparable even to Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth since publishing in 1990, this new epoch is one less rooted in ideology and foundational works like de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, but is far more grounded in the interactions between women that were fragmented and connected only by published ideals in eras prior to our digital age.
“[Woman] must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies — for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text — as into the world and into history — by her own movement.”
— Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of Medusa
In 2024, woman has put herself into the world and into history. We watch it happen with every new post uploaded to global platforms that offer a new means of visibility that were not previously available to women, or to men. Women have commandeered social sites, and thus, possess the power to shape entire facets of social life.
This is not to say that the world’s only superpower sitting firmly in the palm of Republican extremists is not a dangerous place to be in. For every woman that watched Anita Hill bravely challenge Clarence Thomas, there is a young girl facing the ire of his warped conviction. The grief felt by women across the globe on November 6th is, by no means, unreasonable. This is a reckoning.
Yet, it was ordinary women joining the workforce and staging myriad campus revolts that made shockwaves in the midst of the darkness that shrouded the 1960s. One of the most divisive, calamitous times in American history is survived by the legacies of trailblazers like Betty Friedman, Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, and Shirley Chisholm.
In the 1980s, a “lost decade” for economic growth plagued by the fear of technology, drugs, and nuclear war, it was The National Organization for Women (NOW) that brought us as close as possible to passing the (albeit, failed) Equal Rights Amendment. NOW identified the gender gap, led the first March For Women’s Lives, and worked to fight nearly 100 anti-abortion bills — fewer than 20 of which passed at the time.
Women do not need the approval of men to create change. Though we are entitled to periods of well deserved mourning— to creating space for pain in times such as these — stories told by and for women do not need to entrench themselves in suffering. As women, we see our lives for what they are: dynamic, infinitely complex, and, above all else, full. Our future rests in the hands of women of our past, present, and future standing firmly on the shoulders of giants.
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
— Frederick Douglass
What women have always held onto in the past, and are especially clinging onto in these terribly tumultuous times is community. We have always fought for one other. For ourselves. For every young professional that has committed themselves to becoming the most ethical of lawyers or an aspiring Congresswoman set upon reforming the world of politics, the future stands a fighting chance.
There is an untold resplendence in every neighbor that helps their fellow woman in a moment of need, and an unrivaled rectitude in every girl who takes it upon themselves to make sure no one is left out or behind. The bonds between people — between women — carry us into a hard-won hereafter. Where there were women to speak, to write, and to create, there are and will continue to be women to lead, to rebuild, and to hope.
