Fifty Years a Feminist
Eileen Manion
“It was as though revelation alone could deliver me
into the promised land not only of political equality
but of inner freedom as well.”
Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business
Notes of a Chronic Re-reader
Ahead of the curve? I’d like to think so.
Although reading The Second Sex in 1966 was my road to Damascus, in my inchoate way I’d already noted many of the injustices de Beauvoir catalogued.
What made me most angry at that time was the double standard. The unfairness — I refused to accept it.
But before that, I had an advantage: I grew up in a matriarchy. My grandmother owned the house; my mother worked to support us.
No father, no brother to assert male dominance or prerogatives.
Then I went to an all girls’ high school: no boys to harass, distract,
or challenge my sense of myself as a budding intellectual.
However, I started university with an overwhelming curiosity about men and sex. I was looking for the smart guys I knew must be there, but encountered boys with unearned self-confidence — which I took at face value.
Nevertheless, when young women began challenging male leadership in the student and civil rights movements, I was ready for them. I read every book on feminism that came out in the late 1960s and early 1970s and I agreed with all of it. Exciting insights were bursting from those pages into my brain.
But my life was full of contradictions. I’d gotten married as soon as I graduated (1968), and was certainly not living as a liberated woman. My husband supported us; I made all the meals, did all the housework. So there was a glaring inconsistency between beliefs and experience.
As a Marxist, my husband did not initially share my enthusiasm for feminism.
“The workers won’t like it,” he said.
“You mean the male workers,” I replied.
One early feminist insight: women had always been working — inside and outside the home. The family wage that could allow some white men to support a wife and children was an early 20th century anomaly.
Feminist anger and simmering resentments contributed to the break-up of that marriage, but did not lead me to lose interest in men.
By 1970, I’d helped organize a consciousness raising group. All the women were straight and either married or in a relationship with a man. We bonded with our shared anger and disappointments. Our problems were not just personal; they had political implications.
However, my horizons broadened significantly with the gay liberation movement. Lesbians and gay men seemed to be having much more fun
than the straight people I knew.
Those experiences led me to write an article questioning the
anti-pornography feminists of the 1980s; I wanted to see women
as sexual agents, not just victims. The same women who wanted
to suppress sexually explicit material at that time also refused to accept transgender women — they were the antecedents of today’s TERFs.
Feminists of that decade were also trying to come to terms with new developments in reproductive technology. Many lesbians who wanted children were already making use of the simplest technique — artificial insemination. But a whole new world was opening up —
in vitro fertilization; surrogate mothering.
Ironically — as I’d just finished writing an article on this issue — I got pregnant the old-fashioned way and gave birth to triplet girls.
“Three little feminists,” I announced to all my friends.
From one day to the next I became a born-again Mom.
But at some visceral level, I felt angry and disappointed: Feminism hadn’t prepared me for the joys and terrors of motherhood. As feminists we’d supported abortion rights and free daycare — but what about the day to day pleasures and hassles of being with little ones? Who had mentioned those?
Of course, there had been lots of books about mother/ daughter relationships in the early days, but all from the daughters’ perspective. And naturally, there were plenty of Victorian books that sanctified motherhood — but they were no help!
And why hadn’t feminists improved the world for mothers? Not only was there no free pre-K education, but the sinks in public washrooms were too high for toddlers to wash their hands. I hadn’t noticed before how unfriendly a place the public world was for children. And parents.
Obviously it was not fair to blame the women’s movement for the resistance to so many of our demands. Not only have we not achieved pay equity, but the work/ life balance we hear so much about usually means women are doing the juggling. This has become even more glaring during the pandemic.
Unfortunately, insight is not enough as both Vivian Gornick and I discovered.
Neither for individuals nor for society as a whole.
The world in which I’ve grown old has both changed and not changed from the world in which I grew up. Men and women can live together without benefit of clergy, but women who are openly active sexually are still sluts.
Men, at least in certain circles, are expected to do their share of childcare and housework, but they often just don’t do it. Or do such a poor job that their female partners step in.
Lesbians and gay men can live openly, get married if they wish, but homophobia continues to exist.
Many people question the very nature of the binary division of genders;
we see transgender people on an everyday basis. But their very existence throws some into a bathroom/ sports teams panic.
I often think about the world in which my daughters are “adulting,” as they put it. Instead of new ideas and insights, we seem to have new technologies, new games, new distractions from our new and also old problems.
Of course, gender issues remain fraught with acrimony,
as we saw with “#Metoo.”
Yet today, the fact that women leaders have performed so much better than men to protect their people from the worst effects of Covid-19 is a reason for optimism. I hope we can build on that success by placing more women in positions of power.
And ordinary women, like those who participated in the Portland Wall of Moms, are standing up to abuses of power.
At the very least, feminism has given us a vocabulary to demand change — terms like “sexism,” or “sexual harassment,” or “rape culture”
didn’t even exist when I was in university.
So, although insight is never enough to solve our problems,
now we have a place to begin.
