Feminisms: The Once and Future Feminist

What an odd honor to be asked to write tonight's Feminisms.  I mean, it's not as odd as Ann Coulter being asked, or Pat Buchanan.  I am a Feminist.  However, I am white.  I am straight.  I am a man.  If we really want to get picky about my "disqualifications," I am a part of a power structure that routinely strips people of their civil rights in the name of psychiatric health.

But I am a Feminist.  Born in the Northeast as part of GenX, I was raised as one and it existed as an assumed background condition to progressive thought.  Both my parents worked in full-time jobs.  Both my parents took an active role in my emotional development.  Thus, I remained a Feminist.  I did the usual Feminist guy things in college, like take part in political actions organized through the women's center and denigrate the boors in the Party of the Right.

What being a Feminist means, though, has changed over time.  I never would have accepted the invitation to write this column 16 years ago, at the other end of the Clinton era.  I never would have thought backing the Democratic candidate other than Hillary Clinton constituted Feminism.  Let's go back in time, to those heady days in the early 1990s, and see how times have changed.

First, the obligatory public service announcement:

Feminisms is a series of weekly feminist diaries. My fellow feminists and I decided to start our own for several purposes: we wanted a place to chat with each other, we felt it was important to both share our own stories and learn from others’, and we hoped to introduce to the community a better understanding of what feminism is about.

Needless to say, we expect disagreements to arise. We have all had different experiences in life, so while we share the same labels, we don’t necessarily share the same definitions. Hopefully, we can all be patient and civil with each other, and remember that, ultimately, we’re all on the same side.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way ...

Back at the beginning of the Clinton era, when I was in college, there were two major dividing lines within the feminist movement on campus, such as it was.  Feminism was actually less of a movement at Yale circa 1991, and more of an assumption or a standard baseline that Yale Tories and Yale Party of the Right members railed against.  It was hardly a minority view hanging on by a thread through the stalwart actions of the Women's Center.  That was already a major change from just fifteen years earlier, when women had only just recently joined the undergraduate body, and Baby Boomer Elis struggled with Feminist ideas that many of the other major universities already embraced.

But by 1991, Feminism was strong enough to start having significant internal debates about what constituted Feminist thought and who could really be a Feminist.  My school was no exception.

The first major white line was between Separation Feminists and Equality Feminists.  Separation Feminists believed the genders were equal, but fundamentally different in their abilities.  Moreover, men or women could be more or less masculine or feminine, but women innately had a knack for the qualities believed to be feminine, such as consensus building and listening.  I actually came to embrace this school of thought during college, as it seemed to be a new way to compromise the prejudices of the past with progress.  Equality Feminists were probably truer to the older generations of Feminists, believing that all humans were fundamentally the same and that their differences did not impact major spheres of functioning.  These were not pure divisions, of course, as many Equality Feminists bought into the idea that women still had certain abilities that men tended to lack or neglect, and many Separation Feminists still believed that women could excel at anything they tried, given sufficient effort.

On a personal note, I dated Separation Feminism in the 20th Century, figuratively and literally, but I married an Equality Feminist in the 21st.  More on that later.

The second division, which was also far from absolute, was the feminist concept of equality as toughness vs. the concept of equality as resilience.  Toughness advocates, truer to the older generation, stated women would earn and maintain equality by being tougher than men.  They would be pugnacious, tenacious, relentless, and vigilant against challenge.  Rights were earned through struggle.  Struggle was won by strength, sometimes in concert with others, often through personal trial.  Thus, since individual struggle could constitute the "good fight," individual advancement of one woman was a victory for all women.

Resilience advocates pointed out that struggle, as it had been typically defined, required an attitude that often drew on some of the worst "male" attributes while it attempted to challenge the strength of the system the patriarchy had erected over hundreds of years.  What about resilience, which the separation feminists labelled as more feminine?  Enduring pain was predisposition, whereas inflicting pain was masculine and therefore alien.  Women (and men) could work within the system, enduring its shortcomings while advocating forcefully for change, and by surviving until that change occurred, make real strides for all.  In this philosophy, equality of strength is depicted by men and women who can take anything and survive without being coopted by it.

The difference between the two was subtle, and although the toughness advocates claimed to have the original birthright of older generations, the Suffrage movement of the prior turn of the century was more of a resilience movement.  So where was the real difference?  Someone looking to slowly change the system from the inside by changing the way it operated could never really do so on his or her own.  Thus, resilience advocates searched out allies, starting in the 1970s and culminating in the Clinton era.  Civil rights, gay rights, minority rights, human rights ... these were all feminist campaigns to the person preferring resilience.  Moreover, the advancement of one woman that came at the cost of hundreds of other womens' rights and advancement ... that was not a victory.  Ironically, Hillary Clinton was more of a resilience feminist during her husband's Presidency, as evidenced by her speeches and coalitions.

In just four years, I watched separation feminism become a slim minority view.  Only the pagans on campus held it by the time my future wife graduated in 1997, and that was more religious belief than anything else.  Why?  Because the long-held belief that women tended to be worse at certain topics, and only a few at the top of the bell curve excelled at them, was refuted by the matriculation percentages and achievement of women in science and math majors.  Between 1991 and 1997, young men started their academic decline, that has unfortunately extended into the present decade.  In addition, many men, including myself, discovered that plenty of "feminine" traits could be consistent with a sense of masculinity; they were consistent with being a good person.  Although I had no idea I was going into Psychiatry in 1995, I knew I was going into a healing art and I was going in with the intention to become an even better listener.  The theology and philosophy of my separation feminist friends and girlfriends began to seem stale and limiting to me, in terms of how I saw them and how I saw myself.  To paraphrase one of the Arthurian works the pagans among them loved to read, I had become the Once and Future Feminist, abandoning the old knowledge and waiting for a new epiphany.

Meanwhile, it became increasingly clear that female political leaders of the 1980s and 1990s had made great strides in changing perceptions, but mainly by being as corrupt as men (Bhutto) or as hawkish as men (Thatcher).  What had these women changed?  New role models, like Clinton or Aung San Kyi, began to provide a new path.  Eventually the question became "How could women be equal without BEING men?"  And, with further blending of the civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, and human rights campaigns, non-violent (if sometimes outrageous) resistance became more and more common, in the name of ALL PEOPLE.  Feminism became less about personal advancement for all women and more inspired by WE SHALL OVERCOME.  The hardest work having been done by the Baby Boomers, the Millenials of Generations Jones, X, Y, and Z could be less aggressive and say "I won't be as corrupt as the patriarchy or as violent in power-taking, but I will persistently achieve and advocate until I win over opinion to my view."  And then the magic occurred.  Men who were advocates of equal rights started to take this path as well.

So here we are in the 21st Century.  It's considered poor form by Millenials for a man or a woman to pitch a fit or claim things are unfair when they are losing elections.  There is no difference between a strong man and a strong woman.  And being as brass knuckles as a 20th Century man is just unnecessary roughness, whether you're a man or a woman.

I married a woman who is my intellectual superior, but who knows that when a soft touch is necessary with a bureaucrat, then I should be the one on the other end of the phone.  She became a Blood Bank Pathologist, and faces down the meanest and oldest of the hospital's surgeons daily to properly manage the reserves of the hospital system.  I became a Psychiatrist, still training to learn how to listen better and to bring hope back to people with hardly any left.

And to make a small plug, but one I think is relevant to this discussion, we both back a man who just yesterday explained a key truth to the American people.  I have a dream, but my dream does not have to come at the expense of your dream.  It doesn't.  Sometimes that seems hard to see, but it is a profoundly feminist idea.  Life is not always a zero-sum game, a competition that goes to the greediest or the angriest.  It can be a process in which the number of "chips" grows, but only if the players agree to change the rules and work together.  By no means is this man perfect, and he does plenty of tearing down and attacking.  But he is comfortable with all parts of his character, and he does not see these parts as male or female, just human and flawed.

Clinton, somehow, has become the past of feminism.  In a short space, she has resorted to tactics she once stood against, and progress has begun to pass her by.  She is fearful of "appearing weak," and defines strength through the ability to attack people and things.  Like McCain, she sees the only relevant Senate foreign policy experience as an Armed Services Committee seat, and ignores Foreign Relations altogether.  To be sure, she remains in the race to endure whatever is thrown at her, but she does it while stating that her election would be the most profound change associated with her campaign.  My dream is your dream, even if you don't become any more empowered by it.  That is an old idea.
 
My new epiphany has come.  I, the Once and Future Feminist, can awaken to the call for equal rights once more.  It is a 21st Century feminism that says that a man raised by a single mother can adopt her centering and calmness, and thereby win with a minimum of retaliation.  It is a feminism that says that men and women can adopt these traits from both mothers and fathers, and thereby succeed while still attempting to empower others in the process.  An equality feminism that includes men as equal participants, advocates, and students of life, and a resilience feminism that states unequivocally that we will fail without each other.  A feminism that states first and foremost that women are people, that humans all have basic rights, and that empowered people seek to maximize those rights for all, no matter their differences and resultant disagreements.  It even seeks to include the advocates of older systems, including the ancient patriarchial structures.

And so, in the interest of listening, I turn the dialogue over to all of you.  Thank you for this invitation.  I have been honored by it.