After a recent talk she gave at the Brentwood School in Los Angeles about how she became a writer, novelist Margaret Atwood opened the floor to questions. Garden variety What is your process and What is your schedule (from the adults) duly issued forth. Then, she took one final question from a student.
Did Margaret Atwood consider herself a feminist?
Atwood parried and asked the student what she meant by feminist. And the girl, with not a shred of irony said,
"Oh you know the kind with long hair under their arms who wear overalls."
Ouch.
I can just see telling this to my future granddaughter. (My step daughter-in-law is pregnant. After four sons, there may be hope!)
Once upon a time there were feminists, honey. You remember I told you about those early artifacts like newspapers and books, the things people used to read? Well, about the same time, before there were bad Girls Gone Wild and the Mommy Wars which wiped a lot of us out, and then all the Feminine Mistakes there were these things called the feminists. Now people refer to them with a whiff of dirtiness like the other "f" word, but once upon a time, as I said, they were very important women who had hairy underarms and overalls....
Sigh. It's not the fault of younger women. One thing we haven't done a very good job of is passing the torch. And it's flickering now, worn down by years of babe imagery, mommies who work and consider themselves saints or mommies who don't work and consider themselves saints, women who think by wearing Prada instead of a powersuit or carrying a Gaya satchel instead of a briefcase that they are less liable to get whomped when they assert themselves.
There's still a chance to remedy this failure only I'm not sure it's by taking your daughter to work on Thursday on Take Our Children to Work Day (this was the day formerly known as Take Your Daughters to Work Day but the guys, realizing we were onto a good thing, wanted in on the concept) where they are only apt to get a refresher on the status quo.
Instead, I think it might be more productive and a lot more fun to celebrate Take Your Daughter to WACK Day, and visit the stupendous, exhausting, complicated retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. (Citizens of other cities n.b. New York has its own new Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and many other cities around the country are doing complementary programming. Check the Wack site and your local museum/gallery sites for further info.)
WACK. It's the sound of 120 women artists, their men, their mothers and their children being splattered against the walls of the Geffen Contemporary. It's the screech of the women ricocheting off each other. It's the wail of the many artists who weren't included in the show. It's the dulcet, revisionist tones from some who were.
Who can blame any of them? It's hard to stay angry, focused, cutting edge, and commercial all at the same time for thirty something years when the anger and vitriol and the self-absorption has been co-opted by people like Imus and Coulter and Limbaugh. Women may look complacent and content either nesting in their lairs with lots of babies in sweats and flip flops or marching down Madison Avenue in spikes and Banana Republic but the tumult and confusion and resentment is still very much there when women get together. In other words:
Our hair may look straight but once we let it down, it's nappy.
The retrospective (which will also travel to NY, Washington and British Columbia) is by turn didactic, hilarious, and sobering. But mostly, it serves as stark reminder that there has not been enough true progress in either art or sexual politics since the second wave leap in the 1970's. Though the generation of women just ahead of me had theoretically paved the way to female empowerment, it was as if they had merely shot us full of social Restylane; we were all puffed up with bra-burning rhetoric and glory but it turned out it was only temporary: pretty soon, the plumping wore off and exposed the true sagging underneath.
Before I get a zillion comments from women artists working today and young women climbing the corporate ladder and glares from the mommies in the carpool line, I'm not saying that I don't admire the beautifully rendered work of the current art stars Elizabeth Peyton, Vija Celmins, Marlene Dumas, and Dana Schutz and which if I could afford it, I would love to own. Or that I don't admire Carly Fiorina or Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton for rising to the top of their male-dominated worlds or wish that I could have a corner office on a high floor like theirs. Or, for that matter, that I don't long for the cozy days I spent with my boys just watching them go under the sprinkler at the playground or fixing them tuna sammys.
I'm merely suggesting that though progress has been made for a certain narrow strata of women, most of the women in the world are still struggling with the issues that concerned de Beavoir, Greer, Friedan, Millet et al plus a whole lot of others they couldn't have predicted would still be present in the 00's like being sold as slaves, getting AIDS from unprotected and unwanted sex, unremitting poverty, and seeing their children die in Darfur and Iraq and right here in east Los Angeles. And there is little information that is traded between these disparate segments, even less solidarity. Maybe now that the world is interconnected like never before, that we KNOW about all of this in REAL time that it's time to broaden the definition of feminism so that our children don't think of it only as having to do with farm garments and anti-depilatory-ism.
So as a kind of advance team for this Thursday, sisters, (another word very much out of vogue), I took a 17 year old young woman with me when WACK opened who, as if to attest to her neo-feminist bona fides, had rather matter of factly explained to me on the drive downtown that her parents had split up because of all her fathers affairs and addictions, who had been in charge of her younger siblings since her mom worked and who couldn't afford to attend the many colleges that she was pretty sure would accept her.
My young charge gamely took in the porn, the self absorption, the self flagellation, the anger, the myopia, the wildly divergent media and styles that made it hard to pigeonhole the art. She immediately assured me that she was used to this kind of thing, and indeed, the images intended to shock look so familiar now as be commonplace.
What's changed since 1970 is the anger. Absent the anger, the provocative imagery has become deracinated, homeless, in search of its raison d'etre, a sales tool for Abercrombie, enticing images for men that have somehow migrated to being the ideal for young women too.
We're not allowed to be angry anymore or share our frustrations out loud with other women because it's counterproductive, and well, we wouldn't want anyone to call us a.....feminist.
But wait a second. Is it possible in the midst of the forest of My-Spaced-out teenagers, overqualified and desperately-seeking female singles, cranky, schizophrenic mommies and menopausal empty nesters that this word, a word that for years had been banished to etymological purgatory, the other F word, is nudging around the edges, trying to push its way back into our consciousness?
I know it's out there because my sons have both just come home from college having had their eyes opened by girlfriends who are getting cranky with them for their occasional stereotyping and teachers who present feminism as a construct by which they can rightfully measure their coursework in film and media, neuroscience and even biology.
What does the picture of contemporary womanhood look like to these young women?
All the way through girlhood and their teenage years, these girls have been "amazing": they excel in school, play musical instruments, write, paint and pole vault. They are now being accepted at first tier colleges over their male peers, take more focused courses which prepare them for better jobs and get good jobs after school. Title IX assures them of parity on the playing field. Of those young women I've met through my sons, most have conformed to this new stereotype. Beautiful, fearless, (Arianna's book just out in paperback) intelligent, ambitious, they run rings around my young males and have been boosters for their minds as well as their hearts. They're research scientists working on curing Parkinson's, accountants managing reporting for the banking and insurance industries, art world administrators readying themselves for careers in first amendment law. They don't move back in with their parents nearly as much after school as the boys do. And as a result, many of them are totally fried over achievers.
Just ahead of them they see the twenty somethings who are exhausted from climbing the corporate ladder (Catalyst has recently reported that the percentage of women at the top of corporate America is shrinking. Three out of four women would still prefer to work for a man) or ricocheting off the serial commitment phobes they meet on the internet. Many of them put off marriage, and consequently babies, until they have come to a place in their careers when they feel they can take a step back. This feeling, sadly, never actually happens.
The thirty somethings are in an ideological war with each other: mommies who want to stay home, those who want to work, those who want to split the difference but can't figure out how to do it gracefully or because they just can't afford it.
The privileged ones have put their babies on pre-school waiting lists in utero, found the right doulas and nannies, trimmed down to their pre-baby weights by three months after birth, gone back to work part time by six months and full time by a year or else they are running the parent association, the annual charity ball or the club sports team.
Or, like the ones at my husband's office, they are desperately trying to find affordable day care, worried about moving to a house where the public schools are good, trying to figure out about after school care that doesn't keep their child on the runny nose list in perpetuity, and being able to take an occasional afternoon off work to go sit on a bench at a child's sports event.
Or like the moms of the inner city girls I mentor, they are just trying to keep their kids out of the crosshairs of the gangs on the corner, and speak enough English so that they can be employed, or get their own mothers over illegally for help looking after the kids or to get them free kidney dialysis or get their green cards so that they don't have to look over their shoulders forever after working twelve or fourteen hour days to keep their own, and our, economy going.
Then there are the E nesters, the women their mother's age, boomers who are scrambling desperately to keep up with all the technologies including those that make them look as young as they feel and who are still trying to make their marks in the world since some of them made the feminine mistake of not working while their kids were growing up.
And then there are the few stragglers, looking around at everyone else flipping out and just saying no to it all and continuing on their merry way to write the great novel or paint the great painting or take over the world and they have no time for anything but their work.
In short, in every category they are all totally overwhelmed and if you ask them if they are feminists they kind of look at you like, how is this relevant to me?
But they're not angry. They're frazzled and hectic and overworked and perfect but they are not angry. They are pretty sure it's something they have to figure out themselves. They're not waiting for old fashioned sisterhood to bail them out.
But along with the disappearance of the anger has come a commensurate loss of community, of collectivity, a feeling like you are all in this together, not just alone in your house with your kids or in the office on the 39th floor or in South Central behind a chain link fence, that you could reach out, and well, maybe actually touch someone who would understand.
Where does this leave my young friend who is already hosting something called Project Safezone where young women (and young men) who are feeling lost can look to their peers and speak freely about how horrible and alone they feel to look for role models (another word that's "out" ) today? As corny as consciousness raising was (a piece called Waiting by Faith Wilding in the WACK show shows just how sorry for themselves women could feel), it accomplished one thing: we knew we weren't alone.
Elizabeth Peyton, Dana Schutz and Marlene Dumas sell their paintings for millions. Hillary Clinton is running for President and Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker. But they probably wouldn't credit feminism for their success. It's because they are talented, wheelers and dealers, willing to get their hands dirty with big time art dealers or political favors and backroom maneuvering.
When people complain that Clinton's trying to be all things to all people, that she's too much of a centrist, I see another dynamic at work. First of all, she wants to be the President of the whole country. She has to be elected by a majority of the people. There's no way she (or any Democrat) is going to do it by appealing just to me and my ilk. Sadly.
But more important, I think that's the most feminist a/k/a feminine trait she possesses: what woman doesn't feel she has to take care and please?
Clinton is more likely to resemble Eleanor Antin whose work Domestic Peace is my favorite piece in the WACK retrospective for its sense of humor and spot on analysis of what makes women tick. The charts and graphs that document Antin's 17 day "holiday" are hilarious and make one wince in recognition.
Here's how the conceptual piece goes:
Antin went to NY to visit her mother with her young son and her husband. Knowing full well that she and her family would often fall short of her mother's expectations, she prepared a number of different "carefully chosen stories" to respond to her mother's( and her husband's and son's) various states of being which she mapped (angiogram-like) as Boredom, Calm, Artful and Pleasant, Agitation, Argumentative, Hysteria>, Provocation. During "hectic times when [she] would be forced to stay in the apartment for fairly long periods (and when they were apt to be cranky) [she}kept a set of reserves, back up conversational gambits to keep her out of trouble. If things were going well, she shared something more ambitious.
Ergo Clinton: when she thinks it's a "good day" she risks talking honestly about the war. When she senses impatience with "abrasive elements" she is artful and pleasant and talks a kind of doublespeak. Rarely is she argumentative or does she provoke: she didn't get the 26 million dollars in the first quarter by ruffling feathers but by smoothing them.
In a recent eye popping episode of PBS's Nature, the female desert elephants of Tanzania got together in a kind of football offensive front line to retrieve a baby that had been snatched away by another family group in a turf war. When the mother is later irretrievably injured by a tribesman's spear in another turf war, the grandmother bravely takes charge of the little one.
Now that's feminism.
It's harder to see that dynamic at the office. We need to share our history, and our ever bumpy trajectory but not just by showing the 39th floor corner space. (And if it's true that more women are staying home, then many will be taking their daughters to work by demonstrating how to multi task with their home-based internet companies while ironing and making a mean lasagna at the same time.) Our daughters, and our sons too, need to witness our collective power and our leadership, how we could be responsible for ending the war, greening our environment, stopping human trafficking, in short how we can take the word "feminist" out of the farmers garment-lazy hygiene puddle it has sadly fallen into. To round it out by bringing back the anger and adding the feminine at the same time
The whole thing came together for me at WACK: the joy, the sexiness, the torment and the rage, the gift of being a woman.
It made me want to run right home and shave my legs.