Association of Libertarian Feminists

About ALF

Contact Info

Newsletter

Discussion Papers

Articles

Membership

What's New

Links

No. 76, Fall 2000

But What Does It Really Mean?

by Joan Kennedy Taylor

Last year at this time we looked at 2000 as the beginning of the millennium and a time to take stock, and this year we get to do it all over again. There’s not much change in the broad conclusions one might draw—last year, I said that the next big challenge for feminism was to encourage young girls to think of themselves as productive individuals who at the same time could bond together and help each other as women. At this year’s turn of the year, The New York Times ran a joint review of two current books about women’s future that make a similar point: Sex and Power, by Susan Estrich, and Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards. Both books, says reviewer Ann Hulbert, call for "a collective reawakening to ‘the idea that you can change your world.’" Both books call for feminists to "rise above feminist infighting." Both see the hoped for changes as concerted but not narrowly political. Estrich sees a future for women in ambition, and Baumgardner and Richards although calling for "grass-roots activism" offer a 13-point agenda that hardly sounds like the activism of yore. Indeed, Hulbert calls this agenda amorphous, and cites no. 11, "to make the workplace responsive to an individual’s wants, needs, and talent," as "the most concrete item."

The large, purely political movements that united women in feminist movements to improve their legal status do not seem to be going with American women into this new millennium—perhaps because of the considerable legal strides we have made over the past century, beginning with gaining the right to vote. In fact, the inspiration for remaining political activism concerning women is the condition of women in other countries—women being stoned and left to starve because they are forbidden to work outside the home in Taliban Afghanistan; "honor killings" of women accused of bringing scandal on the family in Pakistan; genital mutilation in some African countries.

A general subordinate status for women still exists in many countries: an interview in Working Woman with Carol Bellamy, the current executive director of Unicef, quotes her as saying, "Of the 110 million children not in school, two thirds of them are girls." And of course, we know that in many countries, sexual trafficking in young girls is not illegal. The Iranian Council of Guardians recently defeated a proposed law that would raise the age at which a girl’s family might marry her off from nine to 15, saying it was contrary to Muslim law.

When proposed changes to U.S. laws and policies may be able to impact such remnants of barbarism, they should be supported. Rita Simon, president of the Women’s Freedom Network, calls attention in an editorial in the Women’s Freedom Network Newsletter, Volume 7 Number 6, to new rules that have been proposed by our Immigration and Naturalization Service, for instance. For the first time, women fleeing domestic violence would be categorized as members of "a particular social group" subject to persecution in their countries who will be allowed to apply for asylum in the United States. The new rules were proposed on December 7, 2000, to be finalized 45 days later if they pass review. If adopted, battered women abroad will be able to apply for entry and asylum here, and those already living here who may be facing deportation could apply for asylum also.

It is still true that the price of liberty continues to be eternal vigilance. There are always laws and regulations being passed or enforced that restrict freedom, including the freedom of women. The war against all people living here that purports to be a war only against some commercial items, the War on Drugs, continues. Censorship laws continue to be proposed as necessary protections for women and children. At the end of the year 2000, a new filtering software requirement for all computers in public schools and libraries that use federal funds to connect to the Internet was passed and signed. In the name of protecting us all from a few things many people dislike—pornography, child exploitation, addictive substances that can ruin our health—the freedom of all is being nibbled at. Even conservative groups, who have often been outspoken in the past in supporting such government protection, are coming out against the new library filtering, for instance, now that they have discovered that their own web sites are being labeled as "hate speech" and are therefore made unavailable by library filtering systems.

Do American young people care enough to try to change their world? In the February 2001 Atlantic, 14 writers were asked their opinion on the social legacy of the Clinton years. Two women had especially relevant things to say. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild (who seems to have a New Deal liberal view of what political action is needed) says "That young people’s commitment to improving society has faded may turn out to be the most significant fact about the Clinton years," and notes that the percentage of 18 to 29 year-olds who read newspapers, have signed a petition, or have gone to a public meeting is in each case about half what it was in the seventies. Tish Durkin, a reporter for the New York Observer, points out trenchantly that perhaps one reason people don’t care is because political issues have been robbed of their meaning.

Durkin sees the Clintons as having transformed politics.

The result in the last election, she points out, is that Al Gore and George W. Bush drowned their differences "in such a pool of platitudes that they tied."

However, there may be in fact a yearning for some sort of meaningful socially transforming engagement on the part of many young people. ALF gets a number of requests from people who are hoping we will have meetings soon in Grand Rapids or North Platte or one of the many towns named Springfield. (Unfortunately, we don’t have that large a membership.) The success of World War II books and movies is another indication that many people have a sense that periods in which young people felt connected to each other and worked together toward idealistic goals created a sense of community that is missing today. Tom Brokaw’s book about the World War II generation who grew up in the Depression, The Greatest Generation, has currently been on the New York Times best seller list for 103 weeks. And to the surprise of toy makers, a very expensive doll with accompanying book, modeled on a little girl living in the Depression, was a big seller last Christmas.

ALF member Eugene G. Schwartz is compiling a book of articles and memoirs written by the members of that generation who founded the National Student Association in this country after the war, whose title alone I think will gain it a lot of attention when it is published later this year. The title is A Generation That Believed in America: Creating a College Student Voice After World War II. The question such a title brings to mind is—How did they do it? Those of us who believe strongly in civil liberties and Enlightenment values—including the Constitution—might like to hark back to believing in America, if it’s not an America that in the name of values installs asset forfeiture, censorship, and young people inflamed into killing each other over their differences.

Partisan politics didn’t do much unifying then and clearly won’t do it today.

The early National Student Association worked for academic freedom and against segregation. Censorship today centers on Internet access and on politically correct campuses wishing to curtail speech in the interest of protecting those considered to be vulnerable and moving to segregate them into identity groups. As yet there is not a general uprising against such censorship and segregation on campus, but it may come. Censorship moves against music, too—there is a little-noticed move in some localities to require concerts to be labeled as containing "explicit content" if the performer has had recordings labeled with a parental advisory label.

As long as it is accepted that such authoritarian moves are only to protect the young from harm, we are disarmed from protesting them. It hardly seems idealistic to call on people to fight for the right to indulge themselves. As Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate point out in their examination of political correctness, The Shadow University, campus authorities don’t have to fear a mass movement in the name of individualism. But the dangers of sex, drugs, and rock and roll are a cleverly crafted excuse, in the name of which we all must be regimented more and more tightly. Adults now cannot legally do controversial research on the Internet in public libraries unless they can persuade the librarian that the project is "worthwhile." People with no connection to drugs have had their cars, boats, even houses seized by the authorities because someone used drugs on their property. No matter what generation we belong to, we all can care about that. Maybe a mass movement in the name of individualism is not impossible, after all.