The next wave?

I was in Montreal recently with my man, who is Quebecois. He had told me that in Quebec there is quite a militant feminism, and he often feels blamed by angry women when he enters any conversation about equality between women and men. He just ends up getting frustrated, there is no dialogue.

He said there also seems to be a double standard. On the one hand these women are angry at men for stamping them down and oppressing them, and they want to be leaders in their own right. They want men to be sensitive and caring. On the other hand these women don't respect a man who is weak, they complain that men in power are failing at being leaders, and they still want to be taken care of emotionally by the men around them.

This has left my man and his male friends perplexed and dismissing "feminism" as "man-hating". They feel utterly excluded from the entire discourse because the discourse is focused on blaming them, blaming men.

I found this all pretty fascinating. There are clearly cultural moves to feminism which show up differently at different times in different countries. What my man described to me as we drove towards his home town Montreal sounded to me like the echoes of second wave feminism. As I said to him, there was a time when this anger, this militance, was necessary. Maybe it always will have some kind of place, but second wave feminism, dubbed "women's liberation" in the 1970's and 80's, needed to be angry. It was the time of the sterotypical image of burning bra's, refusing to change one's last name if one was married, adopting "Ms" as a title, and being loud and proud about being lesbian, screaming out about oppression of women whether it be sexual, in the workplace, or at home.

Looking back at the "first wave" of feminism, known as womens' suffrage, in many developed western countries this movement in the early 20th century had given women the vote, property rights, and more access to the workplace. During the second world war, women in fact dominated the workplace and learned new skills in the labour market. Most of the men were off fighting in the war, women were needed in the workforce to keep the economy going. The quintessential image familiar to so many of us hailed from the U.S. War Production Co-Ordinating Committee, encouraging women to work to help the war effort.


And then, after the end of the second world war, what are the quintessential images of women in the western world? Happy homemaker, devoted housewife, desiring only to please her husband, raise good children, and over the moon when she is presented with modern whitegoods to make er job even more of a pleasure...this was a polemic shift to undo what the second world war had done to women's participation in the economy. Put women back in the home to ensure that men can return to work. Womens' economic participation became hidden and undervalued.

Of course women were angry. Having made so much headway, women were being told they should not proceed in careers, they should not work in skilled or unskilled labour, they would be paid less than their male counterparts for the same work, they should stop working when they got married (up until the 1960's in many western countries women lost their property rights and economic autonomy once they got married and became legal children, dependent on their husbands to sign all contracts and make all purchases) and at the same time sexual images of women were increasing in advertising, film and tv, decreasing women's value as anything other than a sexual object.

Of course women were pissed off! They needed to make noise to make the next wave, the next shift. And thus began the "second wave" of feminism.

And of course men were affected by this. And of course many women felt threatened by it too. (Women have often been the harshest of critics against their sisters who make noise abut women's rights) So in the 1980's we got the whole phenomenon of the backlash, depicting feminism as man-hating, and all feminists as butch dykes with no sense of femininity. "Power dressing" women were reaching higher positions professionally but were being ostracised by both their male and their female counterparts.

This backlash is what I heard in the background of my man's frustration towards the militant feminism he described in his home town. It is also something I recognise in the reaction many people have to the word "feminism" in the Netherlands, where I have lived for 12 years. There, people look with suprise and say "but women's emancipation is a fact, we're finished, it's done! What are you complaining about?" Feminism is a dirty word because it is associated with the push of the second wave, and since we are done addressing those concerns, it should be put to bed and forgotten about.

Perhaps I am simplifying things too much by saying it is cultural, but what strikes me is that the third wave of feminism that dominated Anglo-American academic discourse in the 1990's and early 2000's doesn't seem to have made it's way into some western countries' culture.

The third wave was all about being inclusive. Feminst scholars started to realise they were writing and speaking about the experience and perspective of the white, middle class, western woman. A black woman in the US may however identify more closely with black men who experience society in a certain way due to their colour, race or ethnicity, than she does with a white woman who shares her gender but nothing else. An Indian-born Hindi woman living in London might identify more closely with a Hindi man in than with an English-born Christian woman. A woman living in poverty in a developing country, or an indegenous woman in Australia may experience the world through her place in the economy more than through her gender identity. In order to rectify the fact that feminst scholarship was in fact guilty of the same hegemonic tunnel vision which it criticised in paternalistic or masculine-dominated world views, it started to deconstruct itself (part of the post-modernist buzz at the time) and aim to be more inclusive of diverse voices and experiences.

Ultimately, third wave feminism has many voices, there is no "one" feminism. A difference theory feminist will disagree on some substantive issues with an equality theory feminst, or a critical race theory feminist. In the end, post-modernism taught feminism that it is about the oppressive structures in society much more than it is about "men" oppressing "women". Gender is not at the cause, it is at the effect. And it may be only one (however important) effect. The same oppressive structures and belief systems oppress minorities of race, religion, ethnicity, create poverty divides and affect our environment. This inclusivity of different voices led to recognition of different experiences under these constructs and the need to consider different solutions. Inevitably, it led to recognising the need to include men's voices and experiences as well.

Therefore to make any real change, we need to include EVERYONE in how this change is to come about, and how we can all re-imagine our roles in socoiety. To me, this is the next wave, the fourth wave perhaps? The shifts that feminism has brought about has impacted both men and women. Giving women the space to participate in the economy and in policy making and in academia has meant men have had to reconsider their position in society as well. In fact if what we are seeking is equality, then there needs to be an equality in the discourse too.

What we are all seeking now is a re-balancing. We have torn down a language of oppression, we now need to shift away from any language of blame, and towards a language of responsibility. We need to take the focus from gender and place it on masculinity and femininity. A re-invention and rediscovery of what these things are can lead to a re-balancing in society, where men and women feel included in moving things forward.

Many would say the "battle of the sexes" is over, but some people are still fighting it. I would say it's more important to seek a balance between masculine and feminine within oneself, in order to understand the strengths and weaknesses, the divinity and the shadow, of each of these aspects of humanity. Once we can do that within ourselves, find that balance between masculinity and femininity, then we have something more worthwhile to contribute to the project of equality in the world.

It's a pity, in that respect, that I had to concede there was something in what my man had described about his experience of the blame-game in his home town when he pointed out a poster to me. It was advertising a network group for men - a support group, a group to just get together and talk about being men. I thought it was a fabulous idea, to be celebrated! But someone had stuck a sticker over it saying it was sexist advertising.

Sexist? Only if you think men getting together to talk about their masculinity is sexist. I would say quite the contrary - it's sexy! So damn sexy because it's a move toward the very re-balancing we all are seeking.