COMM 390: 'Who Won Feminism?' -- this won't be on the final (but 5 extra credit points if you see this, read the story and quote it on your essay)

... because it sure as hell would have been on the final if The Washington Post had run it before I made out the final exam question!

Naomi Wolf, author and political consultant, has written several important books on feminism. She has an article in today's Post suggesting the new face of feminism is the "Cosmo girl" you see in Cosmopolitan magazine: "The stereotype of feminists as asexual, hirsute Amazons in Birkenstocks that has reigned on campus for the past two decades has been replaced by a breezy vision of hip, smart young women who will take a date to the right-on, woman-friendly sex shop Babeland." All of this has major implications for what we studied this semester.

Wolf's article is a review of a biography of Helen Gurley Brown, "a young self-described 'mouseburger' who was raised in Arkansas during the Depression, who never graduated from college but wrote a bestseller that sold in 28 countries and who became, for a quarter-century, the voice of one of America's most influential women's magazines." The magazine, of course, is Cosmo. Brown's bio is by Jennifer Scanlon, a women's studies prof at Bowdoin College.

You've got to love that word "mouseburger."

But the value of Wolf's reveiw is in her description of what she calls "second wave feminism," the women's lib movement of the 1970s that won major legislative victories for women's rights but lost the public relations battle:

... second wave feminism, loosely described, was sincere in its emotional tone, reformist (though many would say radical) in its goals and middle-class or upper-middle-class and overwhelmingly white in terms of its most visible spokeswomen. Its great strength lay in analyzing entrenched gender-based power and challenging it politically, ushering in the great triumphs that made women's lives today possible -- from reproductive rights to Title IX to laws against sexual assault and domestic violence.

But its shortcomings grew more visible with wear: Second wave theory and practice tended toward humorlessness. The movement often saw men and women in opposition (rather than seeing sex discrimination as the enemy). It sometimes viewed domesticity and family life as a trap rather than a potential source of joy for both sexes. It could be puritanical about sexuality, and it often cast a skeptical eye on what it saw as women's frivolous pursuit of romance, fun and fashion.

Wolf contrasts this with "third wave" feminism, which she finds equally in Cosmo and First Lady Michelle Obama:

It has led to an embrace of what was once so politically suspect -- the notion that you can be a "lipstick lesbian" or a "riot grrrl" if you want to be, that you can choose your persona and your freedom for yourself.

But that very individualism, which has been great for feminism's rebranding, is also its weakness: It can be fun and frisky, but too often, it's ahistorical and apolitical. As many older feminists justly point out, the world isn't going to change because a lot of young women feel confident and personally empowered, if they don't have grass-roots groups or lobbies to advance woman-friendly policies, help women break through the glass ceiling, develop decent work-family support structures or solidify real political clout.

I'm not sure I buy all of this. (And Wolf shows herself a "second-wave" feminist in the end.) But it's one of the best short critiques of the feminist movement overall that I've seen lately.