4a. The ERA and Power

Another serious problem facing women is the denigration of feminists and feminist thought and the lack of knowledge about the realities of deep-rooted sexism. Equality is not just a trendy, femme word. Shouting “I’m equal” and “my rights” carries no weight without comprehending the history, concepts, complications, practices, actions and behavior of the equal female. What does equality with men mean personally, legally and in society-at-large? And how does it evidence itself? Why and how is the equal female different from one who is not?

Recently I was talking to two women – one was a professional, about 50 years plus, with a teenaged son; the other was 20 and had just started film school. The young one said she’d never even heard of women’s studies until she got to college. (She was taking a few courses.) The older one said, “What is women’s studies about, anyway?” (I told her.) Then she said she was concerned about what to say to her son about young girls’ aggressive sexual behavior. (She hesitated, concerned that by mentioning teen-aged sluts, she might offend my feminist sensibilities.) I said she should tell him that if he saw girls having indiscriminate sex they were to be avoided and that their conduct had nothing to do with feminism and everything to do with bad training, bad judgment and lack of self-respect.

In between these two examples of cluelessness is the incessant sturm und drang of women questioning if they are or are not feminist enough – or at all; and if they should or should not be one, period, and what either decision might mean. Usually they disguise their anxiety with quandaries about whether or not they should wear lipstick and high heels (lipstick feminism, I call it; more on that later) – or walk through a door if a man holds it open. Their reluctance to grapple with hard facts is both lamentable and harmful – and a reflection of the failure of transmission of feminist knowledge. And the low level of concern about their own social and political position is mindboggling.

A approachable way to open up this conversation is to revisit the Equal Rights Amendment. The stakes of the ERA are different now than those voiced when it was introduced and defeated. (The ERA was introduced in the US Congress in 1923, failed ratification in 1982 and was re-introduced in 2005). During that period the emphasis was on being equal with men under the law.

The defeat of the ERA can be held up as an icon of how American society has failed women. It means that equality is considered optional for us and that the egalitarian values we proclaim far and wide do not apply to American women.

Now the concept must be re-phrased and re-understood. Equality must be defined by a comprehensive understanding of women’s status, reality and the consequences of having or not having the power to act in favor of saving our planet, our home, our future.

Equality for women means access to and the assumption of equal power and turns the entire patriarchy on its head. Patriarchal power involves control of the many by the few, while equality for women – half the population acquiring power which previously belonged to men – blows that model out of the water. How upsetting! Can stability actually result from overturning those who have been at the helm for so long? Is this yet another major threat to the earth? Yikes!!

Don’t expect it to be easy, as it has not been in the past. The same sexist power behavior and the time-honored coercion of media, market and politics will continue its attempt to crush women’s work to legitimize their equality with men as has been done for the past near-century and the five thousand years prior. It is to be expected.

When you think about the ERA in the past, we were asking, negotiating, persuading. Now we must assume it and make sure we get it. After all, we are the feminist majority.