8. GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Today, March 8th, is International Women’s Day (and its 100th anniversary) and millions will be celebrating women’s achievements and making the case for women's rights around the world. And I will continue with this blog and its feminist purposes.

What will the world of women’s equal power combined with the feminine principle look like?

This is not an idle question but a reminder to look at our experience of the past. When the American struggle for women’s emancipation began (Seneca Falls 1848 was the historical starting point), women were still living in their “natural place.” Once they had won the vote (Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution 1920), they had to figure out what their suffrage and emancipation in this sense might mean. Today we have that period and our own experience of the past fifty years as reference. In comparison, we can examine the consequences of our failures and omissions, consider what we had to do to overcome our attachment to patriarchal values, see the results of our progress and cope with the contradictions of common sense – and live with all of this in an increasingly complex time.

During this time we have also learned to live with society’s permanent aggression against feminism – not only for being, but for not having created a panacea. In addition to everything else – like gaining equality under the law, for instance – supposedly we were to have created a world in which relationships were remade to suit some modern-day Cinderella and Prince Charming version of how mature adult women and men are supposed to live together. We were to have engineered a new woman package. She was to be economically successful, breeder and mom, homemaker and community activist, and a sexually pleasured and available entity who had enough private time for musing and her regular color and manicure at the beauty salon. Apparently feminism is at fault for not having designed and integrated this male-defined co-existence in each individual female.

The latest canard is an “economic paper” proving that “female happiness” has declined in the past 30 years; meaning, by extension, that women’s liberation has failed. [Source: Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers, 2009. "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 1(2), pages 190-225, August.]

I suspect that the spirits of my dead mother, aunts, grandmothers and their friends are trying to get their hands on one of these “happy meters” so they can try it out some afternoon over tea and optional sherry. I can just hear the guffaws of these women who came of age between the 1910s and 40s in conditions of world wars, virtually no legal rights and extreme hardship. Theirs would be bitter laughter at people who would characterize women’s liberation as a failure.

I don’t know any feminist who was naive enough to think that activism would change the world in six patriarchal days, meaning that now we could rest on our laurels. We had hope, and we believed. The moment was a watershed in history and we had great expectations for progress – which happened. The cynical fictions about how women failed were to be expected from a stunted, narrow-minded world of men and their submissive women who cannot escape the either-or, with-me-or-against-me mind set. I cannot speak for the current “we” of womanhood. But I still have hope. I still believe. I still have great expectations of our ability to change the world. And this time it has to be fast. Now.

[To be continued....]