The state of feminism in America

Does it still exist in the form it has since the early days of the movement? Is there a new feminism (as even Pope John Paul II referred to in some of his writings) that has replaced it by a newer movement? Or….is that term too laden with imagery and deeply ingrained in the cultural mindset to even be revived?

The Economist has raised it in this interesting piece about America’s feminists. But who are they?

THIS was supposed to be the year in which America’s feminists celebrated the shattering of the highest glass ceiling. They had the ideal candidate in Hillary Rodham Clinton, a woman who had been tempered in the fires of Washington. And they had every reason to think that she would whip both the young Barack Obama and the elderly John McCain.

But it was Mrs Clinton who got the whipping. She not only lost an unlosable primary race. She was dissed and denounced in the process.

All true enough. It has been an astonishing defeat.

Mr McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running-mate has turned the defeat into Armageddon. Mrs Palin is everything that liberal feminists loathe…

Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms magazine, says that “Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton”. Kim Gandy, the president of the National Organisation of Women, dismisses her as a “woman who opposes women’s rights”. Debbie Dingell, a leading Michigan Democrat, said that women felt insulted by the choice.

And those are just some of the mentionable things being said about her by liberal feminists. Here’s another, odd one.

Sally Quinn, a writer for the Washington Post, has even argued that, given the size of her family, she cannot possibly be both a national candidate and a good mother.

That’s just intellectually dishonest, at best.

But is feminism really faring so badly? American women are certainly under-represented in public life. They make up less than 20% of governors and members of Congress. The number of women on the Supreme Court has recently fallen by half, from two to one, thanks to Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement. But what Ms Steinem regards as the most “restricting force” in America is nevertheless getting ever less restrictive. Some of the most culturally conservative states in the country, such as Kansas and Michigan, have female governors. In 1998 women won the top five elected offices in Arizona. Mrs O’Connor was arguably the most powerful voice on the Supreme Court for decades.

Furthermore…

Projections show that by 2017 three women will graduate for every two men. The meritocracy is inexorably turning into a matriarchy, and visibly so on many campuses: the heads of Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Brown and the National Defence University are all women.

Those are some stats. Now some interesting analysis…

One reason why younger women did not coalesce behind Mrs Clinton in the same way as their mothers must surely be that they have simply become accustomed to living in a world of opportunities.

It’s a new generation, and some of the older ones don’t want to give up the battle. Maybe Palin is to older angry feminists as Obama is to older angry civil rights activists. Just maybe.

In her idiosyncratic way, Mrs Palin also represents the fulfilment of the feminist dream. She demonstrates that gender is no longer a barrier to success in one of the most conservative corners of the land, the Alaska Republican Party. She also proves that you can be a career woman without needing to subscribe to any fixed feminist ideology. Camille Paglia hails her as the biggest step forward for feminism since Madonna.

Okay, not sure about that one…

But if feminism means, at its core, that women should be able to compete equally in the workplace while deciding for themselves how they organise their family life, then Mrs Palin deserves to be treated as a pioneer, not dismissed as a crackpot.