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feminism 101 by amy levinson

Gina Gionfriddo has written a play wherein a feminist scholar debates feminist theory only to discover she has fallen victim to the very constructs she has always deplored. But Rapture, Blister, Burn is not a feminist polemic or diatribe. It is, instead, a heartfelt, intelligent, moving story of women (and men) finding their place in the world.

While this play certainly isn’t about the feminists to whom Gionfriddo refers, this crash course in feminist theory may be useful. Below are just a few of the women who have analyzed women’s roles and perspectives. Love ‘em, hate ‘em — as the character Catherine points out it’s as important to study ideas with which you disagree as it is to study those which validate our points of view.

1777 All states pass laws that forbid women to vote.

1860 Connecticut becomes the first state to prohibit all abortions after the American Medical Association announces its opposition to abortion.

1866 Congress passes the 14th Amendment, which grants all citizens the right to vote. It is the first time that “citizens” and “voters” are defined as “male” in the Constitution.

1869 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton form the National Woman Suffrage Association, while Lucy Stone and others form the American Woman Suffrage Association. The territory of Wyoming passes the first women’s suffrage law in the U.S. 1896 The National Association of Colored Women is formed out of more than 100 black women’s clubs.

1920 Congress passes the 19th Amendment, granting women suffrage. It passes in the Senate by only two votes.

1923 Alice Paul drafts the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

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Betty Friedan Betty Friedan founded and became the first president of The National Organization for Women. (NOW). NOW advocated fiercely for legal equality between women and men. They lobbied for enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed major forms of discrimination against racial, ethnic, national and religious minorities and women. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public. NOW also pushed for execution of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, a United States federal law amending the Fair Labor Standards Act, aimed at abolishing wage disparity based on gender.

Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963 would become one of the most influential books describing the plight of women in industrialized societies. In it she points out that the average age of marriage was dropping and the birthrate was increasing for women throughout the 1950s, yet the widespread unhappiness of women persisted. American culture insisted that fulfillment for women could be found in marriage and housewifery. She summarized, “we can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.” She depicted the full-time homemaker role as stifling and asserted that she had never seen a positive female role-model who worked outside the home and also kept a family, while many existed. This was vehemently disputed by the mass media, educators and psychologists, not unlike the current debate of women assuming combat roles in the military.

The Feminine Mystique has been a critical influence to authors, educators, writers, anthropologists, journalists, activists, organizations, unions and everyday women taking part in the feminist movement.

Phyllis Schlafly As the most visible and effective critic of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), Phyllis Schlafly squared off against the National Organization for Women and other pro-ERA groups in one of the most bitter battles of the 1970s. Critics called her a hypocrite: though she lauded stay-at-home mothers and wives, she herself was a full-time political activist and lawyer. Nonetheless,

1936 A federal law is modified, making birth control information no longer classified as obscene.

1945 Millions of working women lose their jobs when servicemen return from World War II, although surveys show that 80 percent want to continue working.

1960 The Food and Drug Administration approve birth control pills.

1963 The Feminine Mystique is published.

1964 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

1966 The National Organization for Women (NOW) is founded.

1968 The EEOC rules that sexsegregated help wanted ads are illegal, a ruling later upheld by the Supreme Court.

Shirley Chisholm is the first black woman elected to Congress.

1972 The ERA is passed by Congress and sent to states for ratification.

Title IX bans sex discrimination in schools.

Ms. Magazine is first published.

1973 In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court legalizes abortion and overturns anti-abortion laws in many states.

My Secret Garden is published.

betty friedan

phyllis schlafly

Schlafly’s grass-roots efforts prevailed, and the ERA went down to defeat. Schlafly remains a force in conservative politics, with a busy lecture schedule. She is the president of the pro-life, anti–gay marriage Eagle Forum, which has 25,000 members. (TIME Magazine, 2009) Schlafly’s version of the women’s movement was born in 1972, when, as she put it, “some of us realized we had to protect ourselves against the takeaway of the legal rights of the homemaker that was embodied in the ERA.” She defined a Positive Woman as dedicated to truth, faith, service, God, family and “this great country” (the United States). Positive Women, she said, did not seek self-fulfillment as the highest value, but instead, “had their scale of values in order: no matter what they may seek for their own self-fulfillment, they know that the family is more important.” Her arguments against the ERA included claims that it would: undermine traditional families, remove legal protections of wives, subject women to the military draft, remove barriers to women in combat, promote abortion on demand, open the way for “homosexual marriage” and require that public bathrooms be unisex.

Like Friedan, who many considered Schlafly’s political and literary rival, Schlafly was an influential voice during the fight for equality. But unlike her adversary, she believed that “motherhood must be a self-sacrificing role. The mother must be able to subordinate her self-fulfillment and her desire for a career to the well being of her children so she can answer her child’s call any hour of the day or night. This is what marriage and motherhood are all about.”

Nancy Friday Nancy Friday’s successful novels (My Secret Garden, Forbidden Flowers) have seen her placed among feminist pioneers on the subject of women and sex. Her writings argue that women have often been reared under an ideal of womanhood that is outdated and restrictive.

Her thesis posed that fiction found women largely under and misrepresented in regards to their inner lives. By drawing a more intimate

1976 The first marital rape law passes in Nebraska, making it illegal for a husband to rape his wife.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act passes, banning employment discrimination against pregnant women.

1978 More women than men are entering college for the first time in American history.

1981 Sandra Day O’Connor is the first woman ever appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg joins her in 1993.

1982 ERA ratification efforts fail.

1986 The Supreme Court rules that sexual harassment is a form of illegal job discrimination.

1993 The Family and Medical Leave Act goes into effect, allowing women workers to take employment leave after giving birth.

Men, Women and Chain Saws is published.

1994 The Violence Against Women act increases services for rape and domestic violence victims, as well as federal penalties for sex offenders.

nancy friday

carol clover

and rich portrait of women in her writing, she hoped to open a door for women to express themselves more fully and therefore enjoy being women more completely. Friday has explained how, “in the late 1960s I chose to write about women’s sexual fantasies because the subject was unbroken ground, a missing piece of the puzzle ... at a time in history when the world was suddenly curious about sex and women’s sexuality.” She stood to reverse the long held belief that, “women do not have sexual fantasies.”

Friday posited that women were consumed with guilt where sex was concerned primarily based on societal expectations of what it means to be a “good girl.” Her follow-up to My Secret Garden, My Mother/My Self took on that very subject. Friday, like other feminists, was especially concerned with the idea of “good girls” vs. “bad girls” and how a woman’s sexuality was inextricably linked to these labels.

Carol Clover Clover, a medievalist, had written extensively on the literature and culture of early northern Europe, especially the Old Norse sagas. From her expertise in formulaic narrative grew her interest in contemporary cinema. Men, Women, and Chain Saws investigated the appeal of horror cinema, in particular the phenomenal popularity of those genres that feature female heroes and play to male audiences: slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Such genres seem to offer sadistic pleasure to their viewers, and not much else. Clover, however, argued the reverse: that these films are designed to align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the female tormented — with the suffering, pain, and anguish that the “final girl,” as Clover calls the victimhero, endures before rising, finally, to vanquish her oppressor. (Princeton University Press) Clover’s new take on the slasher heroine became part of a larger dialogue dealing with female empowerment. Men, Women, and Chain Saws posited that the long held ideas of women being killed for hyper-sexuality in slasher films was an oversimplification and instead women were frequently the heroes of these stories.

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