Katha Pollitt: Amber Waves of Blame

Can we please stop talking about feminism as if it is mothers and daughters fighting about clothes? Second wave: you're going out in that? Third wave: just drink your herbal tea and leave me alone! Media commentators love to reduce everything about women to catfights about sex, so it's not surprising that this belittling and historically inaccurate way of looking at the women's movement--angry prudes versus drunken sluts--has recently taken on new life, including among feminists. Writing on DoubleX
.com, the new Slate spinoff for women, the redoubtable Linda Hirshman delivered a sweeping attack on younger feminists for irresponsible partying, as chronicled on Jezebel.com, a Gawker-family blog devoted to "Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing." Likewise, a silly "debate" over whether Sex and the Single Girl did more for women than The Feminine Mystique followed the release of Jennifer Scanlon's Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown. As Naomi Wolf wrote in the Washington Post, "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of feminists as asexual, hirsute Amazons in Birkenstocks that has reigned on campus for the past two decades has been replaced by a breezy vision of hip, smart young women who will take a date to the right-on, woman-friendly sex shop Babeland." Pick your caricature.

What's wrong with parsing feminism along a mother/daughter divide? Everything.

First of all, it's chronologically off. If second wavers are those who made the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and '70s, they are not the mothers of today's young feminists but their grandmothers. Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Barbara Seaman and Del Martin are dead. Adrienne Rich is 80, Robin Morgan is 68. Gloria Steinem, still fabulous, celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday on March 25. The wave construct obscures the perspective of women ten or even twenty years younger, like, um, me--in 1966, when NOW was founded, I was a junior in high school--or Susan Faludi (b. 1959), bell hooks (b. 1952) or Anna Quindlen (b. 1952).