On feminism for teachers
How to avoid oversimplification and why it's important
I’ve been a feminist for a pretty long time. We have our First, Second, Third and now with #MeToo Fourth Wave Feminists but I was what you might call a Default Feminist. What’s not to like about equal pay, am I right? This changed for me when I recently read Julie Bindel’s Feminism for Women. I initially heard about Julie, a Radical Feminist, from Bari Weiss’s excellent podcast, Honestly. If you’re a Default Feminist like I was, they’re both worth investigating.
I don’t go in for the idea of the classroom as primarily a social justice arena, but in English, Theory is often essential in understanding an author’s purpose. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is a good example. Likewise, rich critical discussion of a text like the contentious To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is made possible with a Critical Race lens. But it turns out that I have been oversimplifying feminism. Does this even matter? I think it does.
Full disclosure: I’m about to express an embarrassingly flawed approach that I have been foisting upon students. I know other teachers, male and female, also oversimplify various perspectives. I can’t speak for others but in hindsight, I think it’s all too common that our explanations are shaped by the concerns of the day. My students have certainly not been harmed by dropping in casual references to third wave feminism. But I’ll use a couple of literary examples that I hope demonstrate why distinctions matter.
On feminism in English
I taught in a girls school for several years. Feminism, in its Default sense, was part of what we teachers call the ‘hidden curriculum’. I’m completely in favour of enabling and emboldening students in a context-specific way. But I didn’t look too closely at the kind of feminism I was supporting, again largely due to my assumption that it was widely thought to be a good thing. For several years, in a unit on women’s voice and rhetoric, I taught Emma Watson’s now famous He for She speech that she gave at the United Nations. Watson argues that we have to bring men along, with an underlying aim of making feminism more palatable and attractive to men. Watson promotes a liberal feminism, spoken from a position of privilege and of little practical use to so many women.
Here’s what Julie Bindel has to say about the impact of liberal feminism, which aims to give equal opportunity and ‘choice’ to women, without questioning whether those ‘choices’ would be necessary or even desirable without patriarchy.
Emma Watson seems to believe that feminism is about ‘choice’. That’s right, the privileged young woman who sailed through life being able to choose a top-notch education and drama school has come up with a brilliant idea for women’s emancipation. And that idea is that we choose our way out of our oppression. As she explained to Elle magazine in 2014: ‘If you want to run for prime minister, you can. If you don’t, that’s wonderful, too. Shave your armpits, don’t shave them, wear flats one day, heels the next. We want to empower women to do exactly what they want.’ She has been rightly ridiculed by all and sundry for promoting ‘superficial feminism’ that is utterly meaningless and useless to any real woman.
So forget that you live with your three under-fives on the eleventh floor of a tower block with no working lift. Don’t worry that you are claiming benefits because you have no childcare and so can’t go out to work. If you want to, just go and run for prime minister. Or don’t. Either way, you are empowered. If the idea of public office feels too cumbersome, then choose to turn your attention to your armpits. To shave or not to shave? It’s your choice, remember.
Bindel, Julie. Feminism for Women: The Real Route to Liberation (pp. 86-87). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.
This brand of liberal feminism - and I use the word brand deliberately - does not expand minds by bringing to light the issues that universally face half the world’s population. And it barely satisfies a social justice imperative. It encourages paternalistic permission-seeking and makes relatively privileged students feel that the choice not to shave is a subversive act. Feminism wins the day - down tools, ladies!
The second mistake I have made in my teaching was all my own. I had confused liberal or ‘choice’ feminism with third wave, misreading the infinite divisions of female racial and gender identities as being somehow connected to the idea of choice and relative feminism. I suppose in a way, Watson’s choices are highly relativistic, so I can forgive myself for reading third wave as a kind of choose-your-own-adventure feminism. For years, I have explained Margaret Atwood’s character Anne-Maree in Hag-Seed as an example third wave feminism, believing that her individualism constituted some kind of bespoke or DIY approach. But her successes are mostly in the workplace, reflecting Atwood’s liberalism, and Anne-Maree’s independence is still fairly token, operating only in relation to Felix’s male-dominated theatre and admired for her masculine physical strength.
On why distinctions matter
So why does it matter that I have been calling Margaret Atwood a third wave feminist and not a liberal? Well, there’s the personal, the political and the educational reasons. Personally, I feel like I have been a Derelict Feminist. Feminism isn’t one thing: we need to credit the movements that facilitate real change, and seriously question the iterations that don’t. The latter have potential for stagnating the movement altogether. The political reason is that it’s all too easy to steer our politics and teaching to the trends of the day. The conflation of Gender and Queer politics only serves to dilute feminism. Finally, and most relevant, is the educational reason for these distinctions: facts and understanding are important. Nuance is important.
Feminism is not one homogenous movement or era. Feminism has historically been about actual change for women. Suffrage made women visible stakeholders in their own societies. Birth control gave women real choice in their lives. The Liberal Feminist movement towards equal pay and conditions has not yet achieved its goal but has had a positive effect thus far. #MeToo has brought sexual harassment out into the open. Radical Feminism continues to challenge male violence against women around the world. When a brand of feminism splinters women’s issues and identities into so many ‘standpoints’ as to render our experience meaningless, or presents feminism as a superficial set of privileges wrapped up as ‘choices,’ this deserves to be called out and corrected. If my example is anything to go by, the history of feminism is poorly understood and I think as a historical, current and literary movement, it deserves more from teachers.