I feel I need to address some personal history before wading into the depths of academic discourse, or current cultural discourse, on feminism. I need to situate myself among the cross-currents in order to avoid being carried off by a rogue wave or smashed into the rocks on shore. Abstract definitions are easily employed as weapons.
Virginia Woolf has taught me that fiction can be useful in these sorts of essays, so following her lead, I'm going to tell you that I'm having lunch tomorrow with a good friend, outside on the patio in the warmth of late spring, overlooking Portland harbor. My friend "A" and I are part of what scholar Kathleen Gerson calls the "unfinished revolution" -- women born in the late '60s who undeniably benefitted from legal and social breakthroughs of second wave feminism, but find the grand promises of full equality for women that were part of that revolution still unrealized in many ways.
A and I were under five years old when Helen Reddy’s anthem “I Am Woman” was hitting number one in 1972. I cannot reasonably claim to remember the song from that time, but it was played often enough on the radio throughout the ‘70s that I find myself remembering every inflection of Reddy’s phrasing although I haven’t heard the song in decades. The message of the song was echoed throughout the pop culture media of the ‘70s, particularly the elements of that media that were aimed at the young. It’s message merged effortlessly in my mind with the Schoolhouse Rock cartoon on women’s rights and with idealist messages on PBS shows for kids, asserting that girls could do anything boys could do. It was a message of personal empowerment, suggesting that the playing field for women was being leveled, or would be soon, and all women were required to do was stand up for themselves in their personal relationships and find the personal strength and self-confidence to reach for their own future.
A and I first met in the early '90s on an ill-fated political campaign to elect the first women governor in Louisiana. She still works for a top national organization dedicated to electing women to political office. In my previous career, I worked as a consultant to the same organization for many years, and worked as a consultant to numerous other women running for political office. We've also both worked for male candidates, and for other issue organizations. We are (or were, in my case,) political professionals on a certain side of the fence, not cause-oriented activists.
In that first campaign in Louisiana, we were accused by an older woman of taking the gains of second wave feminism for granted. I can say now, with 20/20 hindsight, that there were times in my 20s and early 30s where that was true. I am on record in (perhaps defunct) technology industry magazines saying that I never felt discriminated against as a woman working in the male dominated field of technology for political campaigns. I certainly believe that to be true at the time of the interview. To grab a phrase from another recent book title, I entered the early part of my working life believing that "feminism's work was done" and women could compete in politics or anywhere else on the basis of merit. When the woman candidate in Louisiana no longer met my personal definition of merit, I moved on. Does that mark me as a "third wave" feminist? Perhaps.
Then something curious happened: I had a baby. While I was on maternity leave, an employee quit with little notice. Suddenly I was back in the office, trying to run my consulting business and care for a baby at the same time. I did any number of things wrong, but through some combination of stubborness, naivete, belief in my own merit, and belief in the rhetoric of the political organizations that were my clients, I thought I could do it all. I was wrong. I struggled through the end of the 2004 campaign, and got out with what was left of my sanity.
Later, I came across the work of legal scholar Joan Williams. Her work allowed me to understand that the situation I faced after my daughter was born was not only a personal one -- that I made personal choices and compromises in the context of an economic system and culture that constrains the choices of caregivers (who are still overwhelming women) and within a legal system that has not remedied many forms of discrimination. A 2007 New York Times article on Williams’ work summarizes her arguments:
In the book, which set in motion the legal trend that now consumes much of her time, Williams argued that the growing tension between work and family was not simply a product of economic necessity. It stemmed, rather, from a marketplace structured around an increasingly outdated masculine norm: the “ideal worker” who can work full time for an entire career while enjoying “immunity from family work.” At a time when both adults in most families had come to participate in the labor force, Williams argued that this standard was unrealistic, especially for women, who remained the primary caregivers in most households.In this system, as Williams describes it, job advancement (and the definition of who is worthy of merit) goes to men and a small percentage of women who can perform as ideal workers – putting in the long hours, travel, and uninterrupted, concentrated effort that those jobs demand. I couldn't do so with a small child, and so I "opted-out". It was my choice, certainly, and a choice that many do not have, but if there had been a different system, I would have had different choices. I can't claim to support all of William's legal theories and policy proposals to create a different system, but her analysis brought me real understanding and acceptance in a difficult time. I suppose my consciousness was raised.
(Eyal Press, “Family-Leave Values”, The New York Times, July 29, 2007)
One of the interesting things to me about workplace issues for women in Mad Men, particuarly in season four, is the extent to which the series presents the dilemmas faced by the "women on the verge of the second wave" (as Mary Beth Haralovitch puts it in the title of her essay in the Edgerton book on Mad Men) as fundamentally similar to the work issues faced by women today. To me, the key set of definitions is not second wave vs. third wave feminism, but political action vs. private sector action.
At the height of the second wave in the early '70s, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her team were winning legal victories and the ERA was passing easily in the states, there was a palpable sense that things were changing in the public sphere -- laws were changing, behavior was changing. And they did change in real ways: my alma mater was off limits to women in the late '60s. I might have been unable to get a credit card in my own name, or a home loan. Changes in the law in the early '70s shaped what the private sector could and could not do. And then the changes stopped. ERA was defeated, and never revived. Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993. Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter fair pay act in 2009. Those two new laws constitute the significant legislative victories for women's rights since the fight over ERA.
Peggy, Joan, Faye and all the other working women we see on Mad Men largely fight their own individual battles within the private sphere of Sterling Cooper. Small moments of solidarity, like the moment in "Tomorrowland" when Joan and Peggy dish about Don's marriage to Megan, are celebrated by commentators as a sign of things to come in the women's movement. And perhaps we will see more signs of solidarity in seasons to come. I think though, on balance, we will see more divergent opinions and continued competition between the women of Mad Men's workplace. I think Matthew Weiner's realism about the workplaces of today informs his depiction of the workplaces of the early '60s. Competition trumps solidarity when the vast majority of the spoils go the "ideal worker".
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