The Journal

Issue date: 11/10/05 Section: Opinion/Editorial

Andrea Noble

Feminism evolves in funny ways. For every wave pushed forth there's a tide that draws its advances back. Second wave feminism of the 1960s was the ball-breaking movement challenging the patriarchal status quo of society. According to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, the second wave, for all its successes in achieving greater recognition of women's rights, is also why women are having such hard times finding mates these days.

In an essay adapted from Dowd's soon to be released book Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide the feminist columnist argues that today's successful women are now recoiling from the shots their sisters fired over four decades ago. Dowd is independent, successful, intelligent and funny; and she cites all those qualities as the reasons she isn't married. Apparently in her black-and-white, stereotyped world, that just isn't what men want.

Dowd claims the more independent and successful a woman is, the less likely she is to get married and have a family; and maybe that's the truth, for New York socialites.
Dowd tries to pass off her quick-witted quips as blanket statements for the entire female population, though in reality, she addresses only upper-class, straight, college-educated women. Hardly America's majority.

By ripping on second waver's "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" mentality, Dowd finds a way to effectively ignore the third wave of feminism. These are the ideas of feminism which address issues women enrolled in college today would most likely identify with. She writes the movement off as faltering when in reality it is just shifting away from the points she was raised to believe were most important.

Queer theory and race were pushed into the forefront of feminist discussion by the third wave. Issues which Dowd never even bats an eye at in her essay. Modern-day feminists started down the long hard road to garner more support from men for women's issues, as opposed to the second wave approach, which for the most part, pushed them aside. Webster's own Students for Gender Equality embraces this idea without being a scary, man hating feminist organization. Just look at the group's name one more time.

Women are more empowered than ever because they have the choice to follow feminism's old roots or to lay their own. The defining element of the third wave is reclaiming some of the "girlie" territory the second wave found demeaning. They demonstrated a strong reclamation of power by adopting and using negative images of women as positives, as illustrated so perfectly in the piece "Reclaiming Cunt" in Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues."

Dowd cites that Ms. magazine doesn't have the circulation it used to, or more young, married women prefer to go by Mrs. not Ms. Is that really supposed to mean feminism is in a state of decline? Today's feminists aren't going to pick up the banners and continue marching exactly where second wavers left off, they are just as independent as their foremothers and are going to act as such.

Where Ms. fell off, Bust and Bitch picked up. There is the major support of feminist art movements like the annual St. Louis based "Venus Envy," or the nationally touring Guerilla Girls, who are stopping in St. Louis Nov. 11. Or the Riot Grrl music movement, which urged young women to just start making music no matter what level their talents were at.

Third wave feminism is in direct response to the push to make men obsolete. Just because a woman can dress the sex-kitten part, doesn't mean she's given up her ideals of gender equality. It does present one hell of a balancing act though. But all Dowd sees is a bunch of scantily-clad young women trying to bait men the old fashioned way. She assumes that if success is such a barrier to landing a relationship, it has to be compensated for in other ways. Some women haven't changed the way they play the dating game, but others, who like Dowd, didn't fully embrace second waver's notions of what an empowered woman should look or act like, have forged new paths.

Quoting Harvard business graduates who say they can't get dates after they tell men where they went to school, Dowd paints sweeping generalizations about how men want subservient women, not successful ones. In the process of whining on behalf of her upper echelon peers relationship woes, Dowd discounts the shifts and progressions of the rest of American feminism and the young women that define it.



Andrea Noble, a senior global journalism major, is the managing editor for The Journal.

Page 1 of 1

Article Tools