Ariana Ghasedi &
Andy Cornell
With Bush poised to create a straight flush Republican government, with
female incarceration rates soaring as poverty is increasingly feminized,
the time couldn’t be better for activists to assess the current state of
the feminist movement and lay out a plan for the future of feminism. The
new 400-page book, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future by
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, promises just such a panacea. Don’t
get your hopes up. The title is a misnomer and the praise from prominent
feminists on the back cover and in subsequent reviews arouse suspicions
of back scratching between friends or a sort of desperation for anything
written by someone under 40 containing the F-word. True, Baumgardner and
Richards have written an interesting and helpful book, but it’s hardly
the manifesta that we need.
Manifesta first describes what a day would be like without the current
achievements of the feminist movement. Subsequent chapters to discuss a
variety of currently debated feminist topics including the contributions
and shortcomings of “girlie” feminism, the sometimes flawed methods adult
women use to address adolescent girls’ lack of self-esteem, the dynamics
of young feminists personal relationships with their second wave mothers,
and a call for rational debunking of, rather than angry out-lashes against,
anti-feminist writings. Baumgardner and Richards make valid points in each
of these worthy topics. Yet, taken together, they don’t give us a clear
sense of where the Third Wave of feminism stands and in what direction
it needs to charge.
It appears that the authors of Manifesta have set goals too broad to achieve
with a single book, and that they write from too narrow a perspective.
In one section they try to give history lessons to young women just discovering
feminism, in another they constructively criticize their peers, and in
others they attempt to engage the godmothers of the movement. This leaves
Manifesta un- focused, without a central argument, and lacking a target
audience. It reads like a series of commentaries on current conversations
within mainstream feminism.
Manifesta’s discussion of Third Wave feminism is severely hindered by a
definition of it based more on participants’ age and generation than on
their adherence to specific theoretical currents and tactical approaches.
If the Third Wave lacks these binding factors, the authors might have more
efficiently used their pages to highlight coalescing trends and offer more
thorough suggestions regarding their vision for an effective Third Wave.
Even Richards and Baum- gardner’s conception of “young women” is strangely
lacking. They discuss the work of women, like them, in their early-to-mid
30s, who work in media (mostly in New York City), and they discuss the
movement towards improving the self-worth of middle school age girls, but
leave a gaping hole by rarely referring to the contributions women between
the ages of 15 and 25 have made in the last ten years. This means that
the book lacks in-depth discussion of important work done by high school
and college students—including gay-straight alliances, the activism of
women in the hip-hop scene, and the movement to defend Affirmative Action
on university admissions. Perhaps the most notable omission is a detailed
examination of Riot Grrl—one of the most important developments in Third
Wave feminism to date.
Early in the book Baumgardner and Richards criticize mainstream media for
focusing solely on a few charismatic leaders of the Second Wave, claiming,
“It’s a surefire sign of oppressed status when an entire group gets reduced
to one, or even three, individuals.” Yet Richards and Baumgardner do this
exact disservice to Riot Grrl, by mentioning only a handful of the most
visible participants—Kathleen Hanna, Tammy Rae Carland, and Nomi Lamm—and
then focusing more on their personalities than on the essential features
of the movement they helped form.
This is unfortunate, since a thorough examination of Riot Grrl could be
very instructive. Baum- gardner and Richards discuss the importance of
consciousness-raising groups to Second Wave women, yet they fail to see
trading personal zines about sexual assault, eating disorders, and sexuality
as a 1990’s reincarnation. They don’t attempt to discuss the new perspectives
Riot Grrls brought to feminism around self-mutilation, the relationship
between sexual abuse and mental health, and many other issues. Nor do the
authors consider the merits of the novel tactics employed by Riot Grrls,
such as writing derogative stereotypes of women on their bodies with markers.
Riot Grrl was often criticized for many of the same shortcomings, such
as a lack of racial inclusivity, that Second Wavers were 25 years ago.
Sadly, Baumgardner and Richards missed a perfect opportunity to discuss
why bridging the current Second and Third Wave chasm is so crucial and
how we might go about doing it. While they criticize the Spice Girls for
being light on feminism, they lack a deeper analysis of them as an integral
part of the co-optation of Riot Grrl’s radicalism—the process of changing
Girl Power into girls’ spending power.
Another primary deficiency of Manifesta is the authors’ focus on their
own careers as writers and activists, rather than on the work of a wider
array of feminists. This leaves poor women, queer youth, anti-sexist men,
and many other groups of people—along with their important contributions
to feminism—out of the discussion almost completely. Baumgardner and Richards
professional careers have been mainly within the confines of Second Wave
journalism such as Ms. Magazine. They discuss books like Reviving Ophelia
and The Morning After, web pages such as Maxi.com, and magazines like Bust
and Jane, as well as Ms. This focus on media leads the reader to believe
that the important feminist work being done today occurs only within the
realm of popular media, not in activism and organizing campaigns. One has
to ask, “Do these women truly believe that the merits of Jane magazine’s
beauty Q & A column are a more critical concern to young women and the
future than the Clinton administration’s gutting of welfare, or were they
just not interested in researching and thinking outside of their field
of expertise?”
The writers contend that fictitious characters like Bridget Jones, from
Helen Fielding’s novel The Diary of Bridget Jones, and television’s Ally
McBeal represent what the typical face of young feminism looks like. Offering
women like these fictional characters as symbols or icons of modern day
feminism is highly problematic and the authors’ suggestion that Jones and
McBeal are today’s feminists is offensive.
There is no question that a significant number of women today, like these
characters, suffer from low self-esteem and feel worthless without male
validation. However, Manifesta needs to address the problems that the
Jones/McBeal
version of feminism presents to the fight for equality, as opposed to agreeing
that they are acceptable female role models. In essence, the mainstream
media that has aided in the creation of characters like Jones and McBeal
have succeeded in allowing a more digestible feminism to perforate mainstream
society. This feminism is not one that will radically alter sexism as we
know it, or bring about equality and freedom for women. It is a diluted
feminism where women have some sexual and professional autonomy, yet are
still obsessed with their physical appearance and make their lives’ goal
to find and keep male companionship.
While one of the goals of Manifesta is clearly to move women to action,
the authors suggestions are focused more on encouraging women new to feminism
to take individual action, rather than on larger-scale movement building.
The actual “Manifesta” is a 13-point program of serious and broad goals
for Third Wave feminists to work towards. Concise, concrete, and fairly
radical, the Manifesta is one of the most useful parts of the book (another
being the letter the authors write to Second Wavers), yet it is only two
pages long, buried in the final chapter, and is not directly discussed
anywhere else in the book.
Additionally, the authors’ suggestions for action are mired in liberalism
and lack a connection to other current liberation movements. Throughout
the book, voter registration and “Get Out the Vote” Campaigns are celebrated
as a perfect example of good feminist activism, yet the author’s don’t
decry the lack of feminist candidates. And, take for example this line
from the book’s epilogue, a vision of the world feminists should be working
towards creating: “G.I. Joe, now a member of a peacekeeping force, likes
to shop at the mall.” While the author’s complain that other movements
lack a feminist perspective, they offer critiques, like this one, so narrow
that they fail to incorporate or address other progressive perspectives—in
this case anti-consumerism and the fallacies of “Military Humanism.”
Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future offers helpful insights
into the different contexts young women and previous generations work within.
The historical anecdotes sprinkled throughout are useful and interesting,
and the book is written in an informal conversational tone which makes
it accessible and engaging even to those who have never read books about
feminism. To this end the book succeeds more as a conversation starter
than a plan of action. Discussions of this sort are obviously important,
but in the current political climate they are definitely not enough.
Z
Ariana Ghasedi is the Western Pennsylvania organizer for Citizens For Consumer
Justice. Andrew Cornell is a freelance writer and activist.