As a participant in the women’s movement during the 1970s, I am all too familiar with the hostility aimed at feminism then and now, from many men and from too many women. Sadly, then, many women who agreed on the issues would famously say, “I’m not a feminist, but …” Others interpreted feminism as an attack on their commitment to home and family.
Today, we live with that legacy of ignorance and hostility. Lack of awareness has given rise to women attacking one another for problems that should be laid at someone else’s door. I am talking about men.
Men at home, men on the street, men in the workplace, male governors, senators, members of Congress and statehouses, writers, television executives and newspaper editors. Women’s inequality is their failure. It’s time for them to step up.
Dolores Dwyer
Alberene, Va.
To the Editor:
The “new feminism” that Kim Brooks calls for, one “that understands that the politics of motherhood are inherently intersectional” and that recognizes that women’s empowerment can happen only when “buttressed by truly progressive policies like health care for all,” is not new at all. It is precisely the feminism that many of us have been advocating for decades, but is all too often misrepresented by mainstream media.
Gloria Steinem famously said, many years ago, that feminism is not about wanting a piece of the pie but “baking a whole new pie.” Feminism at its roots in the 1960s (or even, for that matter, in the 1840s) was not about the strivings of individual women, but about envisioning a society in which everyone can flourish.
It is, of course, a goal far from having been achieved, but ignoring the history and struggles that brought us to this point will not help.
Martha Ackelsberg
New York
The writer is professor emerita of government and the study of women and gender at Smith College.