Women's Liberation Redux

Martha Burk and Alison Stein

February 22, 2005

Many younger women today don't identify strongly with the women's movement of the past. They've grown up enjoying the right to work the same jobs as men, enter universities, join the military. But it doesn't mean equality has truly been achieved—just look at pay statistics and American attitudes about patriarchy. Martha Burk and Alison Stein of the National Council of Women's Organizations explain why we need to turn more young women into card-carrying activists—even if they don't use the "F word."

Martha Burk is Chair of the  National Council of Women’s Organizations.  Alison Stein is founder of the Younger Women’s Task Force. To join the Younger Women's Task Force, send an e-mail to ywtf@ncwo-online.org.

Do we need a new women’s movement—younger, more savvy, different? That question has probably been asked more or less continuously since 1848, when delegates to the first U.S. women's rights convention saw the need to create their Declaration of Sentiments asserting the need for legal, political, social and economic equality with men. It was certainly on the minds of more than one hundred young women who attended the Younger Women's Task Force MeetUp last month—a project of the National Council of Women's Organizations, the nation's oldest and largest coalition of women's groups. Throughout the weekend, we heard a lot of “While I believe I should have the same opportunities as men and I care about women's issues, I am not a feminist.” And this was coming from progressive women at a women's conference!

The Younger Women's Task Force's aim is to bring together women past college age who are progressive thinkers but don’t identify with the organized women’s movement. The goal is to organize around and articulate the issues of particular importance to their generation, and to create a voice for younger women in the policy-making process.

The MeetUp attendees were a diverse group—including not just younger women working in women’s organizations, but a woman running for state senate, a mother on welfare trying to start her own advocacy group, a vice president at Merrill Lynch who is the youngest to hold her position, and a student trying to break into the male-dominated science world at her engineering graduate school. They were asked to develop issue statements about nine topics of concern to women ages 19 to 39. These included media representations of women and women's body image, sexual and reproductive freedom, access to education and career opportunities, and work and family balance.

Despite the failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s, most Americans (including younger women) believe the "legal" part of that 19th century Declaration of Sentiments is taken care of, thanks to a healthy 20th century movement that got women everything from the vote to equal access to jobs to the right to control our own reproductive lives.  But somehow, despite these gains, sex discrimination is still not taken particularly seriously in the 21st century. Young women see it in their paychecks (75 percent of men’s overall), and in a culture where women not only compete on TV for men's attention like dogs at Westminster, but where the president of Harvard University can suggest that females have inferior genes and not get fired.  (If you don’t believe gender discrimination is seen as a “lesser” form of bias, just imagine the outcome if he had said African Americans lacked the necessary genes to become scientists.) Furthermore, in 1992, 42 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, “The father of the family is the master of the house,”  according to a study by the research firm Evironics.  In 2004, 52 percent agreed.

While post-college and working younger women are relentlessly courted by the fashion, movie and other consumer industries, somehow they’ve fallen through the cracks of women’s movement organizing. A number of national women’s groups target college women, while organizations like Moveon.org focus on adult women along with men on a general progressive agenda. Yet women in their 20s and 30s do not have a mechanism through which to be active on their concerns as younger women. For a feminist movement trying to engage as many women as possible, this has been a critical gap. Women in their 20s and 30s are at a time in their lives when they are facing difficult and often unfair choices as a result of being female—like choosing between advancing at work or having a child. We discovered at the MeetUp that if these issues are framed not just as general workplace or family issues—but instead as issues specific to women—younger women begin to recognize the need to build their own movement.

Just because we’re still lagging in the political, social and economic parts of that original women’s agenda doesn’t mean it wasn’t right then and isn’t right now.  But a narrow appeal to legal rights falls flat with many younger women today. They’ve grown up with those rights—to enter universities, get hired, join the military, get an abortion, own their destinies. They don’t see a threat to any of that, even with the dire warnings that Roe v. Wade will be overturned in the next four years.  But even though we hear a lot of “I’m not a feminist,” young women are more than ready to be energized. They're ready to recognize how their problems with the work/family balance and the career ladder are indeed rooted in systemic discrimination that has changed little in the last 30 years. If this sounds a lot like the old “consciousness raising,” maybe that's because it's still needed.

Do we need a new women's movement? Yes, because many younger women do have a hesitancy to identify themselves solidly with fighting for women's issues and giving their cause a name. Do we need to turn these women into card-carrying activists? Yes. But do they need to call themselves feminists?  Not necessarily. The “f” word really doesn’t matter. Any word that describes women who want to be treated and thought of as equal to their brothers is just fine by us. 

The goal of the Younger Women's Task Force is to convince every young woman that she can and should work to create a world where women are truly equal—no matter what she may call herself.