Feminism Goes Gen-X
Same movement, different package.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor
May 5-6, 2001

Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 416 pp., $15).

n the day Al Gore finally bowed out of the presidential race in December, I journeyed, for the first time, to the ultra-

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hip studio of Oxygen Media, a chick-oriented cable network whose studios are in Chelsea, Manhattan. I was to appear on what they like to call She-SPAN, the network's midday political roundtable, with a panel of women including Jennifer Baumgardner, coauthor with Amy Richards, of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. It was a far cry from, say, an editorial meeting at National Review; at Oxygen being a woman is an ideology in itself. The few men I ran into there seemed rather emasculated, almost as if they were paid to be so. One guy introduced himself as "the token male" and quietly asked me to sign a waiver form.

On the She-SPAN panel, it was quite obvious that I was the lone Bush defender among us, and quite possibly the only one in the entire building. The election had been stolen. Yada, yada, yada. The panelists, however, were friendly to me, outwardly tolerant of my misfit views. They were, in fact, clearly happy to have someone there to serve as the odd man out, a token conservative to balance the panel of otherwise "normal" women and provide an alien presence that would make the discussion lively enough to be worth watching.

As if to top off the experience, on the elevator ride downstairs after the show, a woman recounted to her companion — another woman, of course — the story of the removal of her ovaries. After a few floors, the narrator looked at me and laughed. "You probably don't want to hear about my ovaries," she said. I giggled politely and told her not to worry. She took this as an invitation to advise me, "Every woman should get rid of her ovaries. Once you've had kids, take them out. It's so liberating. It's just not worth having them."

Like that elevator ride and the She-SPAN panel, Manifesta is a journey into the minds and lives of Generation-X feminists. And, like my journeys to Oxygen, it is a long, strange trip to an alternate reality.

Baumgardner and Richards are über-liberated — or at least as much so as a woman can be these days. Baumgardner's mother read Ms., making Jennifer a feminist since the womb. At 15, she went out to raise funds to pay for her 16-year-old sister's abortion. Her father, a doctor, has "had to deal with my three calls per day describing my vulva in intricate detail" since she was diagnosed with herpes, a disease she refuses "to be ashamed by." Amy Richards is the founder of the Third Wave Foundation, a nonprofit organization for left-wing twenty- and thirty-somethings, and also works as an online advice columnist. She wears two bracelets on her arms — one to protest parental-notification abortion laws and the other to protest the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding of abortions.

As its title makes painfully obvious, Manifesta aspires to be a call to action for feminists, particularly young women, some of whom "today feel as if they live their feminist lives without clear political struggles." At 416 pages, the book is not nearly as short as a manifesto should be, and Baumgardner and Richards don't get around to setting forth their 13-point agenda until the appendix. Nor is it a particularly original call to action. To the authors, an organized feminist movement ultimately means liberal women unifying to "Fight the Right," the hackneyed slogan found on so many National Organization for Women picket signs. "We have to put down our relentless search for feminist purity," they argue, "… and look at Katie Roiphe, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Naomi Wolf, and the rest of the emerging young women as what they are: feminists, the next generation … Yes, all feminists deserve critique and debate, but save your political vitriol for the young babes who are right-wing and political."

"Equality" remains the key word for feminists. To them, however, it still means erasing biological and emotional differences, though now with a twist — no shoulder pads needed. Budding feminists are now permitted to wear nail polish and look like girls. But the one thing they must not do is be repressed by the ultimate in bondage — motherhood. Nor should they allow themselves to shoulder the burden for this preference. To these new feminists, male responsibility in sex means that "a liberated man can come to grips with the fact that a vasectomy is the safest, the easiest to reverse, and the cheapest semi-permanent birth control for a couple to use." They note that, "a vasectomized sixteen-year-old can freeze his sperm indefinitely until he is ready to bring a child into the world." What the average 16-year-old male might think of this, however, they do not say.

According to Baumgardner and Richards, Third Wave feminists believe that motherhood "is still the opposite of liberation" and ask questions like, "Can we untie motherhood from womanhood without throwing childbirth out with the sexism? And, given that society still links some of a woman's power to her ability to reproduce, how do we want to challenge the mother-baby bond?" The authors find their answer in the example of "lesbian co-parenting." Same-sex parents, they write, "illustrate that biology is not destiny, and parenting is a job."

Both authors are former Ms. staffers, which may explain why they so enthusiastically embrace the "girlie" lifestyle led by the cultural daughters of former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown while warning the girls that "without a body of politics, the nail polish is really going to waste." They caution against indiscriminate cries for "Girl Power!," warning that the Spice Girls did not understand that for a woman to approve of the right-wing "milk-snatcher" Margaret Thatcher is like a woman or "person of color" cheering on the likes of Clarence Thomas, "a man who voted against affirmative action any chance he got." (They describe Lady Thatcher as "Reagan with ovaries.") Nor do they spare the Second Wave feminists. These outdated souls are not the Third Wave feminists' mothers, and therefore should feel no guilt that they have failed to solve all the problems of women's lives, but Baumgardner and Richards warn their intellectual forebears to drop the mother complex and stop condescending to the younger generation. In their "Letter to an Older Feminist," they write,

If our message were to be boiled down to one bumper-sticker-size pensée, it would be: "You're not our mothers." We want to reprieve you from your mother guilt. You are officially off the hook for not having solved the day-care problem or made the world equal. You did make the world a better place, and you continue to do so. We have our national soccer teams and women's studies, legal abortion, and the right to commit outrageous acts and sue for everyday injustices. Although there is much to be done, we've got words and laws for many of the abuses you called "life."

Baumgardner and Richards seek to rally their Girl Power "girlie" peers to team up with the National Abortion Rights Action League activists and the Second and Third Wave feminists (the First Wave having been the suffragettes). As long as they are dealing with their type of woman, the authors seek to be uniters, not dividers, reminding every stripe of feminist — including those of their generation who are not likely to describe themselves by the f-word — who the real enemy is. They admonish their less sophisticated sisters for picking fights with author Katie Roiphe, who argued that the early 1990s date-rape hype was hurting feminism, and Naomi Wolf, who, before becoming Al Gore's highly paid adviser on how to pretend to be an "alpha male," took heat for acknowledging that having an abortion leads to feelings of guilt. "Failing to distinguish between Roiphe and the Right wing, regardless of legitimate critiques of her work, is where feminists did themselves damage."

Ultimately, however, nothing unites feminists like abortion, and the authors wave the flag earnestly. "The bottom line," they write, "is that women need to be free agents of their own destinies, which includes having control over their bodies, whether this means choosing to have a child or choosing not to do so." The authors recall that at a dinner party they threw for some of their feminist contemporaries, Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Bitch and Prozac Nation, recounted the story of a recent abortion. She told the girls in attendance: "Anyone who wants to take away abortion should just be shot. They just don't understand anything, because no one would choose that experience." Wurtzel went on to tell of waking up on a gurney in a room full of women "scared and crying and disoriented, and Elizabeth felt totally alienated from them." The authors write, "In terms of seriousness, a first-trimester abortion falls somewhere between having one's wisdom teeth removed and getting a biopsy." Evidently, even the abortion industry has failed the very feminists who have done so much to protect and promote it:

Elizabeth's factory experience is not what feminists meant when they fought for the right to a safe and legal abortion. They envisioned and invented counseling procedures in which each woman was paired with a birthing or lay companion, for example, and freestanding clinics where women could wake up privately, or to the gentle comfort of a nurse or friend. But many of the independent clinics have turned into time-crunched, impersonal "abortion service centers," marginalized from the rest of medicine, and easy targets for anti-abortion terrorism.

What is Baumgardner and Richards's solution to Elizabeth's complaints about her abortion experience? Universal access to the "morning after" abortion pill, RU-486.

Filled with color from the authors' lives and those of their contemporaries, Manifesta is a volume quite appropriate to the age of the Internet chat room — long, repetitive, and largely a waste of time. For liberal women of my generation — Gen Xers — it might serve as suitable propaganda for rallying the troops. For the rest of us, Baumgardner and Richards provide an unintended look into the mind of the Gen-X feminist. They might not call the angry, Second Wave feminists their mothers, but Manifesta makes it clear that the feminist apple didn't fall far from the tree.

This review originally appeared in the March/April 2001 issue of American Outlook, published by the Hudson Institute.