Generation Why? While the next generation confronts History's camera, a young woman studies the programme of the last United Women's Convention to be held in New Zealand. (Hamilton, 1979) Thirty-six years later, the revolutionary fervour of Feminism's second wave seems impossibly remote - especially when viewed from the Neoliberal culture of contemporary New Zealand society. (Photo by Marti Friedlander)
“BUT WE’RE GOING BACKWARDS!” Came the anguished cry from the
table in the corner. Amidst all the sororal warmth generated by Amanda Bailey’s
pulled ponytail, the speaker’s uncompromising judgement arrived like a blast of
cold air from the world outside. A necessary corrective to the perky
inclusiveness of the many Third and Fourth Wave feminists in the audience. The
women seated at the corner table had been present at the birth of Second Wave feminism
in New Zealand. It lent their intervention a special force.
As a bloke, I did not consider it my place to enter into the
public phase of “Beneath the Ponytail: Women. Work. Progress?” – the second of
Ika Seafood Bar and Grill’s “Table Talks”. No matter how many times the panel
(Human Rights EEO Commissioner, Dr Jackie Blue; Senior Lecturer at University
of Auckland, Dr Michelle Dickinson; First Union Secretary, Maxine Gay; and
Labour Party List MP, Jacinda Ardern) reiterated the view that
men-can-be-feminists-too, I still recall Second Wave feminists arguing that the
best thing men can contribute to discussions about feminism is their silence.
Effective political memories (with the obvious exception of
those gathered around the table in the corner) were in rather short supply on
Tuesday night (19/5/15). Poor Jackie Blue admitted to being a young university
student at the time of “Women’s Liberation” and missing the whole thing!
(Although, to her credit, she is rapidly making up the lost time.) Maxine Gay,
by contrast, who has been a fighter on the feminist barricades since the 1970s
and 80s, was for some reason reluctant to acquaint the twenty-somethings
present with the often brutal history of liberal versus socialist versus
lesbian separatist versus cultural
feminism. Inclusiveness was not a conspicuous virtue of the Second Wave.
Dr Michelle Dickinson’s (aka “Nanogirl”) contribution
commenced with the bleak news that although the numbers of young women entering
the sciences has been rising, the number who actually make use of their
scientific training (especially in Dr Dickinson’s own field of engineering)
remains worryingly small.
Significantly, the only viable route out of this situation
was deemed to be through the good offices of sympathetic business leaders –
most of whom are, predictably, men. A number of these individuals were
mentioned, and it would be churlish to disparage their efforts in any way. But
the fact remains that it is now only in the business world; only in the place
where the values of the marketplace reign supreme; that womankind’s quest for
full sexual equality is being realistically contextualised. Grasp that, and the
full extent of feminism’s retreat is made apparent.
It took the Labour List MP, Jacinda Ardern, to spell out the
consequences of this depressing reversal. Paired with National’s Nicky Kaye in
what was called “The Battle of the Babes” for Auckland Central, Ardern was
faced with a hard choice. Either, take offence at the blatantly sexist framing
of the contest and forever afterwards be stereotyped as a humourless feminist
harridan. Or, by taking it in good part, risk being dismissed as Labour’s bimbo.
Quite rightly, she reasoned that the latter stereotype would be more easily overcome
than the former and played along. More than 30 years after Helen Clark poured
out her heart to a female journalist about the extreme sexism she’d encountered
in the male-dominated Parliament of the 1980s, Ardern’s testimony made me
wonder exactly how much has really changed.
Indeed the whole evening’s discussion – ably chaired by
TV3’s Lisa Owen – had about it a decidedly self-referential quality. Just as it
had on the occasion of the first “Table Talk” – about the beleaguered (now
cancelled) Campbell Live – the Ika
Seafood Bar and Grill had turned into a large left-wing echo-chamber. I got the
strong impression that only the women at the corner table understood that the
evening’s discussion – for all its undoubted passion and sincerity – was taking
place in the belly of the beast: a monster whose ideological victory was as
complete as it was unacknowledged.
As the Australian sociologist and feminist Professor Raewyn
Connell puts it in her paper “Understanding Neoliberalism”:
“With a few exceptions neoliberal leadership is composed of
men. It’s treasured figure, ‘the entrepreneur,’ is culturally coded masculine.
Its assault on the welfare state redistributes income from women to men and
imposes more unpaid work on women as carers for the young, the old, and the
sick. Its attack on ‘political correctness’ and its rollback of affirmative
action specifically undermine the gains of feminism. In such ways, neoliberalism
from the 1980s on offered middle-class men an indirect but effective solution
to the delegitimation of patriarchy and the threat of real gender equality.”
The young women who joined in “Beneath the Ponytail: Women.
Work. Progress?”, so inclusive in their definitions of feminism, but, at the
same time, so concerned to escape the shaming label of “feminazi” that men of
all generations are so quick to pin upon them, seemed to bear out Professor
Connell’s bleak observation.
Was that what the Second Wavers at the corner table sensed
also? That the push-back had somehow been reversed? That the enormous sense of
empowerment, of emancipatory élan, that had characterised the feminist
revolution of the 1970s and 80s, had, without anyone really noticing, been
subsumed in something much, much larger?
It’s not as if the many gains of the Second Wave have been
rolled back – not at all – but rather that, in some ill-defined way, they no
longer matter. As if all the changes that were extracted with so much pain and
effort could only ever have worked in a more caring, just and equitable
world – the world which a triumphantly masculine Neoliberal Revolution long
ago destroyed.
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday 23 May 2015.
