Speaking of Feminism

Today's Activists on the Past, Present, and Future of the U.S. Women's Movement

Rachel F. Seidman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469653099
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From the Women's Marches to the MeToo movement, it is clear that feminist activism is still alive and well in the twenty-first century. But how does a new generation of activists understand the work of the movement today? How are their strategies and goals unfolding? What worries feminist leaders most, and what are their hopes for the future? In Speaking of Feminism, Rachel F. Seidman presents insights from twenty-five feminist activists from around the United States, ranging in age from twenty to fifty. Allowing their voices to take center stage through the use of in-depth oral history interviews, Seidman places their narratives in historical context and argues that they help explain how recent new forms of activism developed and flourished so quickly. These individuals' compelling life stories reveal their hard work to build flexible networks, bridge past and present, and forge global connections. This book offers essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the contemporary American women's movement in all its diversity. Interviewees include:
Noorjahan Akbar
Soledad Antelada
Elisa Camahort Page
Park Cannon
Soraya Chemaly
Dana Edell
Kate Farrar
Ivanna Gonzalez
Tara Hall
Trisha Harms
Kwajelyn Jackson
Holly Kearl
Emily May
Kenya McKnight
Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Ho Nguyen
Katie Orenstein
Patina Park
Erin Parrish
Andrea Pino
Joanne Smith
Rebecca Traister
Alice Wilder
Kabo Yang
Rye Young

Part One: Activists in Their Forties

The seven women in this section were born in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the burgeoning feminist movement. Their early lives were shaped by the fact that their parents were living through the changes of that era. The stories they tell are inflected not only with discussions about the impact of feminism on their own upbringings but with interpretations of how the movement shaped their mothers’ lives as well. Some of these women are now mothers themselves of daughters who range in age from babies to full-grown adults, and they reflect on whether or not the world now is a better place for young women than when they were growing up.

Coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s, these interviewees reached maturity during the rise of Reagan Republicanism and what Susan Faludi termed the “backlash” against feminism. Journalist and writer Rebecca Traister remembers there being very little feminist activity on her college campus; her own feminist outrage was sparked by Katie Roiphe’s infamous book The Morning After, which argued that young women’s expressions of concern about “date rape” were false. Writer and media activist Soraya Chemaly was the only one of my interviewees in this age cohort to graduate from a women’s studies program; she was in the first class of the women’s studies program at Georgetown University. While the notion of “third-wave feminism” started to gain traction in the early 1990s, none of these women found that to be a particularly useful label for themselves. Several echoed Traister’s assertion that the term is “a media way of making categorical distinctions that are fundamentally meaningless.”¹

Unlike some of the younger activists in this book, none of these women set out at the beginning of their careers to be professional feminists; it never crossed their minds as a possibility. There was no “feminist beat” when Traister was a young journalist in New York City; she would create that niche herself in her thirties. Chemaly, an outspoken child with a critical eye who went on to start a feminist journal at Georgetown in the 1980s, shifted from journalism to business in order to make a better living. It wasn’t until her forties that she felt compelled to rejoin the feminist fray—and found a new space to do so. Elisa Camahort Page of California drew on a long career in the business and tech world to launch BlogHer in 2005—an organization aimed at creating opportunities for women engaged in the world of blogging and, later, social media. Katie Orenstein was not involved in any political activity in college. Her experiences in journalism sharpened her view of the challenges facing women and minorities, and she set out to make change. Orenstein does not think of herself as “helping women.” Instead she draws on the tools and language of the business world and argues that she is “investing in underrepresented brainpower, women’s brainpower, for the payoff,” which in this case is a strengthened democracy.²

About half of the women in this chapter have been involved in one way or another with the intersecting worlds of journalism, academia, social media, and business, and half—all of them women of color—have worked in direct-service and nonprofit organizations. Joanne Smith, who founded and runs Girls for Gender Equity in Brooklyn, sees a divide between black feminists who work online and those who work “on the ground” directly helping girls and women. Both Tara Hall of Atlanta, who ran a program for refugee women, and Patina Park, who works with Native American women in Minneapolis, have long worked on behalf of women’s rights and empowerment but hesitate to embrace an identity as a feminist. Hall, age forty-five, says, “I really never thought about it. I just do what I do.”³ As a young woman, Park took a job at an abortion clinic “because it was convenient,” and that led her to become a passionate defender of women’s right to choose. But in her Native American community, she does not find feminism a useful framework for the work she does—it is not a word or a way of thinking that resonates much with the women she serves.⁴

With long careers and experience in a variety of contexts, these women help us understand how feminism has changed over the past twenty years, where the movement is headed, and some of the reasons why even those who undertake its work do not always embrace it wholeheartedly.

Soraya Chemaly

Writer and Activist, Director, Women’s Media Center Speech Project, Washington, D.C.

I definitely repeatedly bump into older feminist women—usually white—whom I know and respect, who really think there’s no young feminism, and it’s because they’re not steeped in the internet, and they’re not part of this culture. But there’s so much happening that you can’t even wrap your brain around it.

I met with Soraya Chemaly in the sunny kitchen of her Georgetown townhouse in Washington, D.C. We sat at her small table, under a striking painting—a large, bright orange-red rose on a turquoise background—in a heavy gilt frame. At one point in Chemaly’s life, after her twins were born, her doctor had suggested she take up a hobby in order to help deal with stress. Without any formal art training, Chemaly picked up a brush and painted every night. One day a publisher saw one of her paintings and asked to license it; soon 350 retailers around the country were buying her products. Chemaly says, “Honestly, this isn’t great art. It’s decorative, happy paintings, and people really needed happy things. It was after 9/11, and I think that any kind of bright, happy, joyous thing kind of made people feel good.” After the economic crash of 2008, though, half of the retailers went out of business and she turned her attention to other endeavors.

Chemaly grew up in the Bahamas. Her family—originally from Jordan, England, and Lebanon—had settled in the Caribbean. They were an entrepreneurial family—her father ran a successful import-export business—and she led a life of privilege in the complicated racial, ethnic, sexual, and political terrain of the Bahamas. She was an observant, curious child who reveled in her grandfather’s extensive library—until her grandmother caught her reading a book about Greek art and declared the paintings on the vases pornographic. Chemaly’s sense of outrage over gender inequality grew in part from her recognition of her grandparents’ unhappy marriage, including the fact that her beloved grandfather apparently had other marriages in other countries. He once said, “You know, you’re a pretty girl. Not as pretty as your mother, but you’re a pretty girl, and so you’ll find a nice young man who will take care of you.” Chemaly burst out laughing and said, “No, I’m going to school, thanks, and I’m going to take care of myself.” He asked, “Why? That’s so much harder.” And she said, “Well, so that if I have to, if I married and he’s like you, I can divorce him.”

After starting a feminist magazine at conservative, Catholic Georgetown University in the 1980s, Chemaly moved into the world of publishing after graduation. Frustrated by the lack of pay in writing and editing, she eventually crossed over into the business end of the field. She worked in the new media division at the Gannett publishing company, where she tried to get executives to understand the impending impact of their swiftly changing world, “but all these newspapers thought that the internet was kind of a joke, something kids played with.” So she moved to the Claritas marketing company, where eventually she became a senior corporate vice president.

Forty-nine when I met her (the same age I was), Chemaly had been a feminist her entire life, but it was motherhood that caused her to focus all her energy on the cause. “I used everything I learned [in business] to fuel the work I’ve been doing in feminism for the last five years. Marketing strategy, market development, marketing communications, understanding in depth the business world, understanding data.”

Chemaly has made a name for herself as a feminist writer, critic, and activist. In 2013, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication awarded her the Donna Allen Award for Feminist Advocacy and the Secular Woman Feminist Activism Award. ​In 2014, Elle magazine named her one of its twenty-five inspiring women to follow on Twitter.

My grandmother was born in what was then the Ottoman Empire in a Christian-Arab town in what is now Jordan, and her family left when she was three. Her mother was fourteen when her father rode into town and picked her up and kidnapped her. So when I was growing up, I really do remember this story that was a fairy tale—it was a family fairy tale—that she was a beautiful young woman and he was a handsome young man who rode into town and picked her up, and off they went into the sunset. I was maybe five the first time I heard that.

I was eleven the next time I remember actually responding to it, and by the time I was eleven, I was much more acutely aware of physical vulnerability. I lived in a place that had a lot of street harassment and was a tumultuous political environment. So when they told the story that time, I said, “Well, you know, actually, I think she was kidnapped and serially raped, and he should really go to jail.” I didn’t get much of a response. People just kind of ignored it, and then I said it again, and then I got what I think of in my own mind as my first feminist pat on the head. But my grandmother grew up with a mother who was thought to be mad. She was, the way I think of it, left speechless by trauma. Today, I think we would say she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had all of the symptoms of that.

One day, my daughter, my oldest daughter, who was thirteen—she probably looked like she was eighteen. She’s very tall, very pretty. She was wearing her soccer uniform and she said, “Hey, can I just go out and get some ice cream?” She wanted to go by herself. I think, ultimately, when I look back, her asking me that was, like, a triggering event. Because when she asked me, I wasn’t really ready for thinking about her being out by herself in a city. She had been before; she’d been out in parks and with friends. But this was, for some reason, different. I looked at her and I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. I have to teach her all kinds of stuff I haven’t taught her about navigating public space.” And I remember locking myself in the bathroom and feeling just this blind rage because I didn’t want to teach my daughters about rape. I didn’t want to be the person that transferred that information without objection as it had been transferred to me silently. No one ever talked to me about street harassment or rape. The first time I was harassed, it was not just on the street but in my school yard. I was nine. I was waiting; my aunt had forgotten to pick us up and this boy, he was older than I was, he said, “I could rape you here and nobody could help you.”

So my poor husband, he came home, and I said, “I’m doing something really financially irrational. I’m stopping all business-related work, and I’m going to write about feminism. Because writing I can do, and I can do it while still managing life.” And he said, “Go for it.” So then I actually segmented the writing marketplace the way I would have segmented any market. I thought, “OK, well, there are all these brilliant people writing, but they’re kind of writing in a bubble to themselves, and then we have this massive mainstream audience, and maybe I could be useful as a bridge.” I set out to do that. I gave myself a column. I wrote twice a week for two or three years in the Huffington Post just relentlessly. And then, probably once I had gotten into the practice and habit again, that’s when I also started writing for other places.

But almost immediately, like really almost immediately, the harassment online started. At first I was just sort of stunned because I thought I hadn’t said anything, really. But I got a hanging threat. I’m sort of ethnically ambiguous to look at: I could be Mediterranean, I could be South American, I could maybe be a little Native American—if you really wanted to stretch—and I am kind of polyethnic in my history. But this hanging threat to me came along with a lot of other things, like content that said, “Go back to Africa or Arabia or wherever you’re from,” which was fascinating to me. I’m like, “Wow, OK, so there’s the racism and the ethnocentrism and the sexism, and they’re all in the same pot, right?” You get one, you get the others.

I started then writing about harassment and what it means historically for women to speak in the public space, because clearly the harassment that women are experiencing is meant to just stop women from speaking. I remember sitting with a lot of other feminist writers somewhere and we were exchanging jokes—not jokes, but we were exchanging the fact that we get rape threats or death threats. And I thought, “This shouldn’t be funny.” Like, it’s our way of dealing with it because many women don’t deal with it, right? They stop writing, or they don’t write about certain topics, or they stop writing in certain places, and those among us that were still talking refused to do that, right? We just keep going. But I thought, “It’s really not funny.”

Once I started writing about it, readers started sending me things. But not just to say “Look at what happened” but “Please can you help me?” That was overwhelming. I had one woman send me all of her police reports and files because she thought her rapist would kill her. He had been illustrating her rape on Facebook, and Facebook wasn’t removing it because, to a Facebook moderator, it just looked like drawings of a woman in a bed, and there was no way for her to get through to them to explain the context for what was going on.

I got video of a rape in progress in Malaysia that had been up on Facebook for a month. It had been reported, but no one had taken it down. I was speaking to Facebook representatives, and they were saying all the right words because they had guidelines. But for some reason, it wasn’t applying to what women were experiencing.

Jaclyn Friedman, who is head of Women, Action, and the Media, and I were friends. Laura Bates is another friend; she’s in England, she founded [the online feminist campaign] Everyday Sexism. One day, Laura called me and she was very upset because there was a video of a woman being beheaded in a Mexican drug war, and it was going viral. It was horrible; it was really dreadful. I wrote a letter to Sheryl Sandberg that morning saying, “I understand Facebook has stated quite openly that they are interested in free expression and women’s rights. These are four things”—I don’t know what possessed me, I was just angry—“these are four things Facebook should be doing if you’re serious about it. Can you please look at this content and tell me why this is happening?”

Honestly, I was a random woman. I just sent it via email through an intermediary who knew her because she was on the board of a women’s rights organization, and [Sandberg] responded right away. She put me in touch with her head of global policy, who was very nice, very responsive, but sent me a lot of boilerplate answers. And I kept saying, “You’re not addressing what I said. Thanks so much for your nice note, but maybe we could meet.”

By that time, it was very clear that my writing work was advocacy work, because they were one and the same. We didn’t have those meetings; they kept dropping off. So Jaclyn Friedman said, “Hey, I know how frustrated you are. Why don’t we do a public action?” I said, “Yes, but let’s get Laura, because she, too, is experiencing these things.” Laura had done something quite brilliant. She had just that day, I think, tweeted to an advertiser on Facebook, “Do you really want your ad next to this content?” We used that as the model for our campaign. We were very deliberate in our campaign. I personally feel very strongly that a hashtag has to be linked to action on the ground. It can’t just stand alone in virtual space. We had a website that automated tweets and emails from consumers that linked advertisers directly to this content. This was extremely traumatizing, extremely graphic violence against women that was being proliferated on the platform and not removed and very often was actually slapped with the parenthetical, controversial humor tag because that was meant to somehow—. It literally turned the violence into a joke. So day one of our campaign was a Tuesday. We launched it, and Facebook called right away, and we started to negotiate because we had publicly written a letter—the letter was a lot of the letter that I’d sent to Sheryl Sandberg. We had, in that week, 60,000 tweets, 5,000 emails, and sixteen advertisers drop out.

That was in 2013, and I think that there were a couple of things that were notable about that. One was that it was the first time that Facebook responded to any consumer public action. They responded and they said, “Yes, we’ve dropped the ball on misogyny.” A lot of people thought that we didn’t understand free speech and that we were censoring, and that totally missed the point. We weren’t censoring; we didn’t ask them to create new rules. Companies like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are moderating content day in and day out. They had rules written down. We just said, “Apply the rules fairly.”

I remember on the Thursday of that week, we had over 100 media interviews. The thing just exploded. The campaign, I think, worked because it happened at the right time, at the right moment, and because we were very organized. We worked well together as a team. We each had respective skills. We just had a really positive campaign. Every aspect of it worked. But the thing about that campaign is that once it was over, I was like a dog with a bone. I just wouldn’t let go.

It’s two years later, and we continue to work weekly on these issues, and that’s been very productive. There’s been huge change. Huge change in the culture. Not because of this—I just mean in those two years. But I think that that campaign [the Facebook Rape campaign] helped put online misogyny on the map in a way that gave people the ability to talk about it differently. After that they designated a person who had worked at a rape crisis center at Facebook, who was extremely responsive. She knew what we were doing and what we were trying to do. We continue to work with them, and now our emphasis is getting women in the global south front and center. Eighty percent of Facebook’s audience is not in the U.S.

The purpose of the campaign was not just to say, “Look at this violent content.” It was to say, “Think about the way this violent content suppresses women’s free speech and civic participation and ability to equally access everything that the internet has to offer.” That’s really the emphasis of the work now.

In the early part of 2014, I started this loose organization with no formal structure, because there was no money, but called the Safety and Free Speech Coalition. Initially, it was eight organizations, and I picked each organization because it had an area of functional expertise. Basically, I got everyone together and said, “OK, let’s pool our efforts. We’re all talking to all of these companies: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, all the major platforms. We’re all talking about violence against women, IT, gender issues, free expression, and it’s inefficient. How can we work together to support each other?” At that point, we identified a number-one priority, which was getting companies to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Speaking of Feminism
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Activists in Their Forties
• Part Two: Activists in Their Thirties
• Part Three: Activists in Their Twenties
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Method
• Interview Information
• Notes
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index