No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism

12. From Sisterhood to Girlie Culture

Sporting a bedazzling black tee-shirt embossed with the slogan “F Word,” cover model Gloria Steinem donned an updated look reflective of the doit -yourself culture championed by Bust magazine. Billing her as the beacon of third wave feminist cool, Bust’s editors selected the founder of Ms. magazine to represent the second wave in their 2000 issue devoted to feminism. Consider Bust cofounder Debbie Stoller’s public slight four years prior: “Steinem has gotten so lame[;] . . . if she was cool Ms. would have a cover story on Bust.”1 Regardless, Stoller singled out Steinem, along with Bikini Kill band leader Kathleen Hanna, as the “de facto poster girls for their respective generation’s women’s movements.”2 If Stoller was correct in depicting these two feminists as media-appointed stars, her assumptions about their cultural politics were quickly debunked. Stoller asked Hanna, a frontrunner in the 1990s Riot Grrrls feminist punkmusic scene, whether she drew inspiration from Cyndi Lauper or Madonna. “I’d rather talk about Shulamith Firestone than Madonna,” she replied.3 “So we’ve changed places!” Steinem exclaimed, reflecting on Madonna’s powerful appropriation of “all the symbols of Marilyn Monroe,” whose “real” story was reclaimed by Ms. in 1972.4 Reminding Stoller that she wore miniskirts in the 1970s, Steinem remarked, “It’s always seemed to me that the point was to be able to wear what you fucking well please.” Hanna, however, dismissed the girlie culture first popular among Riot Grrrls, asserting that at thirty-one, she was over “dressing like a little girl.”5 Steinem’s and Hanna’s responses demonstrate that dichotomous characterizations of so-called second and third wave feminists—politically rigid versus apolitical, puritanical versus From Sisterhood to Girlie Culture Closing the Great Divide between Second and Third Wave Cultural Agendas LEANDRA ZARNOW 273 12 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb hypersexual, culturally unsophisticated versus self-absorbed and entitled— preclude complex analysis of current feminisms. One could read both Hanna’s and Steinem’s takes on cultural politics and Stoller’s slight of Steinem as uncool as indicators of cross-generational infighting. As this story goes, the dialogue between second and third wave feminists is best described as a mother-daughter dispute. Indeed, feminists on both sides of the generational divide describe their disagreements using familial terms. For instance, responding to Phyllis Chesler’s reproach of younger women’s commitment to feminism in Letters to a Young Feminist (1997), Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards bemoaned, “Stop treating us like daughters.” Instead, “read our books, buy our records (and read the lyrics), and support our organizations.”6 Yet, not all Richards’s and Baumgardner’s peers are willing to maintain this daughter complex. As Hanna suggested, “Things aren’t going to change until we have a continuum” and stop “reinventing the wheel over and over again.”7 And “similarities are much more difficult” than generational differences, observed Bitch magazine cofounder Lisa Jervis.8 If historians appropriate the discourse of mothers and daughters in first histories of contemporary feminism, then we will affirm what Deborah Siegel calls a “generational disconnect,” which ultimately causes multiage feminists to “splash about in separate pools.”9 Using generational tropes—and especially the wave metaphor—compresses the highly nuanced reworking of feminist thought and practice during the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries. Just as many of the revisionist essays in this volume broaden the history of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ feminist resurgence, this study contemplates what third wave history would look like without the wave. This essay serves two purposes. First, it places the 1990s’ and early 2000s’ feminist moment squarely on the historical map. Considered are why historians have arrived late to the interdisciplinary study of third wave feminism and how historical analysis would enrich first studies of contemporary feminism. Second, this article explores how to historically analyze contemporary feminist activism, considering lessons learned about the inadequacies of waving feminist history. Rather than crafting a new synthesis or a solely conceptual piece, I look at one strand of feminist thought and practice—popular feminism. My aim is to show links among Ms., Bust, and Bitch magazines without valuing the product of a prior historical moment— Ms.—over more recent contributors to this ideological current—Bust and LEANDRA ZARNOW 274 Bitch. Equally, this comparative case study demonstrates the importance of analyzing how inherited ideologies and institutions shape later feminist ventures in acknowledged and hidden...