Because this struggle has been forgotten, we have a distorted memory of the movement, and thus a distorted history upon which to draw. These distortions go in several different directions. One of them is the idea that, in the arena of workplaces, the movement was dominated by liberal feminists who cared primarily about opening the door to women to enter workplaces and then didn’t do anything else about family-related concerns. Another story said more radical feminists ended up turning their attention primarily to issues of reproductive rights and sexual liberation. When we don’t have this full history, we don’t know some of the strategies feminists tried and the successes they achieved to guide the ongoing feminist fights. When you look at the full story of feminism in this era, you see quite a compelling, comprehensive vision of the kinds of changes we need to create an egalitarian society. Their vision is worth resurrecting, because currently, we don’t have a particularly compelling vision of what that world might look like. [...]
The other issue is that conservatives fought back against feminists and in many cases won. They were successful in defeating the largest aspirations of the movement. The conservative family politics of the ’80s and after have obscured the breadth and depth and radicalism of that feminist vision.
Among many young people, there’s an account of second-wave feminism as one dominated by white women who were insensitive toward and ignorant of the needs of women of color; that the movement itself was dominated by advancing the goals of middle-class, largely professional, largely white women. One of my key goals in writing this book is not to minimize the conflicts that unfolded around class and race in the movement, but also to show that there were places where alliances and coalitions formed: where African-American women were feminists and were at the forefront of the movement. I hope to reframe who counts as a second-wave feminist so that their feminist activism is not minimized or made invisible, and to recover the reality of alliance and coalition in many instances. [...]
Beyond those practical policy policies, I think we’re in a period of ongoing cultural struggle about what’s going to replace the old male-breadwinner, female-homemaker ideal. That model did a lot of things: it made it possible to demand a family wage; it provided a person to do essential labor — social reproduction — as well as nurturing and loving. It’s a struggle to say, “How are we going to win those things in our society now without repeating gender stereotypes that trap men and women in particular roles that reinforce that heteronormative model of how households should be organized?”
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