Feminism on One Foot: Part I?

In which I Mansplain the Movement

Is J.K. Rowling a feminist, and if so, is that a bad thing?

That was a question that emerged in the comments section of my post about her heroism in standing up to radical transgender ideology. As a presumed feminist, was Rowling just a woke leftist combating a woke idea she helped create?

But what does it mean to label Rowling a “feminist?” What sort of feminist is she? Is there only one kind? What is a feminist, anyway?

To have any sort of intelligent discussion about this question, we have to define the term, but that’s no easy task.¹

Some people who are either not particularly honest or intellectually rigorous will tell you, “Feminism just means that you believe women and men should be treated equally,” or “Feminism just means that women are people too,” or some such thing. Such people favor these kinds of definitions because it makes it impossible for a reasonable person to deny being a feminist.

On the other hand, people who hate feminism will define it as something like “the belief in the superiority of women over men” or “the advancement of women’s interests at the cost of men’s,” or simply as “man-hating.” These definitions make it almost impossible for a reasonable person to admit to being a feminist.²

So, the whole “defining your terms” thing is not as easy as it seems. One way to approach the topic is to get at the history of the term “feminism.”

There’s some debate about where it originated, whether with Utopian Charles Fourier in 1837 or Alexendre Dumas in 1871. However, rather than look at the history of the word per se, I’m going to look at the history of the movement, and so I will stipulate, for the sake of this post, a relatively neutral, working definition of feminism as “a Euro-American movement dating back to the 1790s advocating women’s rights.”

This movement, as I will argue, evolved both forward and laterally so that it both moved with the times and, within the movement, branched off in many directions, some of which contradicted each other, some of which were extreme, and some of which were not.

It’s traditional and useful to divide the movement into waves, and that’s what I’ll do here.

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First Wave Feminism (1870-1918): AKA “The Woman Question”

Although I date this first wave as starting in 1870, its first articulation is really 1792 with the publication of Mary Stone Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Though a landmark of as-yet-unnamed feminism, this manifesto took nearly a century before its full effect was felt.

A product of the same egalitarian spirit that inspired the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft takes on the unfinished business of extending fundamental human rights to women. In Vindication, she highlights double standards applied to the sexes and asserts that whatever may be the seeming intellectual and moral inferiorities of women, these are due entirely to the inferior educations they receive. This lays the foundation, ultimately, for what you might call “difference-denying feminism” but does not follow it to the extremes of latter articulations.

She also engages in perhaps the earliest feminist lit crit, hammering John Milton for portraying Adam as the big-brained boss of empty-headed Eve in the poem Paradise Lost. This lays the foundation for what you might call “J’Accuse or hermeneutic feminism” or simply “feminist lit crit.”

Wollstonecraft expresses anger and frustration with men, but Vindication is not vindictive and doesn’t assert female superiority. “I do not wish them to have power over men but over themselves,” she said of women. “Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man.”

Ultimately, therefore, Wollstonecraft advocates “egalitarian feminism,” which, at its best, seems to simply say, “Treat men and women with equal dignity.”

First-wave feminism proper could be said to begin in 1848 with the Seneca Falls Convention and the start of the suffrage movement in America. It picks up steam in England in 1869 with John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women. Mill, who wrote the book as a Member of Parliament, reiterates Wollstonecraft’s argument about women’s education and advocates for women’s suffrage.

Over the next few decades in Europe and America, we see the emergence of the so-called “Woman Question” and, in novels, a type of character known as “The New Woman,” as I explained in my PhD Dissertation Toward the New Man:

According to Ann Ardis, author of New Women New Novels, the New Woman was the subject of more than 100 books [from] 1880 [until] . . . .well into the early twentieth century. . . . This independent, unconventional sexual persona . . . . manifested a fierce independence not only from men, but from social customs; insisted upon equal rights for women, both legal and social; identified with the female sex as an oppressed group; and was capable of launching scathing critiques of men and male-created/dominated social institutions.

But the New Woman was complicated. Sometimes, she was “straight-edge,” advocating sexual purity for both men and women and sometimes sexually radical, as was the real-life New Woman, Eleanor Marx, daughter of you-know-who, an early advocate of “free love.” Thus, you might distinguish between “sex-revolution feminism” and “sex-conservative feminism.”

All this reached a boiling point with the Suffragette Movement, led in large part in England by the Pankhurst sisters. The movement that set the stage for today’s climate activists included acts of civil disobedience, such as chaining oneself to public spaces and slashing offensive artwork.

Within this movement—even between the sisters—feminism started to diverge in different directions.

You start to see a tension between difference-denial feminism and difference-assertion feminism. The latter is the belief that women are, in fact, fundamentally different from men, irrespective of education, by virtue of their inherent biology. And within difference-assertion feminism arises a conflict between accommodation feminism and supremacy feminism—the former referring to the idea that society must adjust to the unique needs of women, ranging from their more delicate temperament to childbearing. The latter refers to the idea that female differences represent a superior form of humanity over men who are lustful, violent, and oppressive.

However, nearly all these differences were overshadowed by the movement’s concrete goal, which the suffragettes achieved in 1918 in England and 1920 in the US. And that was the end of first-wave feminism and the women’s movement until the 1960s.

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Second-Wave Feminism: Women’s Liberation

Again, the timeline is not perfect. Simone De Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, attacking what she called “the myth of woman,” where she begins a process that would not take off until third-wave feminism of historicizing or denaturalizing the term “woman.” Any differences between men and women, she asserts, are culturally constructed (and oppressive). Extending Wollstonecraft’s idea that the differences between the sexes are largely due to education, DeBeauvoir attributes virtually all differences to cultural training and perception. This notion would receive its ultimate expression toward the end of this wave and the start of the next in the idea expressed by feminists like John Stoltenberg³ that men and women are no different from each other than people with brown and blue eyes and that the penis is just a large clitoris (and vice versa).

But De Beauvoir’s feminism, though it found a home among intellectuals, was less a driving force than Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), which portrayed the idea of homemaker/housewife—as opposed to the category of “woman”—as oppressive and limiting. She advocated careers outside the home as a better avenue to self-fulfillment for women. Friedan was an example of what Christina Hoff Sommers would later call “equity feminism,” though given the current use of that term, “equality feminism” would be a better term. An extension, again, of Wollstonecraft, Friedan wanted not only for women to be educated like men but also to have the same life opportunities.

Mainstream second-wave feminism—or Women’s Lib(eration)—had three concrete goals: opening career paths to women as prestigious and remunerative as those existing for men, freeing women to enjoy sex without shame and double standards, and opposing the sexual objectification of women. The latter took the form of an anti-porn movement that asserted the existence in the West of a “rape culture”⁴ and militated against sexual harassment in the workplace.

The anti-sexual harassment goals largely succeeded in changing cultural mores and actual laws, though the full force of their achievements wouldn’t be felt until past fourth-wave feminism and the rise of the #MeToo revolution. The sexual liberation movement, if not fully successful, certainly normalized pre-marital sex for women, even if it never quite succeeded in eliminating “slut-shaming.”

The anti-porn, anti-objectification side of second-wave feminism, however, fell flat on its face as any look at popular culture from PornTube to Rap to Republican congresswomen makes abundantly clear.

The opening up of the professions didn’t fully manifest until late third/early fourth-wave feminism. As late as the 1980s and 90s, there was a lot of complaining about a lack of women CEOs.

Nonetheless, women made significant gains. When my mother was training to be a psychiatrist in the 1950s, she was one of two women in her class. Today, more than 55% of medical school classes are female, and you see much the same in law and the academy. Some gains were only achieved after women won lawsuits such as “The Gender Bias Lawsuit that Changed Journalism.”

But though it was slow going, and though some still debate issues such as the “gender pay gap” and “women in STEM,” Women’s Liberation achieved most of its goals:

• Equal opportunities for women in education and the professions

• Protections from discrimination and sexual harassment at work for women

• An increasing consciousness among men that women want to be “treated as equals.”

• A new awareness about and even new definitions of rape (i.e., especially acquaintance rape).

But, among the second-wave feminists, you start to see the rise of what you might call “ressentiment feminism” articulated by such Women’s Liberation stalwarts as Gloria Steinem, who famously said, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and by accusations of misogyny against anyone resisting the feminist tide.

You also see the rise of language policing. It was no longer okay to call young women “chicks,” to refer to a mixed crowd as “guys,” and to use the word “man” to mean humankind. Oh, yes, and there was the invention of the word “Ms.” meant to eliminate the imbalance that existed by virtue of there being no word equivalent to Miss and Mrs. for men. And much to everyone’s surprise, the invented word actually stuck around.

And, of course, some radical feminists were pushing the boundaries of reason. There was theologian Mary Daly, who against all evidence to the contrary, maintained in her in a book with the cringe title Gyn/Ecology, that a universal and peaceful matriarchy ruled the Earth until it was wiped out by the violent patriarchy that still carries on. This was an extension of supremacy feminism asserting that the world was a better place before men took over.

And there was Andrea Dworkin, who questioned whether it was even possible for men and women to have consensual sex. And at the University of Chicago, there were the “Sister Serpents”⁵ whose stated goal was to intimidate men as they had felt intimidated by them. Both examples of ressentiment feminism even more extreme than Steinem’s.

A Sister Serpent art work. I recall there being one of a penis sliced by razors, but maybe that was just a fever dream. . . .

Finally, there was the rise (or return) of hermeneutical feminism or feminist literary criticism. Inspired by Wollstonecraft’s critique of Milton, feminists such as Kate Millett applied variations of ressentiment and supremacy feminism to the reading of canonical texts written by men such as D.H. Lawrence, with the idea of exposing male sexism and misogyny.

So, there was definitely some extremism, craziness, and even toxic feminism, but in the end, there were a lot of positive gains made for women and men in the second wave. Women gained access to jobs, and men got to spend more time with their kids. Some, like John Lennon, even became househusbands.

There was some annoying stuff for men, particularly the mixed messages and hypocrisy. Some women would get offended if you held the door for them. Some would get offended if you didn’t. Men were told to treat women like equals but were expected to pick up the tab on dates. Men were told to be “more sensitive,” but women continued to be attracted to tough guys and “bad boys.”

Moreover, second-wave feminists blamed men for centuries of oppression but never credited them for centuries of protection and building and creating,⁶ —and for helping to usher in women’s rights. Remember John Stuart Mill?⁷ There were lots of men who fought for women’s liberation; the movement could not have succeeded without their support. And yet there were people asking questions like “Can a man be a feminist?”

But if there was a second-wave battle of the sexes, it at least had some concrete goals that, in the end, most people could agree on, and some of it, like the famous Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs tennis match and the film War of the Roses was almost entertaining.

And then there came

Third Wave Feminism—or Gaslight feminism.

Why “gaslight feminism?” Because as the 90s marched on and women started making real gains, those gains were systematically denied.⁸ Women, we were told, were stuck beneath glass ceilings even as they were edging men out of higher education and many traditional male professions. There was a pay gap. There was a patriarchy. There was the ever-present, if highly unlikely, threat of The Handmaid’s Tale world.⁹

And then there was Judith Butler.

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble came out in 1990 and reified De Beavoir’s notion that there is no actual difference between men and women, that it’s all cultural, all “performative.”

It’s been a while since I read the book, but a friend of mine has pointed out to me that by “performative,” Butler didn’t (just) mean that we perform gender in the sense of putting on a costume like I wear jeans and a wide leather belt and a Zeppelin T-shirt and pretend to be a guy, but that it is “performative” in the technical sense of the term, language theory wise, meaning that some “speech acts” are “performative.”

Like when a cop says, “You’re under arrest,” his speech act brings into being the thing, the arrest. Likewise, when I say, “I’m a man,” it is not my biology but language that brings to reality my sex/gender.¹⁰

But the long and short of it is that we were in new era, in which we not only asked to recognize that “masculine” and “feminine” were not nature-based but arbitrary styles assigned to men and women by culture¹¹—and so assigned differently in each culture—but were told to believe that “men” and “women” such as they are, are constituted by language and culture.

I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but I heard a story about Butler visiting my old college Vassar, and after her talk, an audience member asked her straight out, do you or do you not have a vagina? Her answer was “no.”

How could she say that? Well, because “vagina” is just an idea. How do you decide where it starts and ends, and what distinguishes it from any other part or kind of body? There’s an arbitrary element no matter where you draw the line. One could imagine a world in which the part of the “female” body we demarcate as such was not demarcated as such. Of course, no such world ever existed. . . . but that was just par for the course in third-wave gaslight feminism.

Butler was wildly popular. You could not graduate with a high-level humanities degree in the 1990s without reading her work on gender—and this despite her utter absence of credentials in biology, btw.

And it’s a pretty straight shot from Butler to Bruce Jenner and the displacement of real women by “women.”

Truth be told, Butler was not a feminist proper but a “queer theorist.” Queer theory is a whole ‘nother story I may get to at some point.

Suffice it to say, feminists welcomed her into the fold because she offered the promise of completely freeing women from any connection whatsoever to ideals of femininity or womanhood, whether based in cultural tradition or biology. She was extending the French Revolution to flesh itself, and how could you resist that?

The annoying part? The complete denial of reality, of biological reality, maybe even of physics.

Until then, feminism asked us to extend existing rights to people who didn’t have them, to free people from limiting roles, and even to empower women. It sought to convince men and women of uncomfortable truths. This new feminism wanted us to reimagine reality altogether, wanted to convince us that we’ve been living in a sex/gender Matrix and that it has the magic pill to get us out. But the third-wave gender-bending, I would argue, is about as real as Uri Geller’s spoon-bending. It’s wild to look at, but ultimately a manipulative illusion.

Fourth Wave Feminism: Intersectional

There may not be a clear line between third and fourth-wave feminism, and I’m less familiar with the literature since it came about after I finished grad school and transitioned to creative writing. But fourth-wave feminism, as I understand it, has tried to address the issues that the first three waves mostly sidestepped: the relationship between sex and race. That is to say, the first three waves were mostly led by and directed at empowering white women. Intersectional feminism appears to seek a reckoning with white-centered feminism, which is why, I suppose, it’s okay to make fun of Karens and such. Its practical goal is racial and gender equity, i.e., DEI for all. It is the real “equity feminism”—meaning not equal, but same, outcomes for all, not, we all get a chance to be in the Cabinet, but there must be 50% women in the Cabinet—and presumably those women should represent all races.

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So there you have it, the history of feminism standing on one foot.¹²

I have some beefs with the movement.¹³ It went off the rails in many ways, but I also see that it accomplished some good and necessary things.

Where does J.K.R. fit in?

I’d put her squarely in the center of second-wave feminism. She wants to empower and protect women, not to do away with “woman” as a category. She doesn’t much care about men and finds them convenient rhetorical targets. As such, she’s not an ally of conservatives per se, but in the particular case of transgender ideology, she aligns with Matt Walsh. Strange bedfellows, etc.

In truth, she comes across in her tweets as a far more radical feminist, a ressentiment feminist, than she ever appeared to be in, say, Harry Potter, and I don’t think that’s because she has changed or because she was hiding her true self as the writer of HP. I think she positioned herself firmly on radical feminist territory because that’s the safest ground from which to question transgender ideology. To do it from any other grounds is to risk the label of bigot and defender of the patriarchy, so she’s channeling her inner Gloria Steinham.

And that’s okay with me because she’s doing what only she can do and because she wrote some great novels that got a generation of kids reading even during the ascendancy of the Internet. If, in taking on radical transgender ideology, she takes the occasional swipe at men, I’m okay with that. I give props where they are due, and they are due to Ms. Rowling.

1. And who am I to offer such a definition? Besides having written my dissertation and published a “men’s studies” approach to James Joyce, I also once taught a course on Women in Comics and earned a place on my university’s Women’s Studies faculty.

2. One of the things we see today across the board are battles over who gets to define words, whether those words are “feminist,” “woman,” or in other arenas, “genocide,” “indigenous,” etc. Some words have always been highly contested. Orthodox Jews define “Jew” differently than Reform Jews, who define that term differently than antisemites. I just recently saw someone on X claim that Jesus was not a Jew but an “Israelite”—as if there were a difference.

3. Author of Refusing to be a Man (1989).

4. Which I used to think was a stretch, until recently while reading Casino Royale was shocked to see James Bond reflecting on “the sweet tang of rape.”

5. Who took their cue, I suppose, from the 1967 S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Society for Cutting up Men).

6. One-time male feminist Warren Farrell does an excellent job discussing these issues in Why Men are the Way They Are and The Myth of Male Power.

7. And the aforementioned, albeit much less important, John Stoltenberg.

8. This fits Douglas Murray’s “coming into the trains station” theory. In The Madness of Crowds, Murray explains how liberation movements sometimes transmogrify into something toxic just as they achieve their goals.

9. A breath of fresh air, Christina Hoff Summers documented these strange denials of success in her book Who Stole Feminism? (1994).

10. You can thank the French psychoanalyst Lacan for the idea that language precedes reality and for modeling the execrable prose style that marked Butler’s work.

11. I.e., the old style notion of gender being, it’s okay for a man to wear a skirt in Scotland, but not in America, and, so, therefore, there’s nothing inherently feminine or masculine about wearing or not wearing skirts.

12. Meaning, among other things, that this is mostly from memory and some quick google searches rather than me going back to my grad school books.

13. Which I may explore more directly in a part 2.