Full Frontal Feminism_ A Young Women's Guide to Why Feminism Matters - Jessica Valenti [58]
And you know, this wasn’t the only conference that has had this kind of problem. I went to a Feminist Majority Foundation conference once (it’s the organization that owns Ms. magazine) that brought hundreds of college feminist activists to D.C. Awesome, right? It could have been, but the whole conference was the young activists being talked at! No time for socializing, no workshops, hardly even time for questions.
I’m not trying to hate, I’m really not. I know we all do our best. But I honestly think that if our foremothers want feminism to stay alive and kicking, they have to be willing to hand over the reins. At least to some extent. We also have to throw ourselves out there. When you see an article about feminism being dead, write a letter to the editor! Join a local women’s organization—or start your own. ’Cause unless we prove otherwise, they’re just going to keep saying that young feminists don’t exist.
Moving Forward
I don’t know what feminist organizing will look like in the years ahead. I’d like to think it will look like a lot of things.
I think organizations like NOW and Feminist Majority Foundation may no longer be at the forefront of feminism. Many national organizations focus more on D.C. lobbying than activism, in my humble opinion. Yes, I know they’re activist organizations, but I see more activism from local groups than I do from national organizing lately. Not that that role is unimportant—it is. But the younger women I speak to see feminism going in a different direction—actually, a lot of different directions.
Thirty-one-year-old Joanne Smith, founder of the Brooklyn-based organization Girls for Gender Equity, says that the future of feminism “starts at home on a grassroots, community level. There has to be an intersection of ‘The Hill and The Hood’; the current disconnect of [feminism on the Hill] creates a false sense of achievement or advancement in a movement that must be sustained and felt by everyone, or at least a majority of the oppressed.”15 I think this is brilliant, and right on point. Feminism has to be about accessibility—both in how we present it and how we do it.
Amanda Marcotte, blogger for Pandagon.net (and friend of mine), says that blogging is a great new way to look at feminist activism, especially because it’s the realization of the old feminist adage “the personal is political.” Amanda says that the awesome thing about blogs is that they “tear down so many of the obstacles that made it hard for individual women’s stories to get an audience. The personal touch makes blogging a fertile ground for doing the hard work of waking people up to sexism and getting them committed to fighting it.”
Not shockingly, I agree. I think feminist blogs are just about the best way ever to get news about women with smart (and smartass) commentary. A lot of the work I’ve done with Feministing has informed my activism and made me think in new ways about how to be a feminist and organize around women’s issues. And for me, the most important component of my work and what I get involved in lies in its accessibility.
The great thing about doing online activism, especially blogging, is that it builds a community that you can’t get anywhere else. If you’re in some small town with no NOW chapter, or you’re in a high school where no one else calls themself a feminist, you can go to a website and get involved and talk with people from all around. I love that.
I also think that local organizing has done more for feminism than people give it credit for. Yes, big protests in D.C. are great. But changing a local law, or even a school mandate, is incredibly important. Plus, it’s easier to see the effects of activism when it’s in your face and on your home turf.
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