"Strident" and proud

Columnist Katha Pollitt blasts feminism's new timidity and says, "This 'girls just want to have fun' feminism is a very shallow approach to life."

By Jessica Valenti

Read more: Abortion, Activism, Feminism, Life

July 12, 2006 | Katha Pollitt's well-known wit and incisiveness run through all the pieces in "Virginity or Death!" -- a new collection of more than five years' worth of essays from her Subject to Debate column in the Nation. The essays cover a wide range of issues from the war in Iraq to healthcare, but unsurprisingly, the bulk covers feminist issues: abortion, child care and work, and the seemingly never-ending backlash against women's progress. In these meditations, Pollitt defies the stereotype of the finger-wagging, Mommy-knows-best feminist. She credits younger women with being "so much more confident and multicompetent" than she was at her age and lauds their accomplishments.

However, Pollitt definitely has strong opinions about women framing every decision they make as "empowering." She notes in "Sex and the Stepford Wife" that "women have become incredibly clever at explaining these [demeaning] choices in ways that barely mention social pressures or male desires." But, as harsh as Pollitt can sometimes be, there's always truth behind her observations.

When I spoke with Pollitt by phone, what struck me most was her optimism -- something a lot of feminists are understandably lacking these days. We're so busy lashing back against the backlash that forward-thinking feminism is hard to muster. Pollitt says that she wishes people would stop talking about feminism's supposed demise and instead talk about its "life." After reading the book, it occurred to me that maybe young women should do the same favor for their predecessors.

Some of your essays deal with the antifeminist backlash that has been brewing lately. So many of those arguments -- like Sylvia Ann Hewlett's book about older women not being able to have children because they focused too long on their careers, or the New York Times articles about the "opt-out revolution" -- seem like spruced-up versions of old myths. Why do we keep falling for them over and over again?

It's a very interesting question -- why do they keep doing this? It's part of the half-fulfilled nature of feminist hopes. I think that there's a fear out there that "Oh my God, if women aren't holding to marriage and child raising and sacrificing themselves for the family, then nobody is going to do it." People will just be living in their studio apartments for their whole lives. [Laughs.] For example, Sylvia Ann Hewlett had five children, and she produced some of them when she was over 50 years old! And she's saying, even if you have one child you're going to be crying in the gym because you don't have two children. And you just want to say, "Look -- you wanted to have five children." But obviously this is a minority taste. I think there are probably more people in our society who have no children than have five children. She just seems unable to accept that people are doing more or less what they want to do, or some version of what they want to do.

I remember when I was younger and just getting into feminism, I read Susan Faludi's "Backlash." And now, it's really the same exact thing all over again. It's so odd to me that women are still letting bogus statistics -- like if you're over 35 you're more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married -- affect them.

Yes, it's very odd. My mother used to subscribe to Ladies' Home Journal and Good Housekeeping and all those women's magazines, even though she always worked. She would get these magazines and I would read them when I was little and there would be articles: "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" and "How to Have a Better Marriage." I was always thinking -- what's it to you? Why do the editors of this magazine care if somebody else is married or not?

You include essays in the book about the loss of Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin. In the Dworkin piece, you say that you "miss the movement that had room for her." Can you just explain that a bit? Do you think feminism has become watered down?

I was thinking about how timid and deferential and also Beltway-oriented so much of organized feminism is now. It seems to revolve around electoral politics and abortion rights -- those are the two big deals. Think about all the feminist bookstores that have closed and feminist magazines that have folded. I get much less sense of a vibrant culture of feminism with its own institutions and its own internal debates.

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