Why Feminists Fight With Each Other

By Courtney E. Martin, AlterNet. Posted June 12, 2007.

Deborah Siegel -- writer, feminist and entrepreneur -- doesn't strike one as the type to dredge up old fights. Though she's 38, she looks about 18 as she sits happily in the grass at Union Square in a green and brown print dress, sandals thrown to the side and her legs curled under her, and tells me about the anticipation she feels about her new book coming out. Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (Palgrave) is essentially a historical tour of the last 40 years of ideological, and sometimes sadly personal, battles for the soul of feminism.

Siegel is an apt guide as something of a renaissance feminist. With her Ph.D. in English and women's studies from the University of Wisconsin, she connects with academics. With her large network of New York-based feminist authors and nonprofit gurus, she connects with cultural critics and feminist celebrities. And with her Midwestern roots -- she was born and raised near Chicago -- she connects with the average girl.

Sisterhood Interrupted is the kind of book that will draw them all in, not just because it is ripe with controversy, but because it provides historical context for contemporary infighting: the overblown mommy wars, raunch feminists and their older, horrified detractors, and bloggers virtually ripping one another apart. Siegel and I took our own dialogue to the net, as the sun was too bright and Siegel had things to do.

Courtney Martin: What inspired you to write about feminist fighting?

Deborah Siegel: I wrote Sisterhood, Interrupted because I grew tired of hearing women -- both across and within different generations -- blame each other for feminism's failures. It started in the early 1990s when Katie Roiphe blamed 1970s-style feminism for turning women into victims, and it's going on today in the form of women accusing each other of being "faux feminists" on their blogs.

Of course, fights were hot during the late 1960s and 1970s, too. Today, we're repeating past battles without even realizing it. There's so much left to do -- it's such an unfinished revolution -- and I believe we long ago lost sight of our common ground.

Martin: Did you worry that opening old wounds would lead to more fragmentation in the movement instead of less?

Siegel: You can't talk about feminism and not talk about conflict. I wrote about the stands and splits within the popular women's movement across 40 years as someone seeking to understand them -- not to titillate readers, and not to air dirty laundry. For those solely interested in a catfight, my book is going to disappoint!

Martin: What do you hope older feminists get out of the book? Younger feminists?

Siegel: I wrote the book I wanted my younger cousin, my mother, and my great aunt to read: a road map to the feminist past for a younger generation and a guidebook to the present for women who have been calling for change for years.

I want women across the generations to understand that, in important ways, we're more alike than we are different. Older and younger feminists are often depicted at odds, with veterans cast as relics of a bygone era and younger feminists portrayed as unaware of or ungrateful for the work their mothers did. But younger women aren't abandoning the movement -- they're reinventing it. This is our legacy. Feminists have been creating, imagining and reinventing since day one.

Martin: You write, "Across the generations and at the heart of the battle to articulate feminism as a movement with mass appeal has been that singular tagline: The Personal is the Political." Why is this phrase still so damn powerful?

Siegel: The idea behind this truly brilliant slogan transformed the way Americans thought of the politics of private life. In the book I write about how these words launched a movement, then quickly morphed into a philosophy and a blueprint for action that meant different things depending on where you sat.

Today, we're smack dab in the middle of those conversations -- whether we realize it or not. But there's a new hitch. In the absence of a visible, organized, and powerful mass movement and in an era that's far more conservative and individualistic, younger women are less inclined to see our problems as shared.

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Courtney E. Martin is the author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. You can read more about her work at www.courtneyemartin.com. Deborah Siegel's book -- Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild -- is out in stores now. You can read more about her work at www.deborahsiegel.net.

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