New Face & New Wave of Feminism

There have been many tidal waves of feminism throughout history. Just as tidal action replenishes eco-systems in the oceans and estuaries, these tidal waves spurred on by outrageous conditions for women or a particular outrageous event, started and replenished the ranks of feminist activists, created new enthusiasm for the cause, and began pushing a new wave of young leaders who would learn, lead by example, and go on to become lifelong activists and leaders in the feminist movement and in other movements that feminism exposed them to.

One of the first waves in modern feminism was initiated by Flora Tristan in France in the early decades of the 19th Century. She preached that the rights of women (at that time the key demand of women was the simple right of divorce) must be achieved in conjunction with the liberation of the emerging “working class” through a union of all working people. Arnold Ruge, a friend of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, became acquainted with Flora Tristan in her salon discussion circle in Paris. Writing of her new revolutionary thinking to Marx and Engels, they adopted her class analysis of society and were transformed from liberals to socialists.

In America, the first wave was initiated by such

great leaders as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Fredrick Douglass, who were simultaneously aligned as leaders of the abolitionist movement.

The second American wave, kicking into high gear after the Civil War when women were left out of the 13th and 14th Amendments, was the struggle for women’s suffrage, the right to vote. Following the passage of the women’s suffrage Amendment (the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution), the National Women’s Party kept alive a fight for the Equal Rights Amendment which did not gain traction until the founding of the National Organization for Women in the 60’s. The goal of the ERA is to remedy the exclusion of women from the 14th Amendment, to establish constitutional rights to equal protection of the law and due process of law for all regardless of sex. Although we came within 3 states of ratification of the ERA, we lost that battle. I am proud of my work as a member of the speakers bureau of the Los Angeles area Mobilization Committee for the ERA, an umbrella group of many feminist and women’s organizations that were fighting for passage.

In 1989, the Supreme Court’s infamous Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services brought on another wave of pro-choice feminism that replenish the ranks of NOW, NARAL and many other activist causes. The Supreme Court allowed states to whittle away at the right to terminate a pregnancy, i.e., the right of people to control the uses of their own bodies, by regulating abortion services. Around this decision, we had thousands out picketing then-State Senate President David Roberti (an anti-choice Democrat) at his Burbank office. Roberti told the press in response to our virtual blockade that if you wanted to know his position on abortion, they should ask anti-abortion leader (and later Republican politician) Susan MacMillan Carpenter. A whole new generation of leaders, like Barri Falk who became President of San Fernando Valley NOW, got involved and active.

During the 1991 Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings in the United States Senate, while Americans sat riveted to the televisions and radios to hear the sordid details of Thomas’s sexual harassment of Anita Hill — while he was head of the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) — a new and massive wave of feminism broke out. Many of the leaders of my chapter and many NOW chapters came into the movement over this issue and today it remains one of the main complaints of women that we support and recruit because of their personal experiences with the continuing tolerance of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Beginning around 1988 and contemporaneous with the Webster decision and the Anita Hill case, Operation Rescue began blockades of women’s clinics throughout America. I emphasize women’s clinics because frequently the clinics they targeted did not provide abortion services. Operation Rescue was part of a cultural war that opposed not just abortion but services to women that did not fit their ideal of patriarchal male-dominant nuclear families. The only people who could even attempt to infiltrate Operation Rescue to get intelligence on its criminal activities were usually women who had grown up in right wing religious cults, because any normal woman’s body language would be a tip off. For example, when in the presence of a male in Operation Rescue, you had to look down at your feet and not look them in the eyes.

Well, coming full circle, one of the most inspiring days I’ve ever had, seeing a feminist tidal wave rolling in which will provide our great movement with new activists and budding young leaders was yesterday at the Los Angeles Slutwalk: This is what feminists look like!