Summary: Reflections on a pointed question from a website that’s usually not on the forefront of feminist activism.
Angry Mouse, in a toweringly angry post at Daily Kos asks a question that, post Bart Stupak and Ben Nelson, keeps gaining traction: Compared to the (literally!) lunatic fringe teabaggers W exactly TF do NOW and NARAL and Emily’s List actually do anyway?
You know those emails? The ones from NOW and NARAL and Emily’s List that declare, with great urgency and lots of ALL CAPS and exclamation marks, that you must give money right now? Stop this bill! Block this nominee! Protect Roe! Save the Supreme Court! And give, give, give!!!
And since you often agree — why yes, I do want to stop this bill; why no, I do not want that nominee confirmed — you click and give. It won’t stop this bill or block that nominee, but you will get another email at the next crisis.
And it’s always a crisis. Even under a Democratic president, with a Democratic supermajority in Congress, the nation’s biggest feminist organizations are in crisis mode, raising money but unable to deliver results. They’re just as effective as they were under Bush. Which is to say, Not. At. All.
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Remember way back in the fall of 2008, when one clever person decided to donate to Planned Parenthood in “honor” of Sarah Palin?
“Make a donation to Planned Parenthood,” the anonymous e-mail message urged. “Of any amount. In Sarah Palin’s name.”
The message, which began circulating widely on the Internet last week, had one more instruction: request that the personalized thank-you card from Planned Parenthood be sent to Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee and a vocal opponent of abortion, at the McCain-Palin campaign headquarters in Virginia.
So far, the scheme seems to be getting a strong response. As of Friday, Planned Parenthood had taken in $802,678 in donations from 31,313 people, said a spokesman for the organization, Tait Sye. More than two-thirds of the individuals are first-time donors to Planned Parenthood, Mr. Sye said, and money came in from all 50 states.
Nearly a million dollars raised for women’s health care, not by any of these organizations asking for money, but by one anonymous email. If it really is about the bottom line, if feminist advocacy has been reduced to how much money can be raised, what purpose do these organizations serve that can’t be achieved by one person with a good idea and dial-up?
Perhaps it is time for women to examine whether the largest organizations that claim to represent them are really delivering on their promises.
They’ve failed to organize the millions of supporters they have into a coherent and powerful movement. ‘Cause when your movement looks like an amateur mess compared with the “keep your government hands off my Medicare” teabaggers, you’re doing something wrong.
Angry Mouse is absolutely clear the problem isn’t feminism itself. Witness her endorsement of the Planned-Parent letter and its awesome grass-roots response. Which got a lot of acceleration from non-institutional feminist and progressive blogs and websites. (I first heard about it on either Feministing or Feministe.)
It’s also possible those organizations launch tons of initiatives that… um… just aren’t very visible, exciting, base-mobilizing, or particularly cost-effective compared to their high-visibility, highly exciting (or at least stress-elevating), highly-effective but clearly not-at-all base-rallying fundraising.
Just for the record I don’t want to hear that the deck is stacked against women in politics. Or even that the “establishment” welds the whip. Deck-stacking has not hampered Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, for instance, both of whom are doing even though both are women and cordially despised by a conservative establishment that would very much prefer nice well-heeled white men like Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. That these women’s most enthusiastic support comes not from the establishment but from the very demographics that, say, NOW says is most inimical to women: MRAs, super-patriots, evangelicals, secessionists, xenophobes, skinheads, and all-round knuckle-draggers. Also for the record I don’t want to hear yeah-buts about how Palin, or Bachmann, or Liz Cheney, or Michelle Malkin, or Kellyanne Conway, or Mary K. Ham, or Virginia Foxx, or (going back a generation or two) Margaret Thatcher, Ayn Rand, Phyllis Schlaffley, Jeane Kirkpatrick, or (before her welcome but peculiar turnaround) Arianna Huffington, and on and on and on were or are just parroting, mimicking, or sock-puppeting for behind-the-scenes male power brokers. Each one of them believes that shit way more passionately than any 10 John Boehners, Mitch McConnells, or Rupert Murdochs.
And finally, from my childhood encounters with conservative protestantism it’s very often women in churches who let their ministers know when they seem to be going soft on hard-line issues. The point is that if there’s a problem for feminists it’s probably got surprisingly little to do with the fact that women are advancing the issues and way more to do with the issues. And this is why, I think, it’s a mistaken strategy in… I dunno… industrial feminist organizations to imagine that “if you fundraise for it they will come.” And why I think it’s absolutely catastrophic to wait till the bus you’re being thrown has too much momentum to be stopped before saying anything about it. You’ve got to sell it. Promote it. In advance. Sell it to women, far too many of whom are on the bus! Even sell it to men! Who are served by the status quo better than women but only relatively so and only scarcely so. (On this point: if men were that much better served then you’d expect to see neither Mary Matlin advancing the status quo nor me feeling confined by it. Instead you see similar dynamics all over the place.)
Going back to Angry Mouse’s point about the Planned Parenthood fundraiser. One email, multiplied by a thousand forwards, reposts, and retweets turned into a million dollars in donations to an organization that, however perfectly or imperfectly, actually does something. That’s a lot of pent-up interest that in turn suggests there’s room for advocacy and action.
I mean… it’s… I mean… doesn’t it says something right there that Angry Mouse’s angry thesis appeared on the only-vaguely-sorta-gets-women’s-stuff DailyKOS rather than something like, oh, say, the organization-ought-to-be-its-core-mission National Organization for Women?
I feel really, really on thin ice saying this at all but it seems like two of the possible alternatives moving forward would be for, say, some serious reinvigoration of the aforementioned groups under the leadership of new generations of unapologetically feminist-activist women like Jessica Valenti or Pam Spaulding or Jill Filipovic… or else the establishment of additional organizations that might actually do something about the adverse gender climate instead of just complain about it.
Update: I should mention, as Angry Mouse does, that Stephanie Schriock, a Gen Xer, former Deaniac, and progressive political-organizing powerhouse, has just become the new president of Emily’s List. If she’s a feminist activist as well as a political pro that could be a promising development.
