_This second post is a follow up to The New York Times, searching perhaps for alliteration, picked an unfortunate and/or loaded term in Saturday’s Op/Ed piece:
But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?
Except for one big thing, what she’s talking about, and its source, is actually semi-reasonable, as she makes clear when you read further:
When women stepped into male- dominated realms, they put more demands — and stress — on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties — and grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage.
Well yeah, if you’re just adding expectations to one gender instead of redistributing them across all of them then you’re committing to a lot more effort at the same time your chances of success will diminish at least somewhat. Even when men pick up some of the slack. Even though some women can have it all.
All that can be true and yet…
And yet what a choice of words in Dowd’s first sentence! “Aggrieved” is a wonderfully anti-feminist buzzword.
Here’s how Dictionary.com defines grievance
- a circumstance thought to be unjust or injurious and ground for complaint or resentment
- complaint or resentment, or a statement expressing this, against a real or imagined wrong
- a complaint arising from circumstances or conditions relating to one’s employment
Grievances are not brought by superiors against subordinates. Grievances are not filed against one’s self. And so to say women are “aggrieved” is just one more way of locating women in the traditional role of supplicants, of nagging, whining or complaining. Of that most stereotypical of traditional gendered emotions: disappointment.
More to the point, though, “aggrieved” was Dowd’s choice of words. And if she presented herself as steadfastly progressive, as a revolutionary theorist, as a radical feminist, as a crusader for gender deconstruction, or as anyone else with a clear and frequently-articulated vision of where men and women ought to be going I’d hear her rhetoric of grievance a little differently. But she’s not! I’m not saying she’s not feminist (not at all.) I’m just saying she’s not been very good about articulating how our expectations, for ourselves and others, have shifted since the 1970s when the “baseline” study she compares us to today was made and when, incidentally, she began her own career.
In fact, you wanna know what life was like for women back then? Check it out…
In two paragraphs about California’s first woman state senator and assemblywoman Ariel of Feministing says all you really need to know about where feminism got its reputation for “humorlessness” and confrontation.
When [Rose Ann] Vuich arrived [as the first woman elected to the California State Senate, in 1976], there was no bathroom, and no recreational, social, or other facilities for women legislators. She became so incensed when her colleagues would address the Senate as “Gentlemen” that she rang a bell at her desk each time to remind them women had finally infiltrated the boy’s club.
By 1986, the mostly-female legislative staff members, including schedulers, legislative aides and the like, were still referred to as “girls.” Newly-elected Assemblywoman Bev Hansen was on the Assembly floor with a male colleague. A second Assemblyman approached and said, “Well look at that! I didn’t know they were letting the girls on the floor.” His male colleague replied, “Assemblyman, meet Assemblywoman Hansen.”
If you’re old enough to remember the 1970s at all you probably remember that the idea of “unisex” bathrooms outside the home was such an alien concept that municipal and state lawmakers routinely proposed making them or more accurately keeping them illegal. Which made the lack of women’s restrooms in the Senate more than an inconvenience for Vuich.
Please don’t confuse this with a “hey, women are making progress so what are you complaining about” pitch. I’m sort of kind of mostly sure even Dick Cheney wouldn’t want to go back to a time when state legislatures simply didn’t have women’s rooms in their capitol buildings. In fact I’m kind of sure that if, say, Mary Matalin had walked up to Cheney saying there was no women’s restroom in the undisclosed location he’d have said “that’s dumb, I’ll force some of my detainees build you one.” Point being she wouldn’t have brought it up as a grievance, nor would he have particularly received it as a supplication because that’s now an expectation. (Another expectation, oddly enough, is that right-wing hacks may be willing to roll the clock back for everyone else but they’re perfectly sanguine about paying women enormous amounts of money to help them do so. And those women evidently have high enough expectations about their own identities and career potential that it gives them no qualms to do so.)
Sheesh. I’m packing for a three-day camping trip with one of my children’s classes and it feels like I’m not being very focused here. But what I’m trying to say in the last paragraph is that there are two ways to measure gender progress — one by the actual progress, which is fine and yeah, if that was all there was to it then sure, what are them durn feminimisminists complaining about?
But the more significant way to measure progress is by what are the _expectations! By which standard you should be overjoyed by your Pentium II computer running Windows 3.2 because, geesh they sure didn’t have those in 1972 when the study Dowd is carping about set the baseline standard for men’s and women’s happiness. (Heck, I happen to vaguely remember that in 1974 a 4-function calculator was the size of a desktop computer! By which standard having an original Apple II ought to leave everyone over the moon!)
The point being that with expectations you can actually be making giant strides in progress while still feeling like you’re falling behind because your (perfectly reasonable!) expectations are growing even faster. What’s funny (and part of why I like the analogy) is that’s not even a controversial statement in computer technology!
I mean, yeah, you’ll still find people in computers being “aggrieved,” even legitimately aggrieved! But way, way more often a more accurate term would be “impatient.” Also “exasperated.” Oh, and “frustrated,” mostly by hidebound, foot-dragging, short-sighted, and pound-foolish obstacles to ever increasing, and usually perfectly reasonable expectations. And yet… and yet… you never hear someone in computer technology saying “we’re unhappy with the pace of progress, we were better off back in the days of 1,400 baud modems!”
So why, oh why, are so many people including cultural commentators like Dowd who, seriously, ought to know better working inside the frame that defines feminism as whiny, perpetually no-satisfying-some-women, and “aggrieved?” Instead of the perfectly reasonable, even more accurate, and compatible-with-the-cultural-zeitgeist framing like “impatience,” “enthusiasm,” “exasperation,” “anticipation,” or even “frustrated” by the slowness of the pace change in the face of rising expectations?
In computer terms there’s nobody accusing customers of “pushiness” for waiting impatiently for, say, Apple to release an iPhone-capable tablet computer, nor are customers said to be “aggrieved” by Apple’s incomprehensible partnership with the infuriatingly slow and spottily-connected AT&T Wireless. So why use that kind of language when you’re talking about other fast-moving developments like feminism?
