A Broken Wave
How Second-Wave Feminism was Dominated by the White, Middle-Classes
the Grabbing Back team
Definitions to words in green are at the bottom of the page.
Introduction
You’ve probably heard people talking about waves of feminism: first wave, second wave, third wave, and so on. They refer to different eras of the feminist movement. If you’re anything like us, you’ll have no idea what each is actually characterised by. That’s why we thought it would be useful to create an intro-guide-to-waves, which is what this month’s article, podcast, and dictionary definitions focus on. That way, the next time we, or your friend’s boyfriend, are chatting out of our arses about the waves, you can call us out on it.
In this article, we’re going to focus on the UK and US second wave. Roughly, this spanned the 1960s and 70s. It arrived against a backdrop of global protest and social change. The movement owes a lot to the hotbed of ideas and activism of the period, and many of the issues discussed are ones which we still care about today. However, the movement had several important flaws, including racism, homophobia, and loads of others.
Today we’re going to look at one of these flaws: the way the mainstream movement excluded working class women and women of colour. In particular, we’re going to look at the way the narrative of the second wave (how it was presented) and the causes which were central to it were predominantly controlled by white, middle class women.
Narrative
a.k.a. how they presented themselves, and who got to decide it
In this section we’re going to start looking at narrative. Narrative is a words often thrown about with no one really sure what it actually means. We’re using it pretty simply here: by narrative we just mean the way the movement presented itself. The main point we want to make is that white, middle class women were the ones controlling it.
Publications
The ideas you present as central are a crucial part of creating a narrative. During the second wave, a lot of this was done through magazines and pamphlets. We’re going to look at two examples here: SpareRIb in the UK and Ms in the US.
Front cover of Spare Rib
- Spare Rib -
First up is SpareRib. SpareRib was a mass publication, often circulated for free via “floating libraries” in cities like Bristol.The brilliant thing about SpareRib is that there was no economic barrier to the magazine; the floating libraries meant that you could get it for free. However, this was overshadowed by its being exclusively planned and written by university educated, white women, resulting in content that was highly academic (it mainly included left-wing political theory).
It isn’t that spreading academic feminist ideas is a problem in itself (if it was, we would be in trouble). Rather, it’s:
that the content wasn’t really accessible to those who weren’t university-educated (it used inaccessible language and assumed too much knowledge) and mainly focussed on white, middle-class issues,
these kinds of publications set the tone for second-wave feminism, and that tone only really captured a white, educated idea of feminist thought, and
all of this resulted from failure to consult and include women who were not white and educated. The result of this, was that the majority of women didn’t get the opportunity to relate to, contribute to, or understand the ideas which were presented as mainstream feminism.
Front cover of Ms Magazine
- Ms Magazine -
Ok, so it’s not looking that good for the UK second-wave. What about the US? Ms magazine, set up by Gloria Steinem, was a central publication in the US second wave. In many ways, it avoided some of the issues which plagued SpareRib; it included less academic content and it had women of colour on its committee.
This is all sounding pretty good, then. However, having women of colour on the committee is (obviously) not enough on its own. You also need to listen to them. This is where Ms fell short. A lot of women of colour on the committee raised concerns about content and the way Ms was presented. However, their concerns were largely side-lined and ignored. So, again, we can see that, even with some token efforts to include women of colour, mainstream second-wave feminists maintained a tight grip on narrative control.
Local Groups and Centres
Next up we’re going to look at another way narrative was controlled: local women’s groups and centres.
The point of these centres, was primarily the radical feminist aim of “consciousness raising”. By “consciousness raising”, second wave feminists meant making women aware of the specific ways in which they are oppressed. Radical feminists at the time thought that “women’s oppression was so deep-seated that it deprived them even of understanding their own lives and feelings…Liberation demanded first and foremost that women became conscious of how they were oppressed in every aspect of their daily lives”. To put it a little more simply, they thought that to really free women from male power, we have to make them aware of exactly how that power functions.
So far so good. However, without external funding, these groups were mainly run by middle class women who had the money to give their time away for free. This meant that middle-class women got to decide which issues were discussed. In other words, they got to define how women are oppressed.
Unsurprisingly, their definitions didn’t capture the experiences of working-class and minority women, and so “consciousness raising” was pretty much not effective for them. As a result, very few working-class or minority women attended. Some groups, such as Brighton Women’s Group noticed this problem and tried to address it by hosting a “working class women’s day” on Fridays. This, however, only really served to highlight the problem - one Friday a week was unsurprisingly ineffective in engaging working-class women, and it doesn’t seem like women of colour were considered much at all.
The problem which we’re seeing then, is that these groups played a crucial role in defining which ideas were central to the movement. In this sense, they played a key role in deciding how the movement presented itself, and that decision was almost exclusively up to white, middle-class women.
All in all…
So, what can we get from this? The basic point we want to make here is that second-wave feminists created a narrative which only really spoke to the experiences of white, educated, middle-class women. In doing so, they failed to carve out a space for the vast majority of women in the mainstream feminism of the period.
Causes
a.k.a. stuff they did / focused on
Up to here we’ve focussed on narrative; how the movement was presented. As promised, we’re now going to take a look at the causes which came out of this.
The causes of any movement are going to be pretty crucial. They are the bit in the horse’s mouth - they lead action and impact. Second-wave feminism was mainly characterised by concern for equal pay, equal education and opportunity, reproductive rights, and anti-objectification. In this section, we’re going to explore the problems with these. Specifically, how centering these causes had the unhappy consequence of at best limiting the space for issues which concerned working-class women and women of colour, and at worst of harming them.
This might seem a little weird right now - none of these seem like obvious contenders for the title, “problematic”. The next few sections will make this clearer.
Abortion and Contraception
First let’s look at abortion and contraception. To see the issues with this one, we need to dive into the social context.
During this period, a lot of working class women and women of colour were wary of “not only the power of men over women, reflected in the institutional hierarchy of the health service…[but also of] the power of race and class which sought to determine who should reproduce”.
In a nutshell, working-class and minority women had concerns over and above white, middle-class women: where white women’s freedom was restricted by being prevented from choosing not to have children, Black women were restricted in their choice to have children (and not to, for that matter). This was the result of the contraceptive injection, which doctors would use on women they deemed “unfit mothers”. Unsurprisingly, doctors primarily considered working class women and women of colour to fit into this category. To make the picture more grim, US companies at the time were known to use birth control to regulate populations in developing countries.
The problem, then, is not so much that reproductive freedom was an issue that shouldn’t have been spoken about. Rather, pushing for this cause whilst simultaneously ignoring the impact of doing so on women of colour and working class women, and their legitimate concerns surrounding contraception, was careless at best. As such, in pursuing this cause the needs and interests of these women were side-lined.
Equal Pay and Equal Work
“Equal pay for equal work” is a famous second wave slogan, and the 1980 Equal Pay Act is one of its big achievements. The Equal Pay Act essentially writes into UK law that women must be paid equally for the same work. This sounds pretty good. However, prominent second-wave feminist and historian Sheila Rowbotham has since argued that it only really benefitted middle class women. This is given that working class women were more concerned with how different work was graded.
A case in point is the 1968 Ford factory strike carried out by working-class machinists. This dispute centred around the grading of women’s work: they were graded, unlike their male co-workers, as unskilled despite the similarly advanced skillset required to do the work (women were in charge of sewing all the bits together that go inside the cars, men had jobs like fitting engine parts). This prevented these women from getting wages equal to the men doing similarly skilled work.
Contrast this with middle class women who were far more likely to be in the same jobs as men (though paid less). Given this, they were far less concerned with the categorisation of different jobs, and far more concerned with equal pay for the same job.
So what can we get from this? Well, again, it looks like the needs and interests of working-class women were being side-lined. Again, the problem is not that equal pay for equal work wasn’t worth fighting for. Instead, the problem is the way in which it was fought for, and who benefited from that fight.
Objectification and Economic Independence
Barbara Caine has highlighted the extent to which the second-wave was concerned with issues of objectification, and more specifically, the ways in which conventional ideas of femininity contributed towards women’s oppression.
People protesting Miss World pageant
More specifically, the kind of objectification second-wave feminists were concerned with sprung from the ideas which had emerged during the 1950s “era of domesticity” - the period in which women’s bodies and dress were seen as representations of their virtues as homemakers. A nice example of this in action is the 1970s Miss World beauty pageant in London. Feminists launched onto the stage with stink-bombs, pamphleteered the audience, and wore sashes with titles printed on such as “miss-conception” and “miss-treated”.
We can understand this focus on objectification as problematic in two ways. Firstly, objectification was fairly low down on the list of priorities of most working-class and minority women. The difference is mainly economic; they just rarely had the luxury of prioritising these issues when more pressing concerns of economic insecurity and poor pay hadn’t been addressed.
Secondly, working-class women weren’t objectified in quite the same way. This is because working class families just couldn’t afford for their wives to stay at home. As such, these feminine ideals, though likely felt by working-class women, wouldn’t have been experienced the same. As a result, we again see a major cause adopted by the second-wave which prioritised the interests and experiences of white, middle-class women.
Conclusion
The key thing to take away from this, is not that the work of second-wave feminists wasn’t immensely valuable. Rather, it's that it should (and could) have been better.
The issues we covered in this article are part of a broader problem which has been prominent in a lot of feminist theory and activism - .taking the experiences of white, middle-class women to be central, and failing to understand how different social identities can work together and affect people’s experience of oppression. Over the next 3 months, we’ll look at some attempts to overcome this problem. Specifically, we’ll be thinking about intersectionality - we hope to see you there.
Floating libraries
Floating libraries moved around the different sites, so they weren't based in one space. This meant they could reach more people over a wider area.
Objectification
Objectification pretty much means treating someone as an object rather than a subject. To understand this, remember that the object receives the action of the subject. More concretely, objectification means treating someone as a sexual thing to be looked at, and which you can basically do what you want to.
Reproductive rights
Reproductive rights are anything to do with someone’s choice over whether they become or remain pregnant. It mainly concerns the right to contraception and abortion.
We also love to hear your thoughts on our pieces and we would always love to publish replies - we welcome strongly worded letters as much as your glowing praise.
References
Women’s Liberation at the Grass Roots: a View from Some English Towns, c.1968-1990 by Sue Bruley
English Feminism, 1780-1980 by Barbara Caine
Spare Rib, Second-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Consumption by Joanna Hollows in Feminist Media Studies 13.2
Striking Narratives: Class, Gender and Ethnicity in the 'Great Grunwick Strike', London, UK, 1976-1978 by Linda McDowell, Sundari Anitha, and Ruth Pearson in Women's History Review
The past Is before Us : Feminism in Action since the 1960s by Sheila Rowbotham
The Women’s Movement, Politics and Citizenship, 1960’s-2000 by Harold L. Smith in Women in Twentieth Century Britain
The Women's Movement and 'Class Struggle': Gender, Class Formation and Political Identity in Women's Strikes, 1968-78 by George Stevenson in Women's History Review