Are we mad at feminism or are we mad at capitalism?

Towards a fifth wave of feminism that celebrates care and connection

Feminism is like the Yankees, broccoli, or the DMV: people love to hate it. For a movement that’s only been around in its current form for 150 years or so, it’s been blamed for a whack-a-mole gallery of social ills, from the declining birth rate to the male malaise to child delinquency, the loneliness epidemic, overgrown leg hair, lower back tattoos, and the breakdown of marriage. Rush Limbaugh coined the term “feminazi” back in the 1990s (in retrospect, maybe he should have worried more about the actual Nazis spawning within his listener base) and nowadays people like to dunk on girlbosses, white feminists, email jobs, liberal Karens, man-dissing NYT op-ed writers, and all the other ladies who are Ruining Society. I think girlboss white feminism* is annoying too! But here’s the thing.

Most of the cultural changes that people blame on feminism are actually the fault of contemporary late-stage capitalism.

In a recent post, Elena Bridgers, who writes the excellent evolutionary history Substack MOTHERHOOD UNTIL YESTERDAY , describes a poll she conducted of nearly 6000 of her readers. A majority of readers agreed with the statement “feminism has had unintended negative consequences for society” (although 80% of them also described themselves as feminists, suggesting that their concerns did not imperil their overall support for the movement). Their concerns with feminism fell into a few buckets that echo some of the quadrants of feminist exhaustion that Anne Helen Petersen unpacked in another recent post. These include burnout from moms trying to ‘have it all’ (as Bridgers writes, “Feminism pushed us into the workforce but didn’t do much to take away any of our other responsibilities in the process”), and a focus on success in the workplace at the expense of valuing care work.

Bridgers got a cavalcade of responses suggesting that she simply didn’t understand feminism, even though her original post did a nuanced job of unpacking the different goals of feminism (from pay parity to liberation from patriarchy). I would quibble with her wording that feminism “pushed” women in the workplace because I think most women entered the workplace not because of girlboss messaging but due to a combination of economic necessity and the opportunities afforded by labor-saving housekeeping devices and the birth control pill. But I think she’s tapping into a true popular understanding of feminism, which is that it champions paid work at the expense of care work, sex-positive exploration over committed marriage, and individual self-actualization over family and community ties.

But do workaholism, individualism, materialism, and selfishness have to be baked into feminism? Not necessarily.

Here's my basic definition of feminism: The belief that women are full-fledged people with internality, inherent worth, and the right to live with agency, access equal opportunities, and make their own choices.

Here’s not what is included in feminism: The right for all those choices to be good ones. The right for those choices to make us happy and fulfilled, without trade-offs or sacrifices. (Were women of pre-feminist generations happy with all their choices? Was the Dust Bowl farm wife who lost half her children to influenza happy with her choices? Was the 1950s wife of an alcoholic abuser, taking in laundry to pay the bills, happy with her choices? What about the corseted Victorian wife who wasn’t taught how to read for fear that novels would corrupt her sensibilities? There’s a reason there was a cottage industry of doctors treating female “hysteria.”)

As Bridgers acknowledges, feminists have long acknowledged the importance of family life, and care-oriented strains of feminism have been around for as long as feminism has existed. In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, the maternalist movement, led by figures like Frances Perkins, focused on improving the conditions of mothers and children. The “maternalist reforms” included the establishment of maternal and child health programs, advocacy for maternity leave, and promoting the idea that motherhood should be valued as essential work. In the 1970s, Syvia Federici created the Wages for Housework movement, centered around increasing the value of care labor. Many influential Black feminists championed the value of domestic work and the importance of community care.

Feminists have also argued explicitly for more family-friendly supports for working parents, including parental leave, breastfeeding protections, anti-pregnancy discrimination, and subsidized childcare. In 1971, Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, which would have created a universal childcare system similar to the ones that exist in many other advanced economies around the world, and there has been minimal progress on childcare in the 50 years since. Indeed, the lack of progress in the U.S. is notable compared to peer nations, who have greater investments in child welfare and a greater representation of elected women leaders.

When Bridgers writes that feminism encouraged moms to join the work world but “didn’t do much to take away any of our other responsibilities in the process,” that latter failure is not for lack of trying.

I think the reason that girlboss and Lean In feminism ultimately prevailed as the version of feminism that feels most familiar to millennial women is because, frankly, it reflects the wins that were easier for feminism to achieve. Feminism couldn’t get us paid maternity leave and breastfeeding support and help with childcare and health insurance for stay-at-home mothers in the United States, but it could leverage the most ambitious among us to gain women more equal standing in the work world. (Although of course, women are still underrepresented within the ranks of top executives and elected officials). Feminism prevailed in those goals because they were more aligned with the interests of neoliberal economic forces.** Big corporations want more Sheryl Sandbergs, not more Sylvia Federicis. Marketers and media companies want more sex-positive college girls in lipstick and fewer Andrea Dworkin types who scared the pants off of them. Focusing on the individual successes and self-expression of trailblazer women is easier than changing whole communities and societies.

Bridgers is not wrong that the strain of feminism in the zeitgeist in the early 2000s was often overtly hostile to motherhood and the family. There is an early Sex and the City episode that encapsulates this. The four women go out to suburban Connecticut for a baby shower, bearing condoms and a bottle of scotch as gifts. The Connecticut moms are all in pastel sweaters, whereas the SATC ladies are in crop tops and black leather. The single ladies roll their eyes at all the smug domesticity on display and head back to the city and their liberated lives as quickly as possible. Later, Samantha throws an “I Don’t Have a Baby” shower. I watched this episode when I was living in NYC in my early twenties and, at the time, thought it was a hilarious feminist response to the “cult” of motherhood. Now, as a mom in my 40s, I think it’s unfortunate that so much of ‘90s feminism styled maternity as lame and boring.

Of course, every social movement is a pendulum swing, and the SATC episode was itself a response to a culture that vaunted chaste motherhood as the only worthy aspiration for women. There was a long pushback against that concept in the late 20^th century, and a desire to introduce other scripts for women. At the same time, women were facing very real obstacles to their progress in the workplace, and feminism centered around helping them gain economic and political power.

Feminism achieved many of its early goals, so much so that the idea that women can opt to delay parenthood, go to college, and join the work world, a controversial concept just a few generations again, is now taken as a given. Indeed, in many ways feminism is much like the labor movement: a victim of its own success. Women were among the very first factory workers, so they fought on both fronts. Take the Lowell textile mill girls, who worked 12-14 hour shifts in brutal and dangerous conditions. The women breathed in toxic lint dust all day. The mechanized looms were deafeningly loud and had no safety features. If your sleeve got caught in the machine, you’d lose a hand or an arm; if a stray hair got caught in the machine, you’d lose your scalp. Being alert on the job was so important that factory workers of that era dosed their babies with laudanum so they wouldn’t wake them up at night.

In 1834, the mill girls went on strike, one of the first organized labor movements in modern history. They published a pamphlet to describe the horrendous working conditions in the mills, and, despite not having the right to vote, successful lobbied state politicians to listen to their cause. Movements like theirs are the reason that workers have the right to work in safer conditions, to have bathroom breaks, to get the weekend off, and to work an eight-hour instead of a 12-hour day. Contemporary workers take the basic structure of the 40-hour-workweek for granted, and also take it for granted that their workplaces won’t kill them – that is, that they have the right to use equipment with basic safety features. These gains didn’t happen naturally, though. Every single one had to be fought for and won, often after many setbacks. Only about 10% of U.S. workers are formal union members today, but every single worker benefits in some ways from the gains of the labor movement.

Feminism is similar. Even the traddiest trad wife takes it for granted that she can use a credit card, speak in public, wear the clothes she wants to wear, teach her daughters to read, and vote for the political candidate of her choice. It took almost 100 years of tireless effort to win women the right to vote in the United States! Every victory of feminism has been hard-won. Women didn’t get the right to open a bank account or credit card in their own name, without their husband’s permission, until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974. If the early feminists time-traveled to the present day, they would be astonished and delighted at the present status of women. As I wrote in a comment on Anne Helen Petersen’s piece,

Feminism has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams! In fact I’d argue it has been one of the most stunningly successful social movements of our time. Young women who are now turning away from calling themselves feminist are, in some ways, the best sign of how victorious the feminist movement has been, because women are free to renounce it without losing the freedom it has afforded them.

Despite its successes, contemporary feminism has, as Bridgers puts it, a “branding problem.” We are now seeing another pendulum swing, towards a phase of pushback against “feminist liberation” and all the trade-offs it can bring for women and society. Many women are asking, what if having kids is actually fun and good and societies fare better when more babies are born?

An interesting counterpoint to the SATC baby shower episode is the film 9 to 5, starring angel-who-walks-the-earth Dolly Parton. I first watched this movie as a teenager with my mom, who entered the work world in the late ‘60s and told me that she could not enjoy the humor because it was too real. Working women in the ‘70s were not taken seriously, were called “girls” and expected to fetch coffee and run personal errands while their bosses took credit for their ideas. If they got groped by their bosses, they had to smile and put up with it. For all the griping these days about female-dominated HR workplace culture, the prototypical ‘70s office was dominated by lazy dudes who took long lunches and played golf in between chasing their secretaries around the desk.

I watched the film again recently with my daughter. It holds up! When the three leads kidnap their terrible boss and take over the company, they make a bunch of changes to improve morale. These include allowing workers to display photos of their kids, developing a job-sharing program so that working moms can trade off shifts with each other, adopting part-time and flexible schedules, and building an in-office daycare so that moms can see their kids during the workday. In other words, the movie articulates a family-friendly vision of working motherhood that helps women balance their jobs with parenting.

Feminism has been a book with many chapters. The first wave was about winning basic rights, like voting and the ability to own property. The second wave (1960s-1970s) broadened that vision to include cultural change and reproductive rights. The third wave (1990s-2000s) was more diverse, individualistic, and included sex positivity, the Riot Grrls, and “liberated” single ladies like the SATC crew. The fourth wave (2010s-present) includes the publication of the books Lean In and Girlboss and the rise of the MeToo movement.

I think it’s time for a fifth wave of feminism, one that builds on the successes of the previous waves and corrects some of their mistakes. This fifth wave discards the idea that success, for women, means emulating men and outcompeting them on the terrain they have constructed. It continues the fight for political representation and against workplace discrimination, but it also elevates the value of care and champions traditionally feminine alongside traditionally masculine traits and roles. The fifth wave is about community building and creating what Bridgers calls a matricentric society, borrowing the term from primatologist Sarah Hrdy; one that challenges patriarchal devalution of mothers and children and focuses on how we find meaning and connection in the company of each other. The fifth wave is also about valuing men, who are often even more imprisoned and oppressed by rigid patriarchal scripts than women are. There is no need to denigrate men because we’re not in competition with each other; society works best when men and women cooperate on provisioning and parenting and share power. The fifth wave is about recognizing that humans are shaped by biology as well as culture, but also that we are a uniquely flexible and plastic species that can adapt to different roles. The fifth wave is also about rejecting the transactional, late-capitalist logic that the only valuable work is paid work.

*I just read Careless People, the inside story of Facebook’s rise (highly recommend!) and one of the biggest takeaways is that Sheryl Sandberg is actually a terrible boss in ways that reflect the hypocrisy of Lean In. She forced her low-ranking female employees to do unpaid book promotion, and the narrator is pressured to travel late in a high-risk pregnancy, work through maternity leave, told not to talk about her kids at work, and forced to go on a retreat in India just months after giving birth. Lean In had some valuable messages but the overall solution of “beat the men at their own game” is not a sustainable or inclusive model of feminism.

**To paraphrase my response to Daniel Greco in an earlier conversation, this is not an anti-capitalist essay. I’m probably more of a capitalist than anything else, though I would like to see stronger government oversight and regulation along with more redistributive policies. Every system comes with trade-offs, and I think there’s some confusion about how to account for some of the negative side effects that come with capitalism - like hyper-individuality and workaholism and materialism. Conservatives blame feminists, youth, and the decline in church attendance, liberals tend to blame big corporations and big tech and unregulated markets. I think the liberals are more accurate about who the villains are, but that doesn’t mean that capitalism is all bad.

And now for a change of pace:

MUSIC RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Fun announcement: I recently added a paid option to this newsletter! I wasn’t originally planning to monetize it, but I realized I was spending so much money buying subscriptions to other Substacks that I was about to go broke. If you’d like to upgrade to paid, great! If you don’t want to upgrade, no problem at all! If you want to upgrade but money is a hardship, let me know and I’m happy to comp you. If you upgraded by accident and you want a refund, let me know that too. I’m still going to share most of my posts for free, but I might paywall some more of the sensitive stuff connected to my forthcoming book as the release date gets closer (like behind-the-scenes info about how I got a book deal, or what I’m learning about editing and publicity as I go through the process). In the meantime, I thought I’d use this space to share my favorite indie-rock music recommendations - what I’m discovering and listening to the most. For this week, I want to spotlight a couple of my favorite songs from a shoegazey Oklahoma band that just released an excellent new album after a long hiatus.

The band is Broncho, from Norman, Oklahoma. I heard about them from my buddy Tim Regan, who runs Nine Mile Records in Austin, TX. They’re kind of like a shoegazey Spoon or an Americanized Jesus & Mary Chain. You might be familiar with their 2014 song Class Historian, which got licensed in some ads.

I actually like the KEXP version of this song better than the recorded version, because you can see a) how cool the band looks and b) appreciate how hard that stutter-y part is to sing.

Anyway, the band just came out with a new album this year, Natural Pleasure, after a seven-year hiatus, and it’s weirdly glorious. I’m obsessed with this wall-of-sound single, Funny. The video is very strange, and the band has gotten a bit grizzled over the years.

Let me know if you like them!