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stiletto heels.
NEW FEMINIST MACHISMA?
By the late 1990s, the rhetorics of feminism and individualism had com-
bined to create a new popular icon: the feminist badass. If second-wave
feminism had promulgated a vision of individual women as vulnerable and
sisterhood as strong, postfeminist feminism posited sisterhood as weak and
celebrated instead a proud new female brawn.
Images of strong, sexy bad girls permeated late-1990s popular culture.
Hip-hop and rap offered up new images of strong, powerful black
women. The first all-female rap group, Salt-n-Pepa, won a Grammy for
Best Rap Performance for their single, None of Your Business in 1995,
while Missy Misdemeanor Elliott released Supa Dupa Fly, her first
album, in 1997. Badass diva Queen Latifah joined Lisa Loeb and the
Dixie Chicks (and softees Sarah McClaughlin and the Indigo Girls) at
Lilith Fair. In Hollywood, Lori Petty and Naomi Watts raised hell and
tore up the desert in a comic-book adaptation called Tank Girl (1995),
while Hong Kong action diva Michelle Yeoh strutted her stuff to Amer-
ican audiences in the latest James Bond flick, Tomorrow Never Dies
(1997). On television, actress Sarah Michelle Gellar battled demons as
the buff, kick-boxing teenage demon killer known as Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, while off-screen, thousands of women learned to kick box at the
neighborhood gym. Svelte and powerfully sexy professional athletes
daughters of Title IX were celebrated on the covers of women s maga-
zines as real-world icons for female ambition, beauty, and strength. U.S.
women won nineteen gold, ten silver, and nine bronze medals at the
Summer Olympics in 1996, and, in 1999, the U.S. Women s Soccer
Team made headlines not only for winning the Women s World Cup but
because Brandi Chastain, after scoring the winning goal for the team,
tore off her shirt.
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POSTFEMINIST PANACHE 125
Stars who embodied the new feminist machisma spoke out, encourag-
ing ordinary women to follow suit. Said comedic actress speaking quite
seriously Roseanne Barr, The thing women have yet to learn is nobody
gives you power. You just take it. In her book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult
Women (1999), ex rock critic/bad girl Elizabeth Wurtzel (of Prozac Nation
fame) celebrated mythic and real women who flaunted their bitchiness,
while Madonna celebrated her own: I m tough, I m ambitious, and I
know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay. 35
It was a confusing moment for feminist iconography. There were sports
heroines like Mia Hamm and pro-woman politicians like Hillary Clinton.
There was Anita Hill. There were singer/songwriters like Ani DiFranco,
whose songs about contemporary social issues such as racism, sexism, sex-
ual abuse, homophobia, reproductive rights, poverty, and war gained her a
passionate following among politically active college students nationwide.
And then there was Ally McBeal the ditsy twenty-eight-year-old, Ivy
League educated Boston litigator on the hit FOX television series whose
face appeared along with Susan B. Anthony s, Gloria Steinem s, and Betty
Friedan s on a 1998 cover of Time magazine along with the headline Is
Feminism Dead?
The Time cover was emblematic. It synthesized what many second-
wavers perceived as a devolution in focus from the serious to the silly. In-
side, an article by journalist Gina Bellafante ran with the juicy teaser
Want to know what today s chic young feminist thinkers care about?
Their bodies! Themselves! Ally s particular brand of me-first feminism
was taken to be representative of her generation. Said her creator, David
Kelley, She s not a hard, strident feminist out of the 60s and 70s. She s
all for women s rights, but she doesn t want to lead the charge at her own
emotional expense. On one episode, as Bellafante pointed out, Ally char-
acteristically answered the question Why are your problems so much big-
ger than everyone else s? with the honest response Because they re
mine. 36
Raised in solidarity, this fictionalized daughter of feminism had seem-
ingly internalized messages about women s progress only to become hyper-
individualistic. Ally s dilemmas were fiction, but Katie Roiphe s were real.
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126 SISTERHOOD, INTERRUPTED
What did this perceived turn toward individualism mean for feminism as
a movement? On one level, it meant that a younger woman who had made
it, like Roiphe, could believe that she or her friends were somehow in-
vulnerable. It meant that many women who had been able to exercise their
economic, social, and other freedoms no longer necessarily saw their con-
nection, as women, to women who had been unable (for reasons that were
not purely psychological) to access the same. It meant, perhaps, that the
critique had swung too far in the other direction, that some of those who
criticized second-wave feminism for harping on women s vulnerability
dangerously believed that women were now invincible. The result? A fem-
inism lacking in empathy and imagination a brave new feminism that
trafficked in selfishness, maybe, but more likely, in false bravado.
But perhaps the greatest irony of postfeminism 1990s-style was this: In
falsely imagining that we were postpatriarchy, postfeminists had in effect
redefined the enemy: other feminists. In the 1970s, feminists insisted on
sexual difference between men and women and launched a targeted attack
on male power, domination, androcentrism, sex discrimination, and sexual
double standards. But in the early 1990s, as popular feminist writers like
Roiphe and others turned their critical gaze on their predecessors and each
other, the emphasis on patriarchal domination and control faded into the
backdrop. Personal oppression became less about suppression under patri-
archy and more about suppression under the sisters meaning, for mem-
bers of a younger generation, under the mothers.
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C H A P T E R 5
REBELS WITH
A CAUSE
Mothers and daughters stand divided; how long until we are conquered?
Rebecca Dakin Quinn
On a crisp, clear day in early 1992, academics and activists in New York
City organized a conference, Women Tell the Truth, at Hunter College.
As the participants poured in, it felt a bit like a reunion. The older women
all seemed to know each other, greeting each other with hugs, handshakes,
and waves from across the room. Scores of younger women attended
bright-eyed, outraged, and awake. For older feminists, the recent Anita
Hill affair was a fresh but sorry reminder of a situation they already un-
derstood all too well. For many of the younger ones even those whose
feminist mothers had regaled them with tales of the bad old days when
male bosses called secretaries toots it was still an episode as shocking as
an unexpected pinch on the ass.
The conference was designed to capitalize on the anger many felt in the
wake of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Judge Thomas s nom-
ination. Anger was in the air that day, echoing that of the newly elected
Carol Mosely Braun and six of her Democratic women colleagues when
they united in a march on the Senate to urge greater attention to Anita
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128 SISTERHOOD, INTERRUPTED
Hill s charges. A famous Washington Post photograph published a week
after the 1992 election captured the female legislators charging up the
Capitol, which clearly was, their irate faces reminded us, still a bastion of
male power.
Back in New York, the conference organizers promoted straightforward
goals how to get more women to run for Congress, how to make
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