Race, gender, and class are three issues that have been controversial topics in society since the beginning of time. They will never be separate issues because they are simply layers of the same theme. One cannot be spoken about without another one coming into light. Like wheat grains and bread, they come hand in hand. Now try throwing feminism into the mix and the issues get intensified.
There are feminists of all kinds; many colors, shapes, sizes, genders, etc. A feminist is one who wants equal rights between men and women; therefore, they are not just stereotypical bellicose females who argue and fight their way into equality. In contemporary society a feminist encompasses genders, multiple generations and varied socioeconomic groups.
There are four literary resources, and one movie that specifically discuss feminism and the effects that race, gender and class portray on the struggle to gain equality between men and women in society. One particular author, Bell Hooks, focuses on race, gender, and class in many of her works. Her book, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics,” goes in depth with all of these issues and explains the simultaneous struggles that they have with feminism and the road to equality among genders.
In chapter three, “Sisterhood is Still Powerful,” Hooks describes an anecdotal experience that shaped the beginning of her feminist thinking. She realized after transferring to Stanford University from an all-girls school that men and women are looked upon very differently. She saw that there was a significant difference in female self-esteem and self-assertion when males were present in the classroom with females.
This is where her knowledge of feminism came about and the idea that women have to work together if they are going to achieve the task of gender equality. She said, “In order for women to change job discrimination we needed to lobby as a group to change public policy,” so people could eventually change the sexist thinking that women are not equally as intelligent as men (15).
It’s been seen throughout history, that it takes many active voices to change societal thinking, and even then, not every person is going to change. It’s apparent today, as Hooks states, that “as long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized,” but rather women have to come together for a common goal (16).
In the beginning of the feminist movement for suffrage, race and class were major issues holding women back from achieving their goals. This theme is apparent in the movie Iron Jawed Angels, when American women gathered together while risking their lives to reach out against male politicians in Washington. The movie portrays the struggles of women to overcome class issues when Alice Paul and her crew are gathering women to have a parade showing the intelligence and beauty of women and why they deserve to vote. There is one particular scene where Alice Paul is getting ready to gather working-class women and she tells her cohorts to dress down so that they do not look over-privileged, but rather demonstrate they are trying to help women of all backgrounds.
There are two particular ongoing themes of race and class in the movie that are predominant. The one on class is when a politician’s wife secretly begins to help Paul but her husband finds out and gets very angry because it could jeopardize his career. Finally, after his wife is thrown into jail for protesting, he gains respect for struggling women and begins helping them because is able to see the issue from a personal level. The other scene, dealing with race, came about when Alice Paul was planning the march in Washington. The organizers were desperate for African American women to help with the parade, but Alice Paul was worried that the white politicians would not listen to them if black women marched. Mirroring what Bell Hooks said, the black women came back to Paul and said it’s all or nothing. They wanted to march alongside the white women, because they wanted help as well and they knew if they were going to get it that all women had to come together.
Although women ultimately came together for suffrage, they demobilized after reaching that goal and did not continue working together for future feminist ideals. Addressing this in chapter four, “Feminists Education for Critical Consciousness,” of Hooks’s book, it explains that women began to learn about feminism through informal social groups. The movie and the book both speak about the evolution of these informal groups that were necessary to inform women of feminist thought before literature and educational courses were created on the subject (19). This is the same idea as in the movie, but with a different but quite similar issue.
Society and elders have socialized sexist thinking, making the idea more acceptable to many. According to Bell Hooks, feminist thinking and theory encouraged women to look at the roots of these perceptions through word of mouth until the ideas became published and taught in schools (19). This traditional way of thinking was difficult to change after generations of imbedded patriarchal thought. When these feminist theories came to the classrooms in the turn of the century, they caught the eye of many who wanted to learn them and help women as a whole; although, this new way of viewing women was becoming popular, there were still struggles among classes and races within the movement.
An important theme of Bell Hooks’ articles is that, just like class and racial issues, “simply being the victim of an exploitative or oppressive system and even resisting it does not mean we understand why it’s in place or how to change it” (21). Although people could not quite understand why things were the way they were, institutionalizing the feminist theories made these doctrines and women’s literature more legitimate.
One problem that arose with the incorporation of feminist theory was that it changed the audience from the masses to a sort of niche within the educated. According to Hooks, the “feminist thinking and theory were no longer tied to feminist movement,” because people outside of the academic domain did not have as much access because the “academic politics and careerism overshadowed feminist politics” (22).
The contemporary feminist movement began critiquing children’s books for sexist thinking, because the theory was that people’s minds are shaped as they are aging from the time they are young. Again, problems arose because many people these days are consumers of mass media, which is where most of the feminist ideas are seen today. Today’s feminist ideas are very negative in the mass media and follow a patriarchal way of thinking about feminism.
In 2003, Lisa Belkin wrote “The Opt-Out Revolution” for The New York Times, which follows the patriarchal way of thinking with feminism. She makes a very controversial argument that so many intelligent women these days are slipping back into the ways of patriarchal thinking because they are taking the “mommy track.” This mommy track is the trend of women opting-out of the workforce to stay home with their children. The women she interviewed had law degrees from Harvard and Columbia, yet “they chose husbands who could keep up with them, not simply support them,” which was great, until they decided to opt-out and live off of their husband’s salary.
Belkin argues that this “mommy track” is not how the feminist movement was intended to evolve. Belkin states, “women—specifically, educated professional women – were supposed to achieve like men,” and yes, barriers from long ago are down, but there is still work to be done. While women are choosing to opt-out more often, it’s giving anti-feminists and neutral thinkers a way to lean towards anti-feminists thinking because women are taking household roles again. She makes this point more acceptable by saying the issue “…is a continuing conversation, and a surprising amount of the talk is not about how the workplace is unfair to women, but about how the relationship between work and life is different for women than for men.” This
Belkin states in her article that she knows she is getting herself in a pickle with her argument, but she doesn’t stay solely on this track. Belkin tackles the class issue as well. She was on The Today Show with other women, some with varying ideas and some with similar ideas debating the issue of leaving the workplace at the height of their career. A lot of the contention within this article boils down to the issue that women need to have the opportunity to opt-out. Most American women, especially with the current recession, need to work and don’t have the choice to opt-out or they will not be able to feed their families.
This allows race into the issue because the media is always showing minority families with lower income, which again, with the recession, more people of all races and classes are not getting the choice to opt-out currently. There are fewer jobs in contemporary society with these prevailing financial and political issues that, and because women have opted-out, they are having a harder time getting back into the work place. Once these mothers do re-enter, they have been out of practice and may not be as strong as they once were because the workplace is always evolving, as are the issues of race, class, gender, and feminism.
As Bell Hooks describes, “the issues that were most relevant to working women or masses of women were never highlighted by mainstream mass media,” but now that is one part of these controversial issues that is changing. We’ve seen this change in Belkin’s article that subtly covers some debates about class. All of the articles cited above have, in some way or another, simultaneously dealt with at least two of the highlighted issues of race, class, gender, and feminism. There are very few, if any, conversations where only one of the issues stands alone because, although they are diverse issues, they have become interwoven over time. Yes they are controversial, but if people such as Lisa Belkin and Bell Hooks, along with movie producers, etc. aren’t speaking about these topics then education only goes so far. It is important to start educating children on these issues so they are socialized to have an open anti-sexist mind. The less education involved causes for an ignorant society that will never gain a greater understanding of how race, class, gender, and feminism coincide.
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