Taking a Page from 1930s Feminism?

The idea of slipping almost 80 years back in time on the feminist struggle depresses me in the way remembering we still haven't passed the Equal Rights Amendment does, but Dorothy Sue Cobble's Washington Post article almost has me reaching for the time machine.

It's less about equating today's recession with the Great Depression, more about focusing on the victories of the New Deal and the opportunity to make lemonades out of the subprime lemons the banking industry dumped on our economy. The women of my grandmother's and great-grandmother's generation who battled against the concept of "working poor" to better pay and benefits -- for men and women -- would have been horrified at our "progress" into trickle-down economics. (Yes, Obama, I'm looking at you, too, with bank bailouts and bonuses that would make Reagan smile.) After all, Cobble has it right when she asks, "What better way to prime the economic pump than to put money in the pockets of workers, who after all are consumers?"

Though I admit that I'm feeling Cobble's "New Deal feminists," I have to stand up for my 1960s girls when she takes an unfair jab at Betty Friedan and women's lib. I know that The Feminine Mystique and the "second wave" (a divisive concept in of itself) gets a bad rap as elitist -- all those poor bored suburban housewives, etc. I hardly intend to back down on the significance of issues like reproductive rights and women in academia to the movement as a whole, whether you're a female lawyer pulling in big bucks or a Walmart cashier living paycheck to paycheck (whose daughter just might be the next cash-flush lawyer), but I do have another message for Cobble: you don't have to go back to the 30s to find a feminist movement concerned about the economy and women's place in it.

When Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, one of her early moves was to stop the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from dropping sex discrimination claims in the wastebasket. (Point: 60s feminism.) Recognizing the desperate plight of mothers facing the need to both work to feed their children and have someone home to watch them, Friedan charged, "One good child care center in a community is worth 10, 100 marches and slogans." In the 90s, she insisted, "This is not a bedroom war." And she wasn't just talking about pillow fights.

So while I'm thrilled to give kudos to the New Deal feminist warriors right alongside Friedan and the "women's lib" defenders of the 60s onward (and earlier heroes, like Alice Paul or Susan B. Anthony), I have to quibble with Cobble's call for the "other women's movement." Cobble sees recent victories like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as signs of the resurgence of New Deal feminism. Seems to me it's the same movement grandmothers and granddaughters have been fighting in all along.

And the only "waves" I want to hear are about are Google's.

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