When I submitted a proposal for the 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication workshop on feminism entitled “(Post) Institutionalized Feminism: Defining the F-word,” I thought if I were accepted, the paper would be an easy one to write. However, this has not been the case, and over the months since the June deadline, the paper has become more and more difficult to write. I found that every time I thought I had AN answer, it would slip away again as I was affected by something I read. I thought I would talk about womanism but am reluctant to suggest a single term, since it assumes I know anything about THE right way for feminism to move forward, or that there is a single name under which we can all identify. Are the difficulties of writing this paper an indication that feminism is dead? This question seems to be based on older feminists’ perception of the reluctance of young women to identify as feminist, something I will discuss in this paper. Feminism is not a static or universal ideology that has remained constant through time. It is, like all of us, in process, it is becoming, and while this means that feminism is complicated, it means that each generation of feminists reinvent feminism. Since hindsight is 20/20, I look first to history for an example of feminist becoming before considering ways that feminism has been naturalized and finally, I hope to suggest where we might be going.

In The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy, Gerda Lerner traces the development of feminist consciousness. She defines feminist consciousness as “the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group; that their condition of subordination is [. . .] socially determined; that they must join with other women to remedy these wrongs; and finally, that they must and can provide an alternate vision of societal organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and self-determination” (14). She considers several issues important to women as areas of study, such as education, and the authority to think, speak, and write. Lerner also considers the subjects of mysticism, motherhood, the struggle for women’s history, and the importance of women’s coalitions. In her research, Lerner demonstrates that feminist consciousness has taken many forms, and that it has been shaped and reshaped over time around issues concerning gender. While I recognize that Lerner’s consideration of feminist consciousness and its importance is linear, in reality, there is no linearity, no progression toward some single ideal.

One example of feminist becoming is the first wave of feminism in the United States. During the first wave, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony chose not to align themselves with women concerned about issues of class and race. As result of their unwillingness to root out their own biases, feminists had to confront the issue during the second wave. Fractures concerning race, class, and sexual orientation were necessary for silenced women during the second wave in order to create their own forum in which their voices could be heard. Third wave feminism finally dealt with diversity in a more productive way, so that when we speak about contemporary feminism we often use the plural, feminisms. I use this example, generalized as it is, to identify one historical issue in which we can see feminist becoming. We need to keep our own history in mind, recognizing the dangers of silencing younger women via our criticism, lest they feel a need to break from the movement in unproductive or painful ways. Or maybe not. Maybe the struggle for identity as women and feminists means that younger women will have to kill off the last feminism, at a point when feminism becomes accepted and naturalized or less useful. Maybe it must die so that a new feminism may rise to take its place and continue its work.

Part of the reshaping of feminism seems to be its naturalization. Women participate in the workforce in larger numbers than ever. There are more abundant and varied choices forwomen to make. It is important to recognize that the variety of our choices. can lead to increasing pressure on women, especially young women. This pressure has, I suspect, been part of the reason that many young women do not identify as feminists. On April 1, 2007, the New York Times published an article by Sara Rimer about girls at Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, an affluent community in the suburbs of Boston. Rimer’s focus was on the pressure which these young women faced in during the college application process. In the article, “For Girls, It’s be Yourself and Be Perfect, Too,” one girl interviewed said “if you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything” (para. 14). This young woman’s comment highlights what I see as the pressures resulting from the naturalization of feminism, because we can do more, we are expected to do more. The article supports this by stating these girls, “have grown up watching their mothers, and their friends’ mothers, juggle family and career. They take it for granted that they will be able to carve out similar paths, even if it doesn’t look easy from their vantage point” (para. 69). However, it may also be true that the anxiety is a reflection of concerns in Newton, MA, “about the ability of the next generation to afford to raise their families in a place like Newton” (para. 32). More and more families depend on two incomes to make ends meet, and it seems that in this economy the possibility that this generation will do as well, never mind better than their parents, may appear to be or actually be out of reach. So, we must work harder, which raises the bar ever higher.

Overwork is the subject of another 2007 New York Times article that reports the results of two studies comparing the self-reported happiness of men and women. Alex Krueger, a Princeton economist, conducted one study to compare men’s and women’s levels of happiness. Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania, completed another. The two studies’ findings are strikingly similar. They report that

I know this sounds like we have painted ourselves into a corner, but there is a silver lining. Women are stressed and pressured because they can do more than women of previous generations. One example of gains made by women is the changing demographics of colleges and universities. According to a July 2006 New York Times article “At Colleges, Women are Leaving Men in the Dust”:

In the same year, Harvard's Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons told the New York Times that their incoming class for the fall 2006 semester “will be 52 percent female” (Lewin para. 38). Furthermore, in dozens of interviews on the campuses of Dickinson College, American University, and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, male and female students speculated that increases of women enrolled in colleges and universities, and the reportedly higher motivation of female students “had something to do with the women's movement” (Lewin para. 47).

What does all this mean? Pamela Aronson’s 2003 article “ ‘FEMINISTS OR ‘POSTFEMINISTS?’: Young Women’s Attitudes toward Feminism and Gender Relations” indicates that many young women “ ‘tak[e] for granted’ many recent gains: women’s work opportunities, combining work with family, sexual autonomy and freedom, male participation in domestic work and child rearing” (906). Referring to Alice Rossi’s 1982 book, Feminists in Politics, Aronson states, “simultaneous incorporation, revision, and depoliticization” of feminism indicates that worldviews include more feminist principles while being less explicitly feminist” (Ibid). While Aronson’s study reveals “a general optimism about women’s expanded opportunities [. . .] at the same time, most of the interviewees were quite aware that gender-based obstacles still remained” (909). This awareness hearkens back to Gerda Lerner’s definition of feminist consciousness. Young women understand they belong “to a subordinate group [and] that their condition of subordination is [. . .] socially determined” (14). However, unlike women during the second or third wave of the movement who envisioned a life that included greater autonomy and self-determination, our young women are living it.

Aronson’s study reflects Rossi’s observation that there is

And who knows what feminism will look like in fifty years? Considering identity and its construction in Gender Trouble Judith Butler states, “if there is something right in de Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end” (Butler, Gender Trouble 43). If one becomes a woman through social construction, isn’t it safe to say that feminism must also follow the pattern of becoming? Many of the values of second and third wave feminist movements will die out, replaced by values that apply to the social and material conditions of the women who will shape feminism’s future. The feminist mottos the ‘personal is political’ and the ‘political is personal’ indicate that feminism is a sort of life history, and according to Butler again, “life histories are histories of becoming” (Butler, Undoing Gender 80). Or, to say it more poetically in the words of Walt Whitman, “All goes onward and outward [. . .] and nothing collapses, / And to die is different than anyone supposed, and luckier” (Whitman 37-38).