Reader Survey + One Year of Other Feminisms
Taking stock of a year of advocating for women and the dignity of dependence
If you read only one part of today’s post, please know that I’m doing a reader survey for Other Feminisms’s first birthday. Whether you’re a regular commenter or an occasional reader, I’d love to hear from you.
Other Feminisms launched on October 18th, 2020 with 131 members.
Today, we’re a community of 1,248 readers and commenters—just a little shy of growing 10x over the course of the year.
One in twenty of you have become paid subscribers—and I’m very grateful. Everything written on Other Feminisms is available without a paywall, but paid subscribers help me turn down some paid freelance work in order to say yes to working on this project.
A feminism by another name
Other Feminisms began because my social media was (briefly!) full of discussion of who and what felt left out of modern, mainstream feminism. Amy Coney Barrett had just been nominated to the Supreme Court, and authors like Erika Bachiochi and Serena Sigillito were making their case for how the jurist and mother of seven might represent a different model of what feminism could look like.
NYT columnist Ross Douthat termed this “conservative feminism” and characterized it as follows:
It takes for granted that much of what Ginsburg fought for was necessary and just; that the old order suppressed female talent and ambition; that sexism and misogyny are more potent forces than many anti-feminists allowed. It agrees that the accomplishments of Barrett’s career — in academia and now on the federal bench — could have been denied to her in 1950, and it hails that change as good.
But then it also argues that feminism’s victories were somewhat unbalanced, that they were kinder to professional ambition than to other human aspirations, and that the society they forged has lost its equilibrium not just in work-life balance but also in other areas — sex and romance and marriage and child rearing, with the sexes increasingly alienated from one another and too many children desired but never born.
I didn’t like the term “conservative feminisms”—I think there are plenty of you here who don’t feel particularly “conservative.” I put it more like this:
For most people, what drew them to this group was wanting to advocate for women as women. Often, our equality is premised on remaking ourselves to be more like the median man, whether that means changing our style of speaking to exclude apologies, changing our breastfeeding plans to keep up with work’s minimal accommodations, or changing our bodies to suppress fertility and destroy our children.
We say no, and that, instead, the world must remake itself to be hospitable to women, not the other way around. That means valuing interdependence and vulnerability, rather than idealizing autonomy.
I asked the folks who were here at the beginning for alternate names than “conservative feminism,” and, as you can guess from the name I went with, none seemed like a perfect fit. But here were some of my favorites:
Personalist feminism
Illiberal/Post-Liberal feminism
Dignitarian feminism
Solidarity feminism
My own (terrible) ideas included “Final Wave Feminism” and “Undertow Feminism.”
I like that we have a name that points to the messiness of the community that gathers here. There are topics where I’d expect to find substantial common ground, and ones where I’d expect Other Feminisms readers to see each other across a police cordon at opposite sides of a protest.
Taking our measure after a year
I’ve put together a reader survey which I’d love for you to take. There’s a short first page on demographics, and then a longer (optional) second part, where you can answer questions about what drew you here, and where you find it easiest and hardest to fit into “mainstream” feminism.
I’ll be doing a little more special programming this week for Other Feminisms’s anniversary, but thank you all so much for making this space such a rewarding place to write, think, and converse.
And, if you’re up for it, here are two bonus questions I’d love to hear your thoughts on.
I appreciate the blend of lived experience and intellectual inquiry that you promote here. Despite a swanky liberal arts education, I never encountered "academic" or various mainstream feminisms in any sort of formal or structured or even peer-promoted way. Rather, I'd say I jumped from inhabiting a fairly complacent, don't-rock-the-boat, conservative-ish upbringing that didn't ask questions or push me much to wrestle with them for myself; into an adult milieu that is decidedly progressive but often ALSO doesn't ask questions, because the right progressive answers are already assumed to be a given. I have often feel underprepared to participate in the discourse around me, but my heart and mind insist that things are more complex than my neighbors and peer group and social media circles seem to allow for. It's as if there's a haze of fogginess hanging over feminism, when the terms and definitions and histories and other -isms either elude me or seem to contradict themselves from conversation to conversation. So, I find in following your articles and links and comment section, that I have to read carefully, think hard, stretch my intellectual and ethical muscles, and sit with things for a week or more when I'm reading along regularly. I think that kind of sustained engagement, paired with a tone of respect and thoughtful exchange, and frankly the anonymity of the web, really helps to exercise those muscles, to dispel some of the fogginess. This page is a workout. I'm grateful for your umbrella of "other" that offers me a chance to test ideas in a way that's robust but not automatically pre-determined. I've felt over the years that I'm the most liberal person in a conservative setting, and the most conservative in my liberal sets-- yet here you typically invite readers past the either/or into a both/and or other/more or even a not-yet-but-what-if? Sometimes I end up reconsidering my position, sometimes I clarify it, sometimes I get to examine my reasons for a gut-reaction disagreement, sometimes I recognize new questions to pursue. This page offers scaffolding, context, and prompting that I hadn't necessarily known how to frame on my own.
I would describe it first and foremost as an all-too-rare place where I can have a great conversation about various women's issues with people who disagree strongly with me.
I also feel like it's a place where the prompts that you share have really helped me reflect and articulate my perspectives on different issues, and having a prompt to respond to each week has helped me keep these topics in the forefront of my mind throughout this year. I really think that responding to your prompts each week has helped strengthen my convictions and in some cases forced me to reconcile contradictions I've tried to hold in my head.
As a side note, I've started playing with the name "Embodied Feminism." A current that runs through a lot of our conversations is that feminism needs to embrace the reality of women's bodies, in all their weaknesses and all the ways they must be treated differently from men's bodies. It's also a rebuke of the idea of the mind-body duality that can encourage us to hate our bodies or wish to change them because they don't conform to what our minds wish they were like.