Good reminder not to lose perspective of larger realities, even when fighting particular injustices:
First, a sketch, to illustrate the stakes: the United States incarcerates over 200,000 women, as many as two-thirds of whom have minors at home. When factoring in women on parole or probation, the number currently “supervised” by the criminal justice system balloons to more than a million. More than a third of American single mothers live in poverty, and according to the National Women’s Law Center, more than one in eight women are poor. In recent years, much has been made of women’s record-high college attendance, with less comment on the fact that women hold nearly 65 per cent of the nation’s student debt ($1.3 trillion at the latest tally). The US has more maternal deaths than anywhere else in the developed world, and black women are almost four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than are white women. Ninety per cent of US counties lack a clinic that provides abortion, which renders the procedure inaccessible to about 40 per cent of women who can get pregnant, and it would be a mistake to assume expense is not as daunting an obstacle as location. Meanwhile, gender violence was brought back into the headlines this summer, albeit briefly, by a report, carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), analysing murders of American women. Strangers are responsible for only 16 per cent of female homicides, which means that a woman’s killer is usually her current or former romantic partner, or else another friend or family member. In response, the CDC recommended bystander intervention training and suggested that states limit access to guns. These measures feel inadequate (and, especially in the case of guns, impracticable). How do we keep men from killing women? Or, how do we simply keep men from killing? The question is one that mainstream feminism doesn’t ask much any more, aside from periodic invocations of “toxic masculinity”.
This litany of entrenched, intentional injustices predates Donald Trump’s presidency, so professional feminists who have neglected these matters cannot excuse themselves with the claim that times abruptly changed. The fixations that have dominated middle-class feminism in recent years – assaults on campus, underwhelming (hetero)sexual encounters, the pathetic ratio of female to male CEOs, sexism in Silicon Valley – cannot speak meaningfully to many of the horrors less advantaged women face both at home and abroad: dangerous labour conditions, deportation, murder by police, imprisonment. This is not to say middle-class concerns are categorically frivolous but rather that their elevation comes at the expense of a more cogent and inclusive ideology. (Plus ça change.) We have narrowed the scope of public feminism to a pinprick, rehashing yet another Lena Dunham controversy when we should have been developing and promoting reforms that encompassed systems of exploitation not defined by gender alone – the rapid progression of mass incarceration, venal health-care systems and repeated, successful attacks on voter rights, to name some of the most glaring. This failure could perhaps have gone on unabated for the immediate future but now, without the superficial reassurance of a woman in the White House, mainstream feminism has to face up to its own deficiencies. One might begin with those evidenced by blogging pundits turned highprofile authors...