Last year, my seventy-eight-year-old grandmother started a salon. Twice a month, she would invite eight of her closest female friends to her house in northern Maine to discuss politics and ideas over tea. The salon was specifically dedicated to talking through issues of gender inequity, exploring it through the lens of more manageable topics like “wokeness” and feminism. There were only two rules. First, to buffer the friction of the wide range of political ideologies present, every perspective had to be taken seriously. Second, and most importantly, men were never to be admitted.
From the get-go, the second rule struck me as odd. If the very purpose of these meetings was to appreciate alternative ideas, why should half of the population be barred from joining? If anything, their inclusion would invite a more diverse set of perspectives and consequently push the conversation further. When I asked her about this rule over dinner one night, with my grandfather bobbing his head in agreement, my grandmother firmly responded: “Because we can.”
First, it was Betty Friedan. In her 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” Freidan identified the “problem that had no name:” There is no blueprint for what constitutes femininity. The idealized image of a happy housewife is neither the only manifestation of womanhood nor a fixed mechanism by which a woman achieves fulfillment. Rather, Friedan demanded that women be freed from the mental and physical confines of their house. Friedan capitalized upon the anger generated by World War II — and the transient freedom granted to women — to catalyze the Women’s Liberation Movement into relevancy.
The rejection of conventionality that she popularized in her book, however, was neither a groundbreaking nor revolutionary idea. When I first read “The Feminine Mystique,” I couldn’t understand the outsized impact of her writing given the rudimentary nature of her claim. If you consider yourself to be grounded in the ideal of freedom of opportunity, a central tenet to American political ideology, shouldn’t all people agree that women must be free to aspire to more than housework? Why, then, was her book so revolutionary?
In the 50s and 60s, an era that needed a unified and cogent message, Friedan dared to offer her own. Growing dissent regarding gender inequity was intellectually repressed. Any isolated woman’s expression of discontent with life as a housewife invited public disapproval. The man would cry: “How dare you not appreciate your children?” and “how selfish can you be not to appreciate the luxuries that I provide?” Betty Friedan validated the thoughts of the majority by turning to one of the only methods through which women could have unimpeded access to the public: writing. She ignited an intellectual revolution, coalescing and consolidating the thoughts of many around the words of one. Women had been conditioned to obey rather than think for so long that when a single banal book invited them to challenge the nature of their inequality, the push towards equality was kickstarted. Friedan fomented the Women’s Liberation Movement by carving out a space devoted to understanding marginalization and consequently articulated the thoughts of the movement.
While powerful, Friedman’s book would never be enough. She focused myopically on the privileged: the White, wealthy, and heterosexual. The crux of her argument itself, that women should be liberated to join the workforce, is a gross misunderstanding of reality: One-third of the female population was working, in largely appalling conditions, out of necessity. Her model may speak for the privileged, but not the majority. Homophobic undertones and racist and classist assumptions meant the feminist movement needed far more to catalyze the world into equality.
Luckily, more critical perspectives came. In 2014, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published “We Should All Be Feminists.” Her essay explores gender inequality through the lens of the seemingly negligible: being overlooked by the waiter when you eat at a restaurant, or the suffocating pressure of picking an outfit that balances professionalism with beauty. She picks up where leaders like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem left off and pushes the fight for gender equity into the 21st century by dismantling deeply embedded social constructs.
Adichie heralded a decisive shift in the fight for gender equality by focusing not on the exclusionary byproducts of inequality that fluctuate in accordance with class, race, or sexuality, but identified the universal root of the problem itself: Inequality, prejudice, and gendered power is a product of inveterate sociocultural constructs weaved into the fabric of society. The beauty of her analysis lies in its universality. The core of her argument can be extrapolated beyond a binary interpretation of gender to address the inequalities associated with sexuality in a gender-diverse world: Regardless of the specific prejudice’s manifestations, gender constructs need to be extracted, one-by-one, from the fabric of our society. Each time I revisit Adichie’s words, I feel like the key to our oppression is unlocked. The elusive nature of our oppression, the prejudices that permeate our lives, and the assumptions we internalize are finally synthesized into its raw, rudimentary truth.
To engage in this expansive culture shift, Adichie places the burden of activism on the individual by reclaiming and refocusing feminism to include us all. In the early 2000s, a sort of collective memory disorder fell upon the word “feminism,” rendering it synonymous with radical, disruptive change that aimed to reverse the gender hierarchy. As a result, the world was needlessly ruptured into its supporters and opponents. Even those in favor of the ideals that undergird the feminist movement believed themselves to be anti-feminist not because they were against its values, but rather against its stigma. Adichie mends the cleavages of the movement by by uniting the word with its simple roots: A feminist is anyone who acknowledges the problems associated with gender inequality today and resolves to address them. Feminism can be masculine; it can be mainstream; it can be kind; and it is inclusive. In reuniting feminism with its inclusionary origins, Adichie implores us all to be the vehicle of change because we are all part of the movement.
If there is one thing that has pushed the fight for gender equity forward in the ways that Friedan and Adichie articulated, it’s the existence of spaces dedicated to thinking through the nature of marginalization. I now understand that this is the purpose of my grandmother’s salon. Without understanding one’s oppression, liberation is not a goal; it is merely a dream. Her decision to bar men was not borne from spite or bitterness, but was rather an attempt to free women from the stereotypes perpetuated and reinforced by men: The polite woman, the deferential wife, the submissive daughter. For women, a history of intellectual repression weighs upon their shoulders, whispering in their ears that the man commands while the woman obeys. The woman is told: “Cross your legs,” “cover-up,”, “be quiet.” We were commanded for so long that the power of thought slipped through our fingers. The language of the repressed is silence. But, slowly, we are breaking free.
The end has not yet arrived. On the most fundamental level, the conversation about gender inequality needs to be expanded to explicitly confront the prejudices associated with a more gender fluid society. Gendered power will never end if the conversation isn’t representative of the people it tries to help. The stats about gender inequality today are all too well known: The gender pay gap still hovers around 77 cents per dollar, transgendered people are four times more likely to live under the poverty line, and women constitute less than 25% of all national parliaments. Of course, change will not come without action. But, articulating the goals of the movement is the first step in translating ideas into action. We must carry on the legacy forged by activists like Friedan and Adichie by continuing to think, write, and analyze the state of our current inequalities. In doing so, we are reclaiming the very thing once stripped of us: the confidence and freedom to think. My grandmother started her salon so that women could have a sacred place dedicated to thought. She is engaging in the same principled behavior as Friedan and Adichie that catalyzed equality into a not-so-far-off reality. If my grandmother can do it, we all can; and we all must.
The original artwork for this article was created by Harvard College student Duncan Glew for the exclusive use of the HPR.
