Feminism Lives!

“The Myth of Postfeminism” by Elaine J. Hall and Marnie Salupo Rodriguez, in Gender & Society (Dec. 2003), Sage Publications, 2455 Teller Rd., Thousand Oaks, Calif. 91320.

Are we living in a “postfeminist” age? That’s certainly the drift of opinion in the popular press and some scholarly journals. But survey data give the lie to this “myth,” argue Hall, a sociologist at Kent State University, and Rodriguez, a graduate student there.

Such hard evidence is exactly what’s missing from nearly all the 90 decline-of-feminism articles in Time and other periodicals that the authors examined. Only about one-fourth of the articles provided any survey data, and the vast majority of those provided none over time, which would be the only way to demonstrate the alleged decline over the 1980s and early 1990s.

According to surveys by the Center for Political Studies, adults looked more favorably on the women’s movement in 1996 than they did in 1980. Asked to rank the movement on a 100-point scale, they gave it an average of 63 points in 1996, up from 53 points in 1980. Other surveys show little change in opinion between 1986 and 1998, with more than two-thirds of adults holding very or mostly favorable views.

Contrary to the postfeminist myth, young women are not less likely than older ones to support the women’s movement, Hall and Rodriguez say. In a 1998 National Election Survey, 78 percent of women 18 to 29 years old expressed a favorable opinion of the movement, compared with 64 percent of middle-aged women. And 73 percent of black women gave the movement a thumbs-up, the largest proportion of any racial group.

Surveys conducted during the 1980s and 1990s consistently showed that about half of American women “considered the movement to be relevant,” say the authors. Yet the postfeminist myth has acquired a life of its own in the mass media, and could “create a future reality in which collective struggle is deemed unnecessary.”