Something to Get Off Our Chests
In this brilliantly titled article from the New Yorker, Ariel Levy explores shifts in the feminist movement over the past half a century through the lens of two recent books on the subject–You’ve Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary and the Shaping of the New American Woman by Leslie Sanchez and When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins. Levy’s review of these books, and her commentary on the subject matter raises many points which, though disheartening to acknowledge, are necessary in re-forming the feminist movement for today’s world in a way that will allow it to talk about and work on many issues pertaining to women which, as Levy points out, have gotten lost along the way. As she puts it “We’ve come a long way in the past forty years; there’s no “maybe” about it. The trouble is that the journey hasn’t always been in the intended direction.” And, above all, Levy’s article raises an important question which I don’t think gets asked (or answered) often enough–”why has feminism, which managed to win so many battles–the notion of a woman with a career has become perfectly unexceptionable–remained anathema to millions of women who are the beneficiaries of its success?”
