“A New Century of Struggle: Feminism and Antifeminism in the United States, 1920-Present”-Kristin Celello (Critic)

In Kristin Celello’s piece, “A New Century of Struggle: Feminism and Antifeminism in the United States, 1920-Present” she focuses on many different aspects of the feminist movement and how it has been historically recorded.  The author aids the reader by limiting her analysis to post-suffrage feminism and specifically highlights the surge of the movement between each wave.  While these are important and interesting topics, it is unclear throughout the essay where she explores the problems with answering the recurring question, “What was (and is) feminism?” There was a lot of information on the movement itself as well as the availability of historical data to researchers, but it never returned to this central question.

A personally intriguing topic brought up was the nature of race throughout the movement.  She succeeded in identifying the presence of black and hispanic women in the second wave while distinguishing between those within and without white women’s organizations. However, it would have been helpful to find out more about why any progressive movement would have had integration issues.  The author specifically points out the split between white socialist feminists and black feminists, but does not cite the source of this divide.  She does bring up the Civil Rights Movement and how it’s patriarchal structure influenced some black women to join the feminists, but she could go more in depth about how these movements interacted as well.

Another section of the reading that could have been more detailed was that of antifeminism.  There was an issue in the lack of information presented on how these groups interacted and the uniformity of their values.  The anti-feminists are shown as placing extreme value on motherhood and the importance of wives, but there was no insight into how they viewed equality in other arenas.  This is also the problem in the feminist description of their support for abortion as a protestation of being defined solely as mothers and wives.  To me, this does not seem to address whether or not feminists looked down upon mothers and housewives, or they just wanted other options.  Painting feminists and anti-feminists as such simple opposites leaves one to wonder how accurate that is.  Including research on how their views crossed over and digging deeper into the source of this opposition would be helpful, especially since the chapter includes antifeminism as one of its’ main subjects.

One of the most interesting parts of the chapter was the relatively short section on third wave feminists.  The nature of feminism she attributes to them is still very prevalent today, with many who should have intrinsic ties to feminism believing that all problems regarding sexism have been fixed.  The rise of literature identifying how problematic single-minded feminism can be to the movement would have been an engaging topic to expand on.  Being able to take a step back and realize there are still major obstacles to overcome is vital to the success of any movement.

Overall, I found this to be a very compelling read, with admittedly only a few problems that do not seriously detract from the content of the piece.  Learning more about the waves of feminism and how even that analogy itself is becoming outdated was enjoyable.  There is definitely value in observing why women in the movement are so keen to distinguish themselves by these waves, and how efforts between these waves have unfortunately been overlooked.

– Meghan Madonna