"Its not you, it's the system." - every generation of women. (voice over: "but their words were not recorded or shared. Leaving the next generation to wake up to the same realization on their own")
Feminism’s generational amnesia is a frustration and a mystery to me. My instinct is that, at least in the last 100 years, the capitalist-individualist ethos is so societally overwhelming (in the West at least) that it stymies collective movements that are based in history. Not just each generation but each individual woman is essentially figuring out how to navigate a patriarchal society alone via individual success—which liberal feminism tells us, falsely, will allow us to transcend the worst indignities of patriarchy and “win” (individually, at the obvious expense of other women). And anything other than capitalist-friendly liberal feminism gets demonized
And as a man I’m embarrassed by Larry Summers trotting out of the old trope about women’s inferiority in STEM and their so called natural ability that didn’t allow them to really compete with men. The generational amnesia is male too.
I’ll add my own voice to this enormous choir. Last spring I was attending my theology residency week in New Brunswick, and I decided to browse our little library. Immediately a title of a book caught my eye. Wish I remembered it exactly, but it was something like Divine Feminine Christianity. I took it off the shelf and it almost collapsed in my hands. The glue was brittle, the pages yellow. I turned to the copyright page. 1984.
I borrowed the book and leafed through it that week. Over and over again, I found the author, a woman I had never heard of, sharing the same thoughts, questions, and observations I have had during my feminist awakening. And there she was, saying, “Ladies. You are not crazy or dumb. You are not inferior. It’s the system that has told you God Almighty has testes and a beard. It’s the system that has hidden the Ruach, Shekhinah, the Mother Hen, Sophia, the Mother Bear, the Mother Eagle, and so many other scriptural references to God the Mother.”
I was at once comforted and enraged to find this work now 40 years old…where has this been all my life and why am I having to do all this work to say exactly what other women have said before me? Why do we not have the privilege and ability to build off of their work instead of starting over every single generation!?!?
Thank you Celeste for making us all feel less crazy.
"Why am I having to do all this work to say exactly what other women have said before me?" is basically the entire feminist experience in a nutshell !!
Sounds like maybe Anne Baring? Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God? Along the same lines is a book by Carol Lee Flinders, At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst. Also old. Late 1990s I think.
Wow, these titles are beautiful! Not the one I saw in my library but absolutely fascinating how much of this has been written and yet I am only now finding out about it. This is why I’ve been creating an online page with links to all these resources. I’ll have to add these—thank you!
That anecdote from Lawrence Summers is WILD. For one, these are 2.5 year-old BABIES. Their play is recreating their experience of the world. If they want to go anywhere, THEY GET CARRIED. They can barely walk. They can barely talk, for fuckssake, and he's expecting, what, that they re-enact the plot of The Matrix?
Also, the president of fucking Harvard, and he's never heard of a little thing called confirmation bias?? What a fucking clown. He's right that someone's just not smart enough to be in a leading intellectual environment, but it sure as hell ain't the women...
Absolutely. Larry Summers is truly an ass and often wrong about the “interesting” things that he is supposed to be an expert in, like economics. And yet this mediocre thinker is regularly elevated to positions of power and influence instead of economists like Stephanie Kelton. Yet another example of Celeste’s point that it’s not us, it’s the system and the ignorance that keeps propping it up.
Thank you for mentioning Stephanie Kelton! Please, everyone read her book The Deficit Myth. While not exactly on the issue of this thread, it explains a great deal about our money system. Spoiler: yes, we can afford it …
Thank you for this!!! I am inspired and fired up by what you shared and definitely making moves to read some of these sources. I also have an enthusiastic recommendation to make: “Normal Women” by Philippa Gregory. She’s the author of “The Other Boleyn Girl” as well as dozens of other books. Normal Women is her painstakingly researched nonfiction look at how women showed up in the written record in the British Isles over the past thousand years. Much like the findings you shared here, what emerges is a pattern of systematic disenfranchisement and marginalization of women by men in power. This goes so far as defining gender and gender roles within limiting conditions, hoarding of resources through changing laws, keeping women dependent on men by preventing us from earning income, and on and on and on. My outrage and inspiration were similarly fired up in reading as in reading your post.
What amazes me is how LITTLE PROGRESS women have actually made since the days of Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique in the 1960s. And what makes me sad for American women is how much of that little progress has been blown sky-high in 2025 by Trumpet (my sobriquet for the current American president). Women have to stick together to keep any more damage from occurring and protest loudly - and at the ballot box where possible - to keep the rights of women, immigrants, and all the other groups damaged by Trumpet's insanity front of mind.
Carol, I agree with what you posted about how slow progress has been in our lifetime (I can only speak for me = my lifetime). (Trump(et) is the puppet of Project 2025, which has infiltrated the branches of our government, the courts, legal profession. They are the ones who are systematically changing our laws to strip women of their gains of the last 100+ years and to revert society back to when women were totally dependent on men for economic survival because women didn't have economic rights. Trumpet could die, Project 2025 will continue on. They just needed him to be their stooge to get the revolution going. They have been working in the shadows for the past 50 years to get to this point. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it will take more than women sticking together and loudly protesting. We didn't have P2025 to content with in the 60s-70s when we last had our major women's movement. Simultaneously they are arresting and deporting immigrants, primarily of Central and South American heritage, you can bet your bippy that people who are black will be targeted with vigor to strip away their hard-earned rights and gains of the past 60 years. Religions will lose protections, as P2025 fulfills God's mandate to tear down our current form of government and society and replace it with a christian, white, male patriarchal theocracy. It could come to another civil war to restore our already ailing pre-Trump government. The next generation will have to reinvent the wheel yet again as women's history is being erased bit by bit by design.
I had this experience with the writings of Gloria Steinem. It took me forever to actually read her writings because of the many ways I’d heard her being made fun of as a teenager.
THIS. When the works of feminist authors are still within living memory, male supremacist society downplays their importance, lambasts the authors themselves, and seeks to de-legitamize them by any means necessary.
This administration's scrubbing of women's contributions from government websites is just the newest version of this erasure. SSDD.
I just remembered that we read Steinem's essay "Erotica and Pornography" in my junior high school English class when we did the nonfiction unit. This was in the early 1990s.
I didn't read more of her work until much later, but I was lucky to have that introduction (from a teacher who, I suspect, grew up during and/or participated in the Women's Liberation Movement).
Nothing like a good Celeste writing to fire me up and get me out of bed to attack the day! I’m ready to change the world…but mostly for me that just means correcting sexist worldviews in front of my sons…(and then hoping it sticks!) 🤞
I feel this frustration daily, Celeste. So many women are having the same thoughts and we are not having successful culture-shifting collective action based on that history. Not for lack of trying. It's the system, indeed.
In this regard, could i get reccomendations for women authors of fiction that don't write romance (not a genre i enjoy). Preferably fantasy, sci-fi and maybe even "slice of life".
Lois McMaster Bujold, Madeleine L’Engle, Kristen Britain, Martha Wells, T. Kingfisher, Maggie Stiefvater, Robin Hobb, Seanan McGuire, Nnedi Okrafor, N.K. Jemisin… and that’s just my borrowed list from Libby this year
I came to exactly the same conclusion! I realised that I'd read all the feminist tracts from Mary W to Simone de Beauvoir and Kat Banyard, and they were all saying "it's not you, it's the system, you're not crazy." But we are a bit crazy cos we keep forgetting... how do we prevent this repetitive amnesia?
Thanks for sharing this again. I'm fairly new here. I really appreciate it. I write feminist historical fiction for this very reason. Because history is littered with accomplished, and subsequently erased, brilliant women. The myths I was fed in high school and college about history simply aren't true. And there is definitely an agenda. Now the powers in charge of the US want to take us all the way back to the 1920s - before women had the right to vote - because our voting is ruining everything, just as they knew it would.
We are not leaders because we "have not been given the opportunity" to lead? How about instead of waiting for somebody (a man, of course) to graciously provide an opportunity, that we TAKE the opportunities in front of us, and TEACH OUR DAUGHTERS our history and our insights and how to take opportunities that present themselves?
Sonia Johnson is a very interesting person— I’ve read her lesbian relationship book with interest — saw her in person at a women’s festival workshop.
Re: gender and sex — it’s really difficult to strive to keep an open mind to the intersection of biology and culture. I think the idea of gender (culturally bound sex role stereotypes and statically defined distribution of preferences by sex) demands nuance and humility —
The Rousseau quote and response I think introduces an undercurrent of doubt to the argument. Rousseau seems to be acknowledging that acquiring power makes men attractive to many women, and women who become beautiful become more attractive to more men. In his typical fashion (being a jerk who is full of himself) he then condemns women for caring about their looks and not caring about the things that men care about in order to acquire power, when someone who wasn’t a jerk would have seen similar underlying drives beneath both behaviors, and might have wondered if women would behave the same way as men if women were rewarded in the same way that men are.
But we do now have some evidence of what happens when women can gain power and status for themselves. It still seems true that power and status allow men with them to be functionally polygamous, and have a lot more options when it comes to attracting romantic partners. Women with power and status do seem to be able to attract men with more power and status than women with less power and influence, but the power and status doesn’t seem to get them more physically attractive men, nor does it allow them to engage in the kind of harem building or the kind of serial monogamy/polygamy that high status men engage in.
So understandably women still care more about their looks than men do, and men (at the least the ones with a modicum of talent and ability) care more about money and success than women do.
Thank you for bringing these early feminist back into the conversation. I hope the age of Aquarius upends the patriarchy if not in my lifetime, then in my daughter’s and granddaughter’s lives.
Feminism’s generational amnesia is a frustration and a mystery to me. My instinct is that, at least in the last 100 years, the capitalist-individualist ethos is so societally overwhelming (in the West at least) that it stymies collective movements that are based in history. Not just each generation but each individual woman is essentially figuring out how to navigate a patriarchal society alone via individual success—which liberal feminism tells us, falsely, will allow us to transcend the worst indignities of patriarchy and “win” (individually, at the obvious expense of other women). And anything other than capitalist-friendly liberal feminism gets demonized
Socialism is not the answer, for women or anyone else who knows history.
Nor is capitalism with its inherent beliefs in individualism, hierarchy and greed.
None of those are limited to capitalism, which does have flaws. We can surely do better.
And as a man I’m embarrassed by Larry Summers trotting out of the old trope about women’s inferiority in STEM and their so called natural ability that didn’t allow them to really compete with men. The generational amnesia is male too.
I’ll add my own voice to this enormous choir. Last spring I was attending my theology residency week in New Brunswick, and I decided to browse our little library. Immediately a title of a book caught my eye. Wish I remembered it exactly, but it was something like Divine Feminine Christianity. I took it off the shelf and it almost collapsed in my hands. The glue was brittle, the pages yellow. I turned to the copyright page. 1984.
I borrowed the book and leafed through it that week. Over and over again, I found the author, a woman I had never heard of, sharing the same thoughts, questions, and observations I have had during my feminist awakening. And there she was, saying, “Ladies. You are not crazy or dumb. You are not inferior. It’s the system that has told you God Almighty has testes and a beard. It’s the system that has hidden the Ruach, Shekhinah, the Mother Hen, Sophia, the Mother Bear, the Mother Eagle, and so many other scriptural references to God the Mother.”
I was at once comforted and enraged to find this work now 40 years old…where has this been all my life and why am I having to do all this work to say exactly what other women have said before me? Why do we not have the privilege and ability to build off of their work instead of starting over every single generation!?!?
Thank you Celeste for making us all feel less crazy.
"Why am I having to do all this work to say exactly what other women have said before me?" is basically the entire feminist experience in a nutshell !!
Sounds like maybe Anne Baring? Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God? Along the same lines is a book by Carol Lee Flinders, At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst. Also old. Late 1990s I think.
Wow, these titles are beautiful! Not the one I saw in my library but absolutely fascinating how much of this has been written and yet I am only now finding out about it. This is why I’ve been creating an online page with links to all these resources. I’ll have to add these—thank you!
That anecdote from Lawrence Summers is WILD. For one, these are 2.5 year-old BABIES. Their play is recreating their experience of the world. If they want to go anywhere, THEY GET CARRIED. They can barely walk. They can barely talk, for fuckssake, and he's expecting, what, that they re-enact the plot of The Matrix?
Also, the president of fucking Harvard, and he's never heard of a little thing called confirmation bias?? What a fucking clown. He's right that someone's just not smart enough to be in a leading intellectual environment, but it sure as hell ain't the women...
Absolutely. Larry Summers is truly an ass and often wrong about the “interesting” things that he is supposed to be an expert in, like economics. And yet this mediocre thinker is regularly elevated to positions of power and influence instead of economists like Stephanie Kelton. Yet another example of Celeste’s point that it’s not us, it’s the system and the ignorance that keeps propping it up.
Thank you for mentioning Stephanie Kelton! Please, everyone read her book The Deficit Myth. While not exactly on the issue of this thread, it explains a great deal about our money system. Spoiler: yes, we can afford it …
Thank you for this!!! I am inspired and fired up by what you shared and definitely making moves to read some of these sources. I also have an enthusiastic recommendation to make: “Normal Women” by Philippa Gregory. She’s the author of “The Other Boleyn Girl” as well as dozens of other books. Normal Women is her painstakingly researched nonfiction look at how women showed up in the written record in the British Isles over the past thousand years. Much like the findings you shared here, what emerges is a pattern of systematic disenfranchisement and marginalization of women by men in power. This goes so far as defining gender and gender roles within limiting conditions, hoarding of resources through changing laws, keeping women dependent on men by preventing us from earning income, and on and on and on. My outrage and inspiration were similarly fired up in reading as in reading your post.
What amazes me is how LITTLE PROGRESS women have actually made since the days of Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique in the 1960s. And what makes me sad for American women is how much of that little progress has been blown sky-high in 2025 by Trumpet (my sobriquet for the current American president). Women have to stick together to keep any more damage from occurring and protest loudly - and at the ballot box where possible - to keep the rights of women, immigrants, and all the other groups damaged by Trumpet's insanity front of mind.
Carol, I agree with what you posted about how slow progress has been in our lifetime (I can only speak for me = my lifetime). (Trump(et) is the puppet of Project 2025, which has infiltrated the branches of our government, the courts, legal profession. They are the ones who are systematically changing our laws to strip women of their gains of the last 100+ years and to revert society back to when women were totally dependent on men for economic survival because women didn't have economic rights. Trumpet could die, Project 2025 will continue on. They just needed him to be their stooge to get the revolution going. They have been working in the shadows for the past 50 years to get to this point. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it will take more than women sticking together and loudly protesting. We didn't have P2025 to content with in the 60s-70s when we last had our major women's movement. Simultaneously they are arresting and deporting immigrants, primarily of Central and South American heritage, you can bet your bippy that people who are black will be targeted with vigor to strip away their hard-earned rights and gains of the past 60 years. Religions will lose protections, as P2025 fulfills God's mandate to tear down our current form of government and society and replace it with a christian, white, male patriarchal theocracy. It could come to another civil war to restore our already ailing pre-Trump government. The next generation will have to reinvent the wheel yet again as women's history is being erased bit by bit by design.
I had this experience with the writings of Gloria Steinem. It took me forever to actually read her writings because of the many ways I’d heard her being made fun of as a teenager.
THIS. When the works of feminist authors are still within living memory, male supremacist society downplays their importance, lambasts the authors themselves, and seeks to de-legitamize them by any means necessary.
This administration's scrubbing of women's contributions from government websites is just the newest version of this erasure. SSDD.
Absolutely. Even the few places that support this type of dialogue don’t elevate it the way they could. Lots of opportunity and uphill battles here.
Very true.
I just remembered that we read Steinem's essay "Erotica and Pornography" in my junior high school English class when we did the nonfiction unit. This was in the early 1990s.
I didn't read more of her work until much later, but I was lucky to have that introduction (from a teacher who, I suspect, grew up during and/or participated in the Women's Liberation Movement).
Nothing like a good Celeste writing to fire me up and get me out of bed to attack the day! I’m ready to change the world…but mostly for me that just means correcting sexist worldviews in front of my sons…(and then hoping it sticks!) 🤞
I feel this frustration daily, Celeste. So many women are having the same thoughts and we are not having successful culture-shifting collective action based on that history. Not for lack of trying. It's the system, indeed.
In this regard, could i get reccomendations for women authors of fiction that don't write romance (not a genre i enjoy). Preferably fantasy, sci-fi and maybe even "slice of life".
Please include Ursula LeGuin, whom I affectionately refer to as Ursula Penguin 🐧. Her sf in particular is thoughtful and social/cultural.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Madeleine L’Engle, Kristen Britain, Martha Wells, T. Kingfisher, Maggie Stiefvater, Robin Hobb, Seanan McGuire, Nnedi Okrafor, N.K. Jemisin… and that’s just my borrowed list from Libby this year
Octavia Butler, Susanna Clarke, Katherine Dunn — all amazing :)
http://midwifemotherme.com/2024/01/28/not-my-target-audience/
I came to exactly the same conclusion! I realised that I'd read all the feminist tracts from Mary W to Simone de Beauvoir and Kat Banyard, and they were all saying "it's not you, it's the system, you're not crazy." But we are a bit crazy cos we keep forgetting... how do we prevent this repetitive amnesia?
Thanks for sharing this again. I'm fairly new here. I really appreciate it. I write feminist historical fiction for this very reason. Because history is littered with accomplished, and subsequently erased, brilliant women. The myths I was fed in high school and college about history simply aren't true. And there is definitely an agenda. Now the powers in charge of the US want to take us all the way back to the 1920s - before women had the right to vote - because our voting is ruining everything, just as they knew it would.
We are not leaders because we "have not been given the opportunity" to lead? How about instead of waiting for somebody (a man, of course) to graciously provide an opportunity, that we TAKE the opportunities in front of us, and TEACH OUR DAUGHTERS our history and our insights and how to take opportunities that present themselves?
Sonia Johnson is a very interesting person— I’ve read her lesbian relationship book with interest — saw her in person at a women’s festival workshop.
Re: gender and sex — it’s really difficult to strive to keep an open mind to the intersection of biology and culture. I think the idea of gender (culturally bound sex role stereotypes and statically defined distribution of preferences by sex) demands nuance and humility —
The Rousseau quote and response I think introduces an undercurrent of doubt to the argument. Rousseau seems to be acknowledging that acquiring power makes men attractive to many women, and women who become beautiful become more attractive to more men. In his typical fashion (being a jerk who is full of himself) he then condemns women for caring about their looks and not caring about the things that men care about in order to acquire power, when someone who wasn’t a jerk would have seen similar underlying drives beneath both behaviors, and might have wondered if women would behave the same way as men if women were rewarded in the same way that men are.
But we do now have some evidence of what happens when women can gain power and status for themselves. It still seems true that power and status allow men with them to be functionally polygamous, and have a lot more options when it comes to attracting romantic partners. Women with power and status do seem to be able to attract men with more power and status than women with less power and influence, but the power and status doesn’t seem to get them more physically attractive men, nor does it allow them to engage in the kind of harem building or the kind of serial monogamy/polygamy that high status men engage in.
So understandably women still care more about their looks than men do, and men (at the least the ones with a modicum of talent and ability) care more about money and success than women do.
If you read his biography I would never take dating advice from Rousseau. Not a role model for me and I hope a lot of other men 🤨
Thank you for bringing these early feminist back into the conversation. I hope the age of Aquarius upends the patriarchy if not in my lifetime, then in my daughter’s and granddaughter’s lives.