Regardless of all those articles in women’s magazines concerning finding/catching/living with/losing men, women’s relationships with each other can be more complex, nuanced, and interesting. (No offense to the guys – you know I love some of you ;-D.) I think this is what draws me to a lot of what I read – women authors, female protagonists, women’s issues, and women blogging about their lives and concerns.
PunditMom posted a review of a new book that sounds intriguing. Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild looks at the evolution of feminism over the last 40 years, the progress we’ve made (and still haven’t), and the friction and ambivalence today over embracing the concepts. As I commented in response to her post, my consciousness developed during feminism’s high-water mark in the 70’s, and I can’t think of a time I wouldn’t have considered myself to be one. I think there are times when the organized movement has gone off on tangents that weakened support for it, and times when its public approach to important issues has outright alienated people. None of that should take away from the fact that equal opportunity and treatment under the law, equal pay for equal work by women and men (and a tax code that doesn’t screw dual-income married couples), and reproductive freedom – just to name a few – are issues that continue to matter and to fight for.
What women can and should do for one another is important, and that’s where the “sisterhood” comes in. We can accomplish more together, and can get there by respecting both each other’s choices (even if they wouldn’t be our own, which is why the “mommy wars” thing is, at the core, just dumb) and the hard work done by the women before us so that we have the opportunity to make those choices. We’ve still got plenty of work of our own to do, though.
