Feminism in 2008 (opinion piece)

For most of this decade, the conventional wisdom has had it that feminism in America is dead – or, at least, irrelevant. The New York Times talked to female students at Yale and found them to be mostly interested in becoming housewives. Sex and the City told us that even the ones who became career girls were more interested in men and Manolos than in their actual careers. Then came Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for the presidency and the “hear me roar” tidal wave of support it generated among women, especially older ones. This renewed focus on feminism brought some of the movement’s veterans back to the national fore, particularly Gloria Steinem, a founder of Ms Magazine, the first mass circulation feminist title. Steinem’s most talked and blogged about comment of recent months is her assertion in an opinion piece in January that, “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.”

A chief purveyor of that hostility towards women, Steinem believes, is US television. On this point, she has no qualms about aiming her guns squarely. “We need to send those news executives to a 12-step programme because they are in denial” of the sexism in their coverage of the Democratic primaries, she says.

It seems like a good moment to ask Steinem if, more than a generation after the “second-wave” feminist revolution she helped lead, she is disappointed that women haven’t made more progress in the workplace.