Criticizing recent newspaper articles lamenting the death of feminism, award-winning columnist Katha Pollitt argued during a speech in Salomon 001 Tuesday night that the feminist movement is as strong as it ever was.
"We are really a long way from the pre-feminist era of the 1950s," Pollitt said.
Delivering the Masha Dexter Lecture to about 100 Brown students and community members, Pollitt, a writer for the left-wing magazine The Nation, cited several recent newspaper and magazine articles that have claimed that feminism is the on decline. She said these articles are based on the fact that more women are changing their names when they get married, getting breast implants and participating in the "Girls Gone Wild" phenomenon.
But she said the media were using faulty methodology to measure the impact of feminism in the country.
"Why are we measuring feminism with this yardstick over some other?" she asked the audience. "What about the increase of women in the sciences, the explosion of women in sports ... the increase of women in blue collar jobs, (the fact) that 45 percent of women own vibrators?"
Pollitt pointed to a New York Times article published last month as an example of the faulty methodology used by some reporters. The article, written by Louise Story, was based on a nonscientific poll that found that a significant number of women at Yale University were planning to get married, have children and retire soon after graduation. But Pollitt blasted Story for using "weasel" terms, such as "many" and "seems," and not providing specific numbers from the poll in her article. Pollitt said Story seemed to have made up her mind about what the story was before it was written.
Pollitt told The Herald after the lecture that part of the problem was that journalists seem to always ask the same kinds of professors and students at elite universities, such as those in the Ivy League, for their opinions about feminism in the United States.
"They look at the most elite and privileged women and use them as the idealized image of women, but that's not reflective" of the rest of the nation, she said. Pollitt said journalists should look at women at less elite schools to measure the impact of feminism.
Pollitt believes that feminism has not lost its power but has merely become less visible.
"What is missing from the present is the social movement," she said. "Almost everyone is a feminist today. Although they may separate themselves from the word 'feminism,' almost everyone believes in the principles of feminism."
When women do make the choice to change their names after marriage or to get breast implants, she said, it is always a conscious decision.
"It's much more of a picture of women making individual decisions ... that are intentional," she said.
Pollitt also addressed current threats to abortion rights. In particular, Pollitt said she found Monday's nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court as a serious setback to the pro-choice movement.
"That this man can sit on the Supreme Court, I find astounding," she said. "Women will not be well-served by him."
She cited an opinion Alito wrote in a 1991 case in which he argued to uphold a law that would require women seeking abortions to notify their husbands. Pollitt found Alito's reasoning in the dissent discriminatory, saying that, by comparison, no laws require husbands to inform their wives of children they have fathered outside their marriage or of their decisions to have vasectomies.
Pollitt also discussed state laws that limited abortion rights, saying they were potentially much more harmful than a reversal of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
"Even if Roe v. Wade stays on the books, abortion rights are very much in trouble," she said.
But despite recent events that have limited women's reproductive and sexual rights, Pollitt said there are many reasons for women to be optimistic about the future, including the development of emergency contraceptives and the increased use of condoms and birth control.
Pollitt was received warmly by the audience. Some in attendance, such as Andrea Richardson '09, came to the lecture because they were familiar with Pollitt's columns in The Nation.
"I came to hear her speak because I'm concerned about reproductive and sexual health issues," Richardson said. "I thought she was very clear and truthful and not too romantic about the problems happening right now."
"Her speech was good in that it was very timely," said Emily Seltzer '08. "The (Maureen Dowd) piece that was just in the New York Times Magazine (on Oct. 30, which partially responded to Story's article) was very interesting, and it was good to hear commentary on it so soon after."
Seltzer said she would have liked to hear Pollitt address some solutions to the problems she presented, but she was nevertheless glad "to hear another opinion and keep on looking" for solutions.
Pollitt's speech was the inaugural Dexter Lecture, designed to honor Masha Dexter '06, who passed away from Hodgkins disease in 2004. The lecture series is sponsored by the Taubman Center for Public Policy.
