I am not sure what years the second wave entails, but I am going to
assume, that as an early gen-Xer it did not include my experiences,
although the ideas of the second wave were out there.
I grew up having feminist leanings -- I simply did not like being told I
couldn't do what I wanted to because I was a girl, but I would not have
claimed the title until after I was out of college, when it started to
make sense. For me, college was a pretty insulated experience. I
certainly didn't hang out with friends with sexist attitudes, and those
I encountered were pretty much confined to a few hours a week.
When I entered the somewhat more real world of grad school, and a summer
job between undergrad and and grad school, I found that I needed
feminism to survive. I discovered that it was far different having to
deal with the loudmouth misogynist for 6 hours a week in organic lab,
than if a similar loudmouth was in a research lab where I was spending
12 hours a day. I noticed some subtle, and not so subtle, ways in which
male and female students were treated and judged. Most tellingly, about
4 years into the program, some other female grad students and I
discovered that we had each been "warned" about spending to much time
with the others, because the others had some sort of negative associated
with them (in all cases it was outspokenness; in mine, it was that I had
dared raise sexual harassment charges against someone --who was later
arrested for harassing someone else; in another, it was just that she
was flaky, whatever that means; the third, an eventual Fullbright
winner, she was just too weird). As it turned out, when we finally did
get together and compare notes, we had some pretty similar stories.
That's when I discovered the sisterhood thing.
As far as my association with other feminists in those years, all was
not so smooth. I think there was some pretty heavy second wave
influence, the third wave being barely out in the world afterall, and I
found myself feeling blamed and derided for taking advantage of those
things the second wave had achieved. I was studying the "wrong" thing
-- science, after all, was a "patriarchal" pursuit and I was somehow,
therefore, selling out. I was being asked to question constructs, etc.,
when I felt I was facing discrimination on a sometimes daily basis (the
post-doc, for example, whose goal it was to try and make me cry at least
once a day). I kind of expected a little reinforcement for facing this,
and often felt that I was being blamed for not changing the world all at
once, as evidently, the Boomers did when they were my age (these same
Boomers now thoroughly enmeshed in the consumer culture of the mid
80's).
There also seemed to be some other baggage that went along with the
feminist scene in my community -- and almost obligate vegetarianism, a
requirement that one went to every single protest march. Now I know
that GenX and the Boomers do things much differently. We are more
likely to do our activism on a much more personal or small group level
than "organize", which took me a long time to realize was a different,
and sometimes necessary, alternative to what I was being told by my
elders that I should do. Since a lot of gains had been made by the
second wave -- I could get credit on my own, for example, overt
discrimination was punishable by law, Title IX was firmly in place, many
of my battles were against more subtle, less discernible forms of
discrimination -- having to "prove" my competence when my male
colleagues didn't; having to fend off lecherous sales reps at meetings
who assumed that I couldn't possibly be there for any reason other than
fun; expectations that I, but not my male colleagues, would take on the
responsibility of cleaning up after departmental parties; when I became
a visiting instructor, it being assumed that the secretary did not have
to type any of my tests or other work because I could, and should be
willing to do, my own; excuses being made for antisocial
behavior/helplessness/laziness on the part of my male colleagues,
because, after all they are brilliant when I knew damned well that if I
dared to do anything similar it would be yet another excuse for why I
didn't belong.
In recent years, I have also found a lot of support from people of color
who were dealing with similar sorts of things in regard to race. When
we started talking and finding that some of what was going on in each
case was similar (e.g. being first judged on behavior and secondarily on
merit), that made it a little easier to extend my "network" as a way of
circumventing, when possible, the good old boys. I should add here that
I am now working in a chemical engineering department and I think
engineering is about 30 years behind biology in regards to dealing with
gender (and other types of) equality, so I "get" a little more about
what the second wavers were up against.
I have, as usual, blathered on way to long!
Next?
Linnea
patricia bowne wrote:
> Hi folks!
>> On my sabbatical (gloat) I'm doing a lot of reading in the
> history of the second wave of feminism. When the second wave was
> actually happening, I was busy taking parasitology and
> remember seeing the campus feminists as living in a different
> world -- they thought my experiences were pretty irrelevant,
> as well. It reminded me of my father's joke that by the height
> of the Vietnam war protests in Berkely things got so extreme
> that 'even the chemists' noticed something was going on ...
>> Anyway, I've begun to wonder about the experiences women studying
> science had with feminism. Did second-wave feminism change your
> view of the world, or did the status associated with doing
> science insulate you as a student from the kinds of issues that
> feminism addressed? At what point did feminism begin to make sense
> to you, or hasn't it yet?
>> Pat Bowne
