During this season of change, feminist organizations must reach out to people of color, young people, and straight men.
By Kay Steiger
January 22, 2009
In this moment of progressive re-awakening, feminism and the reproductive rights movement have accomplished a lot. Not only has a pro-choice president taken office after eight years of an administration that openly attacked women’s rights and reproductive freedom. This fall, Emily’s List, an organization that recruits and funds women to run for office, saw more victories than ever before. Pro-choice groups also defeated ballot initiatives in three states that would have restricted or directly challenged the right to an abortion. Today, public opinion remains two-to-one in favor of the decision made in Roe v. Wade. And with health care reform on the table, groups like the National Women’s Law Center have done a good job of trying to keep women’s interests represented in the debate.
Still, the reproductive rights movement is incomplete. Many people believe the movement, with its obsessive discussion of choice, Supreme Court justices, and slogans like “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries,” seems to be speaking past some key groups that could—and should—be its strong allies. These groups—people of color, young people, and straight men—all tend to think of feminism as we know it as something purely under the domain of white, relatively privileged women. If the movement hopes to achieve broad victories during the Obama administration, it must better engage these constituencies. If it doesn’t, it will have wasted this once-in-a-generation opportunity to truly make an impact on as many people’s reproductive lives as possible.
Recently, the movement began to adopt the moniker of reproductive justice. That name doesn’t necessarily mean straying from maintaining the right to an abortion, but it takes a more holistic approach to the needs of women (and men) when it comes to their bodies. A study by the Pro-Choice Public Education Project, released last year, revealed that abortion and abortion access was relatively low on the priority list for young women of color, falling far behind health care, the economy, immigration, and the environment. The needs of young women of color fall often outside of the narrow discussion that has been restricted by focusing on choice alone.
NARAL recently launched a campaign to try to engage with young people, and it seemed especially targeted at young people of color. The project was called Free. Will. Power. and produced several videos featuring spoken word artists. The project is likely to be unsuccessful because it not only didn’t address real issues of sexuality and health but also because it failed to connect the highly produced videos to legitimate political fights and put forth a call for action.
Groups like NARAL and Planned Parenthood’s Action Fund do have youth outreach arms to their organizations, but they seem reluctant to grant those youth or the organizers they employ any power beyond signing or working on a petition. A major project coordinated by the youth arms of feminist organizations last year was a co-branded petition to protest the rising cost of birth control on campus, but the project didn’t change the fact that the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act remained in place, often doubling the out-of-pocket cost of contraception. The Prevention Through Affordable Access Act was introduced to Congress in 2007, but the legislation never made it out of committee.
Another group that has long been neglected by feminist organizations is straight men. There are often divisive debates over whether or not a man can ever call himself a feminist. Men are marginalized within the movement, told they can never understand the plight of women, and must step aside to allow women to speak for themselves. It’s a running joke that men only sign up for women’s studies courses to get laid. A recent Ms. Magazine cover featuring Barack Obama in a “THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE” t-shirt caused a controversy to erupt in the feminist blogosphere. But certainly women who want to see equality will need men as allies and partners in achieving gender equality.
Men, by far, are the largest perpetrators of domestic violence and are often unengaged on issues of reproduction until they are asked to be fathers. Fathers, Barack Obama noted in his Father’s Day speech during the campaign season, are sorely “missing from too many lives and too many homes.” By refusing to engage with men and teach them about gender equality, there is little hope of actually achieving equality in professional and home life, let alone maintaining the right to contraception and abortion.
Full Article:
http://campusprogress.org/opinions/3569/a-new-focus-for-feminism
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