Has the "f" word fallen out of fashion in the twenty-first century? For all the electoral talk of women, there has been little talk of the feminist movement that helped put these issues on the map. An October women’s march was scarcely a blip on the radar screen for the media, and the candidates seem more interested in speaking of childcare than of dealing with a range of women’s issues.

But for 800 women who paid a hefty registration fee to attend Ms. Magazine’s Millennium Conference, feminism is alive and well. These women traveled from Alaska, Montana, Canada, and abroad to join Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou, Ms. Editor Marcia Gillespie, and several others to talk about work, diversity, women’s development, health, and feminist "family values". Many of the "old line" feminists were there, but people like Third Wave writers Amy Richards, Farai Chideya, Buddhist writer Angel Williams, and others represented the new face of feminism. It was exciting to observe the diversity in the room and on the panels; diversity by race, age, religion and sexual orientation. While women of color could have been more strongly represented in the audience, especially non-African American women of color, the conference planners clearly had diversity in mind when they selected workshop presenters.

There was much talk of ancestors and foremothers. Maya Angelou shared her grandmother, Big Mama, a woman who fried meat pies and ran five miles between two work sites to earn a living. Marcia Gillespie invoked the spirits of Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks to illustrate the distance that women have traveled. Angelou said that every woman who took to a stage had it crowded with foremothers whose sacrifices have brought us here.

While keynote speakers were riveting, equally moving stories were being told at lunch tables, in hallways, or at workshops. A young mother from Montana came to the conference on a scholarship. Her voice broke when she spoke of the pull between staying at home and returning to work. The problem – with two degrees in a tight labor market, the best offer she has is $7 an hour for "professional" work. For now, she’s staying home, but family finances won’t let her do it for long. A women who has left welfare shook in frustration when she talked about the twin pressures of forced work and childcare. A friend of hers just lost her children to foster care because she’d failed to make adequate child care arrangements. She fears the same will happen to her.

A middle-aged flight attendant that works for Delta Airlines talked about the challenges she and her co-workers face without a union. She described a workplace culture where co-workers are encouraged to tattle on each other, and where discipline is enforced arbitrarily and capriciously. An activist spoke of her commitment to work for social change, but her frustration at earning low wages. A mother whose son has been a victim of police brutality asked why feminists have not embraced this issue.

In some ways it was the women’s movement of the seventies. Excited, exuberant, and all over the place. In two general sessions and more than twenty workshops, women shared their stories because, as Steinem reminded, "the personal is political". That mantra has moved women legislators to look at domestic violence, women’s retirement, breast cancer research, assistance for women business owners, and other policy issues. "Tell your story," Gloria Steinem said in the opening session, "and tell it again. And if you hear it back, it’s not a just a personal issue, it’s part of the movement."
The magic of the women’s movement is that it brought women out of the isolation of their individual lives and stitched those stories into the quilt of a movement. The weakness, often, was that there were so many pieces to the quilt that it sometimes didn’t seem to go together. The twenty-first century women’s movement seems to have more cohesiveness as women realize that after 30 years of struggle, there is so much more work to do.

Women still earn 75 cents for every dollar men earn We are just 13 percent of national elected officials. Just a handful of women head Fortune 500 companies; there are glass ceilings that still need to be shattered. And the debacle of welfare deform has pushed millions of women into forced labor, leaving them with few social supports.
Those young women who are engaged in the contemporary women’s movement are focused on social change, ready for the challenges of the new millennium, and activist. As the candidates talk about women’s issues, they ought to take a look at the new face of feminism. For them, the "f" word isn’t unspeakable; it’s a powerful affirmation.

JULIANNE MALVEAUX’S COMMENTARY OCTOBER 26, 2000

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