Modern feminism: is it floundering or flourishing?

Now that the White House will have a new tenant, one might well ask in the manner of old Fabian pamphleteers: whither feminism now?

What is the true nature of this whole phenomenon in our lives and in our markets?

More specifically, are there new insights to be had about how brands should be talking to their women customers as the end of this decade looms?

We open with this thought. It is 26 years since the publication of The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. This was Naomi Wolf’s blistering analysis of how notions of beauty were defined and standards of beauty imposed in a setting of brute male power. Great distress and lifelong confusion in the lives of women everywhere were the result as they forced themselves to conform to a crude and inflexible stereotype of personal attractiveness.

Back then, there was not an advertising agency in the land where The Beauty Myth was not dissected and discussed. As a proposition, it soared in the commercial and cultural consciousness of the epoch. To many eyes, a new dawn had broken, a particularly virulent victimhood was at last being named for what it was and a liberation was under way. Marketers would all have to kick sexism in the crotch and out of their campaigns or be punished.

Fast-forward. By 2014, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, some 16 million (and rising) surgical or minimally invasive procedures were being carried out on Americans each year – 90% of them on women. The same source tells us that, since 2000, the total number of procedures has grown by 115%. Specifically for breast augmentation, the increase has been 31%since the turn of the century, while the number of Botox procedures has risen by a pretty striking 759%. Whatever the dream was – the one that fired The Beauty Myth as an ideological call-to-arms – it plainly died during the lifetime of the generation that followed its publication.

Now we hold up another exhibit. In 2016, Samantha Ettus publishes The Pie Life: A Guilt-Free Recipe for Success and Satisfaction. This is an example of what we might call ‘self-help feminism for the lean-in generation’. In this world, work–life balance for women is nothing more than a managerial or technocratic issue. Ms Ettus affirms that cocktailing together career, intimacy, parenting and accomplishment-accumulation is just a matter of good order and clear goal-setting – along with perhaps a dose of structured ruthlessness. This is a version of what has happened to the debate once captured by phrases such as ‘superwoman’ and ‘having it all’. Nowhere is it to be suggested in such titles that women should give up anything, compromise their dreams, take second best in any sphere. A contribution to any culture of complaint it is not. We might also juxtapose The Pie Life with Cathi Hanauer’s The Bitch is Back: Older, Wiser, and (Getting) Happier, also published in 2016, which chronicles trends in female empowerment via examples of individual women who have learned to enjoy the fruits of what we might loosely call first- and second-generation feminisms – not tolerating any form of imprisonment or any lack of fulfilment in their lives.

Amid this ‘let’s-just-fix-it’ approach, would we be right to identify another trend – something to be styled as ‘Bake Off feminism’? In so much popular culture now, it could seem that domesticity is the new rock ’n’ roll. Some academics are even suggesting that the association of feminism with successful career-building may not elicit the shared and popular emphasis it once did. Not so long ago, such an idea, if ventilated in a public space, would have died under an avalanche of ridicule and contempt from feminists and socially progressive commentators of every hue.

No more, it seems. Meanwhile, down in the suburbs of everytown, the British Social Attitudes Survey will confirm that, in this century so far, the average number of hours women devote to housework each week has not really changed – it’s still twice the number that men devote.

More than 40% of women in the UK workforce are employed on a part-time basis – not a recipe for mass income growth or surging career development. Yes, the majority of graduands are female (true for many years now) but this does not seem to be translating into full career equality (as the perpetuation of a pay gap of about 10% would seem to confirm). It is no great revelation to say that there are many feminisms now. At one end of the spectrum are the voices still clamouring hard for real sustainable equality; at the other, female dissatisfactions (with life, men, money) do not seem all that intense. Many different and competing narratives lie in between.

So where are we headed? I’m really not sure. There’s probably nothing in this picture to change much, for better or worse, in the next decade.