Challenges of the post-feminist age

By SARA ECKEL / Newspaper Enterprise Association

All her life, my friend Julie has defined herself against her mother.

"She wanted me to get married and have babies, because that's what she did," says Julie, who recalls the day when, as a teen-ager, she told her mother that she wanted to go to law school.

"She asked me what I would do when my husband has to pay off my loans, and I said 'Well I'm not going to get married' and that was that."

But now, at 31, Julie sees the limitations of this reasoning.

"The problem is, you get trapped. I feel like I'm not making my own decisions but I'm just reacting. So does that make me any better? Am I really freer than my mother was?"

That's the challenge of being a woman in the post-feminist age: How do you cut through all the various controversies surrounding women's lives and simply make your own decisions? How do you keep personal choices from being perceived as political statements? And why does everything have to be so loaded?

Take the engagement-ring issue. My friend Amy found that her decision not to wear one was met with myriad comments from friends and family.

"I'm not really a jewelry person and there just seemed like better things we could do with $10,000," she says. "But people always put a political spin on it."

Rebecca, on the other hand, saw things from the opposite lens. She found that her traditional wedding - complete with the acquisition of an engagement ring, her husband's name, and a big white dress - defined who she was to many onlookers.

"People would say, 'Oh, you're traditional,' when I kind of felt that that was none of their business. Not that they can't ask me, but they shouldn't assume anything."

Of course, sometimes the decisions we make are political. Amy admits that she didn't like the idea of wearing something that essentially says "taken" when her fiance wore no such marker. "But it doesn't bother me if other women do."

And that, of course, is the key: to not be bothered by what other women do. Which isn't always easy. I confess that when I hear that a friend or acquaintance has decided to take her husband's name, I do feel a slight sting of disappointment - it does make me see her in a different way.

But this is the kind of thinking that women, on all sides of the political spectrum, need to get away from. The culture wars are waged on the premise that so-called "traditional" and "new" women somehow threaten each other, that the two cannot exist in harmony.

Some women blame feminism for all the confusion, but to me that's like blaming the invention of the automobile for the fact that you get stuck in traffic sometimes. True, we probably wouldn't be in this jam if were still driving horses and buggies, but I for one am glad we have cars.

To me, the real problem has been the divide-and-conquer mentality of our culture. Serious debate over women's issues in this country has become nearly impossible because the politicians and the media prefer to stage catfights - in which feminist and antifeminist women snipe at each other, both accusing the other side of being the enemy of "real" women.

The tactic is an effective one, as it sends the message that we are our worst enemies and it gets men - who, after all, are still pretty much in control of every major corporation and government institution - completely off the hook.

We need to learn to ignore all the babble about how women should and should not behave. But before we can do that, we must stop judging each other. Because until we learn to respect each other's choices, we will never really be free.