Panel Discussion, "Young Feminists Take on the Family" (page 2 of 7)

Introductory Remarks

Jennifer Baumgardner: We're talking about family tonight partly because feminists have always been pretty obsessed with family. Family is the first place that women had power and family is also a seat of their primary oppressions as well. And 30 years ago, second wave feminists really critiqued the ways in which the family wasn't working for them.

And so we, our generation, grew up with these critiques. We grew up with the myth of the nuclear family, which I think is still totally perpetuated - the current Bush Administration is involved in nuclear things generally - but we also grew up with all the feminist dreams of what different kinds of families could be. Like, what would be the ideal feminist family? Is there one? Is there a feminist nuclear family where everyone has the woman's name and the dad does dishes?

We could have set up this panel in so many different ways, but as it happens, everybody on the panel, at least superficially, has a really distinct family and identity structure. They have things in common - everyone has written two books, everyone is in her 30s, everyone identifies as a feminist - but now I'm going to introduce them individually and I'm going to augment their differences, although again this is kind of a simplification because I'm sure that they have more in common than different.

First we have Cathy McKinley. Cathy is the editor of Afrekete, which is an anthology of black lesbian writings. It came out in '95. It was a big deal when I was an editor at Ms. Wonderful anthology. Soon after that she received a Fulbright Scholarship. She went to Ghana for two years. She's developing her research right now from that two-year fellowship.

She was raised in . . . I forget the town actually, Outerborough, MA. And she was adopted. She was raised by a white family in a white town. And she went and sought out her birth parents, which became her second book, which is called "The Book of Sarahs." And she is going to talk about that a little bit today. Even though this is personal information on some level, it's also how we construct our families. She has a long-distance relationship with a person in Ghana. So that's longer distance than I can even imagine, but it's a committed relationship.

Irshad Manji lives in Toronto, Canada. She is also the author of two books. She is a television presenter, kind of an all-around voice for younger Canadians. One of her books is called Risking Utopia. And the book that she's currently about to launch and promote couldn't be more timely. The working title is An Open Letter To Muslims Worldwide. It's an argument for embracing diversity within the Muslim world, and an argument against anti-Semitism. She has been together with her partner, Michelle Douglas, for - I don't even know how long, but a long time. Because you stayed in my apartment two years ago and you were happily together then.

Irshad Manji: Four and a half years.

JB: Four and a half years. I actually don't know a lot about your family of origin, but I'm sure you will be talking about that today.

Leora Tanenbaum is the author of Slut. And most recently, the author of Catfight. She always wins the award for sauciest titles. We were talking earlier about how Leora is sort of representing on some level - and she finds this funny - the traditional family. She's married to a man and has two sons. And she also is very religious. She was raised traditionally Jewish and she has maintained that her entire life, and maintained that in her current family and reconciles that with her feminism.

Noelle Howey, there at the end, had to drive and brave such terrible snowstorms to get here from Ohio. She made it, finally.

Noelle Howey: More or less.

JB: She's sort of here. She's worse for wear perhaps, so we'll have to be easy on her. She represents a traditional family in the sense that she is married to a man and has procreated.

(laughter)

But she has a really remarkably different family because of her family of origin: she has a mother and then she has a father, but her father happens to be a woman named Christine. And she has written one book recently called Dress Codes and it's a memoir of her girlhood, her mother's girlhood and her father's girlhood. She has won numerous awards for this book. Among them, she was chosen to be Good Morning America's "Read This Book." Which means that among other things, you can now get her book at the airport.

And so, I'm not going to go into this much more because Amy is going to have their lives and opinions unfold for you, as she aggressively moderates. But this is my business partner and writing partner, Amy Richards, who is going to tell you a little bit about her family of origin as well.

And I should say, I come from a superficially nuclear family. From Fargo, North Dakota where dad was the bread winner and there are three kids and mom and dad are still married. But like most nuclear families, we're a lot weirder under the surface.