We ran out of school to march for Fridays for Future, and still the world doesn’t seem to stop burning. Whether we shouted against Brexit, or war, or marched for Sarah Everard or Black Lives Matter, the forces that promised to bind us together – specifically social media and the internet – have left so many fraught and lonely and unable to organise meaningful change.
Activists are disappearing. Steinem knew this, telling the New Yorker in 2015 that she admired the intersectionality that the internet afforded, but worried women were forgetting “you still have to make change happen in real life”.
1 Comments
frisbird@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 9d
Steinem was the opposite of radical. Radical literally means to get at the root of the problem. She was a reformists, an iconoclast, and a norm breaker, but fundamentally she did not attempt to get to the root cause of patriarchy, only to address the symptoms it caused. This is why she was an anti-communist crusader who worked for the CIA while the USSR was exhibiting exactly the things she was arguing for. Soviet women made up over 50% of the paid labor force, dominated prestigious and highly skilled professions. The majority of doctors and economists were women. The Soviet constitution enshrined equal rights for women explicitly and the law guaranteed paid maternity leave for all women and the state funded day care centers. All things that Steinem was arguing for while also working to deradicalized feminism in the West.