The Bechdel Cast - Aackt 3: Cathy and American Feminist Backlash

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

This week, Jamie takes a look at it where Cathy falls in the history of American feminism — and take a look at how the feminist movement has progressed, regressed, and gatekept. Why are feminists frustrated with Cathy?  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that?

That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller

from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality,

cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast or wherever you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ebony Monet. And I'm Rick Schwartz. And we're here from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, the global conservation organization behind the world-famous San Diego Zoo and Safari Park.

And together, we're excited to announce the podcast Amazing Wildlife. Hear incredible stories about wildlife and the global efforts to save it as we explore the connection between humans, wildlife, and the environment. Listen to Amazing Wildlife on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get to personally pick out, like leather or cloth, sunroof or moonroof,

or four-wheel drive versus all-wheel drive? Yeah, a car, a CarMax car. Buy online, get it delivered to you. It's car buying reimagined. CarMax, available within a 60-mile radius of select stores. See CarMax.com for details. Some restrictions apply. The more we learn about COVID-19, the more questions we have.

The biggest question now? What's next? What will COVID bring in six months? A year? If you're feeling anxious about the future, you're not alone. CalHOPE offers free COVID-19 emotional support. Call 833-317-4673 or live chat at calhope.org today. In 1994, Kathy Geisweit gave the commencement speech at her alma mater, the University of

Michigan, talking about what she talks about best, the insecurities of Working American Women. The world expects so much of you right now. You'll be expected to be a dynamic business person, financial wizard, nurturing homemaker, enlightened, involved parent, environmental activist, physical fitness expert, a sexy and alluring yet responsible partner, champion of human rights, independent thinker, community activist, and if you're a woman, a size five all at once. Today, when the message is that anyone can do anything, it's going to be very hard for you not to feel that everyone else is doing something and that you personally are stuck in your same old ruts.

And just in case normal human insecurity doesn't nail you, you'll be bombarded by images that will try. Look at how women are bombarded in 1994. Look at the commercials. Look at how they picture men and women in the commercials. Men in commercials are always doing one thing. The women are doing six things at once. Now, the man in the commercial will be mowing the lawn, one job.

The woman in the commercial is giving herself a beauty treatment for her hands while she does the dishes. The man in the commercial is grilling a steak, one job. The woman in the commercial is simultaneously cleaning the oven, disinfecting the floor, popping a five-course meal in the microwave, and faxing the office while explaining the miracle of feminine hygiene products to her daughter. And if you think that doesn't translate into real life expectations, head for Detroit during rush hour some morning and look around you on the freeway. If you've been listening to this show, you won't be surprised to hear the creator of Kathy Comics talking about the unreasonable expectations often pushed on women.

The sorts of expectations that make one say, speaking hypothetically, of course. Cathy Comics certainly changed in tone and mission as the strip went on, but it serves as a document of a woman's insecurities and concerns for 34 consecutive years, between 1976 and 2010. And the issues mentioned and not mentioned align pretty closely with mainstream liberal views on women of this time. There's also plenty to say about what this commentary does not reference, a reflection of how American feminism

has historically either ignored or been actively hostile to the interests of women of color, queer women, and working class women. So in this episode, I'm going to let Kathy lead us through American feminist issues according to the funny pages. And I'll fill in some blanks of what does not appear. So! Irving to her feminist friends She's fighting all the standards With some chocolate in her hand Kathy She's fighting back Too stressed for success

Let's cut her some slack Oh Kathy, my Kathy Fighting Kathy She's got a lot going on Kathy She's fighting back She's fighting the standards so not to be patronizing but kathy cartoons did not invent feminism so we do require a little bit of setup here in order for all of the expectations that eventually stress our heroine out during the second wave of feminism to exist

in the first place, a lot of social gains had to be made beforehand. And quick disclaimer here, I will be the first to say that this episode will in no way be comprehensive. And so I want to see at the top, I don't have the purview to give a full overview of the history of American feminism. You could be in school for years on that topic, but I will be including further resources in the show notes to help bridge those gaps. So to begin, we have to take a look at the first wave of American feminism, which leads us to where Kathy alternatively thrives and fails in the second wave. So let's go back to the year 1848. Okay, I can already hear you groaning.

1848? That's so long ago. Sit down and listen. This is going somewhere. 1848, I repeat, was popularly considered to be the launch of the first wave of American feminism with the first formal women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. This wave, while containing many steps forward and eventually steps backward, is considered to have continued through 1920 when women got the vote in the U.S. Victories along the way included increased educational opportunities, wives being granted custody of their own children, women being able to own property in their own

name, and of course the vote. In the first wave of feminism and in every wave since, middle class white women have been disproportionately centered in how the activism is discussed and treated in pop culture. This was well on display during this first wave. The majority of commonly discussed women of this era in American feminism are white. You're Susan B. Anthony's, you're Elizabeth Cady Stanton's, you're Lucretia Mott's, you're Lucy Stone's. While American feminists had certainly existed for some time, it's in the mid-1800s that they began to organize in large numbers. Much of this early organization drew inspiration from prior experiences with the temperance and

abolition movements. Here's what historian Manisha Sinha in The Slave's Cause, A History of Abolition said of first-wave American feminism. If not all female abolitionists became women's rights activists, pioneering feminists owed their public careers to abolition. While women of color spoke not just about the oppression of their gender, but of race and class, the white middle class figureheads of the first wave often ignored or made their insights unwelcome. There were divides among white feminists as well. Working class women were concerned with factory conditions and labor exploitation, while white women of the middle class and above were primarily concerned with gaining rights as individuals outside of marriage, including the ability to own property, have child custody, and vote. Feminist scholar and general legend Angela Davis explains why

upper class white women gained an interest in seeking suffrage for women around this time in her classic 1981 book, Women, Race and Class. An ideological consequence of industrial capitalism was the shaping of a more rigorous notion of female inferiority. It seemed, in fact, that the more women's domestic duty shrank under the impact of industrialization, the more rigid became the assertion that women's place was in the home. They had been productive workers within the home economy, and their labor had been no less respected than their men's. When manufacturing moved out of the home and into the factory, the ideology of women would begin to raise the wife and mother as ideal. As workers, women had at least enjoyed the economic equality, but as wives, they were destined to become appendages to their men, servants to their husbands. As mothers, they would be defined as passive vehicles for the replenishment of human life.

The situation for that White House wife was full of contradictions. And it bears much repeating that Black feminists, many of them born into slavery prior to abolition, were instrumental in this movement, although their contributions are frequently and unfairly de-emphasized by white feminists even today. Sojourner Truth was one of the most prominent black women in the movement at this time, speaking about her experiences intersectionally, as both a formerly enslaved black person and as a woman. Here's a quote from her famous speech, Ain't I a Woman, from an Akron's Women Convention in 1851, read by performer S.T. for the Sojourner Truth Project in 2017. I am a woman's right.

I have as much muscle as any man and I can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed. And can any man do better than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and I can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is today. The poor men seem to be all in confusion, and they don't know what to do.

Why, children, if you have woman's rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You have your own rights and there won't be so much trouble. While truth speech was a huge hit in 1851, Angela Davis explains that a number of white women at the conference did not want truth, the only black woman at the convention, to speak at all. The racism displayed by white feminists of this time is worthy of more discussion and has been chronicled in seminal texts like White Tears, Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad, On Intersectionality by Kimberly Crenshaw, and Davis's Women, Race, and Class, among many, many

others. I will link to these books in the description of this episode. What needs to be said is this, white feminist leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had supported the abolition of slavery and even worked with Frederick Douglass to win the vote, quote, for both women and African Americans, unquote, would later actively work against the black vote and the interests of Black women in particular over and over in an attempt to get white women the vote ahead of Black men. The message being sent by these leaders was clear. The white women's vote took precedence over all women's votes for Anthony and Stanton.

Following the dissolution of their alliance with Douglass, who had previously stood up for the women's vote at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, Stanton and Anthony created the National American Women's Suffrage Association in 1869, specifically to oppose the 15th Amendment, which granted black men the vote. Anthony famously said she would cut off her right arm before demanding voting rights for black men instead of women. With the significant biases of white leaders in Black men instead of women. With the significant biases of white leaders in mind, one of the strengths of the first wave of feminism was its

clear goal and focus, which was suffrage. And after 70 years, that was achieved in 1920. In these years, even the most liberal wings of the movement were met with vitriol from American patriarchy. A best-selling book in 1873 stated that women could not last in careers and would suffer, quote, exhaustion of the feminine nervous system, unquote. And President Theodore Roosevelt once said that a white woman who postponed childbirth to do literally anything else was a race traitor. So in the years of this movement, steps were made in the right direction. Women gained access to higher education, to keeping their wages, as well as early whisperings of widespread birth control access.

Following the success of the women's suffrage movement in securing the vote, the nearly 75 years of consistent feminist activism began to slow down. In part due to active antagonism from American patriarchal structures, who blacklisted feminists from publishing their work in major publications, and labeled many communists and a quote, serious threat to the country. This led to one of the most notable backlashes against the gains of feminists in American history. But keep in mind that even with this passing, Black women's votes were still not treated equally. Martha S. Jones, author of Vanguard, How Black Women Broke Barriers,

Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, told Time in 2020 the following, quote, The 19th Amendment did not eliminate the state laws that operated to keep Black Americans from the polls via poll taxes and literacy tests. Nor did the 19th Amendment address violence or lynching. Some African-American women will vote with the 19th Amendment," unquote. This backlash is carefully documented by writer Susan Paludi in her 1991 book,

Backlash, which documents both the major American feminist movements and the near certainty that periods of women's gains would be followed by a period of severe backlash. Backlash that extends to the political, to the cultural, and within the feminist movement itself. Faludi describes the first 20th century backlash as happening in the 1920s, with a wave of anti-feminist media, demonization of women who wanted to get divorces or abortions, and an increased emphasis on looks and consumptions, exemplified by the rise of the Miss America pageant that started in 1920, the same year that women got the vote. And the thing

about backlashes is they tend to erase a lot of progress. According to Faludi, by 1930, there were fewer women doctors than there had been in 1910. Fast forward a bit to the late 30s, early 40s. Women surged back into the workplace in America during World War II. With men leaving the country to fight in the war, five to six million women entered the workforce, two million of which entered heavy industry jobs. The government began to provide wild stuff like daycare assistance, working class women fought for unions, and young girls grew up wanting their own careers. And keep in mind that this is the era that Kathy Geisweit's mother,

as well as the comic character of mom, would have been growing up in. But when the war ended, backlash again, where the Rosie the Riveter messaging of women's roles in war. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption

that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I've been thinking about you.

I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session. 24 hours. BPM 110.

120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything?

You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I felt too seen. Um, dragged. I'm NK, and this is Basket Case. So I basically had what back in the day they would call a nervous breakdown. I was crying and I was inconsolable. It was just very big, sudden swaps of different meds. What is wrong with me? Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl. Finally, a show for the mentally ill girlies. On Basket Case, I talk to people about what happens when what we call mental health is shaped by the conditions of the world we live in.

Because if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of conditions that are pretty hard to live with. But if you struggle to cope, the society that created the conditions in the first place will tell you there's something wrong with you. And it will call you a basket case. Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Efforts led some to believe that their place in the workplace was here to stay. In came the 1950s. Those two million women in heavy industry laid off and forced out of their job to make room for veterans returning from war. As ever, working class and women of color often remained in the workplace, but not with the same status or pay as in the wartime. Women were denied unemployment pay flat out, and middle class white women were generally pushed into the Donna Reed 1950s era cult of domesticity. Just ten years later, the culture dictated that jobs and education were very unfeminine,

and calling yourself a feminist was once again anathema. And calling yourself a feminist was once again anathema. Never said that word out loud before. Good job, Jamie. OK. Integral to this and all periods of backlash is an emphasis on consumerism and on improving the individual. The economies flourishing in the 1920s and 50s in the

U.S. made women a larger consumer bloc than ever, and defining oneself through consumption was a great way to distract from, you know, being mad about not having rights. Kathy Geisweit, born in 1950, spent her formative years within a period of backlash that predated the second wave feminist movement, which most people consider to have been started in 1968 when a New York Times Magazine article by Martha Lear coining the term was released. So where were women's rights by the 60s? Hey, everyone. It's Dramos from Life as a Gringo podcast. iHeartRadio's Sounds of My Culture is brought to you by State Farm. At State Farm, we know how important it is to celebrate Hispanic heritage every day.

That's why we support My Cultura and invite you to continue enjoying all its great podcasts. We also know what it takes to manage money, no matter the budget. That's why it's a good idea to consider State Farm and their surprisingly great rates. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. All right, Prince Royce, my guy, thank you for hanging out.

And I gotta say, listen, I'm curious. When you look back on growing up in a Latino community, what comes to mind for you? I think growing up in New York and being surrounded by so much Latin culture was a blessing for me. I think I was able to listen to so many different genres of music from hip hop to salsa to merengue to rock, go to bachata, go to reggaeton. And I think that that's what I loved about New York. There was such a big present community of everything. Support Cultura all year long by listening to the My Cultura Podcast Network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Do you own or rent your home? Sure you do. And I bet it can be hard work. You know what's easy? Bundling policies with GEICO. GEICO makes it easy to bundle your homeowner's or renter's insurance

along with your auto policy. It's a good thing, too, because you already have so much to do around your home. Go to GEICO.com, get a quote, and see how much you could save. It's GEICO easy. Visit GEICO.com today. That's GEICO.com. This clip is brought to you by State Farm. It's Geico easy. Visit Geico.com today. That's a good idea to consider State Farm. For surprisingly great rates, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Call or go to statefarm.com for a quote today.

If you could talk to me a little bit about the process you went through, and I think it's good to not pat yourself on the back, but to put it out there so other people can hear what it takes. I don't know't know i always look at like this like what do i want i wanted to be a wwe superstar all right what does it take to be a wwe superstar what are the tools i will need to give me every possible opportunity i can get and so i took the tools of acting classes improv classes wrestling school everything i possibly can to knock on the door of ww the people of the everyone on that real world show would wear my t-shirts, would always ask me to do the Miz. Like they were so supportive. Like you don't get that very often. You really don't. Listen to the My Cultura Podcast Network available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. The 1963 President's Commission on the Status of Women Report, which was initially commissioned by a pre-assassinated President Kennedy. Remember him? People love that guy. But would they have if he had? We'll never know. This commission was led by Eleanor Roosevelt, and while it was still very, you better be a mommy eventually in its tone, this report acknowledged a lot of commonly recognized discriminations against women, using hard federal data to back it up. These acknowledgements included recognition of the wage gap,

of employment inequality, of low support for working class women and women of color, of a dearth of child care services, and on and on. And just like with the first wave, this feminist movement came on the heels of a major racial reckoning in the United States via the civil rights movement, where again, Black women in leadership positions spoke on their role in American society intersectionally with leaders like Marianne Weathers, Ella Baker, who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and more. During the Civil Rights Movement, Black women worked from the radical and liberal wings and were instrumental in community organizing that led to wins like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And by the late 1960s, a new wave of the women's movement

had certainly been building. Challenging American white patriarchal structures were moved along by both the civil rights movement and the energy from the protests surrounding the Vietnam War, as well as the growing number of options in American feminist literature and organizations. Which brings me to Betty Friedan. Oh, you thought we weren't going to get to Betty Friedan? Well, buckle in. She is best known as the author of 1963's The Feminine Mystique, a gospel for dissatisfied housewives that bucked and rejected the idea

that a woman naturally derives purpose from marriage, children, and housework. We'll get to its shortcomings in a bit, but this mystique was, as Friedan put it, quote, the problem that has no name, unquote. And this clearly spoke to a young Kathy Geisweit. She references the feminine mystique in her work constantly, both through her character and through herself. Here she is describing her teen and college years in a PBS NewsHour clip promoting her 2019 essay collection, 50 Things That Aren't My Fault.

My generation was right in between the two Bettys, Betty Crocker and Betty Friedan, and I wanted to be both of them, and a lot of women did at that time. And I literally gained 40 pounds on one Betty's chocolate fudge layer cake mix while reading the other Betty's Feminine Mystique. And a lot of women, I think, found themselves like the place I was in. But she's not wrong. Betty Friedan is a Betty of note, for better and for worse. Friedan was one of the figureheads of the liberal wing of the second wave,

going on to found the NOW, the National Organization for Women, in 1966, with 48 others. Like Anthony and Stanton before them, the organization was extremely polarizing throughout the second wave due to its, say it with me, overemphasis on the issues of straight middle-class white women above everyone else. Also like the first movement, the liberal wing of the second wave came with a pretty clearly defined goal. It was all about passing the ERA, Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that had been unsuccessful in making progress since 1923. The amendment sought to, and get ready for some controversial stuff,

guarantee legal rights regardless of gender. To this day, it's never been signed into law. Isn't that nice? This area of the movement was popularly referred to as women's liberation, and there was a part of it, women's libbers. The struggle to apply women's lib to everyday life is thoroughly explored in the first few years of the Cathy comics. But women of color, while again being sidelined and actively disregarded by liberal white-centered organizations, such as the NOW, were extremely active during the second wave years.

Some organizations of note. Membership in the Black Panther Party was over 60% women. Kathleen Cleaver, who was a communication secretary with the Panthers, was once asked what a woman's role in the revolution was, and she replied, quote, no one ever asks what a man's place in the revolution is, unquote. The National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973, was one of the first to include a lesbian agenda as a part of their mission statement. Asian feminists were extremely active organizers as well, with projects like Asian Sisters, an L.A. drug abuse center founded in 1971, and the L.A. Asian Women's Center was an organizing hub until it closed in 76. In 1974, Indigenous American women formed the Women of All Red Nations, or WARN, based

on concepts of tribal women's traditions, and with the key distinction that patriarchy and colonialism were inseparable concepts. And because of the hostility that these organizations were sometimes met with by the white feminist mainstream, the label of feminist sometimes be resisted. Here's Angela Davis speaking on this at a 2018 talk at the Center of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona. Everybody started referring to me as a feminist and my response was, I'm not a feminist. You know, I'm a black revolutionary because I didn't see how the two had anything to do with each other.

But I realized that I was talking about a certain kind of feminism, a bourgeois feminism, a feminism that is still, yeah, white, white bourgeois feminism, which is unfortunately the most represented feminism today, and most people think of that as feminism. But that ignores the fact that huge numbers of organic and academic intellectuals who are women of color have transformed the very nature of feminism. And the hallmark of feminism today is what we call intersectionality, a recognition of the... And not only the interrelating character of identities,

but as I frequently say, I think intersectionality is most helpful when we think about the intersectionality of social justice struggles. Queer women experienced active hostility from the mainstream movement as well. Activists Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera organized for trans rights with STAR after Johnson had been a key figure at the Stonewall riots, and both worked with the Gay Liberation Front during these years. Betty Friedan was actively homophobic, referring to lesbians as the quote-unquote lavender menace in 1969, and did not welcome queer women into the NOW. And of course,

people were pissed. Rita Mae Brown, who was a lesbian activist, broke off from the New York branch of the N.O.W. and began Radical Lesbians, who wore t-shirts that said Lavender Menace and staged an action at the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970. An action that forced a discussion about homophobia and the exclusion that lesbians experienced in society, as well as within the feminist movement. While some straight feminists with the liberal mainstream movement, including Gloria Steinem, wanted to be more inclusive, Betty Friedan purged lesbians and lesbian sympathizers, as she put it, from the NOW before a 1971 change was made to once again allow queer people into the organization. So again,

with the second wave of feminism, there were radical and liberal wings with very different interests, which created significant interior conflict. The Cathy comics are really only engaging with this mainstream liberal movement, in no small part because the strip's author was a liberal white woman in a majority middle-class white area, writing, to some extent, about her own experiences and opinions. Kathy strips do not feature people of color or queer people, and its radicals, like Andrea, have politics that actually skew pretty liberal. This is exemplified in the consciousness-raising sessions that Andrea runs after work in

the 1970s, which Kathy originally finds to be kind of navel-gazy and bizarre, although she does give it a fair shake. Here's Andrea. Little boys are always encouraged to boast about their achievement while little girls are scolded for boasting because it's unfeminine. But with assertiveness training exercise number two, women can rediscover the pride we have every right to express. Each one of you will stand up and say out loud the one thing you're most proud of yourself. I am very proud of the fact that I have never boasted. Andrea goes relatively hard in these early years. There's also a funny storyline from the late 70s where she

gets a job as a mall Santa to challenge the patriarchal construct of Santa. Actual radicalism at this time took a very different form and often rejected consciousness-raising groups on the same grounds that Kathy did. Many thought they were too centered on the self above the collective. Here's a quote I love from the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful from radical feminist Robin Morgan. This is not a movement one joins. There are no rigid structures or membership cards. The women's liberation movement exists where three or four friends or neighbors decide to meet regularly over coffee and talk about their personal lives. It also exists in the cells of women's jails, on the welfare lines, in the supermarket, the factory, the convent, the farm, the maternity ward, the street corner, the old lady's home, the kitchen, the steno pool, the bed. It exists in your mind and in the political and personal insights that you can contribute to change and shape and help its growth.

This interest in viewing consciousness raising as a wider construct was not shared by all feminists. But the emphasis that everyday lives of women should be up for discussion definitely was. New York Radical Women member Carol Hanisch popularized the phrase, the personal is political in a 1969 essay. That is to say that women speaking about their problems in marriage, in access to health care, in labor issues, in appearance, was important. And emphasizing in these groups that it was counterproductive to say that not living up to this expected image was a personal instead of a systemic failure.

Sidebar, Hanisch was just very cool in general. She was one of four radical feminists who hung a women's liberation banner over the balcony at a Miss America pageant in 1968. Good stuff. So the Kathy character is at first resistant towards consciousness raising because of its, in her perspective, unwillingness to accept gradual change. While she is open and even wants to feel better about her station in life, she isn't a full women's liber in the sense that she wants romantic love with a man and has a tendency to not assert herself in the relationships she cares about as well as in the workplace.

The example of her screaming, Are you nuts? at a consciousness-raising session when the leader suggests that men should be removed from women's lives altogether is a perfect example of this. And Kathy Geisweit has a vested interest in exploring how men reacted

to the women's liberation movement taking off through characters like Irving, Mr. Pinkley, and the parade of losers that Kathy dates and rejects throughout the 1970s. Also referenced in these strips is the then-new term Ms., brought into the mainstream by feminist Sheila Michaels and popularized further by Gloria Steinem's magazine of the same name. The whole idea behind it is that women in the workplace and in general shouldn't be pressured to disclose their marital status when introducing themselves. And Kathy's on board with this. When the Kathy character asks

to be called Ms. in the late 70s, a male employee comments this. Mrs., Ms., or Miss? Miss. Oh, you're single then. No, I'm Miss. Women invented Miss so you wouldn't be able to label us as single or married. Well, that may be, but the only women I see who actually use Miss are single, Miss. Miss? You don't know that I'm a Miss! Yes, I do. If you were married, you wouldn't worry so much about being labeled single. This is what I think Kathy Strips do really well. Take this step forward for the feminist movement like a simple demand to not be defined by marital status, and reflects how the institutions that resist these

changes reacted, usually in a way that makes our heroine feel less than. This is also reflected in Cathy's relationship with Irving, a man who is clearly uncomfortable with the changing role of women in the world. And unlike some popular criticism would lead you to believe, Irving's behavior was criticized within the strip, although some took rightful issue with the Cathy character herself absorbing a lot of toxic and abusive qualities stemming from his own insecurities. And people were rightfully critical of the fact that she married him for some reason. I digress. Here is a late 1970s strip with Irving and Kathy. You want me around until you read some women's article,

and then all you care about is your career. Then you get disillusioned by your career, and you search for some big romance to give meaning to your life. You date yo-yos, you beg me to come back, I come back, I threaten your space, you throw me out, you don't even know what you want, Kathy. At last, a man who really understands me. Something that's always really fun is seeing Irving's character get torn to shreds whenever he comes into contact with Andrea, who thinks that he

is not good enough for Kathy all the way up until the two marry in 2005. Here's a 70s era interaction with the two of them with Kathy sitting silently beside Irving. Throughout history, women have been suppressed, repressed, and oppressed Irving. We've had miserable jobs, hideous pay, humiliating benefits, and not one shred of respect as close to equal human beings. What possible injustices do you think men have suffered that even come close? We never learned to cry. You never had anything to cry about. While the Equal Rights Amendment ultimately failed,

the 1970s proved to be a very productive time for American feminists. According to Faludi, millions more women entered the workplace. The wage gap closed to about 70% for upwardly mobile white women, let's be clear. Access to birth control increased. Title IX passed, which welcomed women into high school and collegiate sports. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 was passed, which banned discrimination in access to credit on the basis of gender, marital status, race, religion, national origin, and age. There was, of course, Roe v. Wade,

the 1973 Supreme Court decision that finally, for now, gave people with uteruses the right to get an abortion for up to three months. This movement absolutely lacked in intersectionality and solidarity with women of color and with queer women. And the Kathy character benefits from much of the progress of this time as a middle-class white woman. She is able to eventually buy her own home as a single woman. She ascends in the workplace.

She struggles and fails to get equal pay, but at least isn't legally barred from pursuing it, technically. And that is how the comic plays out in the 70s. But by the end of the 1970s, the second wave feminist movement was considered to have ended. And it's when we get into Kathy strips from the 1980s that I think the strip really hits its stride. While Kathy comics were never designed to communicate or promote radical feminism, the semi-autobiographical format was well-equipped to comment on the background. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who, on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. and she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session. 24 hours. BPM 110. 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not. What was that?

You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing.

They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I felt too seen. Dragged. I'm NK, and this is Basket Case.

So I basically had what back in the day they would call a nervous breakdown. I was crying, and I was inconsolable. It was just very big, sudden swaps of different meds. What is wrong with me? Oh, look at you giving me therapy, girl. Finally, a show for the mentally ill girlies. On Basket Case, I talk to people about what happens when what we call mental health

is shaped by the conditions of the world we live in. Because if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of conditions that are pretty hard to live with. But if you struggle to cope, the society that created the conditions in the first place will tell you there's something wrong with you. And it will call you a basket case. Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. to the hashtag relatable content that haunts a million abandoned Instagram pages today. In the 1980s, as Reagan came into power, the vast majority of American women

saw the wins of the 1970s and those who had advocated for them treated punitively. Here's how Susan Faludi describes the concept of backlash in a 2020 forward to a new edition of her book. The backlash against women's rights works in much the same way. Its rhetoric charges feminists with all the crimes it perpetrates. The backlash line blames the women's movement for the feminization of poverty, while the backlash's own instigators in Washington pushed through the budget cuts that helped impoverish millions of women,

fought pay equity proposals, and undermined equal opportunity laws. The backlash line claims the women's movement cares nothing for children's rights, while its own representatives in the Capitol and state legislatures have blocked one bill after another to improve child care, slashed billions of dollars in federal aid for children, and relaxed state licensing standards for daycare centers. The backlash line accuses the women's movement of creating a generation of unhappy, single, and childless women, but its purveyors in the media are the ones guilty of making single and childless women

feel like circus freaks. To blame feminism for women's lesser lives is to miss entirely the point of feminism, which is to win women a wide range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple concept despite repeated and enormously effective efforts to dress it up in grease paint and turn its proponents into gargoyles. Oh! This backlash of the 1980s manifested both in large systemic and small innocuous everyday ways. For as close as the second feminist had seemed to passing the Equal Rights Amendment just years earlier, there was significant pushback from the evangelical right and from former allies of the feminist movement throughout the decade.

Kathy Strips' focus on the more innocuous but still clear backlash, partially as a privilege of her race and class, and partially because nothing too depressing was really tolerated in the funny pages at that time. One of the things she addresses is a severe uptick in sexual harassment in the 1980s workplace, as demonstrated by Kathy's boss, Mr. Pinkley, harassing and pressuring her to let him into her home in 1982. Kathy, being way cooler than anyone ever gave her credit for, punches him in the face. He is not punished for this, but Charlene and Kathy then begin a whisper network in the workplace to protect others from it happening to them. In the first episode, we touched on Andrea's reaction in trying to motivate Kathy to advocate for herself in the aftermath. Here's a slice of that strip.

All right, then what are you going to do about Mr. Pinkley? I'll show him I'll quit my job. Ah, wrong, wrong, wrong. The hopelessness of this situation is very 80s. Women who pursued justice after being harassed at work were often met with, well, no job and further harassment. To this end, Andrea takes center stage in the comic strip's commentary on the struggle of working mothers, specifically with maternity leave. Andrea began as almost a parody of 1970s women's libbers, originally vowing to focus on her career and ignore dating

and children. But she has a change of heart in the 1980s. She gets married and has her first child, Zenith, by the end of the decade. The comic makes it clear that this isn't a betrayal of her values. Andrea's personality and tireless advocacy for women continues, both in the way that she ensures her marriage to husband Luke remains an equitable one, and with her attempts to retain her power in the workplace while raising her daughter. After giving birth to Zenith, Andrea returns to work to confirm her maternity leave, only to discover there is no maternity leave.

Here's a strip from 1986 with Andrea talking to the secretary at her work. What do I fill out to begin my maternity leave? We have no maternity leave here. What? No leave, no pay, no job when you come back. I think I'm going to be sick. Better save it. You only have three days of paid sick time coming.

This episode is brought to you by Royal Caribbean, an award-winning global cruise line. A vacation is what you make it. So are you ready to make the most of it? A Royal Caribbean adventure is the perfect opportunity to not just take a vacation, but to take it for all it's worth. We know you're eager to get back out there. And with Royal Caribbean, you can make the most of the moment and rise to the vacation. This is not just a cruise. This is the biggest, boldest vacation on land or at sea. This is pushing the limits of what could be done

at sea and on land, breaking records and earning honors along the way. With over 270 plus destinations from the Caribbean, Alaska to Europe, and the biggest ships in the world to take you there, each one of our cruises is packed full of onboard features you won't find anywhere else. Like the tallest slide at sea and the tallest water slide in all North America. Plus dining that takes your taste buds on a world tour. Jaw-dropping entertainment and award-winning service delivered by a crew that comes to us from over 140 countries. So just don't take a vacation. Rise to the vacation. Come seek the Royal Caribbean. Visit royalcaribbean.com to learn more. Hey, everyone. It's Dramos from Life as a Gringo podcast. iHeartRadio's Sounds of My Culture is brought to you by State Farm.

At State Farm, we know how important it is to celebrate Hispanic heritage every day. That's why we support My Cultura and invite you to continue enjoying all its great podcasts. We also know what it takes to manage money, no matter the budget. That's why it's a good idea to consider State Farm and their surprisingly great rates. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. All right, I am here with the one and only Nadi Natasha. And I wanted to ask you, you know, how do you feel like your work has impacted your community and culture? I feel like my work has impacted my community and my culture in a very big way,

because back in the day, it was not that common to see a girl, especially from the Dominican Republic, to be having success in the music industry and in the urban industry, especially where it was not common. It was not accepted for a girl to even belong there. And for, for like me, my example to be so explicit with the things she says. So having that freedom of speech is definitely something that was not common.

Support Cotura all year long by listening to the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Imagine fighting climate change every time you buy groceries or pizza. Now you can. With the Aspiration Zero credit card, you can reduce your carbon footprint by making the same purchases you always make. Aspiration Zero plants one tree every time you make a purchase or plant two trees when you choose to round all your purchases up to the nearest dollar. Track your progress in the app and earn 1% cash back each month you reach carbon zero. For a limited time, earn a $300 bonus when

you open an account at aspiration.com and spend $3,000 in the first 90 days. Join the community that helps you fight climate change with every purchase. Aspiration Zero, one card, zero carbon footprint. The Aspiration Zero MasterCard is issued by Beneficial State Bank pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Beneficial State Bank member FDIC 2021. Terms and conditions apply. Visit Aspiration.com slash zero for more information. Andrea then goes to her boss to confirm that she was never guaranteed maternity leave, and it's true. Personnel confirms that she can either quit, be fired, go broke hiring child care, or collapse from exhaustion doing it herself. She takes some time off without pay and returns to work again,

asking to build back up to her normal workload while keeping Zenith at work to avoid expensive child care she can't afford. But this time, she's told her job has been given away altogether. In this strip, she is holding baby Zenith in her arms, and as someone trying to raise a young feminist herself, she's furious. Here she is talking to the same secretary. How could you give my job away? Companies aren't required to hold jobs for women who take time off to have babies, Andrea. Well, that's ridiculous. 44% of the whole labor force is women and 80% of us will

have children. This is 1986. Let's just say this company believes in old-fashioned values. What? They found someone who would take your job for a 1950 salary. Andrea is using real statistics from 1986 here, and she goes to the mat fighting for parental leave in her workplace, but ultimately loses, in spite of the millions of mothers in this same era that were facing the same issue. She tries to raise Zenith in a gender-neutral environment, but she fails at this too. The toys of this time are extremely

binary, and she ends up giving up due to lack of options and energy. Is that an inspiring or motivational storyline? No, it's very bleak, and Andrea goes on to work as a temp for $6.50 an hour. But the thing is, this was reflective of a very real possibility for working women of this time. Andrea comes into play again when campaigning for Michael Dukakis in his presidential bid against George Bush Sr. in 1988, enlisting Kathy in the efforts as well. As I mentioned in episode one, including an overt political endorsement, got the Kathy strip dropped from some papers and moved to the editorial pages by other papers, but Kathy Geisweit and her characters held firm. As Faludi notes in Backlash, Dukakis would later

pretty severely backpedal on his promise to working women and parents by the end of his bid in a failed attempt to gain wider support. And so a decade after Andrea was dutifully raising consciousness in her community, she was a married mother who had been all but banished from the successful career she'd spent a decade building, and she was understandably pissed off about it. Unfortunately, she starts to fade from the comics as the years go on, but the storylines involving Andrea in the 70s and 80s are truly some of my favorites. A lot of Kathy and Andrea's friendship is built around the house of cards that is the woman who has it all. Someone who is a career woman, a domestic goddess, and a doting mother, all without breaking a sweat. As the comic goes on, Guys White's commentary is clear.

Not only is this an unrealistic expectation for anyone, but the powers that be in the workplace, government, and often a woman's own home, were sometimes actively working against this being a possibility. And so in the 1980s, we see a lot of Cathy feeling bad about herself when asked by pop culture to compare herself to other women. To put that in context, a huge component of backlash against social causes is an increased focus on consumerism and self-improvement through things like observing fashion trends,

investing in self-help books, and joining health clubs and gyms versus collectively organizing. Get in shape, girl. You'll love the feeling. Get in shape, girl. It's so appealing. Pump and run lets you adjust the weight of your workout. Twist and twirl comes with four batons and sneaker pom-poms. Pump and run, twist and twirl. I'll be doing a whole episode on Kathy Geisweit's commentary on food, fashion, and beauty later in the series, but even outside of the advertising blitz that defined and distracted so many in the 1980s, it's interesting to watch the Kathy character constantly feel that she isn't living up to the standards that she's supposed to. Standards that

are basically impossible to achieve. Here's a strip from the early 80s. Kathy's sitting on her armchair at home watching a TV show that says this. Welcome to the Women's Hour, and now here's your host, Mr. Bob Black. Hello, we're talking to Margie Miller, married, mother of two, founder and president of a small manufacturing empire, and author of two best-selling novels and three plays. Margie, at age 29 and with all this going on, how in the world do you have time to be on our show today? Margie says, He replies, Well, you must have a lot of help at home.

As the show continues, Kathy begins to sink down in her chair. Margie says, The host says, Actually, I find a well-organized house runs itself. Of course, it has to be a bit cluttered because of the addition I'm building this week. The host says, My, my, you don't do anything the traditional way, do you? Kathy grabs her TV in anxiety. Margie says, No, not unless you count the 250 sweater sets I knit each year for needy causes.

The host says, Margie, thank you so much for being with us today. And the last panel, Kathy is sobbing in front of her TV as the host says, it's women like you who are helping women all over the world feel better about themselves. I love it. This came from a very personal place for Guys White, who wrote on this in 1991 saying in theory we all say we've rejected the notion of being superwoman in practice i don't know anyone who isn't still trying kathy guys white was uniquely suited to comment on this time here she is to the detroit free press in 1981 when asked about her work's views on feminism k Cathy puts feminism in a light that's more acceptable to many women

than the hardline feminism that turns some women off. It's true. Cathy's vulnerable. She doesn't win all the time. She's always trying to improve her life, and she often falls short of her goals. Some may say that's a bad way to portray the new woman. Well, I say it's realistic. I know no woman who has it totally together.

And I think that's okay. I think you can be a feminist and still balance your checkbook by changing banks every six months or so. I think you can still be a feminist and eat frozen donuts right out of the freezer and still say yes when you mean no or no when you mean yes. My goal is to keep Kathy honest and close to real life. But declaring yourself a feminist was not necessarily a very cool thing to do in the 80s. It's no secret that women are not a monolith, and many have upheld their

own oppression for power profit or just… fun? over the years. Phyllis Schlafly emerged as the big bad of the feminist movement in the 1970s and successfully campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment so hard that Cate Blanchett played her on a TV show in Women Have No Rights. Awesome. The 80s uplifted many women, mostly white, who denounced the feminist gains of the 70s while visibly benefiting from those same gains. That is to say, the reason that many of these women, including Phyllis Schlafly,

were able to become such prominent anti-feminists was because they had childcare and support to focus on their careers. You know, things feminists fought for. So while feminism wasn't trendy in the 1980s to say the least, that doesn't mean that feminists weren't doing great and important work during this time. In 1984, Bell Hooks published From Margin to Center, which included a strong critique of the feminine mystique, saying that it was solely concerned with the interests of upwardly mobile white women.

Hooks wrote this, Friedan's famous phrase, the problem that has no name, often quoted to describe the condition of women in this society, actually refers to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women, housewives, bored with leisure, with the home, with children, buying products. We wanted more out of life. Friedan concludes her first chapter by stating, We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says,

I want something more than my husband and my children and my home. That more, she defines as careers. She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not ask of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure class housewife.

The closest Kathy strips come to addressing these concerns are through Charlene. Charlene is Kathy's best friend at work and eventually her maid of honor and was a stand-in for a woman who was relegated to jobs that many feminists refer to as pink collar, secretarial jobs grossly underpaid and undervalued in spite of their importance to the workplace. Charlene has a story in the late 80s about her status as the lowest paid employee in the Product Testing Incorporated office. She advocates for herself, her lack of pay respect and career mobility every Secretary's Week, and it's a running joke in the comic that her circumstance never changes. Even Kathy dismisses her concerns in a very upper management, I pretend I do not see it kind of way. Here's a strip. When I started here at $10,000 a year,

they got me a $3,000 typewriter to type on. The year they could only give me a $200 raise, they bought a $200,000 phone system for me to operate. The year I got a $300 raise, they bought an $11,000 copier, a $4,000 fax machine, and a $1,500,000 computer system for me to use. Why do I get the feeling I'd be more valuable to this company if I came with a plug? Kathy Geisweit is, again, addressing a very real 1980s trend here. While those who wanted feminists to shut up about workplace harassment and the pay gap cited figures indicating that women's presence in the workplace had increased, they tended to not get specific about where they were in the workplace, and it's not surprising why. And areas like the secretarial pool were overwhelmed with women. And historically, gender segregation by profession means that marginalized genders are making much less money for equal work. Charlene remains a secretary throughout the comic and is extremely good at her job, but never treated fairly. And by the end of the backlash 80s, Kathy strips were often focused around existing in the wreckage of the feminist backlash

and the dissonance that it created in women's lives. Here's a strip with Kathy and Charlene from 1988 that hits on this theme exactly. I'm going to read the captions. While their friends got engaged, they got promoted. While their friends took Lamaze class and made dinner, they took meetings and did lunch. Some call them the lost generation of women. Others say their time has just now come. After years of devoting themselves to developing careers, the over-30 set emerges this March like the first flowers of spring. Brave, confident, proud, and ready for love. And then we see Charlene and Kathy.

Their outfits are a lot. They're holding diet cookies. Kathy's wearing a sweatshirt that says I heart lean cuisine. They're just decked out in 80s consumerism. The comic concludes the debutante class of 1988. By the beginning of the 90s, George Bush Sr. was president. The third wave of feminism was on the horizon, and Kathy Geisweit used Andrea's waspy helicopter parenting to poke some fun at how many upper-class white feminists had taken to raising their kids. Most feel the third wave of feminism began around 1991, when Anita Hill spoke to an all-white Supreme Court about being harassed by Judge Clarence Thomas. Geisweit was extremely

interested in commenting on how sexual harassment affected the workplace. Interestingly, not how it affected the women in the workplace, who are all well aware that this happened all the time, but she focuses instead on the men's reaction to realizing that there could be consequences for their behavior. You might remember that Kathy had been sexually assaulted by her boss, Mr. Pinkley, in her own house in 1982. When he forced a kiss on her, she punched his lights out. But the Mr. Pinkley character remained this lovable, misogynist boss in the workplace throughout the comic. And Mr. Pinkley and Kathy's other male co-workers could not handle the fallout of the Anita Hill hearing. Here's a strip

from 1991. As you know, this office has always prided itself on its progressive attitude toward women. While most companies rushed into discussions about sexual harassment right after the Thomas Hill incident, I felt we all needed a few weeks for personal reflection. By waiting until today, I believe I've once again demonstrated my profound sensitivity to the feelings of the women in our workplace. And according to my wall calendar, the majority of you are now safely past your PMS days. Jeez. Later in this storyline, Pinkley uses what I am assuming is company money to bring the men at the company on a retreat to quote unquote, reclaim their manhood. By the time it's over,

the men have learned nothing, but they have taken a free vacation with company money. And that might sound ridiculous, but it's based in the real life bizarro work of Robert Bly, a poet who became the founder of the New Age Masculinist community to turn men into men again. He would do this by having men pay him $300, the grift is strong, meet him in the middle of nowhere in Minnesota, and would then encourage them to find the deep masculine through wearing wild animal costumes and walking around on all fours. This was a real thing. After the Anita Hill hearings, most of what Kathy Geisweit discusses about women's issues are related to beauty standards, diet culture, changing fashion trends, and the commodification of radical

movements like Riot Grrls by fast fashion. But there are solid moments of workplace commentary as well. In guys' whites' view, much of the financial gain that women, mostly white women, had made in middle management was squandered trying to achieve an unrealistic beauty standard that was pretty rigidly imposed in the workplace. Here's a strip from the late 90s to that effect from a collection called I Am Woman, Hear Me Snore. In it, Kathy is attempting to write off these expenses on her taxes. Any deductions this year for the extra expenses women incur trying to dress appropriately for the 20 different images we're supposed to maintain?

No. Any write-offs for the unpaid time women suspend creating relationships without which there'd be no family values because there'd be no families? No. Any allowances whatsoever for the fact that our nation would screech to a halt if it weren't for the underpaid, overworked women cheerfully wading through the muck? No. Forget Uncle Sam. What this country needs is an Aunt Samantha. Kathy would remain in print for the remainder of the third wave of feminism, which ended around 2010 when the comic did. And she does comment on a fair amount of things going on. Third wave feminism was more inclusive while still having a strong tendency to center white women. There were many critiques from

women of color and trans women in particular as gatekeeping and the feminist movement continued. The riot girl movement took off in the 90s with bands like Bikini Kill, Free Kitten, and Bratmobile using both their music and their determination to remain DIY to release politicized material and communicate their ideas even further using zines. The Riot Grrrl zine, created in Washington, D.C. in 1991, were made and distributed by punk girls for whom Ms. Magazine had long become stale for. Kathleen Hanna, the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, had become activated as a feminist after reading, oddly enough, The Feminine Mystique, and she became a major advocate for including sex workers in the feminist movement as well, which gatekeepers of the second wave had not been enthusiastic about in the least. With this progressive surge

also came the intense commercialism of feminist ideals. In the 90s, this meant Spice Girls, Girl Power, Disney princesses of the 90s having discernible personalities, sure, but also existing in very rigid societal roles and heterosexual relationships still. You, aren't you a damsel in distress? I'm a damsel? I'm in distress. I can handle this. These moves were often viewed as cynical, with male executives still the primary people and beneficiaries of choices like these. Watered-down feminist values often became more of a marketable tagline than an actual consideration in moving things forward. This still happens now. So while an attempt, I don't think that

gal-power feminism really accomplished that much. Because as it was happening, a slew of 90s tabloid stars were dragged through the mud by the emerging 24-hour news cycle in a way that many are starting to scrutinize today. Think your Anita Hills, think your Tanya Harding's, your Monica Lewinsky's, your Amy Fisher's, your Janet Jackson's. Shout out to the You're Wrong About podcast, you probably listen already. Women of the second and third waves of feminism were also very often at odds. Many second wavers felt that third third-wave feminists, who were the first generation to grow up with the benefits that the movement had made, did not appreciate the work and sacrifice that the women of the 60s and 70s had made. And third-wave feminists wanted to move

in a new direction, rejecting the extensive gatekeeping and lack of inclusivity of liberal white feminist figureheads from the second wave. Writer Rebecca Walker explains this conflict from a unique standpoint. Her mother is author Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple, and her godmother is Gloria Steinem. Walker says this. There is a definite gap among feminists who consider themselves to be second wave and those who would label themselves as third wave. Although the age criteria for second wave feminists and third wave feminists is murky, younger feminists definitely have a hard time proving themselves worthy as feminist scholars and activists. And you know who else commented on this rift? Your girl Kathy. Kathy's interactions

with younger women is very interesting to me, in part because they're pulled from a semi-autobiographical place. Kathy Geisweit's daughter was growing up in the third wave of feminism, and the Kathy character's interaction with third wave women are very telling. Here's a strip from 1995 where the Kathy character talks with a female friend of her 10 years younger hottie boyfriend, Alex. Of course, it's women my age who really paved the way for women your age, Shauna. It must be incredible for you to face a world with so many options. No kidding.

Now we women can use our college degrees to be underpaid in 100 different professions. Now we can work and spend all the money on daycare or not work and be homeless. Now women can demand more for ourselves and go bankrupt immediately or charge it all and be slowly strangled by 18% interest. Alex says, how's it going in there, Kathy? I've just been soaked by the fountain of youth. Another issue Kathy addressed was the anxiety around fertility and age, yet another issue that was frequently misrepresented in the media in order to, viewed cynically, discourage people with uteruses from remaining in the workplace for too long or aiming their goals

too high for fear of the almighty biological clock. Even in the comics' last days, after Kathy gets married in 2005, another comment on boomer women who delayed marriage and children to help develop their careers and themselves, Kathy Geisweit explored the frustrations and pressures that came with aging. Long after Andrea and her children have disappeared from the comic, after Charlene has gotten married and had two children, Kathy continues to pursue the idea of being an optimized woman and it's just as impossible as it ever was. Third-wave feminism sought to address a lot.

Issues like rape and domestic violence, the fight to preserve reproductive rights when conservative after conservative tried to remove them, and included race, class, and trans rights in a more meaningful way in their platform, they ultimately lacked a clear goal. I would argue that one of the greatest accomplishments of third wave feminism was moving organizational efforts across mediums. In the 90s, Riot Grrrls pioneered zines, and by the 2010s, the movement had been brought online. Many say fourth wave feminism is what's happening right now. I kind of reject the whole wave thing anyhow, but it's a clean way to organize a podcast. Here's my question. Why have feminists not embraced or even engaged

with Kathy at any point? It's very possible that there's just a million bigger fish to fry, but different areas of different movements have found the time and energy to rally around other fictional women of different movements. Think your Mary Tyler Moore's, your Jo March's, your Lisa Simpson's. Come on, Stacey. I've waited my whole life to hear you speak. Don't you have anything relevant to say? Don't ask me.

I'm just a girl. Ha! Ha! In On Hating Kathy, a 2018 essay in the comics journal, writer Juliette Kahn takes a guess. But what of the feminists? Why is there no defense from them? How has Kathy managed to fail them so utterly? She is, as they state, not a role model. And though the need for female role models is real, so too is the use of this argument towards patriarchal aims. But beyond this, there is a certain reproach in the tones of Cathy's female critics. A frustration. Why couldn't you do better? How could you fail so visibly? It is an anger at her imperfection that reveals an implicit understanding that Cathy's circumstances are not fair,

that her stumbling weighs more than a man's. It is a criticism born from fear of censure. What might Kathy's weakness bring upon us? Kahn continues later in this same essay. Womanhood is mundane, is what it comes down to, and Kathy operates squarely within what we understand womanhood to be. Women's work is diapers, typing, cooking, and data entry. Kathy dwarfed by stacks of anonymous paperwork, celebrated for her diligence but never innovation. Woman's play is frivolous, superficial, distracting, and materialistic. Kathy enjoying a chick flick, a cute stiletto, an evening in with a friend and some ice cream. Women's sorrow is only poetic if it can become a symbol that means something to a man. Kathy cries most regularly over her inability to become that symbol.

Her frustrations at work, including an episode of sexual harassment from her boss, could never be considered powerful in the manner of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit or Death of a Salesman. Her play is goofy, and the strip itself is, of course, an artifact of women's play. Her sorrow is to be mocked. No one remarks, going on a decade since the strip's end, about the expressiveness of Geisweit's line. No one discusses the artfulness of the interplay between Cathy, largely ambivalent to feminism with a capital F, and her more openly political friend, Andrea. The consciousness of this choice, as Geis

White once remarked, embodying the position of women, quote, launched into adulthood with a foot in both worlds, end quote, will not be lauded. I really like watching characters fuck up and adjust and grow over time, even if they don't grow as quickly as people would like. And again, Cathy is commenting pretty much exclusively on feminism's traditional beneficiaries. That's important to note, and I think it made her work a kind of safe choice to feature in the funny pages at first. The absence of black, brown, queer, Asian, native women from the pages of the newspapers during this era is absolutely a failure, and I believe primarily an editorial and systemic one. So no, Cathy is not an ambassador of perfect feminism and certainly does not speak for all women, and she never claimed to. mission, the Cathy character was created as comfort food for those who felt slower to apply

the tenets of feminism to their daily lives, who were making an active effort to unlearn behaviors and instincts they'd grown up with, but maybe weren't quite there yet. If anything, I think the Cathy character reflects some of the gains made by American feminists between the 70s and the 2000s, as well as the frustrating stop-and-start nature of progress and the exclusionary measures taken. When ending the comic in 2010, Kathy Geisweit said this. I am not stopping the strip because I think anything has been resolved. When I see my daughter and her generation,

I see that a lot of the games between men and women, the fixation on fashion, I'll die if my hair doesn't look right. I see that a lot of the games between men and women, the fixation on fashion, I'll die if my hair doesn't look right. And I really thought we could have lost that in the last 30 years. But I guess we haven't. She continues a bit later. I feel like a lot of the time, my strip made sort of political comments about the state of women. Their expectations, the state of women in the office, being harassed, being held back,

being utterly confused by the mixed messages we get from everything, from what size to be, how to feel about ourselves, how to look. To me, that's all sort of political. A lot of what I wrote about was the woman's place in the world and the pressure we're under to be a certain way, to think certain things, to have or not have certain opportunities. And that's where Kathy and American Feminism stands. Her work does not represent the experience of all American women because American women are not a monolith. There are a lot of perspectives that we don't see in her work. What we do see is how an average woman received the gains and steps back around feminism, whether you agree with her takes or not. I'm going to close this episode with some words from Roxane Gay and her 2014 essay collection, Bad Feminist.

Gay says this, feminism's failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don't regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come. American feminism has been fractured and flawed as hell from the jump, and understanding that history feels important in order to move forward. Though a small one, I think Kathy's strips are a part of that. And as the only woman in the funny pages at the beginning of her career, those contributions are significant. And speaking of those funny pages, what was going on there?

Next week, we take a look at the women who came before Kathy in this medium, at the men she was sharing the pages of, and how newspaper comics grew and changed during her 34-year tenure. There will be boondocks, there will be Dilberts, and with deepest regrets, there might be even a family circus. Next week on ACKcast. ACKcast is an iHeartRadio production. It is written, researched, and hosted by me, Jamie Loftus. Sophie Lichterman is the world's greatest producer. Isaac Taylor is the world's greatest editor. Zoe Blade writes the world's greatest music. And Brandon Dickard wrote the world's greatest theme song for this show. the vocal talents of Jackie Michelle Johnson as Kathy, Melissa Lozada Oliva as Andrea,

Maggie Mae Fish as Charlene, Miles Gray as Mr. Pinkley, and Irving, with additional performances by the wonderful Joelle Smith, Shireen Lonnie Younis, Caitlin Durante, Julia Clare, and Isaac Taylor. Oh boy! See you next week.

Teething can be a real nightmare for your little ones. Oh boy. See you next week. plant minerals and other sources free of harsh chemicals, you can count on Highlands for serious pain relief for your teething baby. Highlands is a kinder way to care for teething. Visit highlands.com slash kind. That's H-Y-L-A-N-D-S dot com slash kind. Claims based on traditional homeopathic practice, not accepted medical evidence, not FDA evaluated. The more we learn about COVID-19, the more questions we have. The biggest question now?

What's next? What will COVID bring in six months? A year? If you're feeling anxious about the future, you're not alone. CalHOPE offers free COVID-19 emotional support. Call 833-317-4673 or live chat at calhope.org today. If you work in IT, you'll want to check out Changemakers, a podcast profiling IT industry leaders.

We dive deep into IT profiles and learn what it takes to drive large-scale IT transformations for successful businesses. Visit changemakers.freshworks.com. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist Visit changemakers.freshworks.com beloved country into a mafia state. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you.

Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister, or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm.

Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.