On Taylor Swift, Mrs. Maisel and the Third Wave
Sometimes, parenting, feminism and femininity are a challenging combination
My 13-year-old daughter wanted me to watch the new Taylor Swift documentary on Netflix. I go back and forth about Swift; she rose to fame and fortune looking like a Barbie doll and singing about boys (oh, those bad boys that she just can’t help falling for!), so, you know … not exactly my jam. But pandemic lockdowns have a way of expanding one’s screen time in unexpected ways.
My daughter was right: songs like “You Need to Calm Down” and “I’d Be the Man” — attacks on homophobia and misogyny, respectively — and her court case against a sexual predator indicate that Swift has well and truly pivoted, and “Miss Americana” focuses on her growth into a woman fully aware of the politics of gender and power at play in her life and the world around her, and what’s more, of Third Wave nuance: as she paints a friend’s nails with glitter polish, she says in voice-over, “I want to wear pink and tell you how I feel about politics. And I don’t think that those things have to cancel each other out.”
Third Wave feminism has always been a tough nut for me to crack, not in terms of its insistence on greater inclusivity (a no-brainer), but because of its argument that legit feminist empowerment and loving girlie stuff aren’t mutually exclusive territories.
(First Wave feminism was suffrage for women’s right to vote; Second Wave was the women’s rights movement championed and typified by women like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem; Third Wavers talked back to the Second Wave by arguing for the inclusion of ethnic minority and poor and working class voices, but also against the idea that anything considered “feminine,” even in the pop cultural sense, is somehow disempowering or shameful to any respectable feminist.)
Some think we’re already in a Fourth Wave, but it seems to me that mainstream pop culture is very much having a Third Wave moment, and not only because of Swift and greater visibility for trans and ethnic minorities in public feminist discourse. I’m thinking, for example, of Midge in the award-winning TV show “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” delighting in her fabulous wardrobe of dresses and matching hats, tripping delightedly down the sidewalk along to the strains of 1958’s “I enjoy being a girl” by Rogers and Hammerstein: “When I have a brand new hairdo With my eyelashes all in curl,
I float as the clouds on air do,
I enjoy being a girl!”
Never at any point in her defiant rise as a single mother and female comedian in stiflingly patriarchal 1950s America, as she defies and interrogates gender ideologies, does she decide to be less invested in being pretty and having pretty clothes.
No, she insists on delighting in these things.
I really struggle with this dynamic, especially when it comes to parenting as a feminist.
My grooming at home is pretty minimal; there’s some sunscreen and some lipstick. Every few months I buy a box of hair colour to try and resuscitate my blond. I used to try and carry all these things out in secret so the kids wouldn’t know that Mummy is vain, or Mummy has bowed to patriarchal beauty ideals, or Mummy doesn’t really believe that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
But being alone in the bathroom for a few minutes (nay, seconds) is just unrealistic with five small children bombing around, so eventually I had to face questions. A lot of questions.
“Mummy, why are you shaving your legs?”
“Because of social pressures to adhere to gendered beauty norms that have associated femininity to a lack of body hair in certain places.”
“Oh.”
They sniff out these transgressions like little bloodhounds, as if they sense how each small attempt at prettification makes me feel like a fraud, because I still believe that to find pleasure in looking beautiful — to “enjoy being a girl” — is a fragile, perishable thing balanced precariously on a pile of insecurities.
As Swift herself points out in “Miss Americana,” time is unkind to women who’ve dealt in the beauty currency of the girl:
“Be young to us, but only in a new way and only the way we want …. Live out a narrative that we find to be interesting enough to entertain us but not so crazy that it makes us uncomfortable. This is probably one of my last opportunities as an artist to grasp onto that kind of success. So … as I’m reaching 30, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.”
As long as glitter nail polish and pretty outfits are linked to that kind of success, I can’t enjoy them. It seems like a better plan to figure out what it means to enjoy being a woman, and then joyfully leave girlhood behind.