Aackt 3: Cathy and American Feminist Backlash

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.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, I'm ebonymone and I'm Rick Schwartz, and we're here
from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, the global conservation
organization behind the world chame of San Diego Zoo and
Safari Park, and together we're excited to announce the podcast
Amazing Wildlife. Here incredible stories about wildlife and the global

(00:22):
efforts to save it as we explore the connection between humans, wildlife,
and the environment. Listen to Amazing Wildlife on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Advertising is online and delivered where you are. Just like
this radio ad, I want to know what else is

(00:42):
delivered where you are. We'll give you a hint. It's
shiny as a honk and comes with special features that
you get to personally pick out, like leather or cloth,
sunroof or moonroof, or four wheel driver versus all wheel drive. Yeah,
a car, a car max Car buy online, get it
delivered to you. It's car buying realm a Carmacks available
within a sixty mile radius of select doors. See carmacks

(01:04):
dot com for details. Some restrictions apply. The more we
learn about COVID nineteen, 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. Cal Hope offers free COVID nineteen emotional

(01:27):
support call eight three three four six seven three or
live chat at cal hope dot org. Today, Cathy guys
White 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

(01:52):
much of you right now. You'll be expected to be
a dynamic businessperson, financial wizard, nurturing homemaker and lightened involved parent,
environmental activist, physical fitness expert, a sexy and alluring yet
responsible partner, champion of human rights, independent thinker, community activists,
and if you're a woman, a size five, all at once. Today,

(02:20):
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 humans insecurity doesn't nail you, you'll be bombarded
by images that will try look at how women are bombarded.

(02:42):
Look at the commercials. Look at how they picture men
and women in the commercials. Men and 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.

(03:07):
The man in the commercial is grilling a steak one job.
The woman in the commercial is simultaneously cleaningly of and
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

(03:30):
doesn't translate into real life expectations, head for Detroit during
rush hours 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 Cathy Comics talking about
the unreasonable expectations often pushed on women, the sorts of
expectations that make one say acc speaking hypothetically. Of course,

(03:53):
Cathy Comics certainly changed in tone and mission as the
strip went on, but it serves as a document of
a woman's insecure rities and concerns for thirty four consecutive
years between nineteen seventy six ten, and the issues mentioned
and not mentioned aligned pretty closely with mainstream liberal views
on women of this time. There's also plenty to say

(04:13):
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 gonna
let Kathy lead us through American feminist issues according to
the funny pages, and I'll fill in some blanks of

(04:35):
what does not appear. So she passed into the world
in nineteen seventy six, she's at what, she's out on dates,
and she don't lack politics. From Mama and urban to
feminist friends. She's fighting all the stands it with chocolate
and hair. Kathy. She's fighting back to stress with success.

(04:58):
Let's snack Cathy pan She's got luck going all. So

(05:23):
not to be patronizing, but Kathy cartoons did not invent feminism,
So we do require a little bit of set up
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,

(05:45):
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 re sources in the
show notes to help bridge those gaps. So to begin,
we have to take a look at the first wave

(06:06):
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 eighteen forty eight. Okay, I can
already hear you growning. That's so long ago. Sit down
and listen. This is going somewhere, I repeat. Was popularly

(06:31):
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 when women got the vote in the US victories
along the way included increased educational opportunities, wives being granted

(06:54):
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

(07:14):
of commonly discussed women of this era and American feminism
are white. Your Susan B. Anthony's your Elizabeth, Katie Stanton's
your Lucretia Motts, You're Lucy Stones. While American feminists had
certainly existed for some time, it's in the mid eighteen
hundreds that they began to organize in large numbers. Much
of this early organization drew inspiration from prior experiences with

(07:37):
the temperance and abolition movements. Here's what historian Manisha Sinha
in The Slaves 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

(07:58):
of their gender, but 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,

(08:20):
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 book Women, Race
and Class. An ideological consequence of industrial capitalism was the

(08:42):
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 ridge became the assertation
that women's place was in the home. Have been productive
workers within the home economy, and their labor have been
no less respected than their men's. The many back tring
moved out of the home and into the factory. The

(09:02):
ideology of women who begin to raise the wife and
mother is ideal. As workers. Women had at least enjoyed
the economic quality, but as wives there were destined to
become appendagous to their men, servants to their husband's As mothers,
they would be defined as passive vehicles for the replenishment
of human life. The situation for that white housewife was

(09:23):
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 deemphasized by white feminists even today. So journal Truth
was one of the most prominent Black women in the
movement at this time, speaking about her experiences intersectionally as

(09:47):
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 Akrons Women Convention in eighteen fifty one, read
by performer st for the Sojourner True Project. In I
am a woman's right. I have as much muscle as

(10:10):
any man, and I can do as much work as
any man. I have plot and reaped and husked and
chopped and mode, and can any man do better than that?
I have heard much about the sexiest being equal. I

(10:31):
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 man seemed to be all in confusion. They don't
know what to do. Why children, If you have woman's rights,

(10:53):
give it to her and you will feel better. You
have your own rights, and they will be so much trouble.
While truth speech was a huge hit in eighteen fifty one,
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

(11:15):
by white feminists of this time is worthy of more
discussion and has been chronicled in seminal text like White Tears,
Brown Scars by Ruby hammad 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 Katie Stanton,

(11:37):
who had supported the abolition of slavery and even worked
with Frederick Douglas 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

(11:58):
by these leaders is clear. The white woman's vote took
precedence over all women's votes for Anthony and Stanton. Following
the dissolution of their alliance with Douglas, who had previously
stood up for the woman's vote at the Seneca Falls
Convention in eighteen forty eight, Stanton and Anthony created the
National American Woman's Suffrage Association in eighteen sixty nine, specifically

(12:21):
to oppose the fifteenth 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 mind, one
of the strengths of the first wave of feminism was
its clear goal and focus, which was suffrage, and after

(12:41):
seventy years, that was achieved in nineteen twenty. In these years,
even the most liberal wings of the movement were met
with vitriol from American patriarchy. A best selling book in
eighteen seventy three 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

(13:01):
white woman who postponed childbirth to do literally anything else
was a race trader. 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 Suffrage movement in securing the vote, the

(13:22):
nearly seventy five 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

(13:42):
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, were all told time in
the following quote, the nineteenth Amendment did not eliminate the

(14:06):
state laws that operated to keep Black Americans from the
polls via poll taxes and literacy tests, nor did the
nineteenth Amendment address violence or lynching. Some African American women
will vote with the Nineteenth Amendment unquote. This backlash is
carefully documented by writer Susan Kaluti in her book Backlash,

(14:26):
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.
Valuti describes the first twentieth century backlash as happening in

(14:47):
the nineteen twenties, 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 agent that started in
the same year that women got the vote. And the
thing about backlashes is they tend to erase a lot

(15:08):
of progress. According to Fluti, by nine there were fewer
women doctors than there had been in nineteen. Fast forward
a bit to the late thirties early forties, women surged
back into the workplace in America. During World War Two,
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

(15:30):
provide wild stuff like daycare assistants, 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 guiss Wide'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

(15:51):
messaging of women's roles in war efforts led some to
believe that their place in the workplace was here to stay.
In came the nineteen fifties, those a million women in
heavy industry laid off and forced out of their job
to make room for veterans returning for war. As ever,
working class and women of color often remained in the workplace,

(16:11):
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 nineteen fifties 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 and athema. Anathema,

(16:35):
and calling yourself a feminist was once again an athema.
Never said that word out loud before, Good job, Jamie, Okay.
Integral to this and all periods of backlash is an
emphasis on consumerism and on improving the individual. The economy
is flourishing in the nineties and fifties in the US
made women a larger consumer block than ever, and defining

(16:57):
oneself through consumption was a great way to distract from,
you know, being mad about not having rights. Kathy Guys White,
born in nineteen fifty 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 nineteen
sixty eight, when a New York Times magazine article by

(17:18):
Martha Lear coining the term was released. So where were
women's rights by the sixties? Hey everyone, it's dramas from
Life as a Gringo podcast. I Heart Radio. Sounds of
My Culture is brought to you by Stay Farm. As

(17:39):
Stay Farm, we know how important it is to celebrate
Hispanic heritage every day. That's why we support Michael 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 the surprisingly great rates. Like a good neighbor,
Stay Farm is all right, Prince Royce, my guy, thank

(18:04):
you for hanging out, and I gotta say listen. I'm
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 medding,

(18:25):
get to rock, go to and I think that that's
what I loved about New York. There was such a
big present community of of everything. Support TUA all year
long by listening to the MICA podcast network available on
the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to podcasts. Do you own or rent your home?

(18:48):
Sure you do, And I bet it can be hard work.
You know, it's easy bundling policies with ga Geico makes
it easy to bundle your homeowners or renters insurance along
with your auto policy. It's a good thing too, because
we already have so much to do around your home.
Go to Geico dot com, get a quote and see
how much you could save. It's Geico Easy. Visit Geico

(19:09):
dot com today. That's Geico dot com. This clip is
brought to you by State Farm. At State Farm, they
know it's important to ensure the things you love. They
also get that everyone has a budget. That's why they
have options like ensuring your car and your home, getting
you great rates on both. It's a good idea to
consider State Farm for surprisingly great rates. Like a good neighbor.

(19:33):
State Farm is there, call or go to state Farm
dot 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 kind of hear what it takes. Like I
don't know. I always look at like this, like what
do I want? I wanted to be at w w

(19:54):
WE Superstar all right, what does it take to be
a WW 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 w W. The people of the everyone on
that Real World Show would wear my T shirts, would
always ask me like they were so supportive, like you

(20:17):
don't give it that very often? Really don't listen to
the Michael Doua podcast network available on the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
The nineteen President's Commission on the Status of Women Report,

(20:41):
which was initially commissioned by a preassassinated 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

(21:04):
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,

(21:25):
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 Non Violent 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

(21:46):
Act of nineteen sixty four and the Voting Rights Act
of nineteen sixty five, and by the late nineteen sixties,
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

(22:11):
me to Betty for Dan. Oh, you thought we weren't
going to get to Betty for Dan while buckling. She
is best known as the author of nineteen sixty three,
is 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

(22:33):
shortcomings in a bit, but this mystique was, as free
Dan put it, quote the problem that has no name, unquote,
and this clearly spoke to a young Kathy Guy's wife.
She references the feminine mystique in her work constantly, both
through her character and through herself. Here she is describing
her teen in college years in a PBS News Hour
clip promoting her essay collection Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault.

(23:00):
Generation was right in between the two Betties, Betty Crocker
and Betty for Dan, and I wanted to be both
of them, and a lot of women did at that time.
It was and I literally gained forty pounds on one
Betty's chocolate funge layer cake mix while rating the other
Betty's feminine mistake. And a lot of women I think

(23:21):
found themselves like the place I was him. But she's
not wrong. Betty for Dan is a Betty of note,
for better and for worse for Dan was one of
the figureheads of the liberal wing of the second Wave,
going on to found the NW the National Organization for
Women in n with forty eight others. Like Anthony and

(23:43):
Stanton before them, the organization was extremely polarizing throughout the
second Wave due to it say it with me over
emphasis 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 e R,

(24:03):
a equal Rights Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that had
been unsuccessful in making progress since ninety three. 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

(24:27):
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 Kathy 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

(24:49):
note membership in the Black Panther Party was over sixty women.
Kathleen Cleaver, who was a communication secretary with the Panthers,
was once asked what a woman's role in the revolution was,
and he replied, quote no one ever asks what a
man's place in the revolution is unquote. The National Black
Feminist Organization, founded in nineteen seventy three, was one of
the first to include a lesbian agenda as a part

(25:11):
of their mission statement. Asian feminists were extremely active organizers
as well, with projects like Asian Sisters in l A
drug Abuse Center founded in nineteen seventy one, and the
l A Asian Women's Center was an organizing hub until
it closed in seventy six. In nineteen seventy four, Indigenous
American women formed the Women of All Read Nations or WARREN,

(25:33):
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 main stream, the label of
feminists sometimes be resisted. Here's Angela Davis speaking on this
ATEN talk at the Center of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona.

(25:57):
Everybody started referring to me as a feminists 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

(26:19):
bourgeois feminism, a feminism that is still white, white bourgeois feminism,
which is unfortunately the 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

(26:42):
who are women of color have transform the very nature
of feminism. And the hallmark of feminism today is what
we call intersectionality, a recognition of the and not only
not only the inter relating um uh character of identities,

(27:09):
but as I frequently say, I think intersectionality is 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 Mercia Johnson and Sylvia Rivera organized
for trans rights with Star after Johnson had been a

(27:30):
key figure at the Stonewall Riots, and both worked with
the Gay Liberation Front during these years. Betty free Dan
was actively homophobic, referring to lesbians as the quote unquote
lavender menace in nineteen sixty nine and did not welcome
queer women into the n o W, and of course
people were pissed. Rita May Brown, who was a lesbian activist,

(27:53):
broke off from the New York branch of the n
OW and began radical lesbians who wore t shirts that
said lavender men us and staged an action at the
Second Congress to Unite Women in nineteen seventy, an action
that forced a discussion about homophobia and the exclusion that
lesbians experienced in society as well as within the feminist movement.

(28:14):
While some straight feminists with the liberal mainstream movement, including
Gloria Steinham, wanted to be more inclusive, Betty for Dan
purged lesbians and lesbian sympathizers, as she put it, from
the n OW before in nineteen seventy one, change was
made to once again allow queer people into the organization.
So again with the second wave of feminism, there were

(28:36):
radical and liberal wings with very different interests, which created
significant interior conflict. The Kathy comics are really only engaging
with this mainstream liberal movement, in no small part because
the strips author was a liberal white woman in a
majority middle class white area, writing to some extent about

(28:56):
her own experiences and opinions. Cathy's ups do not feature
people of color or queer people, and it's 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 nineteen seventies, which Kathy originally finds to
be kind of naval gazey and bizarre, although she does

(29:19):
give it a fair shake. Here's Andrea. Little boys are
always encouraged to boast about their achievement. Well, little girls
are scolded for boasting because it's unfeminine. But with assertiveness
training exercise number two, women can rediscover the prod we
have every right to express. Each one of you will
stand up and say out loud the one thing you're

(29:40):
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 seventies, where she gets a job as a
mall Santa to challenge the patriarchal construct of Santa. Actual

(30:00):
radicalism at this time took a very different form and
often rejected consciousness raising groups on the same grounds that
Kathy did, and he thought they were two centered on
the self above the collective. Here's a quote I love
from the nineteen seventy anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful, from radical
feminist Robin Morgan. This is not a movement one joined.

(30:22):
There are no rigid structures or membership card. 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 and the welfare lines, in the supermarket, the factory,
the convent, the farm, the maternity ward, the street corner,

(30:43):
the old Ladies home, the kitchen, the steno pool, the bet.
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 construc was not shared by all feminists,
but the emphasis that everyday lives of women should be

(31:04):
up for discussion, definitely was. New York Radical Women member
Carol Hannish popularized the phrase the personal is political in
a nineteen sixty nine essay, That is to say that
women speaking about their problems in marriage and access to healthcare,
in labor issues in appearance was important and emphasizing in
these groups that it was counterproductive to say that not

(31:27):
living up to this expected image was a personal instead
of a systemic failure. Sidebar. Hannish 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 ninety eight. Good stuff. So, the
Cathy character is at first resistant towards consciousness raising because

(31:49):
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 is an 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 at a

(32:12):
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 guys White 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 Cathy dates and rejects throughout the

(32:33):
nineteen seventies. Also referenced in these strips is the then
new term MSS, brought into the mainstream by feminist Sheila
Michaels and popularized further by Glorious Dynham'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 Cathy is

(32:55):
on board with this. When the Kathy character asks to
be called MS in the late seventies, a male employee
comments this Mrs MSS 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 woman I see you

(33:15):
actually use MSS 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's 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

(33:39):
a way that makes our heroine feel less than This
is also reflected in Kathy'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 rateful issue with the Kathy character herself

(34:00):
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 nineteen seventies 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

(34:20):
you get disillusioned by your career and you search for
some big romance to give meaning to your life. You
do yo yo's 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

(34:40):
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 two thousand five. Here's a
seventies era interaction with the two of them, with Cathy
sitting silently beside Irving. Throughout history, women have been suppressed, repressed,

(35:01):
and oppressed serving. We've had miserable jobs, hideous pay, humiliating benefits,
and not one shred of respect as close to equal
human beings. What possible injustice is? 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

(35:22):
Rights Amendment ultimately failed, the nineteen seventies proved to be
a very productive time for American feminists. According to Fluty,
millions more women entered the workplace, the wage gap closed
to about seventy for upwardly mobile white women. Let's be clear,
access to birth control increased. Title nine pass which welcomed
women into high school and collegiate sports. The Equal Credit

(35:44):
Opportunity Act of nineteen seventy four 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, Row View eight, the nineteen seventy three Supreme
Court decision and that finally, for now gave people with
uterus as the right to get an abortion for up

(36:06):
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 by her own home as a single woman,
she ascends in the workplace. She struggles and fails to

(36:28):
get equal pay, but at least isn't legally barred from
pursuing it technically, and that is how the comic plays
out in the seventies. But by the end of the
nineteen seventies, the second wave feminist movement was considered to
have ended. And it's when we get into Kathy's strips
from the nineteen eighties that I think the strip really
hits its stride. While Kathy comics were never designed to

(36:50):
communicate or promote radical feminism, the semi autobiographical format was
well equipped to comment on the backlash to second wave
feminism that took place through the nineteen eighties. As a
general rule, Kathy was a reactor to trends, not a
creator of trends, sort of an ancestor to the hashtag
relatable content that haunts a million abandoned Instagram pages today.

(37:13):
In the nineteen eighties, as Reagan came into power, the
vast majority of American women saw the winds of the
nineteen seventies, and those who had advocated for them treated punitively.
Here's how Susan Faludi describes the concept of backlash in
a forward to a new edition of her book. The
backlash against women's rights works in much the same way.

(37:36):
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 is own. Instigators in Washington
pushed through the budget cutch 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

(37:59):
right while its own representatives in the capital and state
legislatures have blocked one bill after another to improve childcare,
slashed billions of dollars in federal aid for children, and
relaxed state licensing standards for daycare centers. The backlash line
accuses of the women's movement of creating a generation of unhappy,
single and childless women, but it's purveyors in the media

(38:21):
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 Greece paint and turn

(38:43):
its proponents into gargoyles. Oh this backlash of the nineteen
eighties 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 or leader,
there was significant pushback from the evangelical right and from

(39:04):
former allies of the feminist movement. Throughout the decade. Cathy's
strips focus on the more innocuous but still clear backlash,
partially as a privilege of her race and class, and
personally because nothing too depressing was really tolerated in the
funny Pages at that time. One of the things she
addresses is a severe uptick and sexual harassment in the

(39:24):
nineteen eighties workplace, as demonstrated by Cathy's boss, Mr Pinkley,
harassing and pressuring her to let him into her home.
In two, Cathy, being way cooler than anyone ever gave
her credit for, punches him in the face. He is
not punished for this, but Charlene and Cathy then begin
a whisper network in the workplace to protect others from
it happening to them. In the first episode, we touched

(39:46):
on Andrea's reaction in trying to motivate Cathy 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 Joba. Wrong. Wrong, wrong.
The hopelessness of this situation is very Eighties Women who

(40:09):
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 strips commentary on
the struggle of working mothers, specifically with maternity leave. Andrea
began as almost a parody of nineteen seventies women's Livers,
originally vowing to focus on her career and ignore dating

(40:32):
in children, but she has a change of heart in
the nineteen eighties, she gets married and has her first child, Zenith.
By the end of the decade, the comic basic 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

(40:54):
in the workplace while raising her daughter. After giving birth
to Zenith, Andrea returns to work to con her maternity leave,
only to discover there is no maternity leave. Here's a
strip from 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,

(41:19):
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

(41:40):
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 in on land or

(42:00):
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 two hundred and
seventy 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

(42:22):
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 one hundred and
forty countries. So just don't take a vacation. Rise to
the vacation. Come seek the Royal Caribbean. Visit Royal Caribbean

(42:44):
dot com to learn more. Hey everyone, it's dramas from
Life as a Gringo podcast. I Heart Radio. 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 to why we support Michael
Ta and invite you to continue enjoying all its great podcast.

(43:05):
We also know what it takes to manage money, no
matter the budget. That's why it's a good idea to
consider Stay Farm, and they're surprisingly great rates like a
good neighbor. State Farm is there all right? I am
here with the one and only not in Natasha, and
I wanted to ask you, you know, how do you
feel like your your work has impacted your community and culture.

(43:29):
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, in in the urban industry, especially where

(43:50):
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 it's blissit with the things
she says. So having that freedom of speech is definitely
something that was not common. Support all year long by

(44:10):
listening to the mic podcast network, available on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, 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

(44:32):
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 one percent
cash back each month you reach carbon zero for a
limited time, earn a three bonus when you open an
account at Aspiration dot com and spend three thou dollars

(44:54):
in the first ninety days, join the community that helps
you fight climate change with every purchase Aspiration zero errow
one card, zero carbon footprint. The Aspiration zero MasterCard is
issued by Beneficial State Bank, pursu into license by MasterCard
International Incorporated, Beneficial State Bank Member f d i C.
Terms and conditions apply. Visit Aspiration dot com slash zero

(45:15):
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,

(45:37):
hiring childcare, 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 childcare she can't afford.
But this time she's told her job has been given
away altogether. In this trip, she's holding baby Zenith in

(45:58):
her arms. 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 of the whole labor
forces woman and of us will have children. This is

(46:22):
let's just say this company believes in old fashioned values.
What they found someone who would take your job for
a nineteen fifty salary. Andrea is using real statistics from
six here. And she goes to the matt fighting for
parental leave in her workplace, but ultimately loses in spite
of the millions of mothers in this same era that

(46:44):
we're 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 tempt for

(47:06):
six fifty 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 from
Michael Ducaccus in his presidential bid against George Bush Sr.
Enlisting Cathy in the efforts as well, as I mentioned
in episode one, including an overt political endorsement, got the

(47:27):
Kathy strip dropped from some papers and moved to the
editorial pages by other papers. But Kathy, Guys White and
her characters held firm. As Faludi notes in Backlash, Ducaccus
would later pretty severely back pedal on his promise to
working women in pearance by the end of his bid
and a failed attempt to gain wider support, and so
a decade after Andrea was dutifully raising consciousness in her community,

(47:50):
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 piste off about it. Unfortunately, she
starts to fade from the Mikes as the years go on,
but the storylines involving Andrea in the seventies and eighties
are truly some of my favorites. A lot of Cathy
and Andrea's friendship is built around the cost of cards.

(48:11):
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,
Guy's wides 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

(48:31):
sometimes actively working against this being a possibility, and so
in the nineteen eighties 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

(48:55):
health clubs and gyms versus collectively organizing help. They really
star listen to earls we get you, show in the
world what you can do. Get it in shape, her feeling,
get it in shape, it's so feeling. And run let's

(49:18):
see what just the wait if you work out? Twist
and Twirl comes in formatons and singer Pom Poms and
run Twist. I'll be doing a whole episode on Kathy
Guys Whites 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 nineteen eighties. It's
interesting to watch the Kathy character constantly feel that she

(49:39):
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 eighties, Kathy 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 to founder

(50:00):
and president of a small manufacturing empire, and author of
two best selling novels and three plays. Margie at and
with all this going on, how in the world do
you have time to be on our show today? Margie says, Oh,
it's nothing, Bob. The little ones are at their Greek
literature workshop and the opera I have a small pardon
doesn't begin until seven o'clock. He replies, well, you must

(50:22):
have a lot of help at home. As the show continues,
Kathy begins to sink down in her chair. Margie says, actually,
I find a well organized house rends 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. Cathy
grabs her TV in anxiety. Margie says no, not unless

(50:45):
you count the two D fifty sweater sets on it
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

(51:08):
for guys White, who wrote on this in 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 when asked
about her works views on feminism, Kathy puts feminism in

(51:32):
a light that's more acceptable to many women than the
hardline feminism that turns some women off. It's true Kathy
is 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.

(51:56):
I know no woman who has it totally together, and
I think that 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

(52:18):
Kathy honest and close to real life. But declaring yourself
a feminist was not necessarily a very cool thing to
do in the eighties. 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. Philish
Laughlely emerged as the big bat of the feminist movement

(52:41):
in the nineties seventies and successfully campaigned against the Equal
Rights Amendment so hard that Kate Blanchett played her on
a TV show and women Have No Rights Awesome. The
eighties uplifted many women, mostly white, who denounced the feminist
gains of the seventies, while visibly benefiting from those same gains.
That is to say, the reason that many of these women,

(53:02):
including Phyllis Lafley were able to become such prominent anti
feminists was because they had child care and support to
focus on their careers, you know, things feminists fought for.
So while feminism wasn't trendy in the nineteen eighties, to
say the least, that doesn't mean that feminists weren't doing
great and important work during this time. In Bell Hooks

(53:26):
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 Free Dan'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

(53:46):
college educated, middle and upper class married white women. Housewives
would with leisure, with the home, the children, buying products, wood,
and more out of life. Free Dance includes her first
chapter by stating, we can no longer ignore that voice
within women that says I want something more than my

(54:06):
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 her self were freed
from their house labor and give an equal access with
white men to the professions. She did not ask of
the needs of women without men, without children, without holbmes.

(54:30):
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 prostitute than to be a
leisure class housewife. The closest Kathy's trips come to addressing
these concerns are through Charlene. Charlene is Cathy's best friend

(54:52):
at work and eventually her maid of honor, and was
a stand in for a woman who was relegated to
jobs that many feminists referred to as pink caller secretarial jobs,
grossly underpaid and undervalued in spite of their importance to
the workplace. Charlene has a story in the late eighties
about her status as the lowest paid employee in the
Product Testing Incorporated Office. She advocates for herself her lack

(55:15):
of pay, respect, and career mobility every Secretaries Week, and
it's a running joke in the comic that her circumstance
never changes. Even Cathy 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
ten thousand dollars a year, they got me a three

(55:35):
thousand dollar typewriter to type. On the year they could
only give me a two hundred dollar raise, they bought
a two hundred thousand dollar phone system for me to operate.
The year I got e three hundred dollar raise, they
bought an eleven thousand dollar copy or a four thousand
dollar facts machine and a one million, five hundred thousand

(55:55):
dollar computer system for me to use. Why do I
get the feeling I'd be more bad reuble to this
company by game with a plug. Kathy guys White is
again addressing a very real nineteen eighties 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

(56:17):
specific about where they were in the workplace, and it's
not surprising why by nine six a higher rate of
working women were receiving poverty wages than in nineteen seventy
three in 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 remained

(56:40):
the secretary throughout the comic and is extremely good at
her job but never treated fairly, and by the end
of the Backlash eighties, Kathy's 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 that hits on this theme exactly.

(57:01):
I'm going to read the captions. While their friends got engaged,
they got promoted. While their friends took Lama's 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 thirty set emerges this march like

(57:23):
the first flowers of spring. Brave, confident, proud, and ready
for love. And then we see Charlene and Kathy. Their
outfits are a lot of they're holding diet cookies. Cathy's
wearing a Swhite shirt that says I heart Lean cuisine.
They're just decked out in eighties consumerism. The comic concludes
the debutante class of By the beginning of the nineties,

(57:47):
George Bush Sr. Was President, the third wave of feminism
was on the horizon, and Kathy guys White 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 when
Anita Hill spoke to an all white Supreme Court about

(58:08):
being harassed by Judge Clarence Thomas. Guy Swhite 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

(58:29):
remember that Cathy had been sexually assaulted by her boss,
Mr Pinkley in her own house in two when he
forced a kiss on her, she punched his lights out,
But the Mr. Pinkley character remained this lovable, misogynous boss
in the workplace throughout the comic, and Mr Pinkley and
Cathy's other male co workers could not handle the fall

(58:51):
out of the Anita Hill hearing. Here's a strip from
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.

(59:12):
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 p MS days. Jeez.
Later in this storyline, Pinkley uses what I am assuming

(59:33):
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 want to

(59:59):
turn in into men again. He would do this by
having men pay him three hundred dollars 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.

(01:00:19):
Most of what Kathy Guy's White discusses about women's issues
are related to beauty standards, diet culture, changing fashion trends,
and the commodification of radical movements like Riot Girls by
fast fashion, but there are solid moments of workplace commentary
as well. In Guy's White's view, much of the financial
gain that women, mostly white women, had made in middle

(01:00:39):
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 nineties 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 deduction is this year for the extra expenses women

(01:01:00):
and her trying to dress appropriately for the twenty different
images were supposed to maintain any right offs for the
unpaid time women to spend creating relationships, without which there
would be no family values because there'd be no families,
any allowances whatsoever. For the fact that our nation would
screech to a halt of it weren't for the underpaid,
overworked women cheerfully waiting through the mark. No, forget Uncle sam,

(01:01:23):
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 two thousand ten, 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

(01:01:44):
women in particular. As gate keeping and the feminist movement continued,
the riot girl movement took off in the nineties, with
bands like Bikini Kill, Free Kitten, and Bratt Mobile using
both their music and their determination to remain d i
y to release politicized material and communicate their ideas even
further using zines. The Riot Girls zine created in Washington,

(01:02:06):
d C. Were made and distributed by punk girls, for
whom Miss Magazine had long become stale. For Kathleen Hannah,
the front woman 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

(01:02:28):
Wave had not been enthusiastic about in the least. With
this progressive surge also came the intense commercialism of feminist
ideals in the nineties. This meant Spice Girls, girl Power,
Disney princesses of the nineties having discernible personality is sure,
but also existing in very rigid societal roles in heterosexual

(01:02:50):
relationships still you aren't you dam distress and damsel and
in distress, I can handle this. These moves were are
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

(01:03:12):
actual consideration in moving things forward. This still happens now
so well an attempt. I don't think that gal Powa
feminism really accomplished that much because as it was happening.
A slew of nineties tabloid stars were dragged through the
mud by the emerging twenty four hour news cycle in
a way that many are starting to scrutinize today. I

(01:03:34):
think you're Anita Hills, think you're Tanya Harding's your Monica
Lewinsky's your Amy Fisher's your Janet Jackson's shout out to
the year wrong about podcast you probably listen already. Women
of the second and third waves of feminism were also
very often at odds. Many Second waivers felt that third
wave feminists, who were the first generation to grow up

(01:03:55):
with the benefits that the movement had made, did not
appreciate the work and sacrifice that the women of the
sixties and seventies had made, and third wave feminists wanted
to move in a new direction, rejecting the extent of
gate keeping and lack of inclusivity of liberal white feminist
figureheads from the second wave. Writer Rebecca Walker explains this

(01:04:16):
conflict from a unique standpoint. Her mother is author Alice Walker,
who wrote The Color Purple, and her godmother is Gloria Steinham.
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 as murky,

(01:04:38):
younger feminists definitely have a hard time proving themselves worthy
as feminists, scholars, and activists. And you know who else
commented on this rift year girl Kathy. Cathy's interactions with
younger women is very interesting to me, in part because
they're pulled from a semi autobiographical place. Kathy guys by
It's daughter was growing up in the third wave of

(01:05:00):
a minism, and the Kathy character's interaction with third wave
women are very telling. Here's a strip from where the
Kathy character talks with a female friend of her ten
years younger hottie boyfriend Alex. Of course, it's women my
age who really paved the way for women your age, Shaannah,
it must be incredible for you to face a world

(01:05:20):
with so many options, no kidding. Now we women can
use our college degrees to be underpaid in one hundred
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 at all and be slowly strangled by eighteen
percent interest. Alex says, how's it going in there, Kathy,

(01:05:43):
I've just been soaked by the fountain of youth. Another
issue Cathy 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 work place for too long or aiming
their goals too high for fear of the almighty biological clock.

(01:06:06):
Even in the comics Last Days After Kathy gets married
in two thousand five, another comment on boomer women who
delayed marriage and children to help develop their careers and themselves,
Kathy guys White 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

(01:06:29):
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.

(01:06:52):
I would argue that one of the greatest accomplishments of
third wave feminism was moving organizational efforts across mediums. In
the nineties, Riot Girls pioneered zines, and by the two
dozen tens 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

(01:07:17):
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 you're Mary Tyler, Moore's
your Joe March is your Lisa Simpsons. Come on, Stacy,

(01:07:39):
have 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 in on hating Kathy essay in the
comics journal writer Juliette Cohn 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,

(01:08:03):
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 of frustration. Why couldn't you do better? How
could you fail so visibly? It is an anger at

(01:08:25):
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 Cathy's weakness bring upon us? Con continues later in
the same essay. Womanhood is mundane, is what it comes
down to, and Kathy operates squarely within what we understand

(01:08:48):
womanhood to be. Women's work is diapers, typing, cooking, and
data entry. Cathy dwarfed by stacks of anonymous paperwork, celebrated
for her diligence but never in ovation. Woman's play is frivolous, superficial,
distracting and materialistic Kathy enjoying a chick flick, acute stiletto,
and evening in with a friend and some ice cream.

(01:09:11):
Women's sorrow is only poetic if it can become a
symbol that means something to a man. Cathy 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.

(01:09:32):
Her play is goofy, and the strip itself is, of
course an artifact of woman's play. Her sorrow is to
be mocked. No one remarks, going on a decade since
the strip's end, about the expressiveness of Guys White's line.
No one discusses the artfulness of the interplay between Kathy,
largely ambivalent to feminism with a capital F, and her

(01:09:54):
more openly political friend Andrea, the consciousness of this choice,
as Guys White once remarked, embodying the position of women.
Quote launched into adulthood with a foot in both worlds,
and quote will not be lauded. I really like watching
characters funk up and adjust and grow over time, even
if they don't grow as quickly as people would like.

(01:10:14):
And again, Kathy is commenting pretty much exclusively on feminisms
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

(01:10:36):
primarily an editorial and systemic one. So no, Kathy is
not an ambassador of perfect feminism and certainly does not
speak for all women, and she never claimed to by guys.
By its own admission, the Kathy character was created as
comfort food for those who felt slower to apply the
tenets of feminism to their daily lives, who were making

(01:10:56):
an active effort to unlearned behaviors and instincts they've grown
up with but maybe weren't quite there yet. If anything,
I think the Kathy character reflects some of the games
made by American feminists between the seventies and the two thousand's,
as well as the frustrating, stopped and start nature of
progress and the exclusionary measures taken when ending the comic

(01:11:17):
in two thousand ten, Kathy guys White 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 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 thirty years, but I guess

(01:11:39):
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, 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 had, a few about ourselves,

(01:12:00):
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

(01:12:23):
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 stepped back around feminism.
Whether you agree with her takes or not, I'm going
to close this episode with some words from Roxanne Gay
and her essay collection Bad Feminist. Gay says this, feminisms

(01:12:46):
failings do not mean we should hue 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 laud as hell from the jump, and understanding

(01:13:07):
that history feels important in order to move forward, though
a small one, I think Cathy 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

(01:13:28):
came before Kathy in this media, at the men she
was sharing the pages of, and how newspaper comics grew
and changed during her thirty four year tenure. There will
be boondocks, there will be Dilbert's, and with deepest regrets,
there might be even a family circus next week on
ac Cast. Act Cast is an I Heart radio production.

(01:13:50):
It is written, researched, and hosted by me Jamie Loftus,
Sophie Lichtaman is the World's Greatest producer, Isaac Taylor is
the world's greatest editor. Zoe played It's the World's Greatest music,
and Brandon Dickard wrote the world greatest theme song for
this show. In today's episode, you heard the vocal talent
of Jackie Michelle Johnson as Cathy, Melissa Lozada Oliva as Andrea,

(01:14:13):
Maggie Mayfish as Charlene, Miles Gray as Mr. Pinkley, and
Irving with additional performances might be wonderful Joel Smith, Sharene
Lanny Unist, Caitlin Derante, Julia Claire, and Isaac Taylor. Oh Boy,
see you next week. Teething can be a real nightmare

(01:14:36):
for your little ones. Highlands Naturals baby oral pain relief
tablets can help ease the pain. It's gentle natural active
ingredients like camemeo and arnica southe your baby's mouth and
gums made with ingredients derived from 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 dot com.

(01:14:57):
Slash kind that's h y l A n d A
dot com. Slash kind claims based on traditional homeopath a
practice not accept the medical evidence not ft evaluated. The
more we learn about COVID nineteen, 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

(01:15:20):
the future, you're not alone. Cal Hope offers free COVID
nineteen emotional support. Call eight three three four six seven
three or live chat at cal Hope dot org today.
If you work in I T, you'll want to check
out change Makers, a podcast profiling I T industry leaders.

(01:15:41):
We dive deep into I T profiles and learn what
it takes to drive large scale I T transformations for
successful businesses. Visit change Makers dot fresh works dot com