TOXIC

What the pop culture of the two-thousands did to millennial women.

- BY DAYNA TORTORICI

In 1969, Vivian Gornick was assigned by the Village Voice to write about the “women’s libbers” gathering in downtown Manhattan. Gornick set out never having heard of women's liberation. She returned one week later a convert. What happened in the interval was the dawning of what second-wave feminists called feminist consciousness: the growing conviction that how things were for women were not how they had to be. Often, this insight arose in conversation with other women, in consciousness-raising groups. Comparing notes on the parts of their lives once thought too personal to merit political analysis—love, sex, housework, marriage, motherhood—they found their “symptoms of private unhappiness,” in Gornick’s words, “so powerfully and so consistently duplicated among women that perhaps these symptoms could be ascribed to cultural causes as to psychological ones.” Reflecting on one’s life in a consciousness-raising session, Gornick wrote, was “rather like shaking a kaleidoscope and watching all the same pieces rearrange themselves into an altogether other picture.”

Making sense of this new picture involved a kind of reappraisal. What voices, loud or soft, had convinced women of their own inferiority for so long? What myths, scripts, and stories had predisposed them to accept the limitations placed on them from within and without? What alternate ways of living could be gleaned from the past? “Contemporary feminism is bound up with a profound rereading of the culture,” Gornick wrote years later. “We read the novels we grew up on as though for the first time, we sit up late watching the movies of our childhood, we turn again to familiar memoirs and biographies of distinguished men and women.” Adrienne Rich, in 1972, wrote that “re-vision,” the task of “entering an old text from a new critical direction,” was “an act of survival” for women: “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.”