In a historic election, no one’s talking about feminism
Kamala Harris’s campaign for president is in many ways among the most feminist campaigns in history. Just don’t mention the f-word.
Harris has pointedly avoided talking about her status as the potential first woman president, much less embraced a feminist label. It’s a marked departure from the suffragist-white pantsuit symbolism touted by Hillary Clinton during her own historic 2016 campaign. At this summer’s Democratic National Convention, only a single speech from Clinton focused on Harris’s trailblazing place in history, with Clinton referring to the central metaphor of her failed bid: that stubbornly unshattered glass ceiling.
At the same time, Harris has championed undeniably feminist policy goals. She’s kept reproductive freedom central to her campaign, is the first sitting vice president to ever visit an abortion provider (no sitting president ever has, either), and advocated for child care policies as a core part of her economic message.
As much as she doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s difficult to avoid the fact that Harris is the first woman of color and the second woman ever to be the nominee of a major party. Harris may not be embracing a label of feminism, but if we define feminism as seeking the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes, her candidacy by its very existence fits the bill.
Political observers have read Harris’s decision not to lean into her race and gender identity as savvy, mostly because of the trauma of what happened to Clinton after she went all-in on feminism. But it also speaks volumes about the place feminism, as a movement and an ideology, holds in popular culture in 2024 — one very different from the place it enjoyed in 2016.
Feminist policies are still popular. People like abortion rights. They like the idea of child care reform. But feminism as a label is far less galvanizing. Instead, it seems to be in the odd position of appearing too dull, compromised, and centrist to be of interest to the left and too dangerous and radical to be embraced by the right. Its repositioning might be best understood as a feminist vibe shift: It just feels different now than it did the last time around.
The girlboss has been canceled. Pantsuit Nation shut itself down last March and then resurrected itself in support of Harris in July, but it’s no longer the spiritual home of a presidential candidate’s most ardent fans. The iconic pussy hat was foresworn by 2019 as being too racist and transphobic to be truly feminist.
There’s a sense that feminism is less essential to mainstream Democrats now than it was a few election cycles ago. That may in part be a reaction to the hard-fought Democratic primaries of 2016 and 2020, when leftists argued bitterly over whether or not women voting against Bernie Sanders and for Hillary Clinton (in 2016) or Elizabeth Warren (in 2020) were “voting with their vaginas.”
In the rhetoric of some of Sanders’s most vocal and inflammatory supporters in those primaries, wanting a woman to be president became something intellectually unserious, insufficiently progressive, a little gauche, a little uncool. It meant that you were prioritizing gender solidarity over class solidarity.
It centers on how meaningless the symbolism of a woman president is and how silly it might be for women to care about it
Sanders himself occasionally appeared to echo this sentiment in a softer form. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me,’” he said in 2016. In 2020, Warren said that he had told her a woman could not win the presidency (Sanders denied it).
Sanders didn’t win either primary, but the recurring debate each election cycle helped create and standardize a set of derisive talking points that remains popular today. It centers on how meaningless the symbolism of a woman president is and how silly it might be for women to care about it. You see this strain of attack rearing its head when Harris’s detractors say that in her ambiguous stance on Gaza, she is simply gaslight gatekeep girlboss genociding, a taunt that pokes at her gender. Why worry about representation and identity politics, the thinking goes, when you should be focused on policy.
On the center-right, the issue with feminism isn’t that it’s too centrist but that it’s too extremist and alienating. It remains the subtext of one of the central differences between Republicans and Democrats this election, despite the vibe shift. Democrats overwhelmingly favor gender egalitarianism while Republicans want more traditional gender hierarchies.
That difference offers a potential explanation for the highly discussed political gender divide of Gen Z men and women. Post Me Too, young women seem to be breaking left while young men appear to be either staying constant with previous generational trends or tilting right. (The data here, it’s worth noting, is pretty inconsistent.)
The Survey Center on American Life, a nonpartisan organization run by the right-wing American Enterprise think tank, found that though young men and women had similar political views for most of the past two decades, in 2021, 44 percent of young women identified as liberal, while only 25 percent of young men did the same. Moreover, in a 2023 survey, 43 percent of Gen Z men said they generally think of themselves as feminists, compared to 52 percent of millennial men.
Not all Gen Z men are turning right. Yet for those who are, feminism offers a convenient scapegoat. Gen Z men “feel that rapidly changing gender roles have left them behind socially and economically,” reported the New York Times in August, “and see former President Donald J. Trump as a champion of traditional manhood.”
“For a growing number” of young men, writes Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, in an article for Business Insider, “feminism has less to do with promoting gender equality and more to do with simply attacking men.” Cox argues that as young men see the outcomes of their education, professional lives, and mental health go off a statistical cliff, they grow increasingly resentful of the political solidarity they see their peers find in feminism. “Out of a sense of increased insecurity, more young men are adopting a zero-sum view of gender equality,” Cox writes. “If women gain, men will inevitably lose.”
As the right positions itself as a safe haven for these men alienated by feminism, Democrats find themselves faced with the question of whether feminism is a liability if it’s losing them potential young voters. “If the Democrats are the ‘women’s party,’ as one party strategist claimed, it might not be surprising that men are looking in another direction,” says a recent article in Politico.
The rightward turn of young men and the disenchantment of leftists and liberals all play a part here. But to be honest, I think what is most at work in feminism’s disappearance is not so much politics as it is pop culture. The publicity cycle that feminism is going through right now feels eerily familiar to me as a feminist writer who covers women in pop culture. It’s the same one every female star on the rise experiences: at first she’s beloved, and then she gets overhyped and overexposed.
After the regressive misogyny of the Bush era, feminism began trending upward as the country embraced Barack Obama. In the early 2010s, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift alike declared themselves feminists, and trendy new direct-to-consumer corporations adopted feminist mission statements as swiftly as they adopted chic sans-serif millennial pink logos. After the dual traumas of the Trump election and the explosion of Me Too, feminism roared into focus as one of the central concerns of the nation. It felt vital and serious and important because it was. It was also already commodified, and about to get more so.
The pussy hat is the most illustrative feminist icon of those years. After its arrival in 2017, it appeared on runway shows, magazine covers, and the short-lived Will and Grace revival (Grace uses hers to sneak candy into movies). Every time it showed up, it seemed to lose a little more edge.
We had a decade of corporate-friendly, easy, mainstream feminism being very, very popular in ways that were of use to the salesmen of major corporations and electoral politics alike
The same thing kept happening over and over again with all the most popular feminist commodities and archetypes of those years. Hollywood released dozens of pop culture revivals and reboots and sequels that tried to justify their existence via their feminism, and then they turned out to be not very good. The famous girlbosses turned out to be scammers and bullies.
We had a decade of corporate-friendly, easy, mainstream feminism being very, very popular in ways that were of use to the salesmen of major corporations and electoral politics alike. It got defanged and then it got boring. Now it’s out of fashion.
The good news is that what’s going out of fashion is simply the decade-old signifiers of feminism, not its substance. Reproductive freedom is incredibly politically popular. The past decade of mainstream feminism has left the movement with dozens of powerful activists and networks ready to activate.
A woman is running for president and has decent odds of making it. She just seems to think her chances of being the first woman president are better as long as she never, ever talks about it.
On the other hand, if Harris loses even after being so careful about the f-word and all the baggage that comes with it; if we learn that America would rather reelect the man who overthrew Roe and was found criminally liable of sexual assault than grant the office to yet another perfectly capable woman, no matter how neatly she sidesteps identifying as a feminist — well, if that happens, we’ll have learned a lot about what this country really thinks about women and the project of their political and social equality.