We shouldn't wait for the bros
For much of feminist history, young men were not on board (part 1 of 2)
Progressives are desperately fighting for the hearts and minds of young men who, in the last election, flocked to Trump. The New Yorker aptly called it “The Battle for the Bros,” reporting on the race to find progressive media voices that speak the language of Gen Z men. An article in Vox warned, “If Democrats are to make any progress, their first step must be rooting out denial: When it comes to young men, the party has a real problem.” From the alarmist tone, it seems like without the bros, there is no hope for left-leaning politics in the US.
Some young men told journalists that they support reproductive rights but feel abandoned by Democrats. I wrote here recently about my concern for the men subscribing to Trump and Musk’s toxic masculinity. Young men’s sense of being left behind is alarming; the crisis of masculinity is real and must be taken seriously. But while the left is trying to get them back, women are getting arrested for having miscarriages, women, trans people, and people of color disappear from government websites and funding by the office on violence against women is suddenly gone. We can’t sit on our hands and wait until the bros listen to just the right progressive podcast.
And history tells us we shouldn’t. This is not the first time young men and women have diverged on gender equality; feminist organizing has often happened despite young men's objections. Many young men eventually came on board. Progressive should seek new ways to engage young men but until they succeed, let’s follow the example of our feminist forebears: center women and trans people and fight to get our rights back.
To that end, I bring you inspiration: two stories about feminists fighting for their rights without waiting for the bros to join in. Here’s the first story—part two coming soon.
Coffee for bros
In the mid-60s, The New Left - a loose coalition of civil rights, socialist, and anti-war organizations, many born out of student organizing - hummed with the energies of young people fighting for civil rights and class equality. But women activists were soon disillusioned. “It was a slowly dawning and depressing realization that we were doing the same work in the Movement as out of it: typing the speeches men delivered, making coffee but not policy, being accessories to the men whose politics would supposedly replace the Old Order,” recalled feminist writer Robin Morgan1. As Alice Echols details in her book “Daring to be Bad,” anti-war protests featured young men bravely tearing up draft notices while women’s role was neatly captured by the slogan, “Girls say yes to guys who say no.” One activist told Echols that, despite endless discussions about all manners of oppression, “male chauvinism was a phrase one did not utter unless one was ready to be laughed at.”
Did the women try to awaken their peers to their plight? Of course they did! In 1964, women activists drafted a position paper decrying sexual discrimination in the movement and demanding equal roles in decision-making; they were ridiculed, their concerns dismissed as “personal” and “apolitical” (grave insults for aspiring revolutionaries). When a women’s workshop presented demands for gender equality at a 1967 New Left convention, the men present started “yelling, arguing, cursing, objecting all over the floor,” as one eye witness told Echols. Finally, in another 1967 New Left conference, Shulamith Firestone and fellow activists tried to discuss women’s rights onstage; in response, the conference director patted Firestone’s head and said, “Move on, little girl; we have more important issues to talk about here than women’s liberation.”
That night, Firestone and other women splintered off from The New Left and the radical feminist movement was born. Radical feminists went on to create collectives providing low-cost health care, establish credit unions for women, found rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters, fight for legal abortion and accessible contraception. They moved the mainstream feminist movement to the left. Though short-lived, radical feminism shaped the world as it is today. It could only be done once feminists realized it was useless to wait for the bros.
Next time: a woman doctor? Surely you’re joking!
This was mostly a white women problem- black women never had the privilege of not working or organizing, since they couldn’t rely on getting protection or provision from men. This made their lives more precarious but also gave them some freedom to operate outside of gender norms, including in Civil Rights organizations. Echols includes a few rather salty quotes from black activists about white women’s entitlement.