This year, female activists have been full of energy – but unfocused. In 2014, they need to unite to effect change
The second volume of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has two epigraphs. For the first, she borrowed from Kierkegaard: "What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet the worst misfortune of all for a woman is not to understand she is one." The weary sentiment is not one I've heard very often in 2013.
This year, feminism has been in buoyant mood, high on its own successes: Jane Austen, whose most loved character, Lizzy Bennet, falls in love when she sees the grandeur of Pemberley, her suitor's estate, will appear on the £10 note; successful efforts to force Facebook to get rid of visual jokes about rape have been joined by high-profile campaigns against topless pictures on page three of the Sun and against lads mags more generally; Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines has been banned from student unions all over the country in a resurgence of student-led feminist societies; and the year has ended with the early release of two members of Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympics in February.
Feminism's newfound ebullience has spread to Westminster too: legislation that will enable couples to share a year's leave after their baby's birth as they wish was taken through the Commons by Jo Swinson; Stella Creasy and Yvette Cooper brought pink banners and movie stars to Parliament Square for One Billion Rising in February and Ed Miliband was photographed with one of the Fawcett Society's trademark T-shirts – "This is what a feminist looks like" – and called for equal representation in parliament, equal pay and an end to casual sexism in his autumn conference speech.
But the clue to where feminism should go in 2014 might be in the second epigraph de Beauvoir added to The Second Sex. She took a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre's play Dirty Hands: "Half victims, half accomplices, like everyone else."
What has feminism been complicit in this year? There are features common to the successful campaigns: they happen on Twitter and Facebook with occasional forays into the mainstream media; they are fronted and run by younger women; their target is very often the way women are seen in the media or portrayed in the public sphere; they are legion but unco-ordinated, related but not connected; and every inch of ground they win is accompanied by trolling, abuse and rape threats.
This so-called fourth wave of feminism is a young wave, untempered by previous generations (partly because they ran out of steam after the last national women's liberation movement conference of 1978 in Birmingham). After the first wave of early 20th-century suffragettes led by the Pankhursts, the second wave of de Beauvoir's optimistic postwar wave and the third wave of 1970s bra-burners, we've waited a long time for the fourth. That it is a young wave accounts for its energy but it also points to its weaknesses.
There's no reason a mother in Rhyl or a carer in Blackpool wouldn't be happy that Jane Austen will appear on their tenners, but equally, how are their worries and concerns reflected by it?
By banning the unserious song Blurred Lines, are student feminists trading an early victory for an opportunity to persuade, cajole and ridicule? And is aiming for so many mediocre, concessionary, scattershot goals more likely to dissipate energy than to focus it? This year's suffragette nostalgia was about more than the anniversary of Emily Wilding Davison's death – it was also for a time feminists could unite under a single, undoubtedly worthy demand: universal suffrage. Because if we're going to have to fight harder for each victory – against the coalition government, against Twitter trolls, against American-style pro-lifers – we have to be sure that what we are fighting for is unquestionably worth it, not just to us but to women across the country, and across the ages.
When The Second Sex was published in France in 1949, de Beauvoir received letters calling her a nymphomaniac, a lesbian, frigid, oversexed, an unmarried mother and accusing her of having undergone hundreds of abortions. She was laughed and pointed at as she ate in a restaurant on the boulevard Montparnasse; the book was put on the Vatican banned list. She was shocked but unrepentant, and maybe even a little amused: "Certainly it is monotonous writing inscriptions on lavatory walls; I could understand that many sexual maniacs might prefer to send their lucubrations to me for a change."
In her book, she had taken on not a media organisation or an economic institution, but all the papers, all the institutions. Over 800 pages, she analysed, teased out, upset and railed against biologists, Freud, Engels, the Napoleonic Code, Stendhal and DH Lawrence.
She went through women's lives from babyhood to motherhood and old age; she thought about what it might be like to be a lesbian, a prostitute, a housewife (she saw cleaning the house as a way to "hold away death but refuse life"), a narcissist and a mystic.
She argued that abortion wasn't about morality but about "masculine sadism" towards women, but she also took action, by writing and signing, alongside Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Sagan, Jeanne Moreau, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda and 337 others, the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971. Together, they declared they'd had an abortion, showing up how absurd it was that they risked criminal prosecution by doing so. The stunt (met with derision by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo: "Who got these 343 abortion manifesto bitches pregnant?") led to a change in the law: women would no longer be prosecuted for ending a pregnancy in the first 10 weeks.
Where is the fourth wave's intellectual? De Beauvoir was far from perfect, but she served a purpose for a movement that needed her as much as she needed them.
She pulled the experiences of different women from across history and the social spectrum into her work; she served as a still centre around which to meet and campaign; she wasn't afraid to borrow from Kierkegaard and challenge Freud; she took the criticism and ridicule with as much good humour as she could; and she found a way to pressure parliament and turn her ideas, words and theories into something that could be seen on the statute book.
And she reminds us, both in the epigram from Sartre and throughout The Second Sex, that women are also responsible for the state they're in – both victims and accomplices – and that it will take years before women can be fully free. Beauvoir thought only St Teresa had achieved as perfect a state of liberation as could yet be imagined.
The British fourth wave, intellectual-less for now, is at least in a better state than the American one, who seem to think they've found theirs. This year's other strain of activism has been Harvard-educated Sheryl Sandberg's own tech-inflected brand of "Lean In" feminism.
Her view is that women should push harder through the most difficult, child-bearing years of their careers, an approach that could work only if coupled with legislative change to ease the pressure. (Such legislation, as the Tory dilution of the parental leave bill showed, has been often shelved as "unaffordable" in the downturn.) For Sandberg, the solution to most things – better sex, happier children, liberated women – is more work. And there is something of that approach to the energetic, scattershot nature of the British fourth wave too: setting up a separate campaign instead of rolling one into another, and another and another.
I've sometimes wondered whether it is time for another national women's liberation movement conference to co-ordinate efforts and define aims. The demands of the 1970s third wave, perhaps unsurprisingly, don't feel irrelevant: equal pay, equal job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand and free 24-hour nurseries.
The more I think about it, the more I see that it is only a matter of time until the fourth wave's intellectual turns up, with a big book that will sell thousands and draw letters from the modern equivalent of de Beauvoir's sexual maniacs who wrote on lavatory walls.
As the main character in Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? , one of the feminist novels of the year, put it: "One good thing about being a woman is we haven't many examples yet of what a genius looks like."
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