It’s Thanksgiving and I’ve returned to fish for bass in the pond where I fished all summer. When the days and water were warm I was killing it with a purplish Senko worm with a bright yellow tail. Cast it out, let it fall slowly, and boom: bass on the hook. Today, I get nothing. For an hour and a half, I work the shoreline, fishing in all my favorite spots, casting out my bait in all the same places, and…nothing. Looking at my watch, I realize I have only 30 minutes until I’m due back at home to make lunch for the boys so I tie on a froggy-looking crankbait lure that I’ve never caught anything with. Three casts in and I have a 16-inch largemouth bass on my hook. One thing that keeps fishing interesting is that it’s always changing. As the weather varies, the tides shift, and the seasons change, where you’ve been fishing and what you’ve been using to catch the fish no longer work. The fish are somewhere else, or they are attracted to something else. You can keep on doing what you’ve been doing before, but you probably won’t catch much. Or you can break tradition, adapt to the changed conditions, and try something new. You’ll likely have to try many new somethings before finding a new tradition, but it’s worth the disruption, uncertainty, and experimentation once you start catching fish again.
One of my favorite activist photographs is of a young woman wearing a hijab and a T-shirt that says: “This is what a Feminist looks like.” The image reminds me that we shouldn’t get hung up on the way things once were, but instead look to how things are now. Activists need to be willing to break traditions, not just with old tactics as I’ve written about before, but with their very sense of identity. The history of feminism(s) in the US is a good example of this. In the “first wave” of feminism, at the turn of the last century, activists drew upon patriarchal notions of “true womanhood” in a strategic move to make their case for voting rights. Dressing all in white, carrying American flags, and sometimes pushing baby carriages, Suffragettes staged massive marches, rallies, and other spectacles to show their strength and refute the anti-feminist imagery of feminists as “mannish.” Fast forward a half-century, and “second wave” feminists are protesting against this culture of womanhood by throwing mops, lipstick and high heels into a “Freedom Trash Can” at a Miss America pageant. (Bra-burning, it turns out, is largely a myth.) A few years later, lesbian and feminists-of-color challenge “universalist” notions of women’s liberation as cultural, racially, and sexually specific, and make the case for what we now call intersectional politics. And, in more recent times, “third wave” feminists reject what they perceive as the overly censorious culture of feminism and re-appropriate lipstick and girly dresses, and yes, wear hijabs. Through all these permutations, the call for respect, dignity, and power remains the same, but what these demands sound like, and what the people making these demands look like, have changed. It’s the willingness to break tradition that’s one of the reasons why feminist activism is still so active at a time when labor activism — still waking up from its self-image of a White, male factory worker with burly forearms — struggles to redefine itself.