The death of feminism has been pronounced many times over the years by those who want it to be so. But to borrow a phrase from Maya Angelou, "Still we rise."

Recently I was on a talk show panel with three men, ages appearing to be 30-something to 50-something, each of whom said during the interview, "I'm a feminist, but..." I found that particularly amusing given that so many women say, "I'm not a feminist, but..." The serious bottom line, though, is that both men and women in this country have so incorporated the fundamental principles of feminism that we assume women should have equal educational and job opportunities, that women should be able to own property, not be property, and so forth. We haven't attained full gender equality, but the values have become so much part of the culture that it is not fruitful to argue about feminism's viability, as some commenters here would like to do.

What is worth discussing is the damage done by the U.S. to women's ability to gain equality and reproductive justice in the rest of the world during the time that the fundamentalist right has held political sway. Reproductive self-determination isn't the only thing women need, but without it, women can't determine any other aspect of their lives.

And despite the election of Barack Obama who supports international family planning and has already rescinded George Bush's global gag rule that denied funding to programs that so much as mentioned abortion, there is much work to be done to restore U.S. leadership globally in this field and to repair the damage that our two-and-one-half decades of ping-ponging (gag rule on/gag rule off, UNFPA funding on, then off, overall funding for international family planning never reaching the levels it should to pull our share of the weight to assure that all women have access to modern birth control methods) of this critical U.S. foreign policy. Given that when the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world catches pneumonia (our "leading" the way to a global economic meltdown being a case in point), we also have a good bit of damage to undo before we can start moving forward again.
Obama rode into office the wave of a hunger for change combined with disgust for the excesses of the Bush administration's hubris that brought us a failed war and a failing economy. But reaction doesn't translate into a sustainable movement for change. The sharpest lesson of political history is that to allow the grassroots to lie fallow, to fail to mobilize the troops around a specific, forward looking agenda, is sure death to any political movement.

For example, five former directors of USAID's Population and Reproductive Health Program are calling for immediate doubling of U.S. funding for family planning overseas, to $1.2 billion and increasing to $1.5 billion over the next few years, if global anti-poverty and development goals are to be achieved. And it is essential that the U.S. address the legitimate place of safe and legal abortion within women's reproductive health and human rights.

Michelle argued persuasively that the absence of women's reproductive rights contributes to overpopulation, environmental disaster, family instability, HIV/AIDS, and sex-ratio imbalances that threaten global stability. Other matters may make more news, but nothing will make more difference. So, the heck with arguments about tensions about or within feminism; we have work to do.