Feminism revisited

Oyyy, those waves of feminism are once again washing over me. We've moved from the first, and the basics of legal and political parity and through to the second,  the social, cultural, biological. But as I watch the tide roll in and out on Brighton beach these Tuesdays of my Masters degree, I wonder if the sands ever really shift at all.

My girls are probably watching Lady Gaga at the moment, playing with notions of self expression, pushing the boundaries of what women can be - so much so that for a while, she was even thought to be a man. And all the while, beneath those Emperor's clothes, can we admit that there's little she deliberately leaves to the imagination? Surely that was always the overriding proof that that gushing, whispering, weeping award accepting popster was so not a bloke. But what do the kids see? That must be the test of which wave we're currently surfing, and if there's ever any real rip in the tide.

But I am loving Carolyn Steedman's 'Landscape of a Good Woman', her autobiography which offers a more individual understanding of women at a certain place in a certain time. That I read my own biography - and my mother's and hers - in it is for another time (and maybe I'll even write the book myself one day), but for now, the question is did the fracture of Feminism in the '80s create a stronger generation of women who are free, in Britain in 2011 anyway, to make their own choices? I'm sure it did, but do they know it, and if not, does it matter? Do my kids need to deconstruct the way Gaga plays with perceptions of women or do they just absorb the mixed message that women can do anything as long as they're fit and happy to get their kit off?

'Consciousness' was my conclusion about what the tide reveals as we made our way out of Cultural Theory this morning. If we grow ever more aware of the politics of identity, of the language that shapes our thinking, of the frameworks in which we make our life choices, has the revolution already happened? Perhaps, but maybe with less of a bang than a whimper.