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Feminism, as all social and pollical movements, can be described in waves, movements, or schools of thought and activity. Second-wave feminism refers to the fight for equality between men and women in the public sectors of employment, education, and legal rights. It came about because of the realization that by the early 1960s, women had not achieved equality with men, even after winning the right to vote and their contributions during World War II. It came after a concerted effort by businesses and government to urge women to go back to the domestic sphere and let men returning from war have all those jobs, and the resulting depression that some of those once working women felt upon being left at home. It came from the frustrations of women who had always had to work who were now being told once again that their work was not as valuable as a man’s and that they just needed to accept less pay and fewer benefits. Novelist, satirist, and poet Erica Jong is sometimes credited with helping to inspire this second-wave feminism, so today we’re going to look into her work and life.
Jong was born Erica Mann on March 26, 1942, a pre-baby boomer, but just barely. Both of her parents were Jewish immigrants to New York City; her father Seymour Mann was from Poland, and her mother Eda Mirsky was from England but of Russian parents. Jong was the middle of three sisters. Both Jong and her daughter, Molly, have written about and commented on the frustrations that Eda felt at being expected to turn her artistic talent into an aid for her husband’s business while also being a wife and mother. Living with those frustrations certainly informed Jong’s critiques of her life and the lives of women compared to men.
From an early age, Jong was drawn to the artistic and literary world. She graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York City. While at Barnard College, she edited the Barnard Literary Magazine. For Barnard’s brother institution, Columbia University, she created a poetry program for the campus radio station. She received her bachelor’s degree in English from Barnard in 1963, then earned a master’s in 18th-century English literature in 1965 from Columbia University. Jong has returned to Barnard as an alumna, a speaker, and a guest lecturer over the years. The Erica Mann Jong ’63 Writing Center at Barnard helps students edit their papers and began with a donation from Jong herself in 1990. Columbia University has housed much archival material from Jong’s career since 2007.
Jong’s career to date has included 25 books as well as lectures, articles, essays, and interviews. While her works are undeniably about sex, many of them also critique marriage and gender by laying out the internal conflict of balancing the gendered roles women are expected to fulfill and embody. Some, like Inventing Memory (1997), specifically deal with Jewish women’s lives or shed light on the lives of lesbians as in Sappho’s Leap (2003), using fiction as the vehicle. Her poetry is powerful and covers topics from the beginning of life to its end. Jong is best known for her fiction and poetry but has also put out powerful nonfiction books about a wide range of topics from everyday life to political calls for equality as she did with A Letter to the President (2012). Her most recent published work is The World Began with Yes, a collection of poetry, which came out in 2019.
Before arguably her most famous book, the novel Fear of Flying (1973), Jong’s poetry collection, Fruits & Vegetables (1971, 1997), was gaining attention. She had won Poetry Magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize in 1971; that magazine has published at least ten of Jong’s pieces over the years. In 2009, Jong won the Fernanda Pivano Award for American Literature in Italy.
Jong’s personal life may reflect the changing roles and expectations for the genders in society. She has been married four times but still uses the surname from her second marriage to Allan Jong, with whom she had a daughter, Molly Jong-Fast. Currently Jong is married to Kenneth David Burrows, an attorney.
Jong uses her social media presence and public engagements to also speak out for women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights. She has been a public supporter of the Democratic Party and a critic of political and social conservativism for decades. She even has a family tie to it; one of her nephews is Peter Daou, a political activist, author, and campaign strategist and advisor.
Second-wave feminism was overwhelmingly white and heteronormative in terms of the writers and thinkers who got the most attention from the general public and government. It is rightly criticized as not considering the intersectionality of gender and sex with race, ethnicity, religion, and other social identities, especially when such a diverse group of activists fought hard every day to gain equality for women while their own ideas and inequalities were being ignored. Jong did not ignore the concerns of other women but took the “political is personal” motto to heart and shared what she experienced and researched to write about what she didn’t know first-hand. Erica Jong is still writing and speaking out today. However, she is very much a second-wave feminist and does not always connect well with the younger and hopefully more intersectional generations of feminists. That does not mean we should dismiss her work but instead encourage and expect all second-wave feminists to grow along with us in the fight for equality.