That's meant to be provocative but it's also true. Short version: While feminism has always taken itself to be an egalitarian movement, its real appeal has always been as a libertarian one. Equality was part of it, to be sure, but what really inspired women was the example of liberty as given by iconic feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft to Germaine Greer. (Both these examples chosen because a lot of doctrinaire feminists find their personal conduct troubling.)
This came up in some discussion in response to an old post of mine last week. "If not equality, then what?" wrote one commenter named Annette. And if you read feminist writing for the last fifty years it all seems to be about equality.
And not just any kind of equality but Marxist equality as was identified by Joan Didion in what remains the best essay every written about contemporary feminism.
And Didion identifies the very thing that made feminism and Marxism seem like such a natural fit.
Except maybe women. They too saw liberation as the real goal and most had no interest in any larger game. As Didion notes in her essay, the real goals of feminism rapidly became the goals of self fulfillment and not revolution. The leaders were still talking revolution but the rank and file, well, they didn't even want to be rank and file.
By the mid 1980, most of the real goals that most women had wanted had been achieved. Things weren't perfect but they never are are they?
Meanwhile, an increasing number of women looked at feminism and feminists and thought, "that isn't me". Meanwhile movement feminists made things worse by sweeping aside the great feminist icons and role models—Steinem, Friedan, Brownmiller, Greer—in favour of concepts, "women of color", lesbians and so forth. And there was the implied insult that went with that, for example, that other women are colourless. The craziest moment was when a group called MAW was set up. It's name came from Mothers Are Women, as if it needed to be said!!
I remember the way women at university with me in the 1980s started to say "I'm not a feminist but ..." so as to be able to take a stand but reject the identity. Even when there was an issue that all women at my university could get behind—the first Take Back The Night Marches, for example—they saw it as a one-time statement and not an ongoing project they would take part in every year.They wanted the specific goal, they didn't want to be part of the movement.
And that has been the story ever since. When feminism latches onto some issue that matters to women right now, they get on the wagon again. And then they move away again.
The glory days are over but it's not only that. The glory days only happened because the movement was de facto individualist even thought its philosophy was egalitarian. It was a movement that succeeded without understanding the basis of its success.
This came up in some discussion in response to an old post of mine last week. "If not equality, then what?" wrote one commenter named Annette. And if you read feminist writing for the last fifty years it all seems to be about equality.
And not just any kind of equality but Marxist equality as was identified by Joan Didion in what remains the best essay every written about contemporary feminism.
In fact there was an idea, and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women's movement would have seemed to have any interest at all.My commenter Annette, trying to come up with a general description of feminism in 2011, came up with a modified Marxism where women replace the working class as the primary engine for revolution:
Just to get past this point, let's define the key idea of feminism as something like this: "the idea that everyone has the basic right to social, economic, and vocational equality" - this generally has an emphasis on women since they are the gender that have been most oppressed ...There it is in all its glory.
And Didion identifies the very thing that made feminism and Marxism seem like such a natural fit.
Marxism in this country had even been an eccentric and quixotic passion. One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game.The most recent example of this has been gay men, whom, I remember reading in an essay in The Nation were "the class that couldn't be absorbed". Not until they were that is. IT's hard to think of any other rebel group who were absorbed quite so quickly.
Except maybe women. They too saw liberation as the real goal and most had no interest in any larger game. As Didion notes in her essay, the real goals of feminism rapidly became the goals of self fulfillment and not revolution. The leaders were still talking revolution but the rank and file, well, they didn't even want to be rank and file.
By the mid 1980, most of the real goals that most women had wanted had been achieved. Things weren't perfect but they never are are they?
Meanwhile, an increasing number of women looked at feminism and feminists and thought, "that isn't me". Meanwhile movement feminists made things worse by sweeping aside the great feminist icons and role models—Steinem, Friedan, Brownmiller, Greer—in favour of concepts, "women of color", lesbians and so forth. And there was the implied insult that went with that, for example, that other women are colourless. The craziest moment was when a group called MAW was set up. It's name came from Mothers Are Women, as if it needed to be said!!
I remember the way women at university with me in the 1980s started to say "I'm not a feminist but ..." so as to be able to take a stand but reject the identity. Even when there was an issue that all women at my university could get behind—the first Take Back The Night Marches, for example—they saw it as a one-time statement and not an ongoing project they would take part in every year.They wanted the specific goal, they didn't want to be part of the movement.
And that has been the story ever since. When feminism latches onto some issue that matters to women right now, they get on the wagon again. And then they move away again.
The glory days are over but it's not only that. The glory days only happened because the movement was de facto individualist even thought its philosophy was egalitarian. It was a movement that succeeded without understanding the basis of its success.
No comments:
Post a Comment