The Need for Feminist Struggle Persists

Laura Lee Downs is the author of Manufacturing Inequality: Gender Division in the French and British Metalworking Industries, 1914-1939. She teaches history at the University of Michigan.

The real troubles in this world tend to settle on the misalignment between men and women -- that's my opinion, my humble opinion, as I long ago learned to say. But how we do love to brush these injustices aside. Our wont is to put up with things, with the notion that men behave in one manner, and women in another.

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

FEMINISM HAS LONG BEEN DOGGED by a kind of denial-cum-wishful-thinking that is often shared by its sympathizers and enemies alike, namely, the delusion that the need for fierce political engagement (and any attendant upheaval in well-worn perceptions of self and society) is now safely behind us. Of course, few outside the far right would deny that once upon a time, there was a crying need for feminist struggle. Women were virtually enslaved to their husbands, lacked the vote, had no legal, separate personhood, no right to sue for divorce, or even too much say in the care and fates of the children they bore. But that was in the bad old days. Now (and "now" might be 1792, 1857, 1921, 1972, or just last week, to choose but a few commonly cited "transformative" moments...), today, all that has been reformed and resolved, women are now mistresses of their own fates, happier and stronger than ever. Surely the time for such a powerful liberatory politics is now safely behind us.

The popular notion that our need for a feminist politics has (unlike the state) happily withered away is a delusion whose wide skirts owe to the multiple forms that women's oppression has taken across time and space. Movements thus tend to rise and form around resolving or changing one or more of these particular manifestations. When these specific issues have been conquered, the movement appears to have succeeded. Energies dissipate and people's passionate, deeply held convictions of separate and unequal genders, barely touched by the movement, lodge themselves in some other cultural and social niche, from whence they continue to shape an unequal society. Little girls and grown women alike thus share the uncomfortable sense that all is not right with the world, a sense that is reinforced by daily experiences of sexual harassment, even danger, as one walks down the street at night, of unequal pay and uneven opportunities at work, of expectations that one will accept and bear the burdens of motherhood alone, if necessary, and without question (for biology remains destiny in our "post-feminist" moral universe). And yet haven't the real battles already been won? Isn't the time and space for feminist complaint long past?

One of the most striking qualities of Katha Pollitt's writing is her unerring eye, trained squarely on the heart of the matter, never mistaking particular victory for that end of feminism whose arrival is so often and eagerly hailed. I suspect this is why her essays stir in people a sense of welcome relief: while others are prepared to bid feminism a hasty farewell, Pollitt stands ready to remind us why the send-off remains a bit premature. As new issues surface (surrogate motherhood), or old favorites return for a visit (the many faces of "family" values, sexual harassment in the workplace), Pollitt lucidly unfolds the specific details with an eloquent economy of gesture. In so doing, she consistently underscores one clear and unavoidable certainty: that without a feminist analysis, that is, one that regards women as human ends in themselves, rather than the conveniently situated instruments of male will, one is simply unable to understand how such issues might affect the lives of individual human beings. Indeed, without a solid feminist framework, one would be hard pressed to identify these as political questions, as opposed to a series of endlessly interesting personal dramas.

But as Pollitt well knows, the debates surrounding date rape or surrogate motherhood are political in the most fundamental sense of the word. For these are issues that pose, time and again, the question of women's freedom to decide how they will live -- a freedom that Americans seem increasingly prepared to compromise in the name of fetal protection or the integrity of the family. Writing from the ground of a generous humanism, an appealing blend of envisioning the world as it might be with an acute sense of current social and political realities, Pollitt invites her reader to understand and embrace gender equity as integral to the struggle for social justice:

For me, to be a feminist is to answer the question 'Are women human?' with a yes. It is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. And it's certainly not about trading personal liberty -- abortion, divorce, sexual self-expression -- for social protection as wives and mothers, as pro-life feminists propose. It's about justice, fairness and access to the broad range of human experience...It's about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as means to an end for others: fetuses, children, 'the family,' men. (p. xxi)

Reasonable Creatures elaborates this utopian vision in a series of essays that illuminate the strands of feminist concern winding through a whole range of cultural and political dilemmas, from campus culture wars to media hype. Together, they make an eloquent and powerful argument that feminist politics cannot be separated from the broader project of constructing a more humanitarian and collective public sphere inside the shell of American political practice, hollowed out by a competitive, hyper-individualist and essentially negative vision of human freedom and social interaction.

IT IS HERE, I BELIEVE, THAT THE EXTRAORDINARY POWER AND APPEAL of Pollitt's political vision lies. For in setting forth the discursive and practical links that bind anti-feminism to the forces that drive and uphold structures of economic exploitation and political inequality, Pollitt accomplishes two crucial tasks: first, she addresses people's uneasy perception that there are far more important and pressing social problems than "mere feminism" at stake in the troubled late 20th century (and here, "feminism" translates roughly as the problems of the middle-class woman with briefcase, pressed up against a glass ceiling at work while juggling the unforgiving schedules of nanny/day-care center on the home front). Secondly, her searching analyses reveal the poverty of current political discourse in the United States. For ours is a language of individual striving and economic ascent that remains stubbornly mute -- blind, even -- to the inherently inegalitarian and oppressive nature of everyday transactions in an allegedly free marketplace, a market that is in truth shaped and underwritten by deep divisions of class, race, and gender. By attending to those divisions, Katha Pollitt offers a sharper and more nuanced understanding of particular events, from incidents of date rape to domestic violence to the bombing of family-planning clinics. She thus gives voice to sorrows and injustices of which our political language cannot even speak. Let me offer one brief example.

In discussing the unfortunate early childhood of Baby M, Pollitt turns our attention away from the middle-class angst of Elizabeth and William Stern in order to reflect on the very troubling questions that Mary Beth Whitehead and the Sterns had opened up with their unenforceable contract in flesh:

What is new about contract motherhood lies in the realm of law and social custom. It is a means by which women sign away rights that, until the 20th century, they rarely had: the right to legal custody of their children, and the right not to be bought, sold, lent, rented or given away...Goods can be distributed according to ability to pay or not. People shouldn't be.

By concentrating on the larger issues raised by such trafficking in babies, on the conflicts between material lack and maternal desire that gathered around the unprepossessing figure of Mary Beth Whitehead, Pollitt calmly turns aside the disingenuous argument-from-stereotype that feminism is mere bourgeois self-interest clothed in Wall-Street drag. Indeed, her delicate opening out of this case quietly, almost off-handedly, reveals the bourgeois-lady-with-briefcase stereotype for what it is: a selective, distorted and angry portrait drawn by a harsh and ungenerous political right, for whom women in the home, maternal, fecund, giving, and (above all) subordinate to patriarchal authority, has deep affective and political significance.

It is here that the core issues dwell, straddling the uncomfortable divide between gender as symbolic category and gender as lived experience. For on the political right, woman in the home stands at the center of a powerful (if fantasy-laden) chain of moral and political associations that point toward an orderly and harmonious world where clearly differentiated beings (children/adults, females/males, lower-class/upper-class, non-white/white) know their place in various race, class and gender hierarchies, hierarchies that are, in theory, warmed by vertical ties of affection and obligation. As Pollitt well understands, the patriarchal family remains the last secure bastion of this social vision. For it is the only site on which self-abnegation and subordination (of women and children) still hold some purchase on political discourse in the late 20th century, comparable forms of racial or class-based deference having at last been dismissed as the no-longer-credible products of a conservative and paternalist alchemy that would transform oppression into just and affective order.

In the context of a political culture that is marked by adversarial and individualist modes of interaction, a culture in which many feel (understandably) drawn toward more accommodative and communitarian mores, the right is offering a vision of community that is anchored in the patriarchal family as a model of harmonious political order. It is a vision that is purchased at the cost of women's basic right to self-determination -- a price that is all too easily ignored. It is a vision whose basic appeal lies in the imaginative transformation of oppression into a just order, one that is accepted from the bottom up, as it were. And it is a vision whose capacity to persuade lies partially in the slippage between gender as ideology (gendered categories of social difference, or the representation of nation-states as women) and the gendered experiences of living humans. The two are closely linked, and therefore easily confused, especially in political discourse. But they are not the same thing. Pollitt moves with fluid precision between the two levels, dissecting the paternalist dream of moral order so that the consequences for human, and especially female freedom are always clearly to the fore.

Contents of No. 22