FEMINIST THOUGHT

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FEMINIST T

A MORE COMPREHENSIVE INTRODUCTION

Rosemarie Tong University of North Carolina, Charlotte

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

T H I R D E D I T I O N

HOUGHT

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Copyright © 2009 by Westview Press Published by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Westview Press, 2465 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877. Find us on the World Wide Web at www.westviewpress.com.

Westview Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, or call (800) 810-4145, extension 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN: 978-0-8133-4375-4 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: The Diversity of Feminist Thinking 1

1 Liberal Feminism 11

Conceptual Roots of Liberal Feminist Thought and Action 11 Eighteenth-Century Thought: Equal Education 13 Nineteenth-Century Thought: Equal Liberty 16 Nineteenth-Century Action: The Suffrage 21 Twentieth-Century Action: Equal Rights 23 Twentieth-Century Thought: Sameness Versus Difference 27 Contemporary Directions in Liberal Feminism 34 Critiques of Liberal Feminism 37 Conclusion 45

2 Radical Feminism: Libertarian and Cultural Perspectives 48

Libertarian and Cultural Views on the Sex/Gender System 51 Some Libertarian Views on Gender 52 Some Cultural Views on Gender 56 Sexuality, Male Domination, and Female Subordination 65 The Pornography Debate 68 The Lesbianism Controversy 71 Reproduction, Men, and Women 73 Libertarian and Cultural Views on Mothering 82 Critiques of Radical-Libertarian and Radical-Cultural Feminism 90

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3 Marxist and Socialist Feminism: Classical and Contemporary 96

Some Marxist Concepts and Theories 97 Classical Marxist Feminism: General Reflections 106 Contemporary Socialist Feminism: General Reflections 110 Women’s Labor Issues 118 Critiques of Marxist and Socialist Feminism 125 Conclusion 126

4 Psychoanalytic Feminism 128

Sigmund Freud 129 Feminist Critiques of Freud 133 Early Feminist Appropriations of Freud 135 Later Feminist Appropriations of Freud 138 Psychoanalytic Feminism: General Reflections 152 Conclusion 160

5 Care-Focused Feminism 163

The Roots of Care-Focused Feminism 164 Maternal Ethics and the Ethics of Care 181 Conclusion 195

6 Multicultural, Global, and Postcolonial Feminism 200

Multicultural Feminism: General Reflections 201 Roots of Multicultural Feminism in the United States 202 Interlocking Sources of Women’s Oppression 204 Conceptual Challenges for Multicultural Feminism 207 Global and Postcolonial Feminism: General Reflections 215 Diversity and Commonality 217 Sexual/Reproductive Issues Versus Economic Issues 218 Knowing When to Respect Women’s Culture 228 Conclusion 233

7 Ecofeminism 237

Some Roots of Ecofeminism 238 Ecofeminism: New Philosophy or Ancient Wisdom? 242 Tensions in Nature: Ecofeminist Thought 243

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Spiritual Ecofeminism 252 Transformative Ecofeminism 256 Global Ecofeminism 261 Critiques of Ecofeminism 265 Conclusion 268

8 Postmodern and Third-Wave Feminism 270

Postmodernism/Postmodern Feminism: Keynotes 272 Critique of Postmodern Feminism 283 Third-Wave Feminism 284 Critique of Third-Wave Feminism 289 Conclusion 290

Notes 293 Bibliography 333 Index 401

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Preface

Oftentimes, a new edition of a book, particularly a third edition, amounts to lit- tle more than some added references and updates. But I can assure readers that this new edition of Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, con- stitutes a major overhaul: eighteen months of drafting and redrafting. Chapters that remain substantially the same are the chapters on liberal feminism, radical feminism, and ecofeminism, though even these have significant revisions. Sub- stantially reformulated chapters are the ones on psychoanalytic feminism and Marxist/socialist feminism. I have reassigned some feminist thinkers I previ- ously classified as postmodern feminists to the psychoanalytic feminist fold, and I have amplified my discussion of socialist feminism in ways that better clarify the differences between it and Marxist feminism. In addition, although Chapter 6, “Multicultural, Global, and Postcolonial Feminism,” includes ideas from the second edition, I have thoroughly revised the section on multicultural femi- nism, offering new interpretations of this mode of feminist thinking. Further enhancing this chapter, which is now one of my favorite chapters, is a serious effort to address the differences between multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminism. New or expanded discussions of Susan Okin, Martha Nussbaum, Chila Bulbeck, Linda Martin Alcoff, and Adrian Piper are featured. Another chapter that blends a bit of old material with much new material is Chapter 8, “Postmodern and Third-Wave Feminism.” Among the feminist thinkers now showcased are Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, Leslie Heywood, Jennifer Drake, and Rebecca Walker. Finally, a new chapter makes its debut in this third edition. Although Chapter 5, “Care-Focused Feminism,” includes previous discussions of Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings, equally long discussions of Virginia Held and Eva Feder Kittay have been added.

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As I reflect on this third edition of Feminist Thought, I realize how quickly and richly feminist thinking has developed. I applaud the creative and schol- arly abilities of the feminists whose work I try to summarize, interpret, and share with as wide and diverse an audience as possible. Feminist thinking has energized the academy and challenged it to reject the limits that had been previously imposed on it by a “white/male/exclusionary” modality of thought. Just as importantly—indeed more importantly—feminist thinking has motivated feminist action. The world is more fair, just, and caring thanks to the ideas not only of the feminist thinkers featured in this book but also the many feminist thinkers who, for lack of pen perhaps, have not been able to write down, let alone widely publicize their ideas. It is to this group of feminist thinkers I dedicate this book.

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Acknowledgments

As anyone who has ever written a book knows, it is not a solo project. Rather, it is a collaborative effort. My only fear is that I will fail to say a public thank-you to one of the persons who helped me bring this book to completion.

First, I want to thank Lisa Singleton for the long hours she spent research- ing for me and the even longer hours she spent typing draft after draft of a book that seemed without end. Without Lisa’s cheerful commitment to this project, it would not have seen the light of day. There is no way that I can thank this gifted woman enough.

Second, I want to thank Karl Yambert, my editor. His patience is that of Job. Due to life’s unpredictable and sometimes sad detours, it took me far longer to complete this book than I hoped. Rather than chastising me, Karl made things easy for me. Had I had a less understanding editor, I would have probably abandoned this third edition.

Third, I want to thank my diligent copyeditor, Patty Boyd, for perfecting my manuscript and the anonymous reviewers who motivated me to improve it. Their behind-the-scenes work is most appreciated.

I also want to thank Laura Stine, my project editor, for getting this edition of Feminist Thought to press.

Finally, I thank all feminist thinkers for building a body of thought that is moving us closer to being a more just and compassionate world. I am grateful to be a part of this effort and hope to remain a part of it until the day I die.

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1

Introduction: The Diversity of Feminist Thinking

Since writing my first introduction to feminist thought nearly two decades ago, I have become increasingly convinced that feminist thought resists categoriza- tion into tidy schools of thought. Interdisciplinary, intersectional, and interlock- ing are the kind of adjectives that best describe the way we feminists think. There is a certain breathlessness in the way we move from one topic to the next, revising our thoughts in midstream. Yet despite the very real problems that come with trying to categorize the thought of an incredibly diverse and large array of feminist thinkers as “x” or “y” or “z,” feminist thought is old enough to have a history complete with a set of labels: liberal, radical, Marxist/socialist, psychoanalytic, care-focused, multicultural/global/colonial, ecofeminist, and postmodern/third wave. To be sure, this list of labels is incomplete and highly contestable. Indeed, it may ultimately prove to be entirely unreflective of femi- nism’s intellectual and political commitments to women. For now, however, feminist thought’s old labels still remain serviceable. They signal to the public that feminism is not a monolithic ideology and that all feminists do not think alike. The labels also help mark the range of different approaches, perspectives, and frameworks a variety of feminists have used to shape both their explana- tions for women’s oppression and their proposed solutions for its elimination.

Because so much of contemporary feminist theory defines itself in reaction against traditional liberal feminism, liberalism is as good a place as any to begin a survey of feminist thought. This perspective received its classic formulation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women,1 in John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women,”2 and in the nineteenth-century women’s suffrage movement. Its main thrust, an emphasis still felt in contemporary

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groups such as the National Organization of Women (NOW), is that female subordination is rooted in a set of customary and legal constraints that blocks women’s entrance to and success in the so-called public world. To the extent that society holds the false belief that women are, by nature, less intellectually and physically capable than men, it tends to discriminate against women in the academy, the forum, and the marketplace. As liberal feminists see it, this dis- crimination against women is unfair. Women should have as much chance to succeed in the public realm as men do. Gender justice, insist liberal feminists, requires us, first, to make the rules of the game fair and, second, to make certain that none of the runners in the race for society’s goods and services is systemati- cally disadvantaged.

But is the liberal feminist program drastic and dramatic enough to com- pletely undo women’s oppression? Radical feminists think not. They claim the patriarchal system is characterized by power, dominance, hierarchy, and competition. It cannot be reformed but only ripped out root and branch. It is not just patriarchy’s legal and political structures that must be overturned on the way to women’s liberation. Its social and cultural institutions (espe- cially the family and organized religion) must also be uprooted.

As in the past, I remain impressed by the diverse modalities of thinking that count as “radical feminist thought.” Although all radical feminists focus on sex, gender, and reproduction as the locus for the development of femi- nist thought,3 some of them favor so-called androgyny, stress the pleasures of sex (be it heterosexual, lesbian, or autoerotic), and view as unalloyed bless- ings for women not only the old reproduction-controlling technologies but also the new reproduction-assisting technologies. In contrast, other radical feminists reject androgyny; emphasize the dangers of sex, especially hetero- sexual sex; and regard as harmful to women the new reproduction-assisting technologies and, for the most part, the old reproduction-controlling tech- nologies. As in the second edition of my book, I sort this varied array of rad- ical feminist thinkers into two groups: “radical-libertarian feminists” and “radical-cultural feminists.”4

With respect to gender-related issues, radical-libertarian feminists usually reason that if, to their own detriment, men are required to exhibit mascu- line characteristics only, and if, to their own detriment, women are required to exhibit feminine characteristics only, then the solution to this harmful state of affairs is to permit all human beings to be androgynous—to exhibit a full range of masculine and feminine qualities. Men should be permitted to explore their feminine dimensions, and women their masculine ones. No human being should be forbidden the sense of wholeness that comes from combining his or her masculine and feminine sides.

2 Introduction

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Disagreeing with radical-libertarian feminists that a turn to androgyny is a liberation strategy for women, radical-cultural feminists argue against this move in one of three ways. Some anti-androgynists maintain the problem is not femininity in and of itself, but rather the low value that patriarchy assigns to feminine qualities such as “gentleness, modesty, humility, supportiveness, empathy, compassionateness, tenderness, nurturance, intuitiveness, sensitiv- ity, unselfishness,” and the high value it assigns to masculine qualities such as “assertiveness, aggressiveness, hardiness, rationality or the ability to think log- ically, abstractly and analytically, ability to control emotion.”5 They claim that if society can learn to value “feminine” traits as much as “masculine” traits, women’s oppression will be a bad memory. Other anti-androgynists object, insisting femininity is the problem because it has been constructed by men for patriarchal purposes. In order to be liberated, women must reject femininity as it has been constructed for them and give it an entirely new meaning. Fem- ininity should no longer be understood as those traits that deviate from mas- culinity. On the contrary, femininity should be understood as a way of being that needs no reference point external to it. Still other anti-androgynists, reverting to a “nature theory,” argue that despite patriarchy’s imposition of a false, or inauthentic, feminine nature upon women, many women have nonetheless rebelled against it, unearthing their true, or authentic, female nature instead. Full personal freedom for a woman consists, then, in her abil- ity to renounce her false feminine self in favor of her true female self.

As difficult as it is to fully reflect the range of radical feminist thought on gender, it is even more difficult to do so with respect to sexuality. Radical- libertarian feminists argue that no specific kind of sexual experience should be prescribed as the best kind for women.6 Every woman should be encour- aged to experiment sexually with herself, with other women, and with men. Although heterosexuality can be dangerous for women within a patriarchal society, women must nonetheless feel free to follow the lead of their own desires, embracing men if that is their choice.

Radical-cultural feminists disagree. They stress that through pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, rape, and woman battering,7 through foot binding, suttee, purdah, clitoridectormy, witch burning, and gynecology,8 men have controlled women’s sexuality for male pleasure. Thus, in order to be liber- ated, women must escape the confines of heterosexuality and create an exclu- sively female sexuality through celibacy, autoeroticism, or lesbianism.9 Only alone, or with other women, can women discover the true pleasure of sex.

Radical feminist thought is as diverse on issues related to reproduction as it is on matters related to sexuality. Radical-libertarian feminists claim bio- logical motherhood drains women physically and psychologically.10 Women

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should be free, they say, to use the old reproduction-controlling technolo- gies and the new reproduction-assisting technologies on their own terms— to prevent or terminate unwanted pregnancies or, alternatively, so that women can have children when they want them (premenopausally or post- menopausally), how they want them (in their own womb or that of another woman), and with whom they want them (a man, a woman, or alone). Some radical-libertarian feminists go farther than this, however. They look forward to the day when ectogenesis (extracorporeal gestation in an artificial placenta) entirely replaces the natural process of pregnancy. In contrast to radical-libertarian feminists, radical-cultural feminists claim biological mother-hood is the ultimate source of woman’s power.11 It is women who determine whether the human species continues—whether there is life or no life. Women must guard and celebrate this life-giving power, for without it, men will have even less respect and use for women than they have now.12

Somewhat unconvinced by the liberal and radical feminist agendas for women’s liberation, Marxist and socialist feminists claim it is impossible for anyone, especially women, to achieve true freedom in a class-based society, where the wealth produced by the powerless many ends up in the hands of the powerful few. With Friedrich Engels,13 Marxist and socialist feminists insist women’s oppression originated in the introduction of private property, an institution that obliterated whatever equality of community humans had previously enjoyed. Private ownership of the means of production by rela- tively few persons, originally all male, inaugurated a class system whose con- temporary manifestations are corporate capitalism and imperialism. Reflection on this state of affairs suggests that capitalism itself, not just the larger social rules that privilege men over women, is the cause of women’s oppression. If all women—rather than just the “exceptional” ones—are ever to be liberated, the capitalist system must be replaced by a socialist system in which the means of production belong to everyone. No longer economically dependent on men, women will be just as free as men.

Socialist feminists agree with Marxist feminists that capitalism is the source of women’s oppression, and with radical feminists that patriarchy is the source of women’s oppression. Therefore, the way to end women’s oppression, in socialist feminists’ estimation, is to kill the two-headed beast of capitalist patriarchy or patriarchal capitalism (take your pick). Motivated by this goal, socialist feminists seek to develop theories that explain the rela- tionship between capitalism and patriarchy.

During the first stage of theory development, socialist feminists offered several “two-system” explanations of women’s oppression. Among these two- system theories were those forwarded by Juliet Mitchell and Alison Jaggar. In

4 Introduction

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Women’s Estate, Mitchell claimed that women’s condition is determined not only by the structures of production (as Marxist feminists think), but also by the structures of reproduction and sexuality (as radical feminists believe), and the socialization of children (as liberal feminists argue).14 She stressed that women’s status and function in all of these structures must change if women are to achieve full liberation. Still, in the final analysis, Mitchell gave the edge to capitalism over patriarchy as women’s worst enemy.

Like Mitchell, Alison Jaggar attempted to achieve a synthesis between Marxist and radical feminist thought. Acknowledging that all feminist per- spectives recognize the conflicting demands made on women as wives, moth- ers, daughters, lovers, and workers,15 Jaggar insisted that socialist feminism is unique because of its concerted effort to interrelate the myriad forms of women’s oppression. She used the unifying concept of alienation to explain how, under capitalism, everything (work, sex, play) and everyone (family members and friends) that could be a source of women’s integration as per- sons becomes instead a cause of their disintegration. Together with Mitchell, Jaggar insisted there are only complex explanations for women’s subordina- tion. Yet, in contrast to Mitchell, she named patriarchy rather than capital- ism as the worst evil visited on women.

After Mitchell and Jaggar, another group of socialist feminists aimed to develop new explanations of women’s oppression that did not in any way pinpoint capitalism or patriarchy as the primary source of women’s limited well-being and freedom. Iris Marion Young, Heidi Hartmann, and Sylvia Walby constructed explanations for women’s oppression that viewed capital- ism and patriarchy as interactive to the point of full symbiosis. To a greater or lesser extent, these thinkers addressed the question of whether capitalism could survive the death of patriarchy, or vice versa. Although the nuances of their theories were difficult to grasp, Young, Hartmann, and Walby—like their predecessors Mitchell and Jaggar—pushed feminists to address issues related to women’s unpaid, underpaid, or disvalued work.

To the degree that liberal, radical, and Marxist-socialist feminists focus on the macrocosm (patriarchy or capitalism) in their respective explana- tions of women’s oppression, psychoanalytic feminists are most at home in the microcosm of the individual. They claim the roots of women’s oppres- sion are embedded deep in the female psyche. Initially, psychoanalytic feminists focused on Sigmund Freud’s work, looking within it for a better understanding of sexuality’s role in the oppression of women. According to Freud, in the so-called pre-Oedipal stage, all infants are symbiotically attached to their mothers, whom they perceive as omnipotent. The mother-infant relationship is an ambivalent one, however: sometimes

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mothers give too much—their presence is overwhelming—but other times mothers give too little—their absence disappoints.

The pre-Oedipal stage ends with the so-called Oedipal complex, the pro- cess by which the boy gives up his first love object, the mother, in order to escape castration at the hands of the father. As a result of submitting his id (desires) to the superego (collective social conscience), the boy is fully inte- grated into culture. Together with his father, he will rule over nature and woman, both of whom supposedly contain a similarly irrational power. In contrast to the boy, the girl, who has no penis to lose, separates slowly from her first love object, the mother. As a result, the girl’s integration into culture is incomplete. She exists at the periphery, or margin, of culture as the one who does not rule but is ruled, largely because, as Dorothy Dinnerstein sug- gested, she fears her own power.16

Because the Oedipus complex is the root of male rule, or patriarchy, some psychoanalytic feminists speculate that the complex is nothing more than the product of men’s imagination—a psychic trap that everyone, especially women, should try to escape. Others object that unless we are prepared for reentry into a chaotic state of nature, we must accept some version of the Oedipus complex as the experience that integrates the individual into society. In accepting some ver- sion of the Oedipus complex, Sherry Ortner noted, we need not accept the Freudian version, according to which the qualities of authority, autonomy, and universalism are labeled male, whereas love, dependence, and particularism are labeled female.17 These labels, meant to privilege that which is male over that which is female, are not essential to the Oedipus complex. Rather, they are sim- ply the consequences of a child’s actual experience with men and women. As Ortner saw it, dual parenting (as recommended also by Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow) and dual participation in the workforce would change the gender valences of the Oedipus complex.18 Authority, autonomy, and uni- versalism would no longer be the exclusive property of men; love, dependence, and particularism would no longer be the exclusive property of women.

Not sure that dual parenting and dual participation in the workforce were up to changing the gender valences of the Oedipal complex, a new generation of psychoanalytic feminists turned to theorists like Jacques Lacan for more insights into the psychosexual dramas that produce “man” and “woman,” the “feminine” and the “masculine,” the “heterosexual” and the “lesbian,” and so forth. Formidable theorists like Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva claimed that feminists had spent too much time focusing on the Oedipal realm and not nearly enough time on the prelinguistic, pre-Oedipal domain. This domain, often referred to as the Imaginary, is the domain infants are supposed to leave behind so they can enter the Symbolic order, the realm of language, rules, and

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regimes: civilization. But, asked Irigaray and Kristeva, why should women abandon the Imaginary so they can be oppressed, suppressed, and repressed in patriarchy’s Symbolic order? Why not instead stay in the Imaginary, and relish the joy of being different from men? Why not remain identified with one’s first love, the mother, and develop with her new ways of speaking and writing, of constituting one’s subjectivity, that do not lead to women’s oppression? Why lead life on men’s terms at all?

In earlier editions of this book, I had included theorists like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings with psychoanalytic feminists because of their interest in women’s psychology. But I now realize that Gilligan and Noddings are not the same kind of thinkers as those I currently classify as psychoanalytic feminists. What distinguishes Gilligan and Noddings from psychoanalytic feminists, and what links them to feminists thinkers like Sara Ruddick, Virginia Held, and Eva Feder Kittay, is their focus on the nature and practice of care. More than any other group of feminist thinkers, care-focused feminists are interested in understanding why, to a greater or lesser degree, women are usually associated with the emotions and the body, and men with reason and the mind. On a related note, care-focused feminists seek to understand why women as a group are usually linked with interdependence, community, and connection, whereas men as a group are usually linked with independence, selfhood, and autonomy. These thinkers offer a variety of explanations for why societies divide realities into things “feminine” and things “masculine.” But whatever their explanation for men’s and women’s differing gender identities and behaviors, care-focused feminists regard women’s hypothetically greater capacities for care as a human strength, so much so that they tend to privilege feminist approaches to an ethics of care over the reigning ethics of justice in the Western world. In addi- tion, care-focused feminists provide excellent explanations for why women as a group disproportionately shoulder the burden of care in virtually all societies, and why men as a group do not routinely engage in caring practices. Finally, care-focused feminists provide plans and policies for reducing women’s burden of care so that women have as much time and energy as men have to develop themselves as full persons.

Like all the feminists who preceded them and now overlap with them, multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminists focus on the causes of and explanations for women’s subordination to men worldwide. However, these groups’ main contribution to feminist thought is their strong commitment to highlighting the differences that exist among women and identifying ways that diverse kinds of women can work together. Unafraid of the challenges that women’s differences sometimes present to women’s alleged solidarity, multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminists courageously address the

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ways in which race, ethnicity, sexual identity, gender identity, age, religion, level of education, occupation/profession, marital status, health condition, and so on, may separate one group of women from another. They aim to reveal how contextual factors shape women’s self-understanding as being oppressed or not oppressed. They also seek to help feminists reject both female essentialism (the view that all women are, down deep, exactly alike) and female chauvinism (the view that privileged women should take it upon themselves to speak on behalf of all women).

Although the terms “multicultural,” “global,” and “postcolonial” are often used interchangeably to describe feminists who focus on women’s varying social, cultural, economic, and political contexts, I reserve the term “multicultural” to denote feminists who focus on the differences that exist among women who live within the boundaries of one nation-state or geographical area. In turn, I use the terms “global” or “postcolonial” to denote feminists who focus on the ways in which most women’s lives in most developing nations are generally worse off than most women’s lives in most developed nations. These feminists challenge women in developed nations to acknowledge that many of their privileges are bought at the expense of the well-being of women in developing nations. Regrettably, the harmful effects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century coloniza- tion campaigns are still felt in the so-called Third World.

As attentive as multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminists are to the complexities of human beings’ relationships to each other, they do not focus, as ecofeminists do, on human beings’ relationships to the nonhuman world—that is, to nature itself. In many ways, ecofeminists offer the broadest and also the most demanding conception of the self ’s relationship to the other. According to ecofeminists, we are connected not only to each other but also to the non- human world: animal and even vegetative. Unfortunately, we do not always acknowledge our responsibilities to each other, let alone to the nonhuman world. As a result, we deplete the world’s natural resources with our machines, pollute the environment with our toxic fumes, and stockpile arms centers with tools of total destruction. In so doing, we delude ourselves that we are control- ling nature and enhancing ourselves. In point of fact, said ecofeminist Ynestra King, nature is already rebelling, and each day the human self is impoverished as yet another forest is “detreed” and yet another animal species is extinguished.19 The only way not to destroy ourselves, insist ecofeminists, is to strengthen our relationships not only with each other but also with the nonhuman world.

Challenging all the versions of feminism that have preceded them, post- modern and third-wave feminists push feminist thought to new limits. Although postmodern feminists’ insistence that women are in no way “one” poses problems for feminist theory and action (if women do not exist as a class

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or group or collectivity, it is difficult to fight against women’s oppression), this insistence also adds needed fuel to the feminist fires of plurality, multiplicity, and difference. Moreover, postmodern feminists’ rejection of in-the-box thinking helps feminists speak and write in ways that overcome the binary oppositions of traditional patriarchal thought. Postmodern feminists erase the lines between masculine and feminine, sex and gender, male and female. They seek to break down the conceptual grids that have prevented women from defining themselves in their own terms rather than through men’s terms.

Third-wave feminists, eager to shape a new-millennium feminism, push just as hard as postmodern feminists do to rethink the category “woman/women.” For third-wave feminists, difference is the way the world is. Conflict and even self-contradiction are the name of the game as women seek new identities for themselves and stir up what Judith Butler termed “gender trouble.”20 Yet for all their differences from first-wave and second-wave feminists, third-wave femi- nists have no intentions of thinking, speaking, or writing themselves and other women out of existence. Instead, they aim to answer the “woman question”— Who is she and what does she want?—in ways that it has never been answered before.

Clearly, it is a major challenge to contemporary feminism to reconcile the pressures for diversity and difference with those for integration and com- monality. Fortunately, contemporary feminists do not shrink from this chal- lenge. It seems that each year, we better understand the reasons why women worldwide are the “second sex” and how to change this state of affairs. In this third edition of my book, I have tried to discuss the weaknesses as well as the strengths of each of the feminist perspectives presented here. In so doing, I have aimed not so much at neutrality as I have at respect, since each feminist perspective has made a rich and lasting contribution to feminist thought. At the end of this book, readers looking for one winning view, a champion left standing after an intellectual free-for-all, will be disappointed. Although all feminist perspectives cannot be equally correct, there is no need here for a definitive final say. Instead there is always room for growth, improvement, reconsideration, and expansion for true feminist thinkers. And this breathing space helps keep us free from the authoritarian trap of having to know it all.

As I revised each chapter of this book and decided to delete some old chapters and add some new ones, I became increasingly convinced that I write out of a specific background of experience, as do we all. Thus, I have tried very hard to avoid either accepting or rejecting an analysis simply be- cause it resonates or fails to resonate with my own ideas and experiences. Whether I have largely succeeded or mostly failed in this attempt is some- thing I must leave up to you, my thoughtful readers.

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1 Liberal Feminism

Liberalism, the school of political thought from which liberal feminism has evolved, is in the process of reconceptualizing, reconsidering, and restruc- turing itself.1 Because this transformation is well under way, it is difficult to determine the precise status of liberal feminist thought. Therefore, if we wish to gauge the accuracy of Susan Wendell’s provocative claim that liberal feminism has largely outgrown its original base,2 we must first understand the assumptions of both classical and welfare liberalism. It may turn out that liberal feminists are “liberal” only in some ways.

Conceptual Roots of Liberal Feminist Thought and Action In Feminist Politics and Human Nature,3 Alison Jaggar observed that liberal po- litical thought generally locates our uniqueness as human persons in our capac- ity for rationality. The belief that reason distinguishes us from other animals is, however, relatively uninformative, so liberals have attempted to define reason in various ways, stressing either its moral aspects or its prudential aspects. When reason is defined as the ability to comprehend the rational principles of moral- ity, then the value of individual autonomy is stressed. In contrast, when reason is defined as the ability to determine the best means to achieve some desired end, then the value of self-fulfillment is stressed.4

Whether liberals define reason largely in moral or prudential terms, they nevertheless concur that a just society allows individuals to exercise their autonomy and to fulfill themselves. Liberals claim that the “right” must be given priority over the “good.”5 In other words, our entire system of individ- ual rights is justified because these rights constitute a framework within which we can all choose our own separate goods, provided we do not deprive others

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of theirs. Such a priority defends religious freedom, for example, neither on the grounds that it will increase the general welfare nor on the grounds that a godly life is inherently worthier than a godless one, but simply on the grounds that people have a right to practice their own brand of spirituality. The same holds for all those rights we generally identify as fundamental.

The proviso that the right takes priority over the good complicates the con- struction of a just society. For if it is true, as most liberals claim, that resources are limited and each individual, even when restrained by altruism,6 has an interest in securing as many available resources as possible, then it will be a challenge to create political, economic, and social institutions that maximize the individual’s freedom without jeopardizing the community’s welfare.

When it comes to state interventions in the private sphere (family or domestic society),7 liberals agree that the less we see of Big Brother in our bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, recreation rooms, and nurseries, the better. We all need places where we can, among family and friends, shed our public personae and be our “real” selves. When it comes to state intervention in the public sphere (civil or political society),8 however, a difference of opinion emerges between so-called classical, or libertarian, liberals on the one hand, and so-called welfare, or egalitarian, liberals on the other.9

Classical liberals think the state should confine itself to protecting civil liberties (e.g., property rights, voting rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association). They also think that, instead of interfering with the free market, the state should simply provide everyone with an equal opportunity to determine his or her own accumulations within that market. In contrast, welfare liberals believe the state should focus on economic dis- parities as well as civil liberties. As they see it, individuals enter the market with differences based on initial advantage, inherent talent, and sheer luck. At times, these differences are so great that some individuals cannot take their fair share of what the market has to offer unless some adjustments are made to offset their liabilities. Because of this perceived state of affairs, wel- fare liberals call for government interventions in the economy such as legal services, school loans, food stamps, low-cost housing, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children so that the market does not perpetuate or otherwise solidify huge inequalities.

Although both classical-liberal and welfare-liberal streams of thought appear in liberal feminist thought, most contemporary liberal feminists seem to favor welfare liberalism. In fact, when Susan Wendell (not herself a liberal feminist) described contemporary liberal feminist thought, she stressed it is “committed to major economic re-organization and considerable redistribution of wealth, since one of the modern political goals most closely associated with liberal feminism is

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equality of opportunity, which would undoubtedly require and lead to both.”10 Very few, if any, contemporary liberal feminists favor the elimination of government-funded safety nets for society’s most vulnerable members.

Since it is nearly impossible to discuss all liberal feminist thinkers, move- ments, and organizations in a single book, I have decided to focus only on Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor (Mill), the woman’s suffrage movement in the United States, Betty Friedan, and the National Organization for Women. My aim is to construct a convincing argument that, for all its shortcomings, the overall goal of liberal feminism is the wor- thy one of creating “a just and compassionate society in which freedom flourishes.”11 Only in such a society can women and men thrive equally.

Eighteenth-Century Thought: Equal Education Mary Wollstonecraft wrote at a time (1759–1799) when the economic and social position of European women was in decline. Up until the eighteenth century, productive work (work that generated an income from which a fam- ily could live) had been done in and around the family home by women as well as men. But then the forces of industrial capitalism began to draw labor out of the private home and into the public workplace. At first, this industri- alization moved slowly and unevenly, making its strongest impact on married, bourgeois women. These women were the first to find themselves left at home with little productive work to do. Married to relatively wealthy professional and entrepreneurial men, these women had no incentive to work outside the home or, if they had several servants, even inside it.12

In reading Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,13 we see how affluence worked against these eighteenth-century, married, bourgeois women. Wollstonecraft compared such “privileged” women (whom she hoped to inspire to a fully human mode of existence) to members of “the feathered race,” birds that are confined to cages and that have nothing to do but preen themselves and “stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.”14 Middle-class ladies were, in Wollstonecraft’s estimation, “kept” women who sacrificed health, liberty, and virtue for whatever prestige, pleasure, and power their husbands could provide. Because these women were not allowed to exercise outdoors lest they tan their lily-white skin, they lacked healthy bodies. Because they were not permitted to make their own decisions, they lacked liberty. And because they were discouraged from developing their powers of reason—given that a great premium was placed on indulging self and gratifying others, especially men and children—they lacked virtue.

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Although Wollstonecraft did not use terms such as “socially constructed gen- der roles,” she denied that women are, by nature, more pleasure seeking and pleasure giving than men. She reasoned that if they were confined to the same cages that trap women, men would develop the same flawed characters.15 Denied the chance to develop their rational powers, to become moral persons with con- cerns, causes, and commitments beyond personal pleasure, men, like women, would become overly “emotional,” a term Wollstonecraft tended to associate with hypersensitivity, extreme narcissism, and excessive self-indulgence.

Given her generally negative assessment of emotion and the extraordinarily high premium she placed on reason as the capacity distinguishing human beings from animals, it is no wonder Wollstonecraft abhorred Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile.16 In this classic of educational philosophy, Rousseau por- trayed the development of rationality as the most important educational goal for boys, but not for girls. Rousseau was committed to sexual dimorphism, the view that “rational man” is the perfect complement for “emotional woman,” and vice versa.17 As he saw it, men should be educated in virtues such as courage, temperance, justice, and fortitude, whereas women should be edu- cated in virtues such as patience, docility, good humor, and flexibility. Thus, Rousseau’s ideal male student, Emile, studies the humanities, the social sci- ences, and the natural sciences, whereas Rousseau’s ideal female student, Sophie, dabbles in music, art, fiction, and poetry while refining her homemak- ing skills. Rousseau hoped sharpening Emile’s mental capacities and limiting Sophie’s would make Emile a self-governing citizen and a dutiful paterfamilias and Sophie an understanding, responsive wife and a caring, loving mother.

Wollstonecraft agreed with Rousseau’s projections for Emile but not with his projections for Sophie. Drawing upon her familiarity with middle-class ladies, she predicted that, fed a steady diet of “novels, music, poetry, and gallantry,” Sophie would become a detriment rather than a complement to her husband, a creature of bad sensibility rather than good sense.18 Her hormones surging, her passions erupting, her emotions churning, Sophie would show no practical sense in performing her wifely and, especially, motherly duties.

Wollstonecraft’s cure for Sophie was to provide her, like Emile, with the kind of education that permits people to develop their rational and moral capacities, their full human potential. At times, Wollstonecraft constructed her argument in favor of educational parity in utilitarian terms. She claimed that unlike emotional and dependent women, who routinely shirk their domestic duties and indulge their carnal desires, rational and independent women will tend to be “observant daughters,” “affectionate sisters,” “faithful wives,” and “reasonable mothers.”19 The truly educated woman will be a major contributor to society’s welfare. Rather than wasting her time and

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energy on idle entertainments, she will manage her household—especially her children—“properly.”20 But it would be a mistake to think that most of Wollstonecraft’s arguments for educational parity were utilitarian. On the contrary, her overall line of reasoning in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was remarkably similar to Immanuel Kant’s overall line of reasoning in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals—namely, that unless a person acts au- tonomously, he or she acts as less than a fully human person.21 Wollstonecraft insisted if rationality is the capacity distinguishing human beings from ani- mals, then unless females are mere animals (a description most men refuse to apply to their own mothers, wives, and daughters), women as well as men have this capacity. Thus, society owes girls the same education that it owes boys, simply because all human beings deserve an equal chance to develop their rational and moral capacities so they can achieve full personhood.

Repeatedly, Wollstonecraft celebrated reason, usually at the expense of emotion. As Jane Roland Martin said, “In making her case for the rights of women . . . [Wollstonecraft] presents us with an ideal of female educa- tion that gives pride of place to traits traditionally associated with males at the expense of others traditionally associated with females.”22 It did not occur to Wollstonecraft to question the value of these traditional male traits. Nor did it occur to her to blame children’s lack of virtue on their absentee fathers, who should be summoned, in her view, only when “chas- tisement” is necessary.23 On the contrary, she simply assumed traditional male traits were “good,” and women—not men—were the ones who were rationally and morally deficient.

Throughout the pages of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Woll- stonecraft urged women to become autonomous decision makers; but be- yond insisting that the path to autonomy goes through the academy, she provided women with little concrete guidance.24 Although Wollstonecraft toyed with the idea that women’s autonomy might depend on women’s economic and political independence from men, in the end she decided well-educated women did not need to be economically self-sufficient or po- litically active in order to be autonomous. In fact, Wollstonecraft dismissed the woman’s suffrage movement as a waste of time, since in her estimation, the whole system of legal representation was merely a “convenient handle for despotism.”25

Despite the limitations of her analysis, Wollstonecraft did present a vision of a woman strong in mind and body, a person who is not a slave to her pas- sions, her husband, or her children. For Wollstonecraft, the ideal woman is less interested in fulfilling herself—if by self-fulfillment is meant any sort of pandering to duty-distracting desires—than in exercising self-control.26 In

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order to liberate herself from the oppressive roles of emotional cripple, petty shrew, and narcissistic sex object, a woman must obey the commands of reason and discharge her wifely and motherly duties faithfully.

What Wollstonecraft most wanted for women is personhood. She claimed that a woman should not be reduced to the “toy of man, his rattle,” which “must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.”27 In other words, a woman is not a “mere means,” or instrument, to one or more man’s pleasure or happiness. Rather, she is an “end-in-herself,” a rational agent whose dignity consists in having the capacity for self-determination.28 To treat someone as a mere means is to treat her as less than a person, as someone who exists not for herself but as an appendage to someone else. So, for example, if a husband treats his wife as no more than a pretty indoor plant, he treats her as an object that he nurtures merely as a means to his own delight. Similarly, if a woman lets herself so be treated, she lets herself be treated in ways that do not accord with her status as a full human person. Rather than assuming responsibil- ity for her own development and growing into a mighty redwood, she forsakes her freedom and lets others shape her into a stunted bonsai tree. No woman, in- sisted Wollstonecraft, should permit such violence to be done to her.

Nineteenth-Century Thought: Equal Liberty Writing approximately one hundred years later, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor (Mill) joined Wollstonecraft in celebrating rationality. But they con- ceived of rationality not only morally, as autonomous decision making, but also prudentially, as calculative reason, or using your head to get what you want. That their understanding of rationality should differ from that of Wollstonecraft is not surprising. Unlike Wollstonecraft, both Mill and Taylor claimed the ordinary way to maximize aggregate utility (happiness/pleasure) is to permit individuals to pursue their desires, provided the individuals do not hinder or obstruct each other in the process. Mill and Taylor also departed from Wollstonecraft in insisting that if society is to achieve sexual equality, or gender justice, then society must provide women with the same political rights and economic opportunities as well as the same education that men enjoy.

Like Mary Wollstonecraft, who twice attempted suicide, refused marriage until late in life, and had a child out of wedlock, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor led fairly unconventional lives. They met in 1830, when Harriet Taylor was already married to John Taylor and was the mother of two sons (a third child, Helen, would be born later). Harriet Taylor and Mill were immediately

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attracted to each other, both intellectually and emotionally. They carried on a close, supposedly platonic relationship for twenty years, until the death of John Taylor, whereupon they married. During the years before John Taylor’s death, Harriet Taylor and Mill routinely saw each other for dinner and fre- quently spent weekends together along the English coast. John Taylor agreed to this arrangement in return for the “external formality” of Harriet’s residing “as his wife in his house.”29

Due to their unorthodox bargain with John Taylor, Harriet Taylor and Mill found the time to author, separately and conjointly, several essays on sexual equality. Scholars generally agree that Taylor and Mill coauthored “Early Essays on Marriage and Divorce” (1832), that Taylor wrote the “Enfranchisement of Women” (1851), and that Mill wrote “The Subjection of Women” (1869). The question of these works’ authorship is significant because Taylor’s views sometimes diverged from Mill’s.

Given their personal situation, Mill and Taylor’s focus on topics such as marriage and divorce is not surprising. Confident in their relationship, Mill and Taylor did not feel they had to agree with each other about how to serve women’s and children’s best interests. Because she accepted the traditional view that maternal ties are stronger than paternal ties, Taylor simply assumed the mother would be the one to rear the children to adulthood in the event of divorce. Thus, she cautioned women to have few children. In contrast, Mill urged couples to marry late, have children late, and live in extended families or communelike situations so as to minimize divorce’s disrupting effects on children’s lives.30 Apparently, Mill envisioned that divorced men as well as divorced women would play a role in their children’s lives.

Although Taylor, unlike Mill, did not contest traditional assumptions about male and female child-rearing roles, she did contest traditional as- sumptions about women’s supposed preference for marriage and mother- hood over a career or occupation. Mill contended that even after women were fully educated and totally enfranchised, most of them would choose to remain in the private realm, where their primary function would be to “adorn and beautify” rather than to “support” life.31 In contrast, in “En- franchisement of Women,” Taylor argued that women needed to do more than read books and cast ballots; they also needed to be partners with men “in the labors and gains, risks and remunerations of productive industry.”32 Thus, Taylor predicted that if society gave women a bona fide choice be- tween devoting their lives “to one animal function and its consequence”33 on the one hand, and writing great books, discovering new worlds, and building mighty empires on the other, many women would be only too happy to leave “home, sweet home” behind them.

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Whereas the foregoing passages from “Enfranchisement” suggest Taylor believed a woman had to choose between housewifery and mothering on the one hand and working outside the home on the other, some other passages indicate she believed a woman had a third option: namely, adding a career or an occupation to her domestic and maternal roles and responsibilities. In fact, Taylor claimed a married woman cannot be her husband’s true equal unless she has the confidence and sense of entitlement that come from con- tributing “materially to the support of the family.”34 Decidedly unimpressed by Mill’s 1832 argument that women’s economic equality would depress the economy and subsequently lower wages,35 Taylor wrote instead: “Even if every woman, as matters now stand, had a claim on some man for support, how infinitely preferable is it that part of the income should be of the woman’s earning, even if the aggregate sum were but little increased by it, rather than that she should be compelled to stand aside in order that men may be the sole earners, and the sole dispensers of what is earned.”36 In short, in order to be partners rather than servants of their husbands, wives must earn an income outside the home.

In further explaining her view that married as well as single women should work, Taylor betrayed her class bias. Insisting that women cannot both work full-time outside the home and be devoted wives and mothers without running themselves ragged, Taylor claimed that working wives with children would need a “panoply of domestic servants” to help ease their bur- dens.37 In critic Zillah Eisenstein’s estimation, Taylor’s words revealed her privileged status. Circa 1850, only upper-middle-class women like Taylor could afford to hire a slew of household workers.38 Thus, Taylor, a product of class privilege, offered rich women a way to “have it all” without offering poor women the same. Never did she wonder who would be taking care of the families of rich women’s hired female help.

Like Wollstonecraft, Taylor wrote not so much to all women as to a certain privileged class of married women. Nonetheless, her writings helped smooth the entrance of many poor as well as rich women into the public world. So, too, did Mill’s. He argued in “The Subjection of Women” that if women’s rational powers were recognized as equal to men’s, then society would reap significant benefits: public-spirited citizens for society itself, intellectually stimulating spouses for husbands, a doubling of the “mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity,” and a multitude of very happy women.39 Although Mill’s case for the liberation of women did not depend on his ability to prove that all women can do anything men can do, it did depend on his ability to demonstrate that some women can do anything men can do.40 Unlike Wollstonecraft, who put no “great stress on the example of a

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few women who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution,”41 Mill used the life stories of exceptional women to strengthen his claim that male-female differences are not absolute but instead are differences of average. The average woman’s inability to do something the average man can do, said Mill, does not justify a law or taboo barring all women from attempting that thing.42

Mill also made the point that even if all women are worse than all men at something, this still does not justify forbidding women from trying to do that thing, for “what women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from.”43 Although Mill believed women would fare quite well in any competitions with men, he conceded that occasionally a biological sex difference might tip the scales in favor of male competitors. Like Wollstonecraft, however, he denied the existence of general intellectual or moral differences between men and women: “I do not know a more signal instance of the blindness with which the world, including the herd of studious men, ignore and pass over all the influences of social circumstances, than their silly depreciation of the intellectual, and silly panegyrics on the moral, nature of women.”44

Also like Wollstonecraft earlier, Mill claimed that society’s ethical double standard hurts women. He thought many of the “virtues” extolled in women are, in fact, character traits that impede women’s progress toward personhood. This is as true for an ostensibly negative trait (helplessness) as for an ostensibly positive trait (unselfishness). Mill suggested that because women’s concerns were confined to the private realm, women were preoccupied with their own interests and those of their immediate families. As a result of this state of affairs, women’s unselfishness tended to take the form of extended egoism. Women’s charity typ- ically began and ended at home. They spared no effort to further the interests of their loved ones, but they showed scant regard for the common weal.

As described above, women’s family-oriented unselfishness was not the humanitarian unselfishness Mill espoused. He treasured the unselfishness that motivates people to take into account the good of society as well as the good of the individual person or small family unit. Mill believed that if women were given the same liberties men enjoy, and if women were taught to value the good of the whole, then women would develop genuine unselfishness. This belief explains Mill’s passionate pleas for women’s suf- frage. He thought that when citizens vote, they feel obligated to cast their ballots in a way that benefits all of society and not just themselves and their loved ones.45 Whether Mill was naive to think that citizens are inherently public-spirited is, of course, debatable.

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Overall, Mill went further than Wollstonecraft did in challenging men’s alleged intellectual superiority. Stressing that men’s and women’s intellectual abilities are of the same kind, Wollstonecraft nonetheless entertained the thought that women might not be able to attain the same degree of knowl- edge that men could attain.46 Mill expressed no such reservation. He insisted intellectual achievement gaps between men and women were simply the result of men’s more thorough education and privileged position. In fact, Mill was so eager to establish that men are not intellectually superior to women that he tended to err in the opposite direction, by valorizing women’s attention to details, use of concrete examples, and intuitiveness as a superior form of knowledge not often found in men.47

Unlike Taylor, and despite his high regard for women’s intellectual abilities, Mill assumed most women would continue to choose family over career even under ideal circumstances—with marriage a free contract between real equals, legal separation and divorce easily available to wives, and jobs open to women living outside the husband-wife relationship. He also assumed that women’s choice of family over career was entirely voluntary and that such a choice involved women consenting to put their other interests in life on the back burner until their children were adults: “Like a man when he chooses a profes- sion, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood that she makes choice of the management of a household, and the bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during as many years of her life as may be required for the purpose; and that she renounces not all other objects and occupations, but all which are not consistent with the requirements of this.”48 Mill’s words attested to his apparent belief that ultimately, women, more than men, are responsible for maintaining family life. However enlight- ened his general views about women were, Mill could not overcome the belief that she who bears the children is the person best suited to rear them.

As noted, Taylor disagreed with Mill that truly liberated women would be willing to stay at home to rear their children to adulthood. Yet, like Mill, Taylor was fundamentally a reformist, not a revolutionary. To be sure, by inviting married women with children as well as single women to work out- side the home, Taylor did challenge the traditional division of labor within the family, where the man earns the money and the woman manages its use. But Taylor’s challenge to this aspect of the status quo did not go far enough. For example, it did not occur to her that if husbands were to parent along- side their wives and if domestic duties were equally divided, then both hus- bands and wives could work outside the home on a full-time basis, and working wives with children would not have to work a “double day” or hire a “panoply” of female servants to do their housework and childcare.

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Nineteenth-Century Action: The Suffrage Both John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill believed women needed suf- frage in order to become men’s equals. They claimed the vote gives people the power not only to express their own political views but also to change those systems, structures, and attitudes that contribute to their own and/or others’ oppression. Thus, it is not surprising that the nineteenth-century U.S. women’s rights movement, including the woman suffrage movement, was tied to the abolitionist movement, though not always in ways that successfully married gender and race concerns.49

When white men and women began to work in earnest for the abolition of slavery, it soon became clear to female abolitionists that male abolitionists were reluctant to link the women’s rights movement with the slaves’ rights movement. Noting it was difficult for whites (or was it simply white men?) to view women (or was it simply white women?) as an oppressed group, male abolitionists persuaded female abolitionists to disassociate women’s liberty struggles from blacks’ liberty struggles. Indeed, male abolitionists even con- vinced famed feminist orator Lucy Stone to lecture on abolition instead of women’s rights whenever her audience size was noticeably large.50

Convinced their male colleagues would reward them for being team play- ers, the U.S. women who attended the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London thought that women would play a major role at the meeting. Nothing could have proved less true. Not even Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two of the most prominent leaders of the U.S. women’s rights movement, were allowed to speak at the meeting. Angered by the way in which the men at the convention had silenced women, Mott and Stanton vowed to hold a women’s rights convention upon their return to the United States. Eight years later, in 1848, three hundred women and men met in Seneca Falls, New York, and produced a Declaration of Sentiments and twelve resolutions. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments stressed the issues Mill and Taylor had emphasized in England, particularly the need for reforms in marriage, divorce, property, and child cus- tody laws. The twelve resolutions emphasized women’s rights to express them- selves in public—to speak out on the burning issues of the day, especially “in regard to the great subjects of morals and religion,” which women were sup- posedly more qualified to address than men.51 The only one of these resolu- tions the Seneca Falls Convention did not unanimously endorse was Resolution 9, Susan B. Anthony’s Woman’s Suffrage Resolution: “Resolved, that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their

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sacred right to the franchise.”52 Many convention delegates were reluctant to press such an “extreme” demand for fear that all of their demands would be rejected. Still, with the help of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Resolution 9 did manage to pass.

Assessing the Seneca Falls Convention from the vantage point of the twentieth century, critics observe that, with the exception of Lucretia Mott’s hastily added resolution to secure for women “an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce,”53 the nineteenth- century meeting failed to address class concerns such as those that troubled underpaid white female mill and factory workers. Moreover, the convention rendered black women nearly invisible. In the same way that the abolitionist movement had focused on the rights of black men, the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement focused on the rights of mostly privileged white women. Neither white women nor white men seemed to notice much about black women.

Yet, many working-class white women and black women did contribute to the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. In fact, some black women were exceptionally gifted feminist orators. For example, Sojourner Truth delivered her often quoted speech on behalf of women at an 1851 women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. Responding to a group of male hecklers, who taunted that it was ludicrous for (white) women to desire the vote since they could not even step over a puddle or get into a horse carriage without male assistance, Sojourner Truth pointed out that no man had ever extended such help to her. Demanding the audience look at her black body, Sojourner Truth proclaimed that her “womanhood,” her “female nature,” had never pre- vented her from working, acting, and yes, speaking like a man: “I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”54

As the fates would have it, the Civil War began just as the women’s rights movement was gaining momentum. Seeing in this tragic war their best opportunity to free the slaves, male abolitionists again asked feminists to put women’s causes on the back burner, which they reluctantly did. But the end of the Civil War did not bring women’s liberation with it, and feminists increasingly found themselves at odds with recently emancipated black men. Concerned that women’s rights would again be lost in the struggle to secure black (men’s) rights, the male as well as female delegates to an 1866 national women’s rights convention decided to establish an Equal Rights Association.

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Co-chaired by Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the associa- tion had as its announced purpose the unification of the black (men’s) and woman suffrage struggles. There is considerable evidence, however, that Stanton and some of her co-workers actually “perceived the organization as a means to ensure that Black men would not receive the franchise unless and until white women were also its recipients.”55 Unmoved by Douglass’s and Truth’s observation that on account of their extreme vulnerability, black men needed the vote even more than women did, Anthony and Stanton were among those who successfully argued for the dissolution of the Equal Rights Association for fear that the association might indeed endorse the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised black men but not women.

Upon the dissolution of the Equal Rights Association, Anthony and Stanton established the National Woman Suffrage Association. At approximately the same time, Lucy Stone, who had some serious philosophical disagreements with Stanton and especially Anthony about the role of organized religion in women’s oppression, founded the American Woman Suffrage Association. Hencefor- ward, the U.S. women’s rights movement would be split in two.

In the main, the National Woman Suffrage Association forwarded a revolu- tionary feminist agenda for women, whereas the American Woman Suffrage As- sociation pushed a reformist feminist agenda. Most American women gravitated toward the more moderate American Woman Suffrage Association. By the time these two associations merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the wide-ranging, vociferous women’s rights movement of the early nineteenth century had been transformed into the single-issue, rela- tively tame woman’s suffrage movement of the late nineteenth century. From 1890 until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, the National American Woman Suffrage Association confined almost all of its activities to gaining the vote for women. Victorious after fifty-two years of concerted strug- gle, many of the exhausted suffragists chose to believe that simply by gaining the vote, women had indeed become men’s equals.56

Twentieth-Century Action: Equal Rights For nearly forty years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, femi- nists went about their work relatively quietly in the United States. Then, around 1960, a rebellious generation of feminists loudly proclaimed as fact what the suffragists Stanton and Anthony had always suspected: In order to be fully liberated, women need economic opportunities and sexual freedoms as well as civil liberties. Like their grandmothers, some of these young

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women pushed a reformist, liberal agenda, whereas others forwarded a more revolutionary, radical program of action.

By the mid-1960s, most liberal feminists had joined an emerging women’s rights group, such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), or the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL). The general purpose of these groups was to improve women’s status “by applying legal, social, and other pressures upon institutions ranging from the Bell Telephone Company to television networks to the major political parties.”57 In contrast, most radical feminists had banded together in one or another women’s liberation groups. Much smaller and more personally focused than the liberal women’s rights groups, these radical women’s liberation groups aimed to increase women’s consciousness about women’s oppression. The groups’ spirit was that of the revolutionary new left, whose goal was not to reform what they regarded as an elitist, capitalistic, com- petitive, individualistic system, but to replace it with an egalitarian, socialistic, cooperative, communitarian, sisterhood-is-powerful system. Among the largest of these radical women’s liberation groups were the Women’s International Ter- rorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), the Redstockings, the Feminists, and the New York Radical Feminists. Although Maren Lockwood Carden correctly noted in her 1974 book, The New Feminist Movement, that the ideological contrasts between the women’s rights and women’s liberation groups of the 1960s had blurred by the mid-1970s,58 women’s rights groups still remained less revolutionary than women’s liberation groups.

Because this chapter is about liberal feminists, I reserve discussion of radi- cal women’s liberation groups to Chapter 2. Here I appropriately concentrate on the history of twentieth-century liberal women’s rights groups and their activities, most of which have been in the area of legislation. Between the pas- sage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the advent of the second wave of U.S. feminism during the 1960s, only two official feminist groups—the National Woman’s Party and the National Federation of Business and Profes- sional Women’s Clubs (BPW)—promulgated women’s rights. Despite their efforts, however, discrimination against women did not end, largely because the importance of women’s rights had not yet been impressed on the con- sciousness (and conscience) of the bulk of the U.S. population. This state of affairs changed with the eruption of the civil rights movement. Sensitized to the myriad ways in which U.S. systems, structures, and laws oppressed blacks, those active in or at least sympathetic toward the civil rights movement were able to see analogies between discrimination against blacks and discrimina- tion against women. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy established the Commission on the Status of Women, which produced much new data about

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women and resulted in the formation of the Citizens’ Advisory Council, vari- ous state commissions on the status of women, and the passage of the Equal Pay Act. When Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act—amended with the Title VII provision to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race, color, religion, or national origin by private employers, employment agencies, and unions—a woman shouted from the congressional gallery: “We made it! God bless America!”59 Unfortunately, this woman’s jubilation and that of women in general was short-lived; the courts were reluctant to enforce Title VII’s “sex amendment.” Feeling betrayed by the system, women’s joy turned to anger, an anger that feminist activists used to mobilize women to fight for their civil rights with the same passion blacks had fought for theirs.

Among these feminist activists was Betty Friedan, one of the founders and first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Friedan reflected on how she and some of her associates had reacted to the courts’ refusal to take Title VII’s “sex amendment” seriously: “The ab- solute necessity for a civil rights movement for women had reached such a point of subterranean explosive urgency by 1966, that it only took a few of us to get together to ignite the spark—and it spread like a nuclear chain reaction.”60

The “spark” to which Friedan pointed was the formation of NOW, the first explicitly feminist group in the United States in the twentieth cen- tury to challenge sex discrimination in all spheres of life: social, political, economic, and personal. After considerable behind-the-scenes maneuver- ing, Friedan—then viewed as a home-breaker because of her controversial book, The Feminine Mystique (see the next section for discussion)—was elected NOW’s first president in 1966 by its three hundred charter mem- bers, male and female.

Although NOW’s first members included radical and conservative femi- nists as well as liberal feminists, it quickly became clear that NOW’s essential identity and agenda were fundamentally liberal. For example, the aim of NOW’s 1967 Bill of Rights for Women was to secure for women the same rights men have. NOW demanded the following for women:

I. That the U.S. Congress immediately pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to provide that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” and that such then be immediately ratified by the several States.

II. That equal employment opportunity be guaranteed to all women, as well as men, by insisting that the Equal Employment Opportunity Com- mission enforces the prohibitions against racial discrimination.

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III. That women be protected by law to ensure their rights to return to their jobs within a reasonable time after childbirth without the loss of sen- iority or other accrued benefits, and be paid maternity leave as a form of social security and/or employee benefit.

IV. Immediate revision of tax laws to permit the deduction of home and child-care expenses for working parents.

V. That child-care facilities be established by law on the same basis as parks, libraries, and public schools, adequate to the needs of children from the pre-school years through adolescence, as a community resource to be used by all citizens from all income levels.

VI. That the right of women to be educated to their full potential equally with men be secured by Federal and State legislation, eliminating all discrimination and segregation by sex, written and unwritten, at all levels of education, including colleges, graduate and professional schools, loans and fellowships, and Federal and State training programs such as the Job Corps.

VII. The right of women in poverty to secure job training, housing, and family allowances on equal terms with men, but without prejudice to a parent’s right to remain at home to care for his or her children; revision of welfare legislation and poverty programs which deny women dignity, pri- vacy, and self-respect.

VIII. The right of women to control their own reproductive lives by re- moving from the penal code laws limiting access to contraceptive informa- tion and devices, and by repealing penal laws governing abortion.61

NOW’s list of demands pleased the organization’s liberal members but made both its conservative and radical members angry, albeit for different reasons. Whereas conservative members objected to the push for permissive contraception and abortion laws, radical members were angered by NOW’s failure to support women’s sexual rights, particularly the right to choose between heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian lifestyles. Missing from NOW’s 1967 Bill of Rights was any mention of important women’s issues such as domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and pornography.62

Although Friedan acknowledged that “the sex-role debate . . . cannot be avoided if equal opportunity in employment, education and civil rights are ever to mean more than paper rights,”63 she still insisted “that the gut issues of this revolution involve employment and education and new social institu- tions and not sexual fantasy.”64 Worried that NOW would change its tradi- tional liberal focus to a more radical one, Friedan was among those who most strongly opposed public support of lesbianism by NOW. Allegedly, she termed NOW’s lesbian members a “lavender menace,”65 since, as she saw it, they alienated mainstream society from feminists in general.

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Friedan’s concerns about the “lavender menace” notwithstanding, NOW eventually endorsed four resolutions forwarded by “the lavender menace,” the Gay Liberation Front Women and Radical Lesbians. The resolutions, presented at NOW’s 1970 Congress to Unite Women, read:

1. Women’s Liberation is a lesbian plot. 2. Whenever the label lesbian is used against the movement collectively

or against women individually, it is to be affirmed, not denied. 3. In all discussions of birth control, homosexuality must be included as

a legitimate method of contraception. 4. All sex education curricula must include lesbianism as a valid, legitimate

form of sexual expression and love.66

Moreover, NOW began to stress that its aim was to serve not only the women most likely to survive and thrive in the system but any woman who believes women’s rights should be equal to men’s. Beginning with the 1971 presidency of Arlein Hernandez, a Hispanic woman, a diverse array of minority and lesbian women (including Patricia Ireland, president of NOW from 1993 to 2001) assumed leadership as well as membership roles in NOW.67 The organization’s greater attention to women’s differ- ences meant its members could no longer claim to know what all women want but only what specific groups of women want. Increasingly, the intel- lectual energies of NOW as well as other women’s rights groups became focused on the implications of the so-called sameness-difference debate: Is gender equality best achieved by stressing women’s oneness as a gender or their diversity as individuals, the similarities between women and men or the differences between them? To this day, the many answers to this ques- tion continue to shape and reshape NOW’s political agenda.

Twentieth-Century Thought: Sameness Versus Difference It is instructive to reflect upon Betty Friedan’s career as a writer not only because of her identification with NOW but also because of her own evolu- tion as a thinker who first took it for granted that all women are the same and who then came to quite a different conclusion. Like most contemporary lib- eral feminists, Friedan gradually accepted both the radical feminist critique that liberal feminists are prone to co-optation by the “male establishment” and the conservative feminist critique that liberal feminists are out of touch with the bulk of U.S. women who hold the institutions of marriage, mother- hood, and the family in high regard. When she wrote her 1963 classic, The

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Feminine Mystique,68 Friedan seemed oblivious to any other perspectives than those of white, middle-class, heterosexual, educated women who found the traditional roles of wife and mother unsatisfying. She wrote that in lieu of more meaningful goals, these women spent too much time cleaning their al- ready tidy homes, improving their already attractive appearances, and in- dulging their already spoiled children.69 Focusing on this unappealing picture of family life in affluent U.S. suburbs, Friedan concluded that contemporary women needed to find meaningful work in the full-time, public workforce. Wives’ and mothers’ partial absence from home would enable husbands and children to become more self-sufficient people, capable of cooking their own meals and doing their own laundry.70

Although Friedan had little patience for obsequious wives and doting moth- ers, she did not, as some critics thought, demand women sacrifice marriage and motherhood for a high-powered career. On the contrary, she believed a woman could have a loving family as well: “The assumption of your own identity, equality, and even political power does not mean you stop needing to love, and be loved by, a man, or that you stop caring for your own kids.”71 In Friedan’s estimation, the error in the feminine mystique was not that it valued marriage and motherhood but that it overvalued these two institutions. To think that a woman who is a wife and mother has no time for a full-time, professional career is to limit her development as a full human person, said Friedan. As soon as a woman sees housework for what it is—something to get out of the way, to be done “quickly and efficiently”—and sees marriage and motherhood for what it is, a part of her life but not all of it, she will find plenty of time and energy to develop her total self in “creative work” outside the home.72 With just a bit of help, any woman, like any man, can meet all of her personal obli- gations and thereby become free to assume significant roles and responsibilities in the public world, reasoned Friedan.

In critics’ estimation, The Feminine Mystique explained well enough why marriage and motherhood are not enough for a certain kind of woman. But as the critics saw it, the book failed to address a host of issues deeper than “the problem that has no name”—Friedan’s tag for the dissatisfaction sup- posedly felt by suburban, white, educated, middle-class, heterosexual house- wives in the United States. In particular, The Feminine Mystique misjudged just how difficult it would be for even privileged women to combine a career with marriage and motherhood unless major structural changes were made both within and outside the family. Like Wollstonecraft, Taylor, and Mill before her, Friedan sent women out into the public realm without summon- ing men into the private domain to pick up their fair share of the slack.

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By the time she wrote The Second Stage,73 about twenty years after The Femi- nine Mystique, Friedan had come to see that her critics were right. Often it is very difficult for a woman to combine marriage, motherhood, and full-time work outside the home. Observing the ways in which some members of her daughter’s generation ran themselves ragged in the name of feminism—trying to be full-time career women as well as full-time housewives and mothers— Friedan concluded that 1980s “superwomen” were no less oppressed (albeit for different reasons) than their 1960s “stay-at-home” mothers had been. Increas- ingly, she urged feminists to ask themselves whether women either can or should try to meet not simply one but two standards of perfection: the one set in the workplace by traditional men, who had wives to take care of all their non- workplace needs, and the one set in the home by traditional women, whose whole sense of worth, power, and mastery came from being ideal housewives and mothers.74

Friedan’s own answer to the question she posed was that women needed to stop trying both to “do it all” and to “be it all.” She insisted, however, that the proper cure for the superwoman syndrome was not simply to renounce love in favor of work, or vice versa. On the contrary, said Friedan, women who chose either work or love often told her they regretted their decision. For example, one woman who renounced marriage and motherhood for a full-time career confessed to Friedan: “I was the first woman in management here. I gave every- thing to the job. It was exciting at first, breaking in where women never were before. Now it’s just a job. But it’s the devastating loneliness that’s the worst. I can’t stand coming back to this apartment alone every night. I’d like a house, maybe a garden. Maybe I should have a kid, even without a father. At least then I’d have a family. There has to be some better way to live.”75 Another woman who made the opposite choice, forsaking job for family, admitted to Friedan:

It makes me mad—makes me feel like a child—when I have to ask my hus- band for money. My mother was always dependent on my father and so fearful of life. She is lost now without him. It frightens me, the thought of being dependent like my mother, though I have a very happy marriage. I get so upset, listening to battered wives on television, women with no op- tions. It improves your sense of self-worth when you don’t depend on your husband for everything good in life, when you can get it for yourself. I’m trying so hard to treat my daughter equally with my son. I don’t want her to have the fears that paralyzed my mother and that I’ve always had to fight. I want her to have real options.76

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Rather than despairing over these and other women’s choices, Friedan used them as talking points to convince 1980s feminists to move from what she termed first-stage feminism to what she labeled second-stage feminism. She noted this new form of feminism would require women to work with men to escape the excesses of the feminist mystique, “which denied the core of women’s personhood that is fulfilled through love, nurture, home” as well as the excesses of the feminine mystique, “which defined women solely in terms of their relation to men as wives, mothers and homemakers.”77 Together, women and men might be able to develop the kind of social val- ues, leadership styles, and institutional structures needed to permit both sexes to achieve fulfillment in the public and private world alike.

Friedan’s program for reigniting the women’s movement was, as we shall see, vulnerable to several attacks. For example, it inadequately challenged the assumption that women are “responsible for the private life of their family members.”78 Zillah Eisenstein criticized Friedan’s support of so-called flextime (an arrangement that permits employees to set their starting and leaving hours): “It is never clear whether this arrangement is supposed to ease women’s double burden (of family and work) or significantly restructure who is respon- sible for childcare and how this responsibility is carried out.”79 Suspecting that women rather than men would use flextime to mesh their workday with their children’s school day, Eisenstein worried that flextime would give employers yet another reason to devalue female employees as less committed to their work than male employees.

In all fairness to Friedan, however, she did explicitly mention in The Sec- ond Stage (written after Eisenstein’s critique of Friedan) that when an arrangement like flextime is described as a structural change permitting mothers to better care for their children, the wrongheaded idea that home and family are women’s sole responsibility rather than women’s and men’s joint responsibility is reinforced.80 Unlike the Friedan of The Feminine Mystique, the Friedan of The Second Stage seemed quite aware that unless women’s assimilation into the public world is coupled with the simultaneous assimila- tion of men into the private world, women will always have to work harder than men. Although Friedan conceded that most men might not be ready, willing, or able to embrace the “househusband” role, she nonetheless insisted it is just as important for men to develop their private and personal selves as it is for women to develop their public and social selves. Men who realize this also realize women’s liberation is men’s liberation. A man does not have to be “just a breadwinner”81 or just a runner in the rat race. Like his wife, he, too, can be an active participant in the thick web of familial and friendship rela- tionships he and she weave together.82

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In some ways, the difference between the Friedan of The Feminine Mys- tique and the Friedan of The Second Stage is the difference between a feminist who believes women need to be the same as men in order to be equal to men and a feminist who believes women can be men’s equals, provided society val- ues the “feminine” as much as the “masculine.” The overall message of The Feminine Mystique was that women’s liberation hinged on women becoming like men. Friedan peppered the pages of The Feminine Mystique with com- ments such as: “If an able American woman does not use her human energy and ability in some meaningful pursuit (which necessarily means competi- tion, for there is competition in every serious pursuit of our society), she will fritter away her energy in neurotic symptoms, or unproductive exercise, or destructive ‘love,’” and “Perhaps men may live longer in America when women carry more of the burden of the battle with the world instead of being a burden themselves. I think their wasted energy will continue to be destruc- tive to their husbands, to their children, and to themselves until it is used in their own battle with the world.”83 To be a full human being is, in short, to think and act like a man.

Eighteen years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan’s message to women had substantially changed. In The Second Stage, she de- scribed as culturally feminine the so-called beta styles of thinking and acting, which emphasize “fluidity, flexibility and interpersonal sensitivity,” and as cul- turally masculine the so-called alpha styles of thinking and acting, which stress “hierarchical, authoritarian, strictly task-oriented leadership based on instru- mental, technological rationality.”84 Rather than offering 1980s women the same advice she had offered 1960s women—namely, minimize your feminine, beta tendencies and maximize your masculine, alpha tendencies—Friedan counseled 1980s women to embrace feminine, beta styles. Having convinced herself that women did not need to deny their differences from men to achieve equality with men, Friedan urged 1980s women to stop “aping the accepted dominant Alpha mode of established movements and organizations” and start using their “Beta intuitions” to solve the social, political, and economic prob- lems that threaten humankind.85 The challenge of the second stage of femi- nism, insisted Friedan, was for women (and men) to replace the “win-or-lose, do-or-die method of the hunter or the warrior” with the kind of thinking “women developed in the past as they dealt on a day-to-day basis with small problems and relationships in the family, mostly without thinking about it in the abstract.”86 Only then would the world’s citizens realize their very survival depends on replacing competitive strategies with cooperative initiatives.

Given the foregoing analysis, it is not surprising that Friedan later claimed gender-specific laws rather than general-neutral laws are better able to secure

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equality between the sexes. In 1986, she joined a coalition supporting a Cali- fornia law requiring employers to grant as much as four months’ unpaid leave to women disabled by pregnancy or childbirth. In taking this stand, she alien- ated the NOW members who believed that to treat men and women equally should mean to treat them in the same way. If men should not receive special treatment on account of their sex, then neither should women. According to Friedan, this line of reasoning, which she herself pressed in the 1960s, is mis- guided. It asks the law to treat women as “male clones,” when in fact “there has to be a concept of equality that takes into account that women are the ones who have the babies.”87

If the Friedan of the 1980s is right, then the task of liberal feminists is to determine not what liberty and equality are for abstract, rational persons but what liberty and equality are for concrete men and women. To be sure, this is a difficult task. Among others, Rosalind Rosenberg advised liberal feminists: “If women as a group are allowed special benefits, you open up the group to charges that it is inferior. But, if we deny all differences, as the women’s movement has so often done, you deflect attention from the disadvantages women labor under.”88 Rosenberg’s cautionary words raise many questions. Is there really a way to treat women and men both differently and equally without falling into some version of the pernicious separate-but-equal approach that characterized race relations in the United States until the early 1960s? Or, should liberal feminists work toward the elimination of male- female differences as the first step toward true equality? If so, should women become like men in order to be equal with men? Or should men become like women in order to be equal with women? Or finally, should both men and women become androgynous, each person combining the same “correct” blend of positive masculine and feminine characteristics in order to be equal with every other person?

To the degree that The Feminine Mystique advised women to become like men, The Second Stage urged women to be like women. But The Second Stage did more than this. It also encouraged men and women alike to work toward an androgynous future in which all human beings manifest both traditionally mas- culine and traditionally feminine traits. Once she decided that androgyny was in all human beings’ best interests, Friedan stayed committed to her vision. Indeed, she devoted many pages of her third major book, The Fountain of Age, to singing androgyny’s praises. Specifically, she urged aging alpha men to de- velop their passive, nurturing, or contemplative feminine qualities, and aging beta women to develop their bold, assertive, commanding, or adventurous mas- culine qualities.89 Insisting that people over fifty should explore their “other side”—whether masculine or feminine—Friedan noted that women over fifty

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who go back to school or work or who become actively engaged in the public world report the fifty-plus years as being the best ones of their lives. Similarly, men over fifty who start focusing on the quality of their personal relationships and interior lives report a similar kind of satisfaction in older age. Unfortu- nately, added Friedan, the number of men who age well is far smaller than the number of women who age well. In our society, there are simply more opportu- nities for older women to develop their masculine traits than there are for older men to develop their feminine traits. If a man has neglected his wife and chil- dren for years because he has made work his first priority, by the time he is ready to attend to his personal relationships, these relationships may be extremely troubled. As a result, he may decide to seek a new wife with whom to have a sec- ond family—repeating the activities of his youth in the hope of “getting it right” this time. Worried about the left-behind “old wife” and “first family,” Friedan urged aging men to find ways of loving and working that differed from the ways they loved and worked as twenty-, thirty-, or forty-year-olds.

The overall message of The Fountain of Age is that the people most likely to grow, change, and become more fully themselves as they age are precisely those people who move beyond polarized sex roles and creatively develop whichever side of themselves they neglected to develop as young men and women. In short, the happiest and most vital old men and women are an- drogynous persons.

The more she focused on the idea of androgyny, the more Friedan seemed to move toward humanism and away from feminism, however. Increasingly, she described feminist “sexual politics” as the “no-win battle of women as a whole sex, oppressed victims, against men as a whole sex, the oppressors.”90 In addition, she urged women to join with men to create a “new [human] politics that must emerge beyond reaction.”91 Eventually, Friedan claimed that because “human wholeness” is the true “promise of feminism,” feminists should move beyond a focus on women’s issues (issues related to women’s reproductive and sexual roles, rights, and responsibilities) in order to work with men on “the concrete, practical, everyday problems of living, working and loving as equal persons.”92

In a shift that appears to be more than mere coincidence, NOW’s focus has also moved in the “human” direction suggested by Friedan, a trend that has brought NOW and its first president under concerted attack by radical feminists in particular. In contrast to Friedan and many liberal members of NOW, radical feminists doubt feminism can move beyond “women’s issues” and still remain feminism. They claim that as long as our culture’s under- standing of what it means to be a human being remains androcentric (male- centered), it is premature for feminists to become humanists.

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To be sure, Friedan was not the first liberal feminist who found human- ism attractive. In their own distinct ways, Wollstonecraft, Taylor, and Mill each wanted personhood, full membership in the human community for women. The hypothesis that the ends and aims of feminism may, after all, be identical with those of humanism is a controversial one but worth keeping in mind as we consider recent trends in liberal feminism.

Contemporary Directions in Liberal Feminism Betty Friedan is just one of thousands of women who may be classified as liberal feminists. As Zillah Eisenstein noted, Elizabeth Holtzman, Bella Abzug, Eleanor Smeal, Pat Schroeder, and Patsy Mink are liberal feminists, as are many other leaders and members of NOW and the Women’s Equity Action League.93 Although these women are sometimes divided on specific issues related to women, they do agree that the single most important goal of women’s liberation is sexual equality, or, as it is sometimes termed, gender justice.

Liberal feminists wish to free women from oppressive gender roles—that is, from those roles used as excuses or justifications for giving women a lesser place, or no place at all, in the academy, the forum, and the marketplace. These feminists stress that patriarchal society conflates sex and gender,94 deeming appropriate for women only those jobs associated with the tradi- tional feminine personality. Thus, in the United States, for example, women are pushed into jobs like nursing, teaching, and childcare, while they are steered away from jobs in business, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In addition, legislation specifically barring women from such “masculine” jobs as mining and firefighting or preventing women from working the night shift or overtime is not exactly a distant memory. To be sure, de jure gender discrimination in the workplace is relatively rare nowa- days. But de facto gender discrimination in the workplace remains all too prevalent. Faced with a choice between male or female candidates for certain jobs, many employers still prefer to hire men for particularly demanding po- sitions on the grounds that women are more likely than men to let their fam- ily responsibilities interfere with their job commitment and performance.

It is sometimes argued that men, no less than women, are also the victims of de facto gender discrimination—that even if the law has always been kind to men, other vehicles of social control have not. Thus, men’s liberation activists complain about parents who never hire male babysitters and about nursery schools that prefer to fill their staff positions with women. Although liberal feminists sympathize with men who find it difficult to pursue child-centered careers because of de facto gender discrimination, they still think the kind of de

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facto gender discrimination men experience is not nearly as systematic as the kind that women experience. Society remains structured in ways that favor men and disfavor women in the competitive race for power, prestige, and money. The fact that, as of 2005, U.S. women still earned only seventy-two cents for every dollar men earned is not an accident.95 Although women some- times earn less than men because they freely choose to work less hard or fewer hours than men do, more often, women’s salaries are lower than men’s because society expects women to make their families their first priority. If a dual-career couple has a child, an aging parent, or an ailing relative in need of care, chances are that the female member of the couple will be the person who slows down or gives up her career to lend a helping hand.

In their discussions of the structural and attitudinal impediments to women’s progress, contemporary liberal feminists often disagree about how to handle these hurdles. There are two types of liberal feminists: classical and welfare. Like classical liberals in general, classical liberal feminists favor lim- ited government and a free market. They also view political and legal rights as particularly important. Freedom of expression, religion, and conscience play a major role in the psyches of classical liberal feminists. In contrast, wel- fare liberal feminists are like welfare liberals in general. Welfare liberals think government should provide citizens, especially underprivileged ones, with housing, education, health care, and social security. Moreover, they think the market should be limited by means of significant taxes and curbs on profits. For welfare liberal feminists, social and economic rights are the condition of possibility for the exercise of political and legal rights.

One way to better understand the difference between classical liberal femi- nists and welfare liberal feminists is to focus on a concrete issue such as affirma- tive action policy. Classical liberal feminists believe that after discriminatory laws and policies have been removed from the books, thereby formally enabling women to compete equally with men, not much else can be done about “birds of a feather flocking together”—about male senior professors, for example, being more favorably disposed toward a male candidate for a faculty position than toward an equally qualified female candidate. In contrast, welfare liberal feminists urge society to break up that “old flock (gang) of mine,” especially when failure to make feathers fly results in asymmetrical gender ratios such as the one that characterized Harvard University’s senior arts and sciences faculty in the early 1970s: 483 men, zero women.96 Specifically, they advocate that female applicants to both schools and jobs either be (1) selected over equally qualified white male applicants (so-called affirmative action) or, more contro- versially, (2) selected over better qualified white male applicants, provided the fe- male applicants are still able to perform adequately (so-called preferential

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treatment).97 Welfare liberal feminists insist that to the degree such policies are viewed as temporary, they do not constitute reverse discrimination. As soon as men and women have equal social status and economic clout, there will be no need for either affirmative action or preferential treatment policies. Indeed, when women achieve de facto as well as de jure equality with men, policies advantaging women over men would be markedly unfair.

We may think the only meaningful liberal feminist approaches to combat- ing gender discrimination are the classical and welfare approaches, both of which rely heavily on legal remedies. But as noted earlier, in the analysis of Betty Friedan’s writings, another approach to combating gender discrimina- tion uses the ideal of androgyny to counteract society’s traditional tendency to value masculine traits or men more than feminine traits or women. If society encouraged everyone to develop both positive masculine and positive femi- nine traits, then no one would have reason to think less of women than of men. Discrimination on the bases of gender and biological sex would cease.

Clearly, discussions of sex differences, gender roles, and androgyny have helped focus liberal feminists’ drive toward liberty, equality, and fairness for all. According to Jane English, terms such as sex roles and gender traits denote “the patterns of behavior which the two sexes are socialized, encouraged, or coerced into adopting, ranging from ‘sex-appropriate’ personalities to inter- ests and professions.”98 Boys are instructed to be masculine, girls to be femi- nine. Psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists tend to define the “masculine” and “feminine” in terms of prevailing cultural stereotypes, which are influenced by racial, class, and ethnic factors. Thus, to be masculine in middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant United States is, among other things, to be rational, ambitious, and independent, and to be feminine is, among other things, to be emotional, nurturant, and dependent. To be sure, even within this segment of the population, exceptions to the rule will be found. Some biological males will manifest feminine gender traits, and some biological females will manifest masculine gender traits. But these individu- als will be deemed exceptional or deviant. No matter what group of people (e.g., working-class Italian Catholics) is under scrutiny, then, gender-role stereotyping will limit the individual’s possibilities for development as a unique self. The woman who displays characteristics her social group regards as masculine will be viewed as less than a real woman; the man who shows so-called feminine traits will be considered less than a real man.99

In order to liberate women and men from the culturally constructed cages of masculinity and femininity, many liberal feminists besides Betty Friedan advocate the formation of androgynous personalities.100 Some liberal femi- nists favor monoandrogyny—the development of an ideal personality type

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that embodies the best of prevailing masculine and feminine gender traits.101 According to psychologist Sandra Bem, the monoandrogynous person pos- sesses a full complement of traditional female qualities—nurturance, compas- sion, tenderness, sensitivity, affiliation, cooperativeness—along with a full complement of traditional male qualities—aggressiveness, leadership, initia- tive, competitiveness.102 (Recall that this list of traditional qualities probably needs to be modified, depending on the racial, class, and ethnic characteristics of the group under consideration.) Other liberal feminists resist monoandrog- yny and instead advocate polyandrogyny—the development of multiple per- sonality types, some of which are totally masculine, others totally feminine, and still others a mixture.103 Whether liberal feminists espouse monoandrog- yny or polyandrogyny, however, they tend to agree a person’s biological sex should not determine his or her psychological and social gender.

Critiques of Liberal Feminism In recent years, nonliberal feminists have increasingly dismissed liberal femi- nists. These critics claim that the main tenets of liberal feminist thought (all human persons are rational and free, share fundamental rights, and are equal) do not necessarily advance all women’s interests. At best, they advance the inter- ests of only certain kinds of women—namely, privileged women who, because of their privilege, think and act like men. Because the critiques leveled against liberal feminism are quite harsh, we need to carefully assess their merit.

Critique One: Reason, Freedom, and Autonomy Are Not As Good As They Sound

In Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Alison Jaggar formulated a powerful cri- tique of liberal feminism. She claimed that the rational, free, and autonomous self that liberals favor is not neutral between the sexes. On the contrary, it is a “male” self.

Realizing that not everyone would understand why a rational, free, and autonomous self is “male,” Jaggar carefully defended her point. She first noted that because liberals, including liberal feminists, locate human beings’ “specialness” in human rationality and autonomy, liberals are so-called nor- mative dualists—thinkers committed to the view that the functions and activities of the mind are somehow better than those of the body.104 Eating, drinking, excreting, sleeping, and reproducing are not, according to this view, quintessential human activities, because members of most other animal species also engage in them. Instead, what sets human beings apart from the

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rest of animal creation is their capacity to think, reason, calculate, wonder, imagine, and comprehend.

Jaggar then speculated that because of the original sexual division of la- bor, mental activities and functions were increasingly emphasized over bodily activities and functions in Western liberal thought. Given men’s dis- tance from nature, their undemanding reproductive and domestic roles, and the amount of time they were consequently able to spend cultivating the life of the mind, men tended to devalue the body, regarding it as a pro- tective shell whose contours had little to do with their self-definition. In contrast, given women’s close ties to nature, their heavy reproductive and domestic roles, and the amount of time they consequently had to spend caring for people’s bodies, women tended to value the body, viewing it as essential to their personal identity. Because men took over the field of phi- losophy early on, observed Jaggar, men’s way of seeing themselves came to dominate Western culture’s collective pool of ideas about human nature. As a result, all liberals, male or female, nonfeminist or feminist, tend to accept as truth the priority of the mental over the bodily, even when their own daily experiences contradict this belief.

Liberal feminists’ adherence to some version of normative dualism is prob- lematic for feminism, according to Jaggar, not only because normative dualism leads to a devaluation of bodily activities and functions but also because it usu- ally leads to both political solipsism and political skepticism. (Political solipsism is the belief that the rational, autonomous person is essentially isolated, with needs and interests separate from, and even in opposition to, those of every other individual. Political skepticism is the belief that the fundamental ques- tions of political philosophy—what constitutes human well-being and fulfill- ment, and what are the means to attain it?—have no common answer.) Thus, the result of valuing the mind over the body and the independence of the self from others is the creation of a politics that puts an extraordinary premium on liberty—on the rational, autonomous, independent, self-determining, isolated, separated, unique person’s ability to think, do, and be whatever he or she deems worthy.105

Jaggar criticized political solipsism on empirical grounds, noting it makes little sense to think of individuals as somehow existing prior to the formation of community through some sort of contract. She observed, for example, that any pregnant woman knows a child is related to others (at least to her) even before it is born. The baby does not—indeed could not—exist as a lonely atom prior to subsequent entrance into the human community. Human infants are born helpless and require great care for many years. She explained that because this care cannot be adequately provided by a single adult,

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humans live in social groups that cooperatively bring offspring to maturity: “Human interdependence is . . . necessitated by human biology, and the as- sumption of individual self-sufficiency is plausible only if one ignores human biology.”106 Thus, Jaggar insisted, liberal political theorists need to explain not how and why isolated individuals come together but how and why communi- ties dissolve. Competition, not cooperation, is the anomaly.

To add force to her empirical argument, Jaggar observed that political solipsism makes no sense conceptually. Here she invoked Naomi Scheman’s point that political solipsism requires belief in abstract individualism.107 The abstract individual is one whose emotions, beliefs, abilities, and interests can supposedly be articulated and understood without any reference whatsoever to social context. Kant’s person is this type of abstract individual—a pure reason unaffected/uninfected by either the empirical-psychological ego or the empirical-biological body. However, Kant’s philosophy notwithstanding, said Scheman, we are not abstract individuals. We are instead concrete indi- viduals able to identify certain of our physiological sensations as ones of sor- row, for example, only because we are “embedded in a social web of interpretation that serves to give meaning”108 to our twitches and twinges, our moans and groans, our squealing and screaming. Apart from this inter- pretative grid, we are literally self-less—that is, our very identities are deter- mined by our socially constituted wants and desires. We are, fundamentally, the selves our communities create, an observation that challenges the U.S. myth of the self-sufficient individual.

Political skepticism collapses together with political solipsism according to Jaggar, for political skepticism also depends on an overly abstract and indi- vidualistic conception of the self. In contrast to the liberals or liberal femi- nists who insist the state should refrain from privileging any one conception of human well-being over another, Jaggar argued that the state should serve as more than a traffic cop who, without commenting on drivers’ stated desti- nations, merely makes sure their cars do not collide. Whether we like it or not, she said, human biology and psychology dictate a set of basic human needs, and societies that treat these basic needs as optional cannot expect to survive, let alone to thrive. Thus, said Jaggar, the state must do more than keep traffic moving; it must also block off certain roads even if some individ- uals want to travel down them.

Defenders of liberal feminism challenge Jaggar’s and Scheman’s critique of liberal feminism on the grounds that the liberalism of liberal feminists is not the same as the liberalism of liberal nonfeminists. In what she termed a quali- fied defense of liberal feminism, Susan Wendell stressed that liberal feminists are not fundamentally committed either to separating the rational from the

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emotional or to valuing the former over the latter. On the contrary, they seem fully aware that reason and emotion, mind and body, are “equally necessary to human survival and the richness of human experience.”109 Indeed, observed Wendell, if liberal feminists lacked a conception of the self as an integrated whole, we would be hard pressed to explain their tendency to view androgyny as a positive state of affairs. For the most part, liberal feminists want their sons to develop a wide range of emotional responses and domestic skills as much as they want their daughters to develop an equally wide range of rational capaci- ties and professional talents. Complete human beings are both rational and emotional. Thus, Wendell urged critics to read liberal feminist texts more sympathetically, as “a philosophically better kind of liberalism”110 and to over- come the misconception that “[a] commitment to the value of individuals and their self-development, or even to the ethical priority of individuals over groups,” is automatically a commitment “to narcissism or egoism or to the be- lief that one’s own most important characteristics are somehow independent of one’s relationships with other people.”111 Just because a woman refuses to spend her whole day nurturing her family does not mean she is more selfish than a man who, in the name of professional duty, may spend no time with his family. A person is selfish only when he or she takes more than his or her fair share of a resource: money, time, or even something intangible like love.

Critique Two: Women as Men?

Jean Bethke Elshtain, a communitarian political theorist, is even more critical of liberal feminism than Alison Jaggar is. Like Jaggar, Elshtain claimed liberal feminists are wrong to emphasize individual interests, rights, and personal free- dom over the common good, obligations, and social commitment, since “there is no way to create real communities out of an aggregate of ‘freely’ choosing adults.”112 In addition, more so than Jaggar, Elshtain castigated liberal femi- nists for putting an apparently high premium on so-called male values. She accused the Friedan of the 1960s—and, to a lesser extent, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Taylor—of equating male being with human being, “manly” virtue with human virtue. In her critique “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” Elshtain identified what she considered liberal feminism’s three major flaws: (1) its claim women can become like men if they set their minds to it; (2) its claim most women want to become like men; and (3) its claim all women should want to become like men, to aspire to masculine values.

With respect to the first claim, that women can become like men, Elshtain pointed to the general liberal feminist belief that male-female differences are

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the products of culture rather than biology, of nurture rather than nature. She claimed liberal feminists refuse to entertain the possibility that some sex differences are biologically determined, for fear that affirmative answers could be used to justify the repression, suppression, and oppression of women. For this reason, many liberal feminists have, in Elshtain’s estimation, become “excessive environmentalists,” people who believe that gender iden- tities are the nearly exclusive product of socialization, changeable at society’s will.113

Although she wanted to avoid both the reactionary position of contem- porary sociobiologists, according to whom biology is indeed destiny, and the sentimental speculations of some nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists—according to whom women are, by nature, morally better than men114—Elshtain claimed that society cannot erase long-standing male- female differences without inflicting violence on people. Unless we wish to do what Plato suggested in The Republic, namely, banish everyone over the age of twelve and begin an intensive program of centrally controlled and uniform socialization from infancy onward, we cannot hope, said Elshtain, to eliminate gender differences between men and women in just a few gen- erations. In sum, women cannot be like men unless we are prepared to com- mit ourselves to the kind of social engineering and behavior modification that is incompatible with the spirit, if not also the letter, of liberal law.115

Liberal feminism also has a tendency, claimed Elshtain, to overestimate the number of women who want to be like men. She dismissed the view that any woman who wants more than anything else to be a wife and mother is a benighted and befuddled victim of patriarchal “false consciousness.” Patriarchy, in Elshtain’s estimation, is simply not powerful enough to make mush out of millions of women’s minds. If it were, feminists would be unable to provide a cogent explanation for the emergence of feminist “true consciousness” out of pervasive patriarchal socialization. Elshtain observed that liberal feminists’ attempt to reduce “wifing” and “mothering” to mere “roles” is misguided:

Mothering is not a “role” on par with being a file clerk, a scientist, or a member of the Air Force. Mothering is a complicated, rich, ambivalent, vexing, joyous activity which is biological, natural, social, symbolic, and emotional. It carries profoundly resonant emotional and sexual impera- tives. A tendency to downplay the differences that pertain between, say, mothering and holding a job, not only drains our private relations of much of their significance, but also over-simplifies what can and should be done to alter things for women, who are frequently urged to change roles in order to solve their problems.116

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If, after investing years of physical and emotional energy in being a wife and mother, a woman is told she made the wrong choice, that she could have done something “significant” with her life instead, her reaction is not likely to be a positive one. It is one thing to tell a person he or she should try a new hairstyle; it is quite another to advise a person to get a more meaningful destiny.

Finally, as Elshtain saw it, liberal feminists are wrong to sing “a paean of praise to what Americans themselves call the ‘rat race,’”117 to tell women they should absorb traditional masculine values. Articles written for women about dressing for success, making it in a man’s world, being careful not to cry in public, avoiding intimate friendships, being assertive, and playing hardball serve only to erode what may, according to Elshtain, ultimately be the best about women: their learned ability to create and sustain community through involvement with friends and family. Woman ought to resist membership in the “rat race” culture. Rather than encouraging each other to mimic the tradi- tional behavior of successful men, who spend a minimum of time at home and a maximum of time at the office, women ought to work toward the kind of society in which men as well as women have as much time for friends and family as for business associates and professional colleagues.

Although she came close here to forwarding the problematic thesis that every wife and mother is the Virgin Mary in disguise, Elshtain insisted maternal thinking “need not and must not descend into the sentimental- ization that vitiated much Suffragist discourse.”118 Fearing that full partic- ipation in the public sphere would threaten female virtue, the suffragists reasoned “the vote” was a way for women to reform the evil, deceitful, and ugly public realm without ever having to leave the supposed goodness, truth, and beauty of the private realm. As Elshtain saw it, had the suffra- gists not constructed a false polarity between male vice and female virtue, between the “evil” public world and the “good” private world, they might have marched into the public world, demanding it absorb the virtues and values of the private world from which they had come.119

In assessing Elshtain’s critique of liberal feminism, 1990s liberal feminists observed that although Elshtain’s critique applied to Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), it did not apply to Friedan’s The Second Stage (1981). More generally, 1990s liberal feminists found several reasons to fault Elsh- tain’s communitarian line of thought. In particular, they saw her as embrac- ing an “overly romanticized view of a traditional community, where the status quo is not only given but often embraced”120 and where, therefore, women’s traditional roles remain largely unchanged even if supposedly more valued by society as a whole. They also saw her as accepting the values of a community without critically examining its exclusionary potentialities or

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asking what kind of communities constitute an environment in which women can thrive.

Critique Three: Racism, Classism, and Heterosexism

Feminist critics of liberal feminism fault it not only for espousing a male ontology of self and an individualist politics but also for being only or mainly focused on the interests of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. Although liberal feminists accept this criticism as a just and fair one, they nonetheless note in their own defense that they have come a long way since the nineteenth century when, for example, they largely ignored black women’s concerns. Nowadays, the situation is quite different. Liberal femi- nists are very attentive to how a woman’s race affects her views on any num- ber of topics, including fairly mundane ones such as housework.

We will recall that because Friedan addressed a largely white, middle- class, and well-educated group of women in The Feminist Mystique, it made sense for her to describe the housewife role as oppressive. After all, her pri- mary audience did suffer from the kind of psychological problems people experience when they are underchallenged and restricted to repeatedly per- forming the same routine tasks. But as Angela Davis commented, the housewife role tends to be experienced as liberating rather than oppressive by a significant number of black women.121 Indeed, stressed Davis, many black women, particularly poor ones, would be only too happy to trade their problems for the “problem that has no name.” They would embrace white, middle-class, suburban life enthusiastically, happy to have plenty of time to lavish on their families and themselves.

Liberal feminists’ increased stress on issues of race has prompted an increas- ing number of minority women to join and become active in liberal feminist organizations. For example, largely because NOW has allied itself with minority organizations devoted to welfare reform, civil rights, immigration policy, apartheid, and migrant worker and tribal issues, by 1992, minority women con- stituted 30 percent of NOW’s leadership and 10 percent of its staff.122 Unlike nineteenth-century liberal feminists, today’s liberal feminists no longer mistak- enly contrast women’s rights with blacks’ rights, implying that black women are neither “real women” nor “real blacks” but some sort of hybrid creatures whose rights are of little concern to either white women or black men.

In addition to racism, classism previously existed to a marked degree within liberal feminism, largely because the women who initially led the women’s rights movement were from the upper middle class. Seemingly

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oblivious to the social and economic privileges of the women whom she ad- dressed in The Feminine Mystique, Friedan simply assumed all or most women were supported by men and therefore worked for other than finan- cial reasons. Later, when she came into increased contact with single mothers trying to support their families on meager wages or paltry welfare benefits, Friedan realized just how hard life can be for a poor urban woman working in a factory, as opposed to a wealthy suburban woman driving to a PTA meeting. Thus, in The Second Stage, Friedan tried to address some of the eco- nomic concerns of working women. Nevertheless, her primary audience remained the daughters of the housewives she had tried to liberate in the 1960s: well-educated, financially comfortable, working mothers whom she wished to rescue from the hardships of the so-called double day. In the final analysis, The Second Stage is a book for middle-class professional women (and men) much more than a text for working-class people. It envisions a society in which men and women assume equal burdens and experience equal benefits in both the public and the private worlds. But it fails to ask whether a capitalist society can afford to develop ideal work and family con- ditions for all of its members or only for the “best and brightest”—that is, for those professionals and quasi professionals who are already well enough off to take advantage of joint appointments, parental leaves, the mommy track, flextime, leaves of absence, and so on.

Similarly, Friedan’s The Fountain of Age (1993) is directed more toward rela- tively well-to-do and healthy old people than relatively poor and frail old people. Although Friedan’s anecdotes about people remaking their lives after the age of sixty are inspiring, they are, as one commentator noted, mostly tales about “life-long achievers with uncommon financial resources”123 who are con- tinuing to do in their “golden years” what they did in their younger years. The experience of this group of people is to be contrasted with U.S. citizens whose work years have worn them out physically and psychologically and who find it extremely difficult to survive let alone thrive on a small, fixed income. As such people age, especially if they are infirm, their main enemy is not “self-image.” On the contrary, it is “unsafe neighborhoods, unmanageable stairs, tight bud- gets and isolation.”124 To be sure, Friedan noted the plight of aging, infirm U.S. citizens in The Fountain of Age and recommended a variety of concrete ways (e.g., home care and community support) to ameliorate their situation. Yet she failed to address society’s general unwillingness to allocate time, money, and love to old people who act old and need more than what some consider their fair share of society’s resources. Indeed, by emphasizing the importance of remain- ing “vital” in old age, Friedan may have inadvertently helped widen the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged old people.

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Finally, in addition to racism and classism, heterosexism has posed problems for liberal feminists. When lesbians working within the women’s rights movement decided publicly to avow their sexual identity, the leader- ship and membership of organizations such as NOW disagreed about how actively and officially the organization should support gay rights. As al- ready described, Friedan was among the feminists who feared that a vocal and visible lesbian constituency might further alienate the public from “women’s rights” causes. Friedan’s successor in office, Arlein Hernandez, was embarrassed by her predecessor’s lukewarm support for lesbians, how- ever. Upon accepting the presidency of NOW in 1970, Hernandez issued a strong statement in support of lesbians: “[NOW does] not prescribe a sex- ual preference test for applicants. We ask only that those who join NOW commit themselves to work for full equality for women and that they do so in the context that the struggle in which we are engaged is part of the total struggle to free all persons to develop their full humanity. . . . [W]e need to free all our sisters from the shackles of a society which insists on viewing us in terms of sex.”125 Lesbians, no less than heterosexual women, insisted Hernandez, have sexual rights.

To be sure, not all of NOW’s membership applauded Hernandez’s views. Specifically, conservative members complained that “gay rights” was not a bona fide woman’s issue. Radical members of NOW countered that if any- one knew what a real woman’s issue was, it was the lesbian: she who puts women, not men, at the center of her private as well as public life. The battle between these two groups in NOW escalated to such a degree it threatened NOW’s existence for a year or so before the organization officially pro- claimed lesbian rights as a NOW issue. In 1990, NOW manifested its sup- port of lesbians in a particularly visible way: It elected Patricia Ireland, an open bisexual, as its president. It is important to stress, however, that even today NOW supports lesbianism as a personal sexual preference—as a lifestyle or partner choice some women make—rather than as a political statement about the best way to achieve women’s liberation. Liberal feminists do not claim that women must orient all of their sexual desires toward women and away from men or that all women must love women more than they love men. The claim is instead that men as well as women must treat each other as equals, as persons equally worthy of love.

Conclusion One way to react to the limitations of liberal feminism is to dismiss it as a bourgeois, white movement. In essence, this is precisely what Ellen Willis did

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in her 1975 article “The Conservatism of Ms.,” which faulted Ms. magazine, the most widely recognized publication of liberal feminism, for imposing a pseudofeminist “party line.” After describing this line at length, Willis noted its overall message was a denial of women’s pressing need to overthrow patri- archy and capitalism and an affirmation of women’s supposed ability to make it in the “system.” Whatever Ms. has to offer women, insisted Ellis, it is not feminism:

At best, Ms.’s self-improvement, individual-liberation philosophy is rele- vant only to an elite; basically it is an updated women’s magazine fantasy. Instead of the sexy chick or the perfect homemaker, we now have a new image to live up to: the liberated woman. This fantasy, misrepresented as feminism, misleads some women, convinces others that “women’s lib” has nothing to do with them, and plays into the hands of those who oppose any real change in women’s condition.126

Willis’s criticism may have been on target at the time, but Ms. has changed since the mid-1970s. Its editors have featured articles that show, for example, how classism, racism, and heterosexism intersect with sexism, thereby doubling, tripling, and even quadrupling the oppression of some women. Moreover, liberal feminists have, with few exceptions,127 moved away from their traditional belief that any woman who wants to can liberate herself “individually” by “throwing off ” her conditioning and “unilaterally” rejecting “femininity.”128 They now believe that achieving even a modest goal such as “creating equal employment opportunity for women” calls for much more than the effort of individual women; it will require the effort of a whole society committed to “giving girls and boys the same early education and ending sex prejudice, which in turn will require major redistribution of resources and vast changes in consciousness.”129 Sexual equality cannot be achieved through individual women’s willpower alone. Also necessary are major alterations in people’s deepest social and psychological structures.

In a 2002 article entitled “Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism,” Ruth E. Groenhout argued that feminists who are not liberal feminists should reconsider their wholesale rejection of liberalism. Specifically, she sug- gested that, properly interpreted, the liberal view of human nature is not quite as bad as Jaggar and Elshtain portrayed it. As Groenhout understands it, the liberal picture of human nature contains “a crucial aspect of the femi- nist analysis of the wrongness of sexist oppression.”130

Sexual oppression, and social systems that perpetuate sexual oppression, are morally evil because they limit or deny women’s capacity to reflect on and

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determine their own lives. Sexism also causes immeasurable harm to people, and its consequences are a part of the evil it causes, but sexism would be wrong even if it did not result in either impoverishment or sexualized vio- lence against women. It is wrong, ultimately, because it treats some humans as less than human and limits their freedom to take responsibility for their own lives.131

For all the ways liberal feminism may have gone wrong for women, it did some things very right for women along the way. Women owe to liberal feminists many of the civil, educational, occupational, and reproductive rights they currently enjoy. They also owe to liberal feminists the ability to walk increasingly at ease in the public domain, claiming it as no less their territory than men’s. Perhaps enough time has passed for feminists critical of liberal feminism to reconsider their dismissal of it.

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48

2 Radical Feminism:

Libertarian and Cultural Perspectives

As we noted in Chapter 1, the 1960s and 1970s feminists who belonged to women’s rights groups such as the National Organization for Women believed they could achieve gender equality by reforming the “system”—by working to eliminate discriminatory educational, legal, and economic poli- cies.1 Achieving equal rights for women was the paramount goal of these reformers, and the fundamental tenets of liberal political philosophy were a comfortable fit for these reformers. But not all 1960s and 1970s feminists wanted to find a place for women in the “system.” The feminists who formed groups such as the Redstockings, the Feminists, and the New York Radical Feminists perceived themselves as revolutionaries rather than reformers. Unlike reformist feminists, who joined fundamentally main- stream women’s rights groups, these revolutionary feminists did not become interested in women’s issues as a result of working for government agencies, being appointed to commissions on the status of women, or join- ing women’s educational or professional groups. Instead, their desire to improve women’s condition emerged in the context of their participation in radical social movements, such as the civil-rights and anti–Vietnam War movements.2

Dubbed “radical feminists,” these revolutionary feminists introduced into feminist thought the practice of consciousness-raising. Women came together in small groups and shared their personal experiences as women with each other. They discovered that their individual experiences were not unique to them but widely shared by many women. According to Valerie Bryson, con- sciousness-raising showed how

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the trauma of a woman who had been raped or who had had to resort to an il- legal abortion seemed to be linked to the experiences of the wife whose hus- band refused to do his share of housework, appeared never to have heard of the female orgasm or sulked if she went out for the evening; the secretary whose boss insisted that she wear short skirts, expected her to “be nice” to important clients or failed to acknowledge that she was effectively running his office; and the female student whose teachers expected less of the “girls,” refused requests to study female writers or even traded grades for sexual favours.3

Empowered by the realization that women’s fates were profoundly linked, radical feminists proclaimed that “the personal is political” and that all women are “sisters.” They insisted that men’s control of both women’s sexual and reproductive lives and women’s self-identity, self-respect, and self-esteem is the most fundamental of all the oppressions human beings visit on each other.

The claim that women’s oppression as women is more fundamental than other forms of human oppression is difficult to unpack. According to Alison Jaggar and Paula Rothenberg, it can be interpreted to mean one or more of five things:

1. That women were, historically, the first oppressed group. 2. That women’s oppression is the most widespread, existing in virtually

every known society. 3. That women’s oppression is the hardest form of oppression to eradicate

and cannot be removed by other social changes such as the abolition of class society.

4. That women’s oppression causes the most suffering to its victims, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, although the suffering may often go unrecognized because of the sexist prejudices of both the oppressors and the victims.

5. That women’s oppression . . . provides a conceptual model for under- standing all other forms of oppression.4

But just because radical feminists agreed in principle that sexism is the first, most widespread, or deepest form of human oppression did not mean they also agreed about the nature and function of this pernicious ism or the best way to eliminate it. On the contrary, radical feminists split into two basic camps—radical-libertarian feminists and radical-cultural feminists—and depending on their camp, these feminists voiced very different views about how to fight sexism.

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Radical-libertarian feminists claimed that an exclusively feminine gender identity is likely to limit women’s development as full human persons. Thus, they encouraged women to become androgynous persons, that is, persons who embody both (good) masculine and (good) feminine characteristics or, more controversially, any potpourri of masculine and feminine characteris- tics, good or bad, that strikes their fancy. Among the first radical-libertarian feminists to celebrate androgynous women was Joreen Freeman. She wrote: “What is disturbing about a Bitch is that she is androgynous. She incorpo- rates within herself qualities defined as ‘masculine’ as well as ‘feminine.’ A Bitch is blatant, direct, arrogant, at times egoistic. She has no liking for the indirect, subtle, mysterious ways of the ‘eternal feminine.’ She disdains the vicarious life deemed natural to women because she wants to live a life of her own.”5 In other words, a “Bitch” does not want to limit herself to being a sweet girl with little in the way of power. Instead, she wants to embrace as part of her gender identity those masculine characteristics that permit her to lead life on her own terms.

Freeman’s views did not go unchallenged. Among others, Alice Echols rejected as wrongheaded Freeman’s celebration of the Bitch. She said that Freeman’s Bitch was far too masculine to constitute a role model for women. Still, Echols credited Freeman for expressing radical-libertarian feminists’ desire to free women from the constraints of female biology. Just because a woman is biologically a female does not mean she is destined to exhibit only feminine characteristics. Women can be masculine as well as feminine.6 They can choose their gender roles and identities, mixing and matching them at will.

Later, after the shock value of Freeman’s rhetoric had dissipated, some rad- ical feminists began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of women striving to be androgynous persons. As they saw it, a Bitch was not a full human person but only a woman who had embraced some of the worst fea- tures of masculinity. According to Echols, this group of radical feminists, soon labeled radical-cultural feminists, replaced the goal of androgyny with a summons to affirm women’s essential “femaleness.”7 Far from believing, as radical-libertarian feminists did, that women should exhibit both masculine and feminine traits and behaviors, radical-cultural feminists expressed the view that it is better for women to be strictly female/feminine. Women, they said, should not try to be like men. On the contrary, they should try to be more like women, emphasizing the values and virtues culturally associated with women (“interdependence, community, connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature, immanence, process, joy, peace and life”) and deemphasizing the values and virtues culturally associated with

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men (“independence, autonomy, intellect, will, wariness, hierarchy, domina- tion, culture, transcendence, product, asceticism, war and death”).8 Moreover, and in the ideal, women should appreciate that, despite cultural variations among themselves, all women share one and the same female nature,9 and the less influence men have on this nature, the better.10

To be certain, like any other conceivable classification of radical feminists, the libertarian-cultural distinction is subject to criticism. Yet, in my estimation, this particular distinction helps explain not only why some radical feminists embrace the concept of androgyny and others eschew it, but also why some radical feminists view both sex and reproduction as oppressive, even dangerous for women and why others view these aspects as liberating, even empowering for women. As we shall see throughout this chapter, radical feminists are not afraid to take exception to each other’s views.

Libertarian and Cultural Views on the Sex/Gender System In order to appreciate radical-libertarian and radical-cultural feminist views on androgyny in greater detail, it is useful first to understand the so-called sex/gender system. According to radical-libertarian feminist Gayle Rubin, the sex/gender system is a “set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity.”11 So, for example, patriarchal society uses certain facts about male and female biology (chromosomes, anatomy, hormones) as the basis for constructing a set of masculine and feminine gender identities and behaviors that serve to empower men and disempower women. In the process of accomplishing this task, patriarchal society convinces itself its cultural constructions are somehow “natural” and therefore that people’s “normality” depends on their ability to display whatever gender identities and behaviors are culturally linked with their biological sex.

Among others, radical-libertarian feminists rejected patriarchal society’s as- sumption there is a necessary connection between one’s sex (male or female) and one’s gender (masculine or feminine). Instead, they claimed that gender is separable from sex and that patriarchal society uses rigid gender roles to keep women passive (“affectionate, obedient, responsive to sympathy and approval, cheerful, kind and friendly”) and men active (“tenacious, aggressive, curious, ambitious, planful, responsible, original and competitive”).12 They claimed the way for women to dispel men’s wrongful power over women is for both sexes first to recognize women are no more destined to be passive than men are destined to be active, and then to develop whatever combination of femi- nine and masculine traits best reflects their individually unique personalities.

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Some Libertarian Views on Gender Millett’s Sexual Politics

Among other prominent radical-libertarian feminists, Kate Millett in- sisted that the roots of women’s oppression are buried deep in patriarchy’s sex/gender system. In Sexual Politics (1970), she claimed the male-female sex relationship is the paradigm for all power relationships: “Social caste supersedes all other forms of inegalitarianism: racial, political, or eco- nomic, and unless the clinging to male supremacy as a birthright is finally forgone, all systems of oppression will continue to function simply by virtue of their logical and emotional mandate in the primary human situ- ation.”13 Because male control of the public and private worlds maintains patriarchy, male control must be eliminated if women are to be liberated. But this is no easy task. To eliminate male control, men and women have to eliminate gender—specifically, sexual status, role, and temperament— as it has been constructed under patriarchy.

Patriarchal ideology exaggerates biological differences between men and women, making certain that men always have the dominant, or masculine, roles and women always have the subordinate, or feminine, ones. This ideol- ogy is so powerful, said Millett, that men are usually able to secure the appar- ent consent of the very women they oppress. Men do this through institutions such as the academy, the church, and the family, each of which justifies and reinforces women’s subordination to men, resulting in most women’s internalization of a sense of inferiority to men. Should a woman refuse to accept patriarchal ideology by casting off her femininity—that is, her submissiveness/subordination—men will use coercion to accomplish what conditioning has failed to achieve. Intimidation is everywhere in patri- archy, according to Millet. The streetwise woman realizes that if she wants to survive in patriarchy, she had better act feminine, or else she may be sub- jected to “a variety of cruelties and barbarities.”14

Millett stressed that despite men’s continual attempts to condition and co- erce all women, many women have proved uncontrollable. During the 1800s, for example, U.S. women’s resistance to men’s power took several forms, including the women’s movement inaugurated in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. As noted in Chapter 1, this spirited movement helped women gain many important legal, political, and economic liberties and equalities. Never- theless, the women’s movement of the 1800s failed to liberate women fully, because it did not adequately challenge the sex/gender system at its deepest roots. As a result, twentieth-century patriarchal forces regained some of the ground they had lost from nineteenth-century feminist activists.

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Millett singled out authors D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer as some of the most articulate leaders of patriarchy’s 1930–1960 assault on feminist ideas. She claimed that because readers typically took Lawrence’s, Miller’s, and Mailer’s descriptions of relationships in which women are sexually humiliated and abused by men as prescriptions for ideal sexual conduct, women tended to regard themselves as sexual failures, unable to emulate the sexual behavior of the characters in Miller’s Sexus, for example:

“You never wear any undies do you? You’re a slut, do you know it?” I pulled her dress up and made her sit that way while I finished my coffee. “Play with it a bit while I finish this.” “You’re filthy,” she said, but she did as I told her. “Take your two fingers and open it up. I like the color of it.” . . . With this I reached for a candle on the dresser at my side and I handed it to her. “Let’s see if you can get it in all the way. . . . ” “You can make me do anything, you dirty devil.” “You like it, don’t you?”15

To the objection that readers of Sexus can tell the difference between fiction and reality, Millett replied that pornography often functions in much the same way advertising does. The perfectly slim bodies of the models who grace the covers of Vogue become standards for average women. Nobody has to articulate an explicit law, “Thou shalt mold thine lumpen body in the image of Cindy Crawford.” Every woman simply knows what is expected of her, what it means to be a beautiful woman. In the same way, every reader of Sexus simply knows what is expected of him or her, what it means to be a sexually vital person as opposed to a sexual dud.

In addition to these literary pornographers, Millett identified two other patriarchal groups—neo-Freudian psychologists and Parsonian sociologists— as leading the assault on feminists. Although Sigmund Freud’s openness about sexuality, his willingness to talk about what people do or do not do in the bedroom, initially appeared as a progressive step toward better, more various, and more liberating sexual relations, Millett claimed Freud’s disciples used his writings to “rationalize the invidious relationship between the sexes, to ratify traditional roles, and to validate temperamental differences.”16 In a similar vein, the followers of Talcott Parsons, an eminent sociologist, used his writ- ings to argue that distinctions between masculine and feminine traits are bio- logical/natural rather than social/cultural, and that without rigid gender dimorphism, society could not function as well as it does now. Convinced

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that gender identities and behaviors are not “an arbitrary imposition on an infinitely plastic biological base,” but rather “an adjustment to the real biolog- ical differences between the sexes,” Parsons’s disciples confidently asserted that women’s subordination to men is natural.17

Rather than concluding her discussion of patriarchal reactionaries on a despairing note, however, Millett ended it on an optimistic note. In the late 1970s, women were, she believed, regrouping their forces. Aware of their nineteenth-century predecessors’ mistakes, these twentieth-century feminists were determined not to repeat history. Millett observed in contemporary feminism a determined effort to destroy the sex/gender system—the basic source of women’s oppression—and to create a new society in which men and women are equals at every level of existence.18

Although Millett looked forward to an androgynous future, to an integra- tion of separate masculine and feminine subcultures, she insisted this inte- gration must proceed cautiously with a thorough evaluation of all masculine and feminine traits. Obedience, as it has been traditionally exhibited by women, for example, should not be unreflectively celebrated as a desirable human trait, that is, as a trait an androgynous person should recognize as positive and therefore seek to possess. Nor is aggressiveness, as it has been traditionally exhibited by men, to be incorporated into the psyche of the androgynous person as a desirable human trait. Androgyny, speculated Mil- lett, is a worthy ideal only if the feminine and masculine qualities integrated in the androgynous person are separately worthy.19 After all, if we are told the ideal human combines in herself or himself masculine arrogance and feminine servility, we will be less favorably impressed than if we are told the ideal human combines the strength traditionally associated with men and the compassion traditionally associated with women. Not only is it undesir- able to combine in one person the two vices of arrogance and servility—the excess and defect, respectively, of the virtue of self-respect—but it is also impossible, since these two vices are polar opposites. In contrast, it is both possible and desirable to combine in one person the qualities of strength and compassion, since these two virtues are complementary and likely to help a person live well in his or her community.

Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex

Like Millett, Shulamith Firestone, another radical-libertarian feminist, claimed the material basis for the sexual/political ideology of female submission and male domination was rooted in the reproductive roles of men and women. Fire- stone, however, believed Millett’s solution to this problem—the elimination of

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the sexual double standard that permits men but not women to experiment with sex, and the inauguration of a dual-parenting system that gives fathers and mothers equal child-rearing responsibilities—was inadequate. It would, in her estimation, take far more than such modest reforms in the sex/gender system to free women’s (and men’s) sexuality from the biological imperatives of procre- ation and to liberate women’s (and men’s) personalities from the socially con- structed, Procrustean prisons of femininity and masculinity. In fact, said Firestone, it would take a major biological and social revolution to effect this kind of human liberation: Artificial (ex utero) reproduction would need to replace natural (in utero) reproduction, and so-called intentional families, whose members chose each other for reasons of friendship or even simple con- venience, would need to replace the traditional biological family constituted in and through its members’ genetic connections to each other.

Firestone maintained that with the end of the biological family would come the breakup of the Oedipal family situation that prohibits, among other things, parent-child incest. No longer would there be concerns about so- called inbreeding as people reverted to their natural “polymorphous perver- sity”20 and again delighted in all types of sexual behavior. Genital sex, so important for the purposes of biological sex, would become just one kind of sexual experience—and a relatively unimportant one—as people rediscovered the erotic pleasures of their oral and anal cavities and engaged in sexual rela- tions with members of the same as well as the opposite sex.

Firestone claimed that as soon as both men and women were truly free to engage in polymorphous, perverse sex, it would no longer be necessary for men to display only masculine identities and behaviors and for women to display only feminine ones. Freed from their gender roles at the level of biol- ogy (i.e., reproduction), women would no longer have to be passive, recep- tive, and vulnerable, sending out “signals” to men to dominate, possess, and penetrate them in order to keep the wheels of human procreation spinning. Instead, men and women would be encouraged to mix and match feminine and masculine traits and behaviors in whatever combination they wished. As a result, not only would human beings evolve into androgynous persons, but all of society would also become androgynous. As Firestone saw it, the bio- logical division of the sexes for the purpose of procreation had created not only a false dichotomy between masculinity and femininity but also an invidious cultural split between the sciences and the arts.

Firestone believed we associate science and technology with men and the humanities and the arts with women. Thus, the “masculine response” to reality is the “technological response”: “objective, logical, extroverted, realistic, con- cerned with the conscious mind (the ego), rational, mechanical, pragmatic and

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down-to-earth, stable.”21 In contrast, the “feminine response” to reality is the “aesthetic response”: “subjective, intuitive, introverted, wishful, dreamy or fan- tastic, concerned with the subconscious (the id), emotional, even temperamen- tal (hysterical).”22 Only when the aforementioned biological revolution eliminates the need for maintaining rigid lines between male and female, mas- culine and feminine, will we be able to bridge the gap between the sciences and the arts. Androgynous persons will find themselves living in an androgynous society in which the categories of the technological and the aesthetic, together with the categories of the masculine and the feminine, will have disappeared through what Firestone termed “a mutual cancellation—a matter-antimatter explosion, ending with a poof!”23 At last, claimed Firestone, the male Techno- logical Mode would be able to “produce in actuality what the female Aesthetic Mode had envisioned,” namely, a world in which we use our knowledge to cre- ate not hell but heaven on earth—a world in which men no longer have to toil by the sweat of their brow to survive and in which women no longer have to bear children in pain and travail.24

Clearly, Firestone’s version of androgyny is quite different from Millett’s. Indeed, we may ask whether it is androgyny in the strict sense of the term, for in the world envisioned by Firestone, men and women as defined by current gender traits and role responsibilities no longer exist. Nevertheless, because Firestone’s utopian persons are permitted to combine within themselves a range of characteristics we currently term masculine and feminine, Firestone’s version of androgyny might, after all, be situated on the same continuum with Millett’s. But for Millett, the ideal androgynous person combines a bal- ance of the best masculine and feminine characteristics, whereas for Firestone, there is no one way to be androgynous.

Some Cultural Views on Gender Marilyn French

Because Marilyn French attributes male-female differences more to biology (nature) than to socialization (nurture), and because she seems to think tra- ditional feminine traits are somehow better than traditional masculine traits, I view her as more of a radical-cultural feminist than a radical-libertarian feminist. Like Millett and Firestone fifteen years earlier, French claimed men’s oppression of women leads logically to other systems of human domi- nation. If it is possible to justify men’s domination of women, it is possible to justify all forms of domination. “Stratification of men above women,” wrote French, “leads in time to stratification of classes: an elite rules over people perceived as ‘closer to nature,’ savage, bestial, animalistic.”25

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Because French believed sexism is the model for all other isms, including racism and classism, she sought to explain the differences between sexism’s enslaving ideology of “power-over” others and an alternative, nonsexist liber- ating ideology of “pleasure-with” others.

Examining the origins of patriarchy, French concluded early humans lived in harmony with nature. They saw themselves as small parts of a larger whole into which they had to fit if they wanted to survive. Considering evidence from primates and the world’s remaining “simple societies,” French speculated that the first human societies were probably matricentric (mother centered), for it was the mother who more than likely played the primary role in the group’s survival-oriented activities of bonding, sharing, and harmonious par- ticipation in nature. Nature was friend, and as sustainer of nature and repro- ducer of life, woman was also friend.26 French also speculated that as the human population grew, food inevitably became scarce. No longer experienc- ing nature as a generous mother, humans decided to take matters into their own hands. They developed techniques to free themselves from the whims of nature. They drilled, dug, and plowed nature for the bounty it had decided to hold back from them. The more control humans gained over nature, however, the more they separated themselves from it physically and psychologically. French claimed that because a “distance had opened up between humans and their environment as a result of increasing controls exercised over nature,” humans became alienated from nature.27 Alienation, defined by French as a profound sense of separation, aroused “hostility,” which in turn led to “fear” and finally to “enmity.” It is not surprising, then, that these negative feelings intensified men’s desire to control not only nature but also women, whom they associated with nature on account of their role in reproduction.28

Out of men’s desire to control the woman/nature dyad was born patriarchy, a hierarchical system that values having power over as many people as possible. Originally developed to ensure the human community’s survival, the desire for power over others rapidly became, under patriarchy, a value cultivated simply for the experience of being the person in charge, the lawgiver, the boss, number one in the pecking order. French speculated that untempered by cooperation, patriarchal competition would inevitably lead to unbridled human conflict.29

Intent on sparing the world conflict—particularly as it could, in these times, escalate into a nuclear holocaust—French claimed that feminine val- ues must be reintegrated into the masculine society created by a patriarchal ideology. If we want to see the twenty-first century, said French, we must treasure in our lives and actions “love and compassion and sharing and nutri- tiveness [sic] equally with control and structure, possessiveness and status.”30 Were we to take this last assertion at face value, we could easily infer that, for French, the best society is an androgynous one in which both men and

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women embrace the historically feminine values of love, compassion, shar- ing, and nurturance just as eagerly as humans embrace the historically mas- culine values of control, structure, possessiveness, and status. Yet a closer reading of French suggests she actually esteemed feminine values more than masculine values and that any time she affirmed a masculine value, she did so only because she had subjected it to what Joyce Trebilcot termed a “feminist reconceiving”31—that is, a linguistic reinterpretation of a concept that involves changing its descriptive meaning, the evaluative meaning, or both.32 According to French, most of her linguistic reinterpretations of masculine values involved changing their descriptive rather than evaluative meaning. For example, French did not claim that the masculine value of so-called structure is bad in and of itself. Instead, she argued that structure, under- stood as a system or an organization, is good provided it serves to connect rather than disconnect people.33

That French’s androgyny involved a substantial reinterpretation of male/masculine values but not of female/feminine values became increas- ingly clear throughout her Beyond Power (1985). Because “humanness” had been deleteriously identified with a destructive, power-mongering masculine world in the past, French suggested the term should now be beneficially identified with a creative, power-sharing feminine world. Guided by the value of having power over others, the masculine world accommodates only those thoughts and actions that keep a small group of people in power. This world has room for “true grit,” “doing what you have to do,” and “the end justifying the means,” but no room for “knowing when to stop,” savoring the “best things in life” (which, we are told, are “for free”), and reflecting on process as well as product. Thus, to be a total man, or patriarch, is not to be a full human being. Rather, it is to be what psychoanalytic feminist Dorothy Dinnerstein termed a minotaur—“[the] gigantic and eternally infantile off- spring of a mother’s unnatural lust, [the] male representative of mindless, greedy power, [who] insatiably devours live human flesh.”34

In contrast, the feminine world, guided by the value of having pleasure— by which French meant the ability of one group or person to affirm all oth- ers—accommodates many ways of being and doing. French viewed pleasure as a very broad and deep concept that encompassed all the enriching experi- ences we believe a full human person should have.35 It can be derived from self as well as others, from the mind as well as the body, from the simple and bucolic as well as the complex and urbane.

Because of her obvious dislike for the masculine version of power over oth- ers, French claimed the androgynous person must strike a balance between pleasure with others and a feminine version of power over others she labeled

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“power-to” do for others. French emphasized it is good for us to have power as well as pleasure in our lives, provided our power manifests itself not as the desire to destroy (power over others) but as the desire to create (power to do for others). Conceding we may never be able to completely eliminate our de- sire to be “top dog,” French nonetheless insisted it is possible for us to curb our competitive drives and to cultivate instead our cooperative capacities.

Mary Daly

More than Millett, Firestone, and even French, radical-cultural feminist Mary Daly denigrated traditional masculine traits. Although Daly began her intellectual journey in Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973) with a plea for androgyny, she ultimately rejected the terms “masculine” and “feminine” as hopelessly befuddled products of patri- archy. Her term-transforming travels through Gyn/Ecology ended in Pure Lust, a spirited defense of “wild,” “lusty,” and “wandering” women—women who no longer desire to be androgynous and who prefer to identify them- selves as radical lesbian feminist separatists.

In Beyond God the Father, her first major work, Daly focused on God as the paradigm for all patriarchs, arguing that unless he is dethroned from both men’s and women’s consciousness, women will never be empowered as full persons.36 She repeatedly claimed that if anyone ever had a power-over-others complex, it is the transcendent God who appears in Judaism, Islam, and espe- cially Christianity. This God is so remote and aloof that he dwells in a place beyond earth, suggesting that power over others inevitably leads to separation from others. A transcendent God, observed Daly, is a God who thinks in terms of I-it, subject-object, or self-other relationships. Furthermore, what is most alien to this transcendent God, this total being, is the natural world he called into existence out of total nothingness. Thus, women, who are associ- ated with nature on account of their reproductive powers, play the role of object/other against both God’s and men’s role of subject/self.

Because the old transcendent God rejected women, Daly wished to re- place him with a new, immanent God. An immanent God thinks in terms of I-thou, subject-subject, or self-self relationships and is thoroughly identified with the natural world in which he/she/it abides, she said. Thus, women are equal to men before this God, whom Daly described as Be-ing.37

One of the main ways in which I-it thinking is reflected in patriarchal society, said Daly, is through the institution of rigid masculine and feminine gender roles, polarizing the human community into two groups. Because men collectively perceive and define women as the second sex, each man

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becomes an I, or a self, and each woman becomes an it, or another. One way, then, to overcome I-it thinking, and the transcendent God who thinks I-it thoughts, is to break down gender dimorphism by constructing an androgy- nous person who is neither “I” nor “it” but beyond both forms of existence.

Significantly, Daly’s concept of androgyny in Beyond God the Father, is more akin to French’s than either Millett’s or Firestone’s. She rejected the pluralist model of androgyny, according to which men and women have sep- arate but supposedly equal and complementary traits, and the assimilation model of androgyny, according to which women and men exhibit feminine as well as masculine traits.38 As she saw it, both of these models of androgyny were deficient because neither of them asked whether the concepts of mas- culinity and femininity are worth preserving.

Although Daly’s concerns about using the terms “masculinity” and “femi- ninity” were similar to those previously raised by French, she proposed to handle these terms in a different way than French had. Whereas French seemed interested in reinterpreting traditional masculine traits, Daly seemed intent on reinterpreting traditional feminine traits. Daly insisted that posi- tive feminine traits such as love, compassion, sharing, and nurturance must be carefully distinguished from their pathological excesses, the sort of masochistic feminine “virtues” for which they are frequently mistaken. For example, loving ordinarily is good, but under patriarchy, loving can become, for women, a form of total self-sacrifice or martyrdom. Thus, Daly argued that the construction of the truly androgynous person cannot and must not begin until women say no to the values of the “morality of victimization.” Out of this no, said Daly, will come a yes to the values of the “ethics of per- sonhood.”39 By refusing to be the other, by becoming selves with needs, wants, and interests of their own, women will end the game of man as master and woman as slave.

In Beyond God the Father, Daly observed what she described as the Unholy Trinity of Rape, Genocide, and War combining in their one patriarchal per- son the legions of sexism, racism, and classism. In Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, she articulated this claim more fully, arguing that this Unholy Trinity, this single patriarchal person, has but one essential message: necrophilia, defined as “obsession with and usually erotic attraction toward and stimulation by corpses, typically evidenced by overt acts (as copulation with a corpse).”40 Whereas Daly emphasized in Beyond God the Father that women cannot thrive as long as they subscribe to the morality of victimiza- tion, she stressed in Gyn/Ecology that women cannot even survive as long as they remain in patriarchy. Not only are men out to twist women’s minds, but they are also out to destroy women’s bodies through such practices as Hindu

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suttee, Chinese foot binding, African female circumcision, European witch burning, and Western gynecology.41

In Gyn/Ecology, Daly decided to reject several terms she had used in Be- yond God the Father. Among these terms was “androgyny,” a term that she now viewed as twisted, as idealizing someone like “John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett-Majors Scotch-taped together.”42 The more she reflected on the tra- ditional concept of femininity, the more Daly was convinced that there is nothing good in this notion for women to pursue. She asserted patriarchy has constructed both the positive feminine qualities of nurturance, compas- sion, and gentleness and the negative feminine qualities of pettiness, jeal- ousy, and vanity. Thus, she concluded, women should reject the seemingly “good” aspects of femininity as well as the obviously “bad” ones. They are all “man-made constructs” shaped for the purposes of trapping women deep in the prison of patriarchy.43

Stripped of their femininity, women would be revealed in their original (prepatriarchal) female power and beauty, insisted Daly. Daly used Jerzy Kosinski’s image of a painted bird to detail the differences between “false femininity” and “true femaleness.” Kosinski tells the tale of a keeper who imprisons a natural, plain-looking bird simply by painting its feathers with a glittering color. Eventually, the bird is destroyed by her unpainted “friends,” the victim of their jealousy. Reversing Kosinski’s image, Daly claimed when it comes to women, it is not the artificial, painted birds (whom Daly looks upon as tamed, domesticated, feminized females), but the natural, plain- looking birds (whom Daly calls “wild females”) who suffer. For Daly, painted birds are the women who permit “Daddy” to deck them out in splendor, to “cosmetize” and perfume them, to girdle and corset them. They are the women whom “Daddy” dispatches to destroy real, natural women: that is, the women who refuse to be what the patriarchs want them to be, who insist on being themselves no matter what, and who peel patriarchal paint off their minds and bodies.44 In Daly’s words, the “painted bird functions in the anti- process of double-crossing her sisters, polluting them with poisonous paint.”45 The real, natural woman, in contrast, is “attacked by the mutants of her own kind, the man-made women.”46

For Daly, flying is the antidote to being painted. The real, natural woman does not take off patriarchal paint only to become vulnerable. Rather, she “takes off.” She “sends the paint flying back into the eyes of the soul-slayers”; she “soars . . . out of the circle of Father Time” and flies “off the clock into other dimensions.”47 She flies free of “mutant fembirds,” the women who have permitted themselves to be constructed by patriarchy. She also flies free of the power of patriarchal language and therefore patriarchal values.

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In many ways, Daly’s decision to reject androgyny in Gyn/Ecology led her to where Friedrich Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values led him: to a redefinition of what is good and what is bad, counter to the prevailing notions of good and bad. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche contended there are two basic kinds of moralities: master and slave. In the master morality, good and bad are equivalent to noble and despicable, respectively. To be good is to be on top of the world. To be bad is to be repressed, oppressed, suppressed, or otherwise downtrodden. The criteria for goodness articulated in the slave morality are the polar opposites of the criteria for goodness articulated in the master morality: Those who espouse a slave morality extol qualities such as kindness, humility, and sympathy as virtues, and denigrate qualities such as assertiveness, aloof- ness, and pride as vices. Such thinkers venerate weak and dependent individu- als as saints and condemn strong and independent individuals as sinners.

Motivated by the all-consuming resentment (resentiment) of the masters, the slaves manifest a negative attitude toward what Nietzsche believed is the most natural drive of a human being: the will to power. As Nietzsche saw it, the slaves lack not only a desire for power but also a desire for life. Fearful of conflict, of challenge, of charting the course of their destinies, the slaves wish to be compla- cent in their mediocrity. Nietzsche found slaves profoundly boring. He also found them incredibly dangerous, for they seemed intent on clogging Western civilization’s arteries with sugarplums, placebos, and the milk of human kindness:

For this is how things are: the diminution and leveling of European man [sic] constitutes our greatest danger, for the sight of him makes us weary. We can see nothing today that wants to grow greater, we suspect that things will continue to go down, down, to become thinner, more good- natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indiffer- ent, more Chinese, more Christian—there is no doubt that man [sic] is getting “better” all the time.

Here precisely is what has become a fatality for Europe—together with the fear of man [sic] we have also lost our love of him, our reverence for him, our hopes for him, even the will to him. The sight of man [sic] now makes us weary.48

In order to stop this will to impotence, mediocrity, and death, Nietzsche mandated a transvaluation of all values that would reassign, for example, “good” values to the category of bad values and “bad” values to the category of good values. He declared war on the accepted slave values of his time, which he identified as the values of Judaism, Christianity, democracy, and so- cialism—any philosophy or theology that asks the individual to sacrifice

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himself or herself for the greater good of the community. Because slave morality is, according to Nietzsche, a perversion of the original, natural morality/psychology of the masters, transvaluation must consist in overcom- ing the slave morality/psychology. Transvaluation begins with the recogni- tion that all the stronger values, or master values, still exist but now go unrecognized under false names such as “cruelty,” “injury,” “appropriation,” “suppression,” and “exploitation.” These false names, said Nietzsche, do not connote what the masters originally meant, but what the slaves have inter- preted them to mean. The process of transvaluation will end, therefore, with the restoration of false names’ true meanings.

Like Nietzsche, Daly is a transvaluator of values. She claimed that with respect to women, she whom the patriarch calls evil is in fact good, whereas she whom the patriarch calls good is in fact bad. Providing a dictionary of new language in the last section of Gyn/Ecology, Daly invited “hags,” “spin- sters,” and “haggard heretics” to “unspook” traditional language and their old feminine selves by “spinning” for themselves a new, unconventional lan- guage and new female selves. Daly insisted that women should decide who women want to be. For example, if women want to be hags instead of bathing beauties, then so be it. It is for women to decide whether being a hag is good or bad. Explained Daly:

Hag is from an Old English word meaning harpy, witch. Webster’s gives as the first and ‘archaic’ meaning of hag: “a female demon: FURY, HARPY.” It also formerly meant: “an evil or frightening spirit.” (Lest this sound too nega- tive, we should ask the relevant questions: “Evil” by whose definition? “Frightening” to whom?) A third archaic definition of hag is “nightmare.” (The important question is: Whose nightmare?) Hag is also defined as “an ugly or evil-looking old woman.” But this, considering the source, may be considered a compliment. For the beauty of strong, creative women is “ugly” by misogynistic standards of “beauty.” The look of female-identified women is “evil” to those who fear us. As for “old,” ageism is a feature of phallic soci- ety. For women who have transvalued this, a Crone is one who should be an example of strength, courage, and wisdom.49

By the time she wrote the last page of Gyn/Ecology, Daly had completely re- placed the ideal of the androgynous person with the ideal of the “wild female” who dwells beyond masculinity and femininity. To become whole, a woman needs to strip away the false identity—femininity—patriarchy has constructed for her. Then and only then will she experience herself as the self she would have been had she lived her life in a matriarchy rather than a patriarchy.

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In Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy, Daly continued her transvalu- ation of values. In this book about woman’s power, Daly extended French’s analysis of power-to. It is this power men have fed on, making women grow thin, weak, frail, even anorexic. In order to grow strong, women must resist the trap of androgyny. Utterly dependent on their God-given helpmates, pa- triarchs offer women androgyny in a last-ditch effort to keep women by their sides: “Come, join forces with us. Masculinity and femininity together!” Women should not, said Daly, be deceived by these inviting words, which are simply a ploy on the part of men to appropriate for themselves whatever is best about women. Men have gradually realized it is in their own (but not women’s) best interests to become androgynous persons, since their maleness has so little to offer them. For example, at the end of the film Tootsie, after the lead character’s male identity has been disclosed (he had been posing as a female television star named Dorothy), he tells Julie, a woman he had be- friended in his incarnation as Dorothy, that he actually is Dorothy. Daly commented: “The message clearly is one of cannibalistic androgynous male- ness. Little Dustin, whom Julie had loved but rejected because she believed he was a woman, incorporates the best of womanhood—like Dionysus and Jesus before him.”50 Men want to be androgynous so that they can subsume or even consume all that is female, draining women’s energies into their bod- ies and minds. Instead of submitting to the gynocidal process of androgyny, women must, said Daly, spin new, powerful self-understandings, remaining radically apart from men, reserving their energies for their own pursuits.

What is most impressive about Pure Lust is Daly’s ability to provide new meanings, simultaneously prescriptive and descriptive, for terms. The term “lust” is a case in point. Daly wrote, “The usual meaning of lust within the lecherous state of patriarchy is well known. It means ‘sexual desire, especially of a violent self-indulgent character: LECHERY, LASCIVIOUSNESS.’”51 Lust, then, is evil, said Daly, but only because we live in a society with a slave morality, which resents women. If we lived instead in a nonpatriarchal society, contin- ued Daly, lust would have good meanings such as “vigor,” “fertility,” “craving,” “eagerness,” and “enthusiasm.”52 Thus, the lusty women of Pure Lust are the wild females of Gyn/Ecology, the undomesticated women who refuse to be gov- erned by the rules of men’s “sadosociety,” which is “formed/framed by statutes of studs, degrees of drones, canons of cocks, fixations of fixers, precepts of prickers, regulations of rakes and rippers . . . bore-ocracy.”53

The Daly of Pure Lust had no use for what she regarded as the petrified lan- guage of patriarchy, referring to it only with the aim of redefining, reinterpret- ing, or reclaiming its terms. Pure Lust transvaluated what counts as moral virtue and moral vice for women. In particular, the book showed how patriarchal

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forces deprived natural women of bona fide passions, substituting for these true passions a collection of “plastic” and “potted” ones: a set of inauthentic, coun- terfeit emotions created for artificial women.

According to Daly, plastic passions like guilt, anxiety, depression, hostility, bitterness, resentment, frustration, boredom, resignation, and fulfillment are no substitute for genuine passions like love, desire, joy, hate, aversion, sorrow, hope, despair, fear, and anger. Whereas genuine passions spur women to mean- ingful action, plastic passions enervate women. In Daly’s estimation, the plastic passion of fulfillment, for example, is not to be confused with the genuine pas- sion of joy. Fulfillment is simply the “therapeutized perversion” of joy. A ful- filled woman is “filled full,” “finished,” “fixed” just the way patriarchy likes her. Because she is so “totaled,” she cannot live the “e-motion of joy.” She lacks the energy to move or act purposely.54 Fulfillment, said Daly, is just another term for Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name”55—having a comfortable home, a successful husband, a wonderful child, but no joy.

Like plastic passions, potted passions are also a poor substitute for gen- uine passions, in Daly’s estimation. Although potted passions are in many ways more real than plastic passions, they are not nearly as grand as genuine passions. To appreciate Daly’s point, we may view a genuine passion as a live evergreen out in the woods, a potted passion as a decked-out but cut (and hence, dying) Christmas tree, and a plastic passion as an artificial Christmas tree. The genuine passion of love, for example, is a life-transforming emo- tion, but when it is either potted or packaged and then sold as “romance,” women are duped into settling for love’s illusion rather than its reality.56 There is, of course, something tragic about settling for so little when there is so much to be had. Thus, Daly hoped the words in Pure Lust would help women liberate themselves from the pots and plastic molds blocking their volcanic genuine passions.

Sexuality, Male Domination, and Female Subordination Radical-libertarian and radical-cultural feminists have very different ideas not only about gender but also about sexuality.57 Among the feminists who have written insightfully on this difference is Ann Ferguson. Unfortunately for my purposes, Ferguson and I use different terms to express what I think are essentially the same ideas. To avoid an unnecessarily confusing discussion of Ferguson’s work, I substitute my terms “radical-libertarian” and “radical- cultural” for her terms “libertarian” and “radical.”

According to Ferguson, radical-libertarian feminists’ views on sexuality are as follows:

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1. Heterosexual as well as other sexual practices are characterized by repression. The norms of patriarchal bourgeois sexuality repress the sexual desires and pleasures of everyone by stigmatizing sexual minori- ties, thereby keeping the majority “pure” and under control.

2. Feminists should repudiate any theoretical analyses, legal restrictions, or moral judgements that stigmatize sexual minorities and thus restrict the freedom of all.

3. As feminists we should reclaim control over female sexuality by demand- ing the right to practice whatever gives us pleasure and satisfaction.

4. The ideal sexual relationship is between fully consenting, equal partners who negotiate to maximize one another’s sexual pleasure and satisfaction by any means they choose.58

In contrast, radical-cultural feminists’ views on sexuality are as follows:

1. Heterosexual sexual relations generally are characterized by an ideology of sexual objectification (men as subjects/masters; women as objects/slaves) that supports male sexual violence against women.

2. Feminists should repudiate any sexual practice that supports or nor- malizes male sexual violence.

3. As feminists we should reclaim control over female sexuality by devel- oping a concern with our own sexual priorities, which differ from men’s—that is, more concern with intimacy and less with performance.

4. The ideal sexual relationship is between full consenting, equal partners who are emotionally involved and do not participate in polarized roles.59

Radical-libertarian feminists challenged theories of sexuality that sepa- rated supposedly good, normal, legitimate, healthy sexual practices from supposedly bad, abnormal, illegitimate, unhealthy sexual practices.60 These feminists urged women to experiment with different kinds of sex and not to confine themselves to a limited range of sexual experiences.61

Among the most forceful and articulate spokespersons for radical-libertarian- feminist ideology was Gayle Rubin. She claimed that contemporary society remains uncomfortable with any form of sex that is not between married, het- erosexual couples intent on procreating children.62 It represses—indeed pun- ishes—to a greater or lesser extent unmarried heterosexuals who engage in casual sex for pleasure, bisexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, transsexuals, transves- tites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers, and “those whose eroticism crosses transgenerational boundaries.”63 As a result of this state of affairs, many people

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deny themselves the joys of sex, said Rubin. Wanting to let people have a good time, so to speak, Rubin urged feminists to lead a campaign to stop viewing sex in terms “of sins, disease, neurosis, pathology, decadence, pollution or the decline and fall of empires.”64 For Rubin, all sex was good; no judgments should be made about the rightness or wrongness of any form of sex.

Not surprisingly, radical-libertarian feminists’ views on sexuality were not uniformly accepted by one and all. Rejecting Rubin’s celebration of all forms of sexuality, radical-cultural feminists insisted that, in a patriarchal society, it was feminists’ responsibility to make judgments about one form of sexuality in particular: namely, sex between men and women.

Radical-cultural feminists equated heterosexuality as they experienced it with “male sexuality,” that is, “driven, irresponsible, genitally-oriented and potentially lethal”65 sexuality. They contrasted this “male sexuality” with “female sexuality,” that is “muted, diffuse, interpersonally-oriented, and benign”66 sexuality. In radical-cultural feminists’ estimation, because men want “power and orgasm” in sex and women want “reciprocity and intimacy” in sex,67 the only kind of sex that is unambiguously good for women is monogamous lesbianism.68 Women must understand, they said, that patriarchal heterosexuality is an institution bent on sapping women’s emotional energies and keeping women perpetually dissatisfied with themselves:

Only women can give each other a new sense of self. That identity we have to develop with reference to ourselves, and not in relation to men. This con- sciousness is the revolutionary force from which all else will follow, for ours is an organic revolution. For this we must be available and supportive to one another, give our commitment and our love, give the emotional support nec- essary to sustain this movement. Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backwards towards our oppressors. As long as women’s liberation tries to free women without facing the basic heterosexual structure that binds us in one-to-one relationships with our oppressors, tremendous energies will con- tinue to flow into trying to straighten up each particular relationship with a man, how to get better sex, how to turn his head around—into trying to make the “new man” out of him, in the delusion that this will allow us to be the “new woman.” This obviously splits our energies and commitments, leav- ing us unable to be committed to the construction of the new patterns which will liberate us.69

In sum, patriarchal heterosexuality is beyond repair. It must be destroyed so that women can fully live, according to radical-cultural feminists.

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The Pornography Debate Women’s different reactions to pornography, or their use of it in their lives, dramatically highlight the general differences between radical-libertarian fem- inists and radical-cultural feminists on sexual matters. Radical-libertarian feminists urged women to use pornography to overcome their fears about sex, to arouse sexual desires, and to generate sexual fantasies.70 These feminists claimed that women should feel free to view and enjoy all sorts of pornogra- phy, including violent pornography. Some radical-libertarian feminists even invited women to engage in rape fantasies in which men “had their way” with women in bed. There is a difference between an actual rape and a rape fantasy, insisted the most “libertarian” members of the radical-libertarian feminist camp. The same woman who derives sexual pleasure from playing Scarlett O’Hara–Rhett Butler sex games with her boyfriend would protest loudly were he actually to attempt to rape her. Just because a woman wants to explore whether power games are part of what makes sex “sexy” for her does not mean she wants to serve as an object for male violence in real life.71 Rather than stubbornly insisting that pornographic representations of men sexually domi- nating women somehow harm women in real life, said radical-libertarian fem- inists, feminists should engage in an entirely open-minded and nondefensive examination of pornography, saving their venom for real rapists.

Ironically, radical-libertarian feminists’ defense of pornography served to in- crease, not decrease, radical-cultural feminists’ opposition to it. Radical-cultural feminists stressed that sexuality and gender are the products of the same oppres- sive social forces. There is no difference between gender discrimination against women in the boardroom and the sexual objectification of women in the bed- room. In both instances, the harm done to women is about men’s power over women. Pornography is nothing more than patriarchal propaganda about women’s “proper” role as man’s servant, helpmate, caretaker, and plaything, according to radical-cultural feminists. Whereas men exist for themselves, women exist for men. Men are subjects; women are objects, they said.

Radical-cultural feminists insisted that with rare exception, pornography harms women. First, it encourages men to behave in sexually harmful ways toward women (e.g., sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence). Second, it defames women as persons who have so little regard for themselves they actively seek or passively accept sexual abuse. And third, it leads men not only to think less of women as human beings but also to treat them as second-class citizens unworthy of the same due process and equal treatment men enjoy.

Unable to prove that exposure to pornographic representations directly causes men either to harm women’s bodies or to defame women’s characters,

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radical-cultural feminists sought protection for women in antidiscrimination laws. They followed the lead of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who defined pornography as “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words that also includes women dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; enjoying pain or humiliation or rape; being tied up, cut up, mutilated, bruised, or physically hurt; in postures of sexual submission or servility or display; reduced to body parts, penetrated by objects or animals, or presented in scenarios of degradation, injury, torture; shown as filthy or inferior; bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual.”72

Radical-cultural feminists claimed that sexuality is the primary locus of male power in which women-harming gender relations are constructed.73 They also claimed that because pornographers systematically depict women as less fully human and, therefore, less deserving of respect and good treat- ment than men, pornographers can and ought to be viewed as agents of sex- ual discrimination, guilty of violating women’s civil rights. For this reason, any woman—or man, child, or transsexual used in the place of a woman— should be granted a legal cause of action against a particular pornographer or pornographic business if she is coerced into a pornographic performance, has pornography forced on her, or has been assaulted or attacked because of a particular piece of pornography. Further, any woman should be able to bring civil suit against traffickers in pornography on behalf of all women.74 Empty- ing the pockets of pornographers is the best way for feminists to fight the misogynistic ideology pornographers willingly spread.

Although radical-cultural feminists, under the leadership of MacKinnon and Dworkin, were initially successful in their attempt to have antipornog- raphy ordinances passed in Minneapolis and Indianapolis, a coalition of radical-libertarian and liberal feminists called the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT) joined nonfeminist free-speech advocates to work against MacKinnon and Dworkin’s 1980s legislation. Largely because of FACT’s efforts, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually declared the Minneapolis and Indianapolis antipornography ordinances unconstitutional.75 During the period that FACT worked to defeat MacKinnon and Dworkin’s legislation, its membership insisted phrases such as “sexually explicit subordination of women” have no context-free, fixed meaning.76

FACT referred to the film Swept Away to show just how difficult it is to de- cide whether a particular scene or set of scenes depicts the sexually explicit sub- ordination of women. In the movie, an attractive, upper-class woman and a brawny, working-class man are shown, during the first half of the film, as class antagonists and then, during the second half of the film, as sexual antagonists

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when they are stranded on an island and the man exacts his revenge on the woman by repeatedly raping her. Initially, she resists him, but gradually she falls in love with him, and eventually, he with her.

Because scenes in Swept Away clearly present the woman character as enjoying her own sexual humiliation, the film falls under a radical-cultural feminist definition of pornography and could have been suppressed, pending the outcome of a civil suit brought against its creators, manufacturers, and distributors. According to FACT, however, such suppression would have rep- resented censorship of the worst sort because the film challenged viewers to think seriously about precisely what does and does not constitute the sexu- ally explicit subordination of women. Critical and popular opinion of the film varied, ranging from admiration to repulsion. Whereas the reviewer for Ms. wrote that “‘Swept Away’ comes to grips with the ‘war’ between the sexes better than anything” she had ever read or seen, the reviewer for the Progres- sive stated he did not know what was “more distasteful about the film—its slavish adherence to the barroom credo that what all women really want is to be beaten, to be shown who’s boss, or the readiness with which it has been accepted by the critics.”77 FACT emphasized if two film critics can see the images and hear the words of Swept Away so differently, then contextual fac- tors, such as the critics’ own sexual fantasies and erotic impulses, must ulti- mately explain their divergent interpretations. What looks like the sexually explicit subordination of a woman to a radical-cultural feminist may, as far as the woman herself is concerned, be the height of sexual pleasure.

Shocked by radical-libertarian feminists’ seeming acceptance of women’s sexual abuse, radical-cultural feminists accused radical-libertarian feminists of false consciousness, of buying the “bill of goods” men are only too eager to sell women. Bitter debates about sexuality broke out between radical-libertarian and radical-cultural feminists, reaching fever pitch at the 1982 Barnard Col- lege sexuality conference. A coalition of radical-libertarian feminists, including lesbian practitioners of sadomasochism and butch-femme relationships, bisex- uals, workers in the sex industry (prostitutes, porn models, exotic dancers), and heterosexual women eager to defend the pleasures of sex between consenting men and women, accused radical-cultural feminists of prudery. To this charge, radical-cultural feminists responded they were not prudes. On the contrary, they were truly free women who could tell the difference between “erotica,” where the term denotes sexually explicit depictions and descriptions of women being integrated, constituted, or focused during loving or at least life-affirming sexual encounters, and “thanatica,” where the term denotes sexually explicit depictions and descriptions of women being disintegrated, dismembered, or disoriented during hate-filled or even death-driven sexual encounters.

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Radical-libertarian feminists faulted radical-cultural feminists for present- ing “vanilla” sex—gentle, touchy-feely, side-by-side (no one on the top or the bottom) sex—as the only kind of sex that is good for women. Why, asked radical-libertarian feminists, should we limit women, or men for that matter, to a particular “flavor” of sex? If women are given free rein, some may choose vanilla sex, but others may prefer “rocky-road” sex—encounters where pain punctuates pleasure, for example. No woman should be told that if she wants to be a true feminist, then she must limit herself to only certain sorts of sex- ual encounters. After all, if women’s sexuality is as “absent” as Catharine MacKinnon herself has claimed,78 then it is premature for anyone, including radical-cultural feminists, to fill the vacuum with only their own ideas. Bet- ter that all sorts of women offer diverse descriptions of what they find truly pleasurable. To this line of reasoning, radical-cultural feminists again retorted that radical-libertarian feminists were not true feminists but deluded pawns of patriarchy who had willfully closed their ears to pornography’s women- hating message. Before too long, the Barnard conference collapsed, as the gulf between radical-libertarian and radical-cultural feminists widened.

The Lesbianism Controversy Another topic that divided radical-libertarian feminists from radical-cultural feminists was lesbianism, particularly “separatist” lesbianism. Lesbianism fully surfaced as an issue within the women’s movement during the 1970s. Ironically, at the Second Congress to Unite Women, a group of women wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the label “lavender menace” staged a protest. The organizers of the conference had anticipated trouble due to the publication of Ann Koedt’s provocative essay “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” In this essay, Koedt claimed many women believe the orgasms they feel during heterosexual intercourse are vaginally caused when in fact they are clitorally stimulated. Koedt also claimed that many men fear “be- com[ing] sexually expendable if the clitoris is substituted for the vagina as the center of pleasure for women.”79 Viewing men’s fear of “sexual expend- ability” as alarmist, Koedt noted that even if all women recognized they did not need men as sexual partners for physiological reasons, many women would still select men as sexual partners for psychological reasons.80

Radical-libertarian feminists interpreted Koedt as justifying women’s engagement in noncompulsory (freely chosen) heterosexuality. Since a woman does not need a male body to achieve sexual pleasure, she does not have to engage in sexual relations with a man unless she wants to. In contrast to radical-libertarian feminists, radical-cultural feminists interpreted Koedt

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as implying that since there is no physiological reason for a woman to have sex with a man, there is no feminist psychological reason for a woman to want to have sex with a man. Indeed, there are only nonfeminist psychologi- cal reasons for a woman to want to have sex with a man, the kind of bad rea- sons Adrienne Rich discussed in her essay on compulsory heterosexuality.81 Therefore, if a woman wants to be a true feminist, she must become a les- bian. She must do what comes “naturally,” thereby freeing her own con- sciousness from the false idea that she is deviant, abnormal, sick, crazy, or bad because she enjoys sex with women, not with men.

For a time, the radical-cultural feminists’ interpretation of Koedt’s essay predominated in feminist circles, so much so that many heterosexual femi- nists felt deviant, abnormal, sick, crazy, or bad if they wanted to have sex with men. Deirdre English, a radical-libertarian feminist, reported she found it “fascinating and almost funny”82 that so many heterosexual feminists “seemed to accept the idea that heterosexuality meant cooperating in their own oppression and that there was something wrong with being sexually turned on to men. How many times have I heard this? ‘Well, unfortunately, I’m not a lesbian but I wish I was, maybe I will be.’”83 The so-called political lesbian was born: she who did not find herself erotically attracted to women but who tried as hard as possible to reorient her sexual impulses toward women and away from men.

Radical-libertarian feminists agreed with radical-cultural feminists that heterosexuality is a flawed institution that has harmed many women. Still, radical libertarians insisted it would be just as wrong for radical-cultural fem- inists to impose lesbianism on women as it had been for patriarchy to impose heterosexuality on women.84 Men having sex with women is not, in and of itself, bad for women, in radical-libertarian feminists’ estimation. Rather, what is bad for women is men having sex with women in a particular way: “fucking for a minute and a half and pulling out.”85 Women can and do find pleasure in sex with men when men make women’s sexual satisfaction just as important as their own sexual satisfaction, said radical-libertarian feminists.

Radical-libertarian feminists also stressed that individual men, as bad as they could be, were not women’s primary oppressors. On the contrary, women’s main enemy was the patriarchal system, the product of centuries of male privilege, priority, and prerogative. Thus, unlike those radical-cultural feminists who urged women to stop relating to men on all levels beginning with the sexual, radical-libertarian feminists did not press for a separatist agenda. On the contrary, radical-libertarian feminists urged women to con- front individual men about their chauvinistic attitudes and behaviors in an effort to get men freely to renounce the unfair privileges patriarchy had

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bestowed upon them.86 These feminists recalled that even WITCH, one of the most militant feminist groups in the 1960s, had not urged women to renounce men or heterosexuality entirely but to relate to men only on gyno- centric terms:

Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sex- ually liberated, revolutionary. (This possibly explains why nine million of them have been burned.) Witches were the first Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth-control practitioners and abortionists, the first alchemists (turn dross into gold and you devalue the whole idea of money!). They bowed to no man, being the living remnants of the oldest culture of all—one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly cooperative society, before the death-dealing sexual, economic, and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.

WITCH lives and laughs in every woman. She is the free part of each of us, beneath the shy smiles, the acquiescence to absurd male domination, the make-up or flesh-suffocating clothing our sick society demands. There is no “joining” WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are free and beautiful. You can be invisible or evident in how you choose to make your witch-self known. You can form your own Coven of sister Witches (thirteen is a cozy number for a group) and do your own actions.

You are pledged to free our brothers from oppression and stereotyped sex- ual roles (whether they like it or not) as well as ourselves. You are a Witch by saying aloud, “I am a Witch” three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal.87

Thus, women in the 2000s, like women in the 1960s, do not have to live together on the fringes of society or to have sex only with each other in order to be liberated, according to today’s radical-libertarian feminists. Freedom comes to women as the result of women’s giving each other the power of self- definition and the energy to rebel continually against any individual man, group of men, or patriarchal institution seeking to disempower or otherwise weaken women.

Reproduction, Men, and Women Not only do radical-libertarian and radical-cultural feminists have different views about sex, but they also have different ideas about reproduction.

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Whereas radical-libertarian feminists believe women should substitute arti- ficial for natural modes of reproduction, radical-cultural feminists believe it is in women’s best interests to procreate naturally. As we shall see, radi- cal-libertarian feminists are convinced the less women are involved in re- production, the more time and energy women will have to engage in society’s productive processes. In contrast, radical-cultural feminists are convinced the ultimate source of women’s power rests in their power to gestate new life. To take this power from a woman is to take away her trump card and to leave her with an empty hand, entirely vulnerable to men’s power.

Natural Reproduction: The Site of Women’s Oppression

Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. In The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Fire- stone claimed that patriarchy, the systematic subordination of women, is rooted in the biological inequality of the sexes. Firestone’s reflections on women’s reproductive role led her to a feminist revision of the materialist theory of history offered by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Although Marx and Engels correctly focused on class struggle as the driving forces of history, they paid scant attention to what she termed “sex class.” Firestone proposed to make up for this oversight by developing a feminist version of historical materialism in which sex class, rather than economic class, is the central concept.

To appreciate Firestone’s co-optation of Marxist method, we have only to contrast her definition of historical materialism with Engels’s definition of historical materialism, which is “that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and great moving power of all historical events in the economic development of society, in the changes of the modes of pro- duction and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.”88 Firestone reformulated his definition as follows:

Historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historical events in the di- alectic of sex: the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one an- other; in the changes in the modes of marriage, reproduction and child care created by these struggles; in the connected development of other physi- cally-differentiated classes (castes); and in the first division of labor based on sex which developed into the (economic-cultural) class system.89

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In other words, for Firestone, relations of reproduction rather than of pro- duction are the driving forces in history. The original class distinction is rooted in men’s and women’s differing reproductive roles; economic and racial class differences are derivatives of sex class differences.

In much the same way that Marx concluded workers’ liberation requires an economic revolution, Firestone concluded women’s liberation requires a bio- logical revolution.90 Like the proletariat who must seize the means of produc- tion to eliminate the economic class system, women must seize control of the means of reproduction to eliminate the sexual class system. Just as the ultimate goal of the communist revolution is, in a classless society, to obliterate class distinctions, the ultimate goal of the feminist revolution is, in an androgynous society, to obliterate sexual distinctions. As soon as technology overcomes the biological limits of natural reproduction, said Firestone, the biological fact that some persons have wombs and others have penises will “no longer matter culturally.”91 Sexual intercourse will no longer be necessary for human repro- duction. Eggs and sperm will be combined in vitro, and embryos will be ges- tated outside of women’s bodies.

No matter how much educational, legal, and political equality women achieve and no matter how many women enter public industry, Firestone insisted that nothing fundamental will change for women as long as natu- ral reproduction remains the rule and artificial or assisted reproduction the exception. Natural reproduction is neither in women’s best interests nor in those of the children so reproduced. The joy of giving birth—invoked so frequently in this society—is a patriarchal myth. In fact, pregnancy is “bar- baric,” and natural childbirth is “at best necessary and tolerable” and at worst “like shitting a pumpkin.”92 Moreover, said Firestone, natural repro- duction is the root of further evils, especially the vice of possessiveness that generates feelings of hostility and jealousy among human beings. Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State was incomplete not so much because he failed adequately to explain why men became the pro- ducers of surplus value, said Firestone, but because he failed adequately to explain why men wish so intensely to pass their property on to their biolog- ical children. The vice of possessiveness—the favoring of one child over an- other on account of the child’s being the product of one’s own ovum or sperm—is precisely what must be overcome if humans are to put an end to divisive hierarchies.

Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Firestone’s last point was developed by Marge Piercy in her science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time.93 Piercy set the story of her utopia within the tale of Connie Ramos’s tragic

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life. Connie is a late-twentieth-century, middle-aged, lower-class Chicana with a history of what society describes as “mental illness” and “violent be- havior.” Connie has been trying desperately to support herself and her daughter, Angelina, on a pittance. One day, when she is near the point of ex- haustion, Connie loses her temper and hits Angelina too hard. As a result of this one outburst, the courts judge Connie an unfit mother and take her beloved daughter away from her. Depressed and despondent, angry and agi- tated, Connie is committed by her family to a mental hospital, where she is selected as a human research subject for brain-control experiments. Just when things can get no worse, Connie is psychically transported by a woman named Luciente to a future world called Mattapoisett—a world in which women are not defined in terms of reproductive functions and in which both men and women delight in rearing children. In Mattapoisett, there are nei- ther men nor women; rather, everyone is a “per” (short for person).