Feminism Page 11
a myth invented by men to confine women to their oppressed state.
For women it is not a question of asserting themselves as women, but of becoming full-scale human beings.
Secon
d-w
But though Beauvoir was and remained critical of some forms of av
traditional feminism, she was impressed by the emerging e feminism: th
Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF), admitting in a 1972
interview that she recognized that
e lat
it is necessary, before the socialism we dream of arrives, to struggle e 20th centur
for the actual position of women . . . Even in socialist countries, this equality has not been obtained. Women must therefore take their destiny into their own hands.
y
Beauvoir was one of the women who signed a 1971 manifesto published in the Nouvel Observateur, drawn up by an MLF group, who were campaigning to legalize abortion; 343 women signed it, proclaiming ‘I have had an abortion and I demand this right for all women.’ However, she always insisted (not wholly convincingly) that she herself had no personal experience of women’s ‘wrongs’, that she had escaped the oppression that she analyses so brilliantly in The Second Sex.
Far from suffering from my femininity, I have, on the contrary, from the age of twenty on, accumulated the advantages of both sexes . . .
those around me treated me both as a writer, their peer in the 99
masculine world, and as a woman . . . I was encouraged to write The Second Sex precisely because of this privileged position. It allowed me to express myself in all serenity.
minism
Fe
11. Perhaps the most influential of all 20th-century Western feminists, Simone de Beauvoir remains important still, for her autobiographies and novels as well as for her great piece of feminist theory, The Second
Sex.
100
But Beauvoir’s four autobiographical volumes – Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, The Force of Circumstance, and All Said and Done – as well as the 1964 book about her mother, ironically entitled A Very Easy Death, take us on a uniquely detailed, remarkably frank, and often very moving journey through her own experiences. She never suggests that she is a model for others; but she evokes her own life as a successful example of how one girl escaped the feminine role of ‘object, Other’. She is almost apologetic about concentrating on women’s issues when ‘some of us have never had to sense in our femininity an inconvenience or an obstacle’. But she admitted that a woman who takes up the pen inevitably provides
Secon
a stick to be beaten with . . . if you are a young woman they indulge d-w
you with an amused wink. If you are old, they bow to you av
respectfully. But lose that bloom of youth and dare to speak before e feminism: th
acquiring the respectable patina of age: the whole pack is at your heels.
e lat
And her autobiographies, as well as her novels, are all the more e 20th centur
moving, and certainly speak more directly to women readers, because, perhaps against Beauvoir’s conscious intentions, they evoke her own – inevitable – frustrations and uncertainties, y
whether about Jean-Paul Sartre’s infidelities during their long relationship, about her own affairs with the American writer Nelson Algren and with Claude Lanzmann, or about her own childlessness.
But to the end, Beauvoir remained open to new experiences. In 1955, after she and Sartre visited China, she wrote The Long March, acknowledging that it had ‘upset my whole idea of our planet’, as she came to understand ‘that our Western comfort [is] merely a limited privilege’. Her last major theoretical work, Old Age (1970), in which she struggles to maintain her cool rationality in the face of the ultimate, the inevitable, defeat, is perhaps her most moving book.
101
Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique exploded the myth of the happy housewife in the affluent, white, American suburbs; ‘the problem that has no name’, she wrote, ‘burst like a boil through the image of the happy American Mystique’. The idea for the book began with a magazine article she wrote after she had attended a class reunion, and asked other women there, ‘what do you wish you had done differently?’ Their answers alerted her to a vague but pervasive discontent. She has been criticized, correctly, for being narrowly middle class; for a simplistic argument that urges suburban women to plan their lives ahead so that they can move from family duties to work outside the home, while ignoring the numbers of less fortunate women already desperately juggling housework with outside jobs, usually poorly paid. For poorer Americans, the black feminist bell hooks argued: liberation means the freedom of a mother finally to quit her job – to live the life of a capitalist stay at home, as it were . . . To be able to work and to have to work are two very different matters.
minism
Fe
But Friedan’s book was a well-researched, sharply written, even passionate indictment of the fact that even affluent middle-class women lead restricted lives, and too often lapse into a depressed acceptance of that restriction. She insisted that each woman must at least ask what she truly wants. Then she may indeed realize that ‘neither her husband nor her children nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her a self ’.
Friedan’s own background had been in radical politics, and her earlier writings, particularly, display a keen awareness of social inequalities. Moreover, with a group of other women, some from the Union of the Automobile Workers, she went on to become one of the founder members of NOW, the National Organization of Women, which set out ‘to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society, now, assuming all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men’.
102
12. Betty Friedan in New York, 1970.
103
Friedan, like some of the older women in the movement, was concerned that the new feminist rhetoric ‘rigidified in reaction against the past, harping on the same old problems in the same old way’, instead of moving forward. In The Second Stage (1981) she admits both how much has changed for women – and how little.
Despite arduous and prolonged attempts to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed, some states still reject it. Perhaps inevitably, there was a widening gap between Friedan and the new generation of feminists, though it is hardly fair to accuse her of going along with a ‘backlash’. She approvingly quotes a Toronto journalist: I don’t want to be stuck today with a feminist label anymore than I would want to be known as a ‘dumb blonde’ in the fifties. The libber label limits and short-changes those who are tagged with it. And the irony is that it emerged from a philosophy that set out to destroy the notion of female tagging.
Her criticism may be unfair, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand.
minism
Fe
Within Western feminism – or Women’s Liberation as it soon came to be called – there was initially, at least, great variety, and an energy that sprang in part from anger at having been excluded in existing leftist groups, in part from fruitful disagreements within the emerging movement itself. Many younger women – in the student movement, amongst anti-Vietnam protesters and New Left activists – had felt they were being sidelined by their male comrades. Women among the American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) announced in 1965 that, having learned ‘to think radically about the personal worth and abilities of people whose role in society had gone unchallenged before’, a lot of women in the movement ‘have begun trying to apply those lessons to their relations with men’. Two years later, SDS women insisted that their
‘brothers . . . recognize that they must deal with their own problems of male chauvinism’. Some women issued a news-sheet called ‘Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement’, along with a manifesto from New Left activists who found themselves sidelined by male 104
comrades, and who were infuriated by Stokely Carmichael’s infamous remark that ‘the place of women in the movement is prone’.
bell hooks, in her Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (1984), was sharply critical of the whole movement, arguing that the women ‘who are most victimized by sexist oppression . . . who are powerless to change their condition in life’ have never been allowed to speak out for themselves. Current feminism, she insists, is racist, and has left many women bitterly disillusioned. Movement women have consistently ignored the deeply intertwined issues of race and class; the emphasis on the common ‘oppression’ of women has in fact ignored terribly real inequalities within American society.
Secon
White women behaved as if the movement belonged to them, hooks d-w insists; they ignored the fact that women are divided by all kinds of av prejudice, ‘by sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege’. hooks recalls e feminism: th
her own experience in feminist groups: ‘I found that white women adopted a condescending attitude towards me and other non white participants.’ Black feminists rightly argue that ‘every problem e lat
raised by white feminists has a disproportionately heavy impact e 20th centur
on blacks’.
In America, expressions of feminism ranged from Gloria y
Steinem’s accessible and glossy Ms magazine, first published in 1970, to the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers. In her book Sexual Politics (1970), Kate Millett set out to analyse ‘patriarchy as a political institution’. Politics, she insists, refers to all ‘power structured relationships’, and the one between the sexes is a
‘relationship of dominance and subordinance’ which has been largely unexamined. Women are simultaneously idolized and patronized, she argued, backing up her thesis with a scathing analysis of the patriarchal attitudes of writers from different periods and cultures: Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet. She saw little immediate hope for women; ‘it may be that we shall . . . be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics’, she concluded, ‘but not until we 105
have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit’.
Other political statements included the American Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), which argued that the basic division, the most profound oppression, in society was not class but sex; she hoped for a true ‘feminist revolution’, but argued that revolution would demand
an analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism was for the economic revolution. More comprehensive, for we are dealing with a larger problem, with an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.
In England, the Australian-born Germaine Greer’s lively and provocative The Female Eunuch (1970) challenged the ‘sense of inferiority or natural dependence’ which women have too often accepted placidly, passively, allowing it to distort and impoverish their lives. There are chapters on the middle-class myth of love and minism
marriage; on why being ‘an object of male fantasy’ actually Fe
desexualizes women, and on the way ‘cooking, clothes, beauty and housekeeping’ can become compulsive, anxiety-producing activities.
Sheila Rowbotham’s Liberation and the New Politics (1970) and Juliet Mitchell’s Woman’s Estate (1971) were both written in response to the emerging Women’s Liberation movement in England. Though that movement, Mitchell argued, was international ‘in its identification and shared goals’, and was for the most part ‘professedly, if variously, revolutionary’. Her book cites, briefly, women’s movements in Europe (Holland, Sweden, and France) and in the United States. Everywhere, she argues, women are ‘the most fundamentally oppressed people and hence potentially the most revolutionary’, and she goes on to examine four areas of their lives that must be transformed: production, reproduction, sexuality, and the socialization of children.
106
Lesbian feminism
In the late 1960s, many lesbians felt themselves sidelined both in the women’s movement and in the emerging gay liberation groups. Betty Friedan, president of NOW, notoriously described women advocating lesbian issues as a ‘laven-der menace’. Her denigration was angrily rejected in a brief manifesto called The Woman-Identified Woman. In 1973, the well-known American journalist Jill Johnston published
Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution, which included a witty satire on heterosexual romance: ‘it begins when you Secon
sink into his arms, and ends with your arms in his sink’.
d-w
ave feminism: th
Some lesbians insisted that they were central to women’s liberation because their very existence threatens male supremacy at its most vulnerable point. Lesbianism was sometimes suggested as the most, or even the only, politically e lat
e 20th centur
correct choice for a woman. Rita Mae Brown argued that the difference between heterosexual and lesbian women was ‘the difference between reform and revolution’. In No Turning
y
Back: Lesbian and Gay Liberation of the ’80s, the male and female writers attacked both the common assumption that every household should be heterosexual, as well as the widespread ‘belief in the inherent inferiority of the dominant-male/passive-female role pattern’.
These writings sprang from, and encouraged, the new but rapidly growing women’s movement, in various European countries including England, but also, and perhaps crucially, in America.
Women within the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Movement, and Students for a Democratic Society complained that, too often, they were treated as ‘typists, tea-makers and sexual objects’.
107
Protests at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City in November 1968 and in 1969, when feminists mockingly crowned a sheep, gave the emerging movement high visibility. Protesters argued that the beauty contest was a symbol of the way women in general are objectified, diminished, and judged primarily on appearance. ‘Every day in a woman’s life is a walking Miss World Contest’, one feminist remarked wearily.
In London, women had been meeting in small groups since 1969: some had been involved in protesting against the war in Vietnam, and helping American deserters; other women emerged from traditional left-wing groups, from student movements, or from the radically experimental Anti-University. Hackney women began producing a news-sheet called Shrew, and later issues were put out by other London groups. By the end of 1971, Shrew listed 56 groups
– plus one men’s group. A conference had been called in February 1970 in Oxford; so many women and children (and a few men) turned up that the venue was shifted from Ruskin College to the minism
Oxford Union. Above all, the meetings offered women the Fe
opportunity to talk: about loneliness, about equal rights at work, about childcare, about housework, about men, about revolution.
The emerging movement, rather optimistically perhaps, defined its demands: equal pay, equal education and opportunity, 24-hour nurseries, and free contraception and abortion on demand. A big march through London was organized, with banners announcing
‘we’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry’.
It remained a mainly middle-class movement, though there were many attempts to communicate with working-class women: feminists offered their support to a night cleaners’ campaign for better pay and conditions, and to a strike by women machinists at the Ford Dagenham plant.
Perhaps the most distinctive element in the new movement was its organization: women met in small groups, some locally based, others – later – formed to discuss particular issues, or work for 108
13. All women are beautiful: demonstration against the Miss America pageant, Atlantic City, 1969.
Body issues
One of the most urgent concerns of second-wave feminism has been a woman’s rights over her own body. Western feminists have often addressed questions about beauty and the
value placed on a woman’s external appearance – an issue which may seem, but only at first glance, superficial. Partly driven by the tantalizingly glamorous media images that swamp us, some seek refuge in an anxious, often ruinously expensive, pursuit of the latest fashion. Others may turn to more desperate and self-destructive measures: dieting to the point of anorexia (which may alternate with compulsive eating and bulimia), or anxiously seeking the self-mutilation that is cosmetic surgery.
Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue (1981) and Naomi minism
Fe
Wolf ’s The Beauty Myth (1990) both explore the physical self-hatred and the fear of ageing that, understandably, plague so many contemporary women. And even in the affluent West, women have had to fight hard for the right to better health care: for adequate gynaecological advice and care in childbirth; for the right to contraception and, if necessary, abortion; and for more attention to those cancers, of the breast and the womb, for example, that particularly affect women.
particular causes. But most involved some kind of ‘consciousness-raising’. The term had been coined by an American, Kathie Sarachild: women would meet regularly and talk from their own experience. It was to have nothing to do with gossip; groups set out to explore both what women had in common and the issues that 110
14. Women’s Liberation groups marching through London, 1971.
111
divided them. The overall aim was to begin to understand private fears and discontents in a wider context, to discover, through
‘sharing, recognizing, naming’ their political implications. As Juliet Mitchell remarked, ‘women come into the movement from the unspecific frustration of their own private lives, find what they thought was an individual dilemma is a social predicament’.
Consciousness-raising, Mitchell has suggested, was a matter of
‘speaking the unspoken: the opposite, in fact, of ‘‘nattering together’’ ’. Women who cannot deal with the peculiar forms oppression takes in their private lives are ‘highly suspect when they begin to talk about forms of oppression that afflict other women . . .