Katha Pollitt's Reasonable Creatures

...One of the thrills of reading Pollitt is her refusal to trim her sails with these winds...

...Gender socialization, suggests Wolf—both what men expect of women and what women expect of themselves—undermines the boldness and self-assertion necessary to a strong public voice...

...But I am still waiting for someone to explain why it would be better for my daughter to grow up in a joyless household...

...No angst for the newly single mother...

...What does unify the essays is a luminous voice inflected with a distinct generational sensibility...

...She also shows how much fun a woman can have when she jettisons, at least literarily, the need to please...

...In preparing the columns for publication, Pollitt took care to choose those involving issues that resonate beyond the moment— antifeminism, reproductive ethics, sexual abuse...

...Contract maternity is not a way for infertile women to get children . . . it is a way for men to get children...

...It is this imaginative relationship between writer and reader that led Wolf, after Pollitt's devastating attack on some current piece of antifeminist palaver, to call her a national treasure...

...Like all domestic labor performed for pay," Pollitt concludes bitingly, "housecleaning, baby-sitting, prostitution—childbearing in the marketplace becomes disreputable work performed by suspect marginal people...

...Pollitt never pulls her punches: as you may note after a moment's reflection, that is rare among women in life as well as in print...

...she inquires rhetorically and proceeds to lay out the arguments for "fair play" and dismantle them piece by piece...

...It inoculates her both to the special pleading for women which can mark a liberal like Anna Quindlen and to the melodramatizing of female innocence perpetrated by radicals like Catherine Mackinnon...

...In her columns in the Nation, she reminds readers how much more women might reasonably expect for themselves...

...Why not name the woman...

...Politically, Pollitt carries on a line of feminist thinking intermeshed with the democratic left, a long tradition revivified by that wing of the women's liberation movement that came out of the 1960s with its ties to the New Left frayed but unbroken...

...Reasonable Creatures is an exploration of the territory outside metaphor and myth where the value of a woman's life is its own measure...

...She crowns her investigation of this particular instance of equality-with-a-vengeance with a dead-on, baleful gaze at the male narcissism and cant that inform it...

...Always Pollitt insists on the sexes' shared nature as "reasonable creatures" —the phrase of Mary Wollstonecraft that gives the collection its title...

...Reasonable Creatures is imbued with an awareness of all the structural constraints that militate against women's claiming a full humanity, an understanding of how sexual inequality gets tangled up with economics and class...

...But by the same token, the essays do not always fare well over time...

...Reasonable Creatures does develop certain lines of argument—Pollitt's concern with an emergent rhetoric of fetal rights, her ongoing broadside against media scandalizing about women, a militant assertion of the value of women's sexual and economic independence...

...A hallmark of this democratic feminism has been, since the nineteenth century, its resistance to moralistic notions about the supposedly distinct, higher nature of women and their essential differences from men...

...These pieces derive their energy from their immediacy...

...Family values and the cult of the nuclear family is, at bottom, just another way to bash women, especially poor women...

...Feminist writer Naomi Wolf recently called attention to how little women's opinions figure in our op-ed pages, journals, public affairs shows, and columns, all "strikingly immune to the general agitation for female access...

...The family-value advocates would doubtless say that my husband and I made a selfish choice...

...Who was Hedda Nussbaum...

...Years ago she asked in a poem, "What if a woman/is not the moon or the sea...

...Pollitt's forte is to use this understanding of sexual politics to slash through some controversy shrouded in liberal piety and obfuscation...

...But what about the infertile women whom these gestational mothers help...

...It is perhaps her proximity to literary . and publishing circles in New York City, where she lives, that makes her so shrewd about the eagerness of an enlightened media to sponsor old misogynist myths repackaged as modern sexual realpolitik...

...Traces of a dialogue with Marxism are apparent, not in any ideological language but in an edginess to Pollitt's interest in how the class system breeds a misogyny that eventually bears down on all women...

...She has created a persona of a middle-aged feminist as beguiling, dashing and cheerful—quite a feat amid a climate so hostile to such personages...

...At the heart of Pollitt's thought is a critique of the family, developed by the old politics of women's liberation and elaborated by twentyfive years of subsequent left-wing feminism...

...But inevitably her treatment of these deeper concerns is limited by tying them to events that, given the dizzying pace of the news, can seem passé and even, to younger readers, incomprehensible...

...This view, bolstered and expanded by the very best of feminist history and social science, has been under attack for the duration, subjected to calumnies so intense that even the most militant are prone, at times, to advertise our own domestic successes as protection against the assumption that anyone who adheres to "that" kind of feminism must despise children and detest men...

...Ferocious, canny, Pollitt is both inspiration and reinforcement for the mundane, bumbling argumentative self...

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...What emerges rhetorically is rather a fierce female intellectual, unapologetically feminist and utterly intrepid...

...But neither does Pollitt give any quarter to the wishful thinking, now fashionable among neoliberals, that confuses sexual egalitarianism as a political goal with a description of life as we know it, if only feminist demagogues would cease to brainwash women...

...But even in a tough, funny writer like Barbara Ehrenreich, the domestic voice has intruded over the years, the evocation of children's foibles and a comic domestic chaos, as if Jean Kerr were a ghost that couldn't be quite banished...

...Readers who know little about feminism, however, will not necessarily find an entrée here, since there is no systematic exposition of feminist politics...

...The priceless task [of pregnancy] turns out to have a price after all: about $1.50 an hour...

...Here she makes the au courant gesture toward her own cozy nest—the essay begins with her reading her daughter a bedtime story—but charmingly subverts it by informing readers that she has recently separated from her husband...

...they are not expository or reflective but rather served as fuel for fires burning at the time...

...She goes on to connect the wave of middle-class breast-beating over divorce and single-parent families with a politics that, on the bottom line, is about the perfidies of vulnerable women...

...Fresh from your argument, you read a Pollitt column and, still sizzling with what you might have said, appropriate her thoughts as ammunition for your next encounter...

...Surrogacy— "checkbook motherhood" is Pollitt's term, rendered with characteristic tartness—is one outcome of an economic system that makes many women so financially hard-pressed that the pittance they are paid for bearing a child seems attractive...

...If only they would get married and stay married, society's ills would vanish...

...Katha Pollitt's gift has been an ability to move beyond these limitations and, in doing so, to create a newly imagined space for opinionated women...

...Opinionated women, it is true, too often still register as in over their heads, presumptuous in proportion to how far they venture outside their proven expertise in matters of personal life...

...A delightful piece on the New York Times's decision to publish the name 282 • DISSENT Books of the victim in the Palm Beach rape trial of William Kennedy Smith is a good example...

...As she notes in an aside in an essay reprinted in the collection Reasonable Creatures, "[wje are in a transition period, in which many women were raised with modest expectations and much emphasis on the need to please others...

...For all that Pollitt is very much a woman of her generation, it is one of her virtues never to look back...

...What was the Baby M case all about...

...Pollitt follows out this objection to the end and reminds us, damningly, that the contracting parties in surrogacy arrangements are not a pregnant woman and an adoptive mother but a pregnant woman and a monied man, the sperm donor, who uses her to preserve his genetic inheritance...

...What, exactly, was all the fuss about middle-aged single women not finding husbands...

...What Wollstonecraft described as a determination "to see women neither heroines nor brutes" sets Pollitt's brand of militance aside from other SPRING • 1995 • 281 Books strains of feminism...

...Passions of the moment fade and the specifics of the controversies become blurry...

...The writer drops enough hints about herself to allow readers to sketch in more: an adoring mother of a treasured daughter, unembarrassed user of Clairol to wash out the gray hairs, passionate feminist who counts both men and women as friends...

...She has almost a second sense about the wiles of a culture that dishes out equality with a vengeance, formally acknowledging feminist goals yet reproducing social inequalities of gender in ever more duplicitous ways...

...Pollitt is also a fine poet, too little heard from lately...

...280 • DISSENT Books Reading any of the tiny number of female opinion journalists who have succeeded, you sense their difficulties in claiming full authority, the temptation to take refuge in a more palatable domestic identity...

...One also has to wonder," she muses, "about the urgency with which . . . male proponents of the antistigma theory, with no history of public concern for women, declare themselves the best judge of women's interests and advocate a policy of which they themselves will never have to bear the consequences...

...Would not naming rape victims remove the stigma from rape...

...A book composed of columns constitutes something of a contradiction...

...Years of conservative reaction have made her feisty and smart rather than morose and maundering...

...Why I Hate Family Values" is a memorable contribution on this score...

...In Anna Quindlen, the most successful of the circle, the tendency to evoke the accoutrements of conventional femininity is chronic: the kids, the husband, the concern for the needy, the note of girlish pleading...

...Both the charming girl and the wacky mom are absent from Pollitt's self-presentation...

...Pollitt gives a sound drubbing to updated versions of the nobility of Woman rendered by thinkers like Carol Gilligan as a universal ethic of female caregiving and pacific inclinations...

...Imprecations and accusations lurk at the edges of life and female psychology, fueling prejudices and women's own self-censorship...

...The pieces on surrogate motherhood are a fine instance of how Pollitt can fuse an argument about the exploitation of working-class women with one about the travails of their more privileged sisters...