A feminist's journey:

...Each of us must struggle to attain and maintain an identity...

...I saw women taking care of the chickens, working in the fields, shoveling silage, driving tractors, milking cows, and, in my grandmother's case, building fences and cupboards and even houses...

...Indeed, at this point we are even told by some women that, in the name of feminism, they should be free to enter combat duty just like any man because, as one senior woman in the Pentagon, who calls herself a feminist, put it, "Women need a chance to prove themselves...

...It's as if we wish to say, "You don't have to go through all that...

...It isn't a conflict of competing statuses, or roles, or all the other thin notions sociologists use a lot...

...And if they claim they can-that they only wish to spare you-please be patient and understanding that, most of the time, they mean well...

...It isn't "cognitive dissonance" as some psychologist might claim...

...But in reality I was devastated...

...That was my passion, my concern, and it was, of course, directly related to my life, to my own conflicts over public and private...

...It is wrong...

...I assumed you could do it and I did, although my family pretty much thought I was overdoing it and they tried to get me to slow down...

...We were supposed to do something on the student rebellion, civil rights, and so on, and I did...

...Life had long been hectic, even frenzied...

...To forsake that world entirely, to lose its life-forgiving values when it is at its best, is to lose a great deal and to further deprive the world of principles that counter the machine of megadeaths we construct with such energy with each passing month and year...

...its inception, whether to join 'em or oppose 'em...

...Somehow I survived and managed to keep on keeping on and at least part of what prevented me from becoming a political science clone was the messy reality of my private life...

...I don't think the way I'm supposed to think...

...Is this what we've come to...

...It is quite something else again to label women nothing but victims...

...If feminism means anything, it means we can and must dream our own dreams and that these dreams, in the final analysis, must unite us, in peace and fellowship, with other human beings rather than divide us, one from another...

...What I am trying to convey to you is that, finally, every one of us has the choice to make our own destinies...

...You cannot allow feminism to create some ready-made identity for you, or you should not, any more than women who rebelled against it allowed the old femininity to create their identities out of whole cloth for them...

...For many feminists this is unacceptable...

...Does, or ought, feminism to represent some alternative to politics as usual, and war, and restless, rootless ambition and striving after material success, all the costly and damaging dimensions of a particular sort of upwardly mobile American male ethos...

...I wrote about the vital coming together of politics and culture, the way the music of the '60s, especially Bob Dylan and the Beatles, was not so much 'in the background' as itself constitutive of the activities we were engaged in...

...We were put on this earth to make a difference, to make a contribution, to leave the world a better place than what we had found it...

...It helps, of course, to have a sympathetic professor or two who may be outside the mainstream themselves...

...What also turns on this issue is one's ideal of politics: is it, finally, to do with Who gets what when where how...

...I found one who would tolerate what were seen as my eccentricities-in my own case a concern with how political theorists from the Great Tradition, Plato to the present, understood the relationship between women and politics and the categories they used to explore that issue...

...Everyone worked...

...To the extent that you see yourself as nothing but a victim, you will internalize that victimization, come to define yourself under its terms and act just like a victim-you will become the living evidence of your own pathetic view of yourself...

...Along the way I just assumed-I didn't think about choices here-that I would get married and have children...

...It is demeaning...

...Now certain academic, or intellectual, problems began...

...It is false...

...The truth is: the women's movement has never known, from JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN is a political theorist who has studied at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute...

...in political theory at Brandeis University...

...Of husband and kids and friends and pets and Beatle music and Bob Dylan and the competing loyalties and standards and commitments and the features of human reality they involve...

...Deep down...

...Some feminists held to a strict environmentalist thesis: we get to be the way we are because the environment shapes and molds us into certain forms, including particular ways of looking at the world depending upon whether we are males or females...

...I had gone through a lot, personally and politically...

...I can speak of this ambivalence because I feel and have felt it...

...In whose behalf is their dream being dreamt...

...Of course I had no desire to be (this is harsh but then the Lutheran pietism I grew up in is no easy religion) a parasite, a plaything, a decorative do-nothing...

...Then go on to live your own life, understanding that it isn't just the visions of life promoted by the "status quo" you need to question but those promoted by the social rebels and revolutionaries as well...

...This bind-this dilemma-has never been resolved...

...It helps to explain the ambivalence many women feel about success on the world's terms...

...This doesn't make us individualists, or at least it need not...

...I did-I had three children and a master's degree by the time I was twenty-four...

...MY OWN journey as a feminist began even before I knew the term, before there was such a thing as a women's movement...

...I have long hated all those book dedications academics write to their wives and children for being quiet and out of sight and patient while they hid away in splendid isolation doing their dry tomes...

...I fought that battle, you don't have to...

...It also involves learning how to think in particular ways-or at least graduate schools attempt to force their students within a certain mainstream mold...

...If politics doesn't have to do with people's lives, what does it have to do with...

...It is simplistic to label women's reluctance to be whole-heartedly ambitious strivers their"fear of success.'' That is a vacuous assumption based on a distorted psychology...

...It is always difficult for social rebels, people who have in some way swum against the tide (and I include myself here as a woman in a profession with few women who is also part of a minority of that profession, a political theorist, and, further, a minority of that minority, a critical theorist) to accept the fact that others may not wish to follow them in the terms they set up for their own rebellion...

...Don't let anyone tell you feminism or a feminist commitment requires certain rigid either/or choices...

...And my professor said to me, "Well, this is another interesting Jean Elshtain paper...

...Let me explain the nature and meaning of this conflict...

...It was a paper about the '60s, the decade we were then in...

...Instead something much more complicated is going on...

...She is an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she teaches courses on feminist, psychological, and political theory...

...I thought: I can't do this...

...That my life is framed by one war and what seems to be the military and psychological build-up for another, despite Vietnam and the trauma of the' 60s, is important for it indicates that the contemporary women's movement, just like its nineteenth century predecessor, has thus far, despite the efforts of many noble women, been unable to significantly influence public policy and the direction of political events away from war...

...With power, force, violence, and compulsion...

...I did it for you...

...politics was in the music...

...When I began my prolific adventures there were those who said it "couldn't be done," but there was no feminist movement around to tell me the same thing-that it was impossible to be married, have babies, and go to school...

...I wrote about hippies and the repudiation of war and violence, particularly as a definition of masculine identity...

...It came as some surprise to me, when I left this environment, that was both sheltered yet a source of enormous strength of character, to learn that women were supposed to spend their time ironing doilies, playing bridge, or going off to the local beauty salon in order to keep themselves attractive for their husbands...

...It isn't a superficial conflict I can readily eliminate...

...I thought: well to hell with the study of politics then...

...As far back as I can remember I saw women running the whole show in the house, baking, making homemade catsup and sausage, sewing dresses for my sisters, my cousins, and me out of one-hundred-pound flour sacks...

...But now it became troubled...

...I was too restless, I cast my net too wide, to be content to make my contribution within a small compass...

...The music was in the politics...

...Much hinges on this debate, of course, including a particular theorist's views on whether women were or were not, could or could not be political beings...

...Well, it is part of what we've come to and it makes it all the more imperative to think through what feminism is, what it stands for-or ought to stand for-if the new woman is not to be just a clone of the old man...

...To buck the tide is difficult...

...rather it makes us responsible, choosing, willing human beings rather than patsies, pawns, and blobs...

...I grew up, in the rural Colorado West, where people were still judged, in those days at any rate, more by the quality of their character and by their capacities for hard work, duty, and perseverance than by their sex...

...I had romantic dreams of adventure-of being a female war correspondent (there's one dimension of the feminist image, for it required a war to be realized) or a compassionate, nurturant leader, a mother to her people (there's another...

...Nobody can do it for you...

...That became for me a focus on the public and the private-on the distinctions made between public or political notions, activities, relations, purposes and those that were deemed private, for a variety of reasons...

...Nobody was idle, or was allowed to remain idle for long...

...That was back in 1966...

...Women sense, deep in their bones, that the smaller world, the world of children and neighbors and simple, necessary tasks has its own virtues and blessings, as well as real pain in being immersed and tied to the realm within which maternal thinking and action occur...

...It denies women self-respect...

...I was a woman in an epoch when there was, once again, an official feminist movement, a married woman with children at that, hence a "deviant" within the hallowed halls of academe...

...Or does politics have something to do with certain ideals of the common good and of public ends and purposes, of the capacity of human beings to transcend narrow self-interest and think and work for the good of others...

...I figured you could do everything...

...But I was now, as a graduate student in a political science department, brought up against those binds (join 'em or fight 'em) I talked about earlier...

...You can't become a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless you've earned your stripes in battle...

...Farm life was roughly egalitarian-on the family farm there was no clear-cut division of labor...

...It is one thing to point out instances of outrageous brutalization and victimization of women...

...It is the competing imperatives of two different ways of being a human being, of making one's way in the world, or striving to be somebody, to have a clear self- and social identity, to have, in a world increasingly stripped of it, honor...

...Don't let anyone make you half a human being by fiat, for if you let others make those choices for you, that is precisely what you will become...

...I've got the wrong kind of mind...

...But I learned something interesting in graduate school, or at least my teachers attempted to teach me this, and that was that neither my life nor anybody else's had much of anything to do with political science as a particular, abstract, academically organized and structured inquiry...

...This experience and my study of history have taught me that those within the contemporary feminist movement who specialize in wallowing in self-pity and portraying women as nothing but helpless victims, do women an enormous disservice...

...This means, by implication, that as women forsake the world of family and domesticity, with its ideal imperatives of compassion, nurturance, protection of the weak and the vulnerable and long-range affective ties and responsibilities for the harder-edged, more driven world of business and politics, they, too, can and will acquire the characteristics necessary for success in that world...

...Well, in the dedication to my book which the Princeton University Press will bring out later this year I thank my children for being always within earshot and eyeshot because that helped me to stay in touch with what counts: with real, concrete, particular human beings...

...How, then, to make that contribution in a rapidly changing epoch that would forever break up and dissolve that rural way of life of my grandmother and my mother and myself as a little girl...

...I recall vividly a paper I wrote for a Political Sociology course...

...My fourth child was born just nine months after I started work on my Ph.D...

...They not only want to retain the virtues and moral imperatives tied to mothering, to kin ties, to emotional and intimate familial values, they want the public world to be infused with these qualities and virtues as well...

...Either marriage or career/ Either children or none...

...GRADUATE SCHOOL isn't about learning things-facts and theories and one's specific discipline...

...But of course it has nothing to do with the scientific study of politics...

...Roughly, whether one wished, within the frame of one feminist perspective, to enter the extant hierarchy of status, power, and privilege, or whether, from a different feminist perspective, one questioned hierarchical arrangements and promoted an alternative vision of society, turned, first, on one's notions of the political community and second, on one's theories of how men and women got to be the sorts of beings they are, and were...

...I wrote about the impact of the life and death of John F. Kennedy on my generation- the way he energized us in political ways...

...Everyone contributed...

...THE EDITORS I have been asked to discuss what the women's movement has been and is and to tie that in with some autobiographical fragments that might help you to make sense of how the women's movement has affected, in my own case, the life of a woman born just as this country was entering the Second World War, a woman about to turn forty just as it seems we are being primed, by the Reaganites and the military-industrial complex, for another...

...It haunts the feminist movement and the women who identify with it...