NEITHER DOMINANT NOR SUBORDINATE: THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT AND AMERICAN CULTURE
Stimpson, Catharine R.
To ask about the new feminism and contemporary American culture, I must begin with Le Deuxieme Sexe, which Simone de Beauvoir published in France 31 years ago. Joyless but monumental, that book...
...Quiet, quiescent, they were instead the constructs of culture, a collage of contradictory images that reflected man's need to create woman for the sake of creating himself...
...305 ficient weight and sensitivity to compel people to take a stand on it...
...It is a sad sign of women's subordination, even in America, that such an assumption cannot today claim an easy dominance...
...Many were to interpret it as a lewd exploitation of women that arouses as much thanatos as eros, as much aggression as lust...
...She speaks fondly of Le Deuxime Sexe...
...To varying degrees, each is within a central political tradition...
...How might they relate to women's privileged, but cursed, biological identity...
...She shaped our collective consciousness of a huge subject...
...The larger process of which these religious impulses are a part is an intensifying concern for women's worlds...
...In general, de Beauvoir dramatized the reign of men over women as the most persistent of hegemonies, that "complex interlocking of political, social, and cultural force...
...Ti-Grace Atkinson, Phyllis Chesler, Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, Elizabeth Janeway, Juliet Mitchell, Linda Nochlin, Sheila Rowbotham published their first, major, explicitly feminist books or papers...
...He had once reviewed The Group, and found it cowardly...
...2 Realism in writing has a parallel in simplicity in dress...
...They all scour the promises of any politics, totalitarian or anarchist, patriarchal or feminist...
...304 development of patriarchal structures and private property banished them...
...In The Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf has a serious breakdown...
...They were unhappy victims, whose miseries either went unnoticed or were noticed meanly...
...Simultaneously, in the New York Times Book Review, Joan Didion more or less concurred...
...In 1972, in The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation, Midge Decter performed a traditional role: that of the woman who scolds other women...
...Another cultural event of the early 1960s was the publication of Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle, an interwoven collection of four stories that lyrically articulated the experience of working-class women and their families (in 1971, it came out in paperback, too...
...To tell about them now was necessary, but difficult...
...Within the novel, his filter is that quotidian figure from the traditional novel of growing up: a son...
...We need a narrative about a woman, living alone with her children, who works for a large corporation, as a clerk, or on an assembly line, who then sues that company because she has been insulted or deprived...
...The Golden Notebook the insertion of a tampon...
...Feminists were to talk publicly about the bodies with which they were so intimate, and yet from which they often felt so alienated...
...Men may be absent from them, peripheral to them, or harmless within them...
...However, it inspires or stimulates others...
...One of his good friends is a transsexual...
...The dominant culture—more John Irvings—will absorb the more comfortable, manageable, and stylish features of such writings, but it will balk stubbornly at visions of pleasant, female worlds, culture's equivalent of the political inability to legalize sexual equality in the Constitution...
...It both accepts and diffuses the de Beauvoir tradition...
...Some, like the advice manuals to total women, is either blatantly allied to conservative causes, or commercially exploitative, or an effort to reconcile less threatening aspects of change with conventional domesticity...
...Thinking about women seriously, de Beauvoir insisted that other women do so, too...
...Finally, women had not constructed culture...
...With raucous irony, a later writer exhorted her readers: . . . join ugly lib...
...They also signify a commitment to the straightforward, a desire to abolish discrepancies between the real person and the mask of contrived appearance, and a rebellion against the ideology of the feminine that values woman primarily as beautiful object...
...With the aid of 19th-century anthropology, some assert that matriarchies once existed, but the 9 In American Voices, American Women, ed...
...No stranger to dialectical argument, de Beauvoir dismissed some common ways of regarding women: the psychoanalytic, which, at its most pompous, construed the female as a maimed male...
...and Introduction by Honor Moore (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1977), p. 537...
...to wonder, at least, about the possibility of the female style that Virginia Woolf tentatively predicted in A Room of One's Own...
...but first they had to become conscious of their condition...
...Such techniques were logical strategies for women who assumed that things as they were, publicly and privately, collectively and individually, had never been accurately described...
...Yet, his voice gives birth to theirs within the text...
...For some, psychic autonomy and moral sensitivity suffice...
...Indeed, a crazy feminist assassinates him...
...Paternity has called for equal time...
...34, 35...
...it is an act of survival...
...bourgeois 302 feminism, which seeks to eliminate sexual discrimination and sex roles...
...She also transvalues the received image of the female...
...People began to teach and collect the syllabi of college courses about women...
...In The Bell Jar, the suicidal Esther Greenwood is institutionalized, in bad hospitals and good...
...She barely mentioned Mary Wollstonecraft or Virginia Woolf, whom feminists were later to revere...
...Gertrude Stein, a lesbian...
...For example, Mary Daly's work, particularly in the late 1970s, angers many, who find it unscholarly or hostile...
...Olsen was also instrumental in having works by and about working-class women recovered, reprinted, and taught...
...In the 1950s and 1960s, despite the attention received by individual books such as The Feminine Mystique, commentators tended to ignore or ridicule those patterns...
...Several questions haunt such inquiries...
...In such a context, women may go mad...
...In Fear of Flying (1973), for example, Erica Jong offered passages of sharp feminist criticism and flights of ebullient heterosexuality that a reader who might recoil from de Beauvoir would devour...
...It would also call for more precise measurements of influence than we now have...
...Harald Petersen, Kay's husband, a man of the theater, a lecherous and sadistic fool, also anticipates the radical feminist conviction that an idiot masculinity and brutality are inseparably bound together...
...the Marxist, which, at its most crass, analyzed women as people whose wrongs would be righted when they entered productive spheres...
...She sees "turkey neck and turkey gizzards" and gets "very depressed...
...They also seem freer from, less anxious about, the destructive pressures of cultural history upon women than a Virginia Woolf or a de Beauvoir, perhaps because Woolf and de Beauvoir, among others, so exhaustively exposed such forces...
...in history, in the study of women's institutions and rituals...
...In 1963 its report documented sexual inequalities and labeled them discriminatory...
...In that same year Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique...
...Though born in Boston, Plath had a European father...
...Conservatives accuse them of destroying values...
...In the late 1970s, the most original feminist artists tend to investigate female experience...
...It has been revised, but it retains its integrity and power and the massiveness that inspires revisions...
...However, like her antecedents, the new New Woman finds herself ahead of the society that has produced her, at once attached to and severed from it...
...None of their authors was a "total American...
...that they have the brains, courage, and imagination to serve as a matrix of culture, not simply as its captives and imitators...
...That development, which few early readers of de Beauvoir might have predicted or desired, is my subject now...
...American feminists had ideas about language, especially empirical ones about the relationship between social structure and its use...
...Paradoxically, the novels that lit up subjects that had been hidden in the shadows of discourse were formally conventional...
...Marxist feminism, which integrates a class and feminist analysis...
...It is also affecting the lives of men...
...However, de Beauvoir's theories were also diluted or transformed...
...In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), for example, she dramatizes a planet of "ambisexuals," creatures capable of being both male and female, of impregnating or of bearing children...
...In 1971, in a famous lecture, Adrienne Rich said: . .This awakening of dead or sleeping consciousness has already affected the lives of millions of women, even those who don't know it yet...
...Like de Beauvoir, she presented women as manipulable...
...In psychology, it appears in the new fascination with mother-daughter bonds...
...Together, these books are a cultural reference point...
...Still others announced that femininity was a boon...
...Out or then becomes a pun, referring to sources and to sites that are abandoned...
...In The Group, The Bell Jar, and The Golden Notebook, each observes the new New Women...
...They say feminists encourage filthy language, sap family morality, blaspheme God, mock the righteous power of the instincts...
...Culturally, as well as politically, feminism assumed suf" Barbara Stanford, "Ugly Lib," in On Being Female, Barbara Stanford, ed...
...During the 1970s, the first three groups were to grow in number, the fourth to diminish, and the fifth to nurture patterns of resistance that lack the blank simplicity of a stone wall...
...Irving manipulates 20th-century absurdism, the metaphor of existence as a disease, and black humor, the laughter that lacerates as it ceases to amuse...
...Simone de Beauvoir is now an old woman...
...The collection is dedicated to Tillie Olsen...
...A textbook example of the expropriation of the culture de Beauvoir abetted and its integration into the culture-at-large is The World According to Garp (1978...
...Such movements, with the fresh 8 Berenice A. Carroll, "Mary Beard's Woman as Force in History: A Critique," in Woman: An Issue, Lee R. Edwards, Mary Heath, and Lisa Baskin, eds...
...10 Still others, who may not accept the reality of prehistoric matriarchies, also search for spiritual domains in which one can apprehend the goddess or goddesses, animating female beings who sustain women...
...While he is away, she occupies a new barn he has put up and claims it as her home...
...Such mysticism, especially when it construes divinities as maternal, floats toward Jungian beliefs, which implore materialistic Westerners to recall the psychic anima, a female principle that both women and men supposedly possess, and to call on The Feminine, the exalted Great Mother...
...Ironically, de Beauvoir's thought was partially compatible with habitual assumptions that women were less than men...
...5 However, they share a special balancing of politics and culture...
...the next year, Rich titled hers On Lies, Secrets, and Silence...
...McCarthy had traveled widely...
...The massive changes in the lives of modern Western woman generated both...
...Ironically, the discussion of 300 female sexuality was to become far more pervasively open in America than in France...
...A visionary polymath, Mary Daly writes of: . . . the murder/ dismemberment of the Goddess-that is, the self-affirming be-ing of women . . . . Our refusal to collaborate in this killing and dismembering of our own Selves is the beginning of re-membering the Goddess— the deep source of creative integrity in women...
...Predictably, then, attacks on feminists take cultural forms...
...others that they were feminists who separated their politics and their work...
...As a result, moral judgments and utopian dreams often frame the documentation of the world as it is...
...They were also to suspect the sexual revolution as a selfcongratulatory substitution of physical release for social change...
...Figures like Decter are sadly thin and predictable...
...Shulamith Firestone dedicated the Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) to Simone de Beauvoir, "who endured...
...Give uglies a chance...
...Joyless but monumental, that book articulated a concept of woman that American feminists, some 15 years later, were to accept as both accurate and appalling: a reality to recognize and repel...
...However, the end of the quest, its fulfillment, has differed...
...Such tasks can absorb energies that might otherwise be allocated to formal innovation...
...and Kate Chopin's nowrediscovered novel, The Awakening, which she first published in 1899, a year before Ibsen's play...
...However, de Beauvoir elaborated on their ideas...
...However, an audience adequate enough to underwrite these visions will continue to sustain them...
...He has consistently refused to build her the house she needs...
...For the artist must silence internal censors...
...They include American studies and the new social history, which call for scrupulous attention to ordinary life...
...In 1949, this was unusual...
...In multiple ways, it balances sympathy and skepticism, affirmation of the new and deference to the old...
...How might women's culture mediate between individuals and the subordinate status they so often had to accept...
...in the idealization of the figure of the androgyne...
...in criticism, in the search for a woman's language or imagery or style...
...Still others expressed inconsistent, even erratic and eccentric responses to feminism, but they granted the subject of women a fresh respect and gravity...
...in sexuality, in the increasing admission and approbation of lesbianism...
...political radicals...
...Amidst all this, de Beauvoir's demand that women become actively conscious of their condition has persisted...
...1 Depressing though ' Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 108...
...McCarthy did give one figure a romantic gloss: Elinor Eastlake, a beautiful, intelligent, politically wise lesbian...
...They brought to the Anglo-American tradition a French candor, which Colette had lyricized and de Beauvoir had intellectualized...
...During the first Nixon presidency, but particularly between 1970 and 1972, the cultural element that McCarthy, Plath, and Lessing represent became a cultural movement...
...cultural feminism, which hopes to embody a special, enhancing female sensibility...
...Garp has a feminist mother, whom the son loves...
...Later academic studies of women—which sought to explain their low self-esteem, status, and income—called on the concept of socialization, which, far more flagrantly, presumed women to be passive, malleable, receptive to influence, Galateas to battalions of Pygmalions...
...Still others said they were people, to whom femaleness, femininity, and feminism were of little relevance...
...They were, however, to dislike pornography...
...Given such pressures, for the new New Woman to survive at all, let alone honorably, is itself a value...
...Simultaneously, she served as a public precursor for such figures as Tillie Olsen, and Adrienne Rich who was to become perhaps the most accomplished and daring feminist writer...
...9 Is Freeman calling upon long-suffering wives to become guerrilla warriors...
...Later feminist criticism, such as Mary Ellmann's Thinking About Women (1968) and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), was to codify those images even more resolutely...
...Offering a cathartic story about a woman who refuses to go along with a man who has gone too far...
...In 1961 John F. Kennedy appointed a presidential commission on the status of women...
...Men still have prior claim to the powerful professions...
...It matters not whether the solitary voyager be a man or a woman...
...She accused feminists of being infantile, fretful lifedeniers...
...That one's own press is cheaper to run than one's own television studio was also partially responsible for the growth of the women's presses, such as the influential Feminist Press, which became alternatives to established trade houses...
...The increasing selfconfidence of feminists alone would have made this inevitable...
...To take a particular case, how might a reader, female or male, interpret the Mary Wilkins Freeman story, "The Revolt of `Mother' "? In this story, Sarah is married for 40 years to a flinty farmer...
...She accepts the image of woman as victim of man, though she is more sardonic and angry than de Beauvoir...
...For both groups, Martha Quest, the protagonist of Doris Lessing's five-volume Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision (1971)," in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose /966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp...
...They were bodies that had both abandoned their freedom and had it stripped from them...
...and the reevaluation of and challenge to received notions of what a work of art is, which expands indefinitely the catalogue of possible art objects...
...Some declared that they were feminists whose feminism influenced their work...
...Demand that your school hire at least 65 percent ugly teachers . . . . Demand ugly stewardesses, ugly waitresses, ugly bartenders, ugly movie stars . . . To applaud what women have feared serves the liberating psychic purpose that the discharge of any taboo does...
...The Bell Jar a bloody loss of virginity...
...The adherents of both sorts of worlds have insisted upon finding value in "feminine" characteristics the dominant culture had labeled as liabilities...
...In theory and practice, the new feminism consists of several linked movements: radical feminism, which sees man's oppression of women as a central historical event...
...the prestigious educations...
...Such costumes as pants or T-shirts, which have also been witty sources of slogans, are functional, i.e, they are cheap, comfortable, easy to care for...
...In 1962, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook appeared...
...Demonstrators organized to protest the exclusion of women artists from museum shows...
...Exactly who finds it useful, and why, is not really known...
...As feminists have demanded that the ambiguities of motherhood be a public question, men, and some women, have answered that the 306 poignancies of fatherhood must be studied, too...
...Her Sartrean ethics alone would forbid such a bleak oversimplification...
...They say feminists ignore history, indulge in polemics, argue illogically, respond primly to an analysis of sex, lack respect for academic excellence...
...and in the science fiction of such writers as Ursula LeGuin...
...I n 1963, Mary McCarthy published The Group and Sylvia Plath, using the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas, The Bell Jar...
...Because Martha alters drastically during the novels, from a confused adolescent, to a wartime radical in a colonial country, to an explorer of "universal mind," to a member of a remnant community in a postapocalyptic world, various aspects of her appeal to dissimilar groups: feminist existentialists...
...In a famous scene, Anna Wulf broods about the difference between her clitoral and her vaginal orgasms, which she prefers...
...7 Out of Our Father's House, arranged for the stage by Eve Merriam, Paula Wagner, and Jack Hofsiss, in The New Women's Theatre: Ten Plays hr Contemporary American Women, ed...
...For some, the process of reclaiming history has been inseparable from the conscious or unconscious production of myth...
...interest of women in the works of other women, have led to the exploration of domestic artifacts: quilts, letters, diaries, lullabyes, gardens...
...Agnes Smedley, a radical of working-class origins...
...Does a separate women's culture exist...
...The first American edition of The Bell Jar was issued...
...She calls on "Hags," "Spinsters," and "Crone" to "spin," a traditional women's activity, and to undergo a processional journey through patriarchal murder and sadism to a new female time space...
...What are its special characteristics...
...Her praise of Lakey helped to transvalue the figure of the stigmatized, sorrowful female homosexual...
...Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken...
...Her fastidious disdain symbolized a rough, ideological asymmetry between women who wrote about women and the feminists who did so...
...Rather, she assailed man's use of culture as a weapon against women and the painful deprivations and losses this had entailed for them...
...Garp happily takes care of his home while his wife works...
...In the media, pictures of an "attractive" Gloria Steinem in her aviator glasses now flash against those of a "disruptive" Kate Millett in her dark-rimmed glasses, one a spectacular icon of legitimate protest, the other of deviancy...
...Ironically, feminists had assisted in the canonization of Didion's novel Play it As It Lays (1970) as an impeccable anatomy of the diceyness of modern woman's free-wheeling existence...
...The legatees of de Beauvoir also believe that things as they are are not things as they ought to be...
...The novels of Monique Wittig and Bertha Harris, the prose of 1-161ene Cixous (insufficiently translated), the plays of Maria Irene Fornes, the poems of Adrienne Rich are sufficient proof of that...
...Do they reflect the rule of nature, and thereby partake of the immutable, or do they reflect the law of culture, and thereby partake of the mutable...
...Finally, Garp's vision sees people as "terminal cases...
...In addition, the political and cultural fervor of the 1960s created, often inadvertently, skepticism about their roles among women, and, more advertently, a climate of opinion that rendered skepticism itself commonplace...
...For others, matriarchies were centers for worship of a goddess who was hideously hurt, but whom radical feminists might now resurrect...
...A Rhodesian, Lessing had exiled herself to England...
...and guilt-free sexuality, unless they choose to write about it guiltily...
...Clearly, in its aftermath, cultural tasks remain...
...Without becoming a prisoner of a dogmatic program for the vanguard artist, Marge Piercy also wants art to be of use, to .4...
...In America two Fuller accounts of the new feminism are Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, The Rebirth of Feminism (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1971...
...Among the writers they praised were Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a feminist theoretician also badly treated for mental illness...
...Finally, in the 1960s, the American women's movement was reorganized, providing a political skeleton and an audience for cultural activities about women in general and feminism in particular...
...and the naturalistic, which, at its most vulgar, presumed that biology decreed women to be maternal beings...
...299 her theories of domination were, de Beauvoir was no fatalist...
...McCarthy, Plath, and Lessing were frank about female sexuality...
...more cultural than political history...
...That is, each calls for a redistribution of public power so profound that the structures of power themselves will alter...
...The text, a cultural feat, did not create the women's movement, a social and political force...
...They pass off a publicity-fond parasitism as critical theory, a grumpily hysterical conservatism as sober wisdom...
...It was available for ideological, rhetorical, analytical, scholarly, confessional, poetic, and imaginative enterprises...
...Shocking though it was to some, it has proved less controversial than Lessing's treatment of heterosexuality in The Golden Notebook...
...In addition, publishers were more receptive to feminism than gallery owners, national networks, and powerful film producers...
...To assume that my prophecy is plausible one must also assume, as de Beauvoir does, that women can be generative...
...If they did not, they would remain mired in the swamps of secondariness...
...Garp approves of much of the feminist analysis and recoils from the vicious excesses of male sexuality...
...6 The "awakening" is the first stage of the "quest" or "journey" or "voyage" toward a new life...
...3 Marge Piercy, "To Be of Use," in To Be of Use: Poems (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973), p. 49...
...In 1971, in The Prisoner of Sex, Norman Mailer fulsomely begged women not "to quit the womb...
...This approving interest—generally absent in de Beauvoir, carefully or ironically treated in McCarthy, Plath, and Lessing—is robustly present in the women's culture of the 1970s...
...How dependent has it been upon the dominant culture...
...Gayle Graham Yates, What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975...
...301 However, women have not regressively abandoned the avant-garde...
...How influential...
...2 Though a "fictional" rather than a "real" autobiography, The Bell Jar was also written in the first person...
...Because their ideas about sex and gender are ill-formed, or stale, they must feed for novelty upon the texts they distrust and despise...
...In The Group, Kay Petersen finds herself incarcerated in Payne Whitney...
...To care about them becomes a political necessity...
...Because of its openness, prehistory has been an ample field in which to erect altars of legend...
...and to have a sense of cultural history sophisticated enough to permit them to judge what is new, what only spuriously so...
...She described a distasteful commingling of the ideological imperatives of modern femininity, which told women to be attractively domestic, and the demands of a consumer society, which urged women to be competent purchasing agents for their families...
...terms, two metaphors, came to represent such a process...
...However, unlike several French feminists later in the decade, they wrote less out of a theoretical commitment to language as the primary force in the design and revelation of human beings and more out of a pragmatic sense of language's flexibility...
...The title is one of several references to the act of leaving home, as Ibsen's Nora did, both for its own sake and as a symbol of rebellion against women's role...
...However, Garp loathes what he thinks to be the vicious excesses of feminists...
...Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), p. 127...
...He is also a wonderfully benign and anxious father...
...However, it must coexist with the desire for a world in which 1 " (i.til Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 109...
...Beard argued against: . . . a "myth" of female subjection in history . . . against feminists who have adopted and propagated the myth . . . against historians— mostly male—who have contributed to the myth . . . . 8 Simultaneously, scholars, excavating women's history, were replacing the dimness that de Beauvoir saw in the past with a rich record of achievement and endurance...
...To be sure, Lessing did complex experiments with fragmented narrative techniques, but she, like McCarthy and Plath, was also a realist...
...Each was evidence for the theory that our best observers participate in more than one culture...
...She should...
...Doing so would demand another essay...
...Not only were there a significant number of women in publishing, as there are in nearly all institutions sympathetic to women's projects, but feminist texts were not an overwhelming commercial risk...
...of the evolution of cultural patterns that feminists have primarily fabricated...
...The sympathy of national administrations is obviously not a necessary condition for creativity...
...Zora Neale Hurston, a black...
...must nurture indifference to the charge that competence extends only to narrow, trivial "women's issues...
...Each reasons correctly that the domestic, the psychological, and the cultural have harnessed and reined women in...
...As it grew, it differed from its origins and provoked the attention of an initially negligent larger culture...
...Garp encourages women to write...
...Some of this seems pathological, the sign of a gynephobia that seeks to erase women, or, failing that, to belittle them...
...But after World War II, in the West, de Beauvoir named "woman...
...The Group and The Bell Jar were also stringently antiromantic...
...and Introduction by Lee R. Edwards and Arlyn Diamond (New York: Avon, 1973), p. 180...
...Both historical reality and cultural emblem, the New Woman, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, assumed that she would have a profession, an education, some autonomy...
...Her title, The Second Sex, projected women as a group universally subordinate to men...
...Esther's first glimpse of her boy friend's genitals is neither an initiation into terror, nor an introduction to the awesome glamour of the phallus, nor the match for a blaze of passionate love...
...strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward . . . ." 3 That impulse to reach out toward an audience, to offer it judgments and dreams, helps to create an accessible, at least partially familiar, cultural landscape...
...De Beauvoir refused to demean culture or to mock its potent powers...
...The Group described the purchase of a diaphragm...
...New York: Washington Square Press, Pocktt Books, 1974), p. 39...
...Liberals wonder if feminists are intellectually up to snuff...
...Anzia Yezierska, a Jewish immigrant...
...Describing a frequent domestic revolt...
...In a recent play, for example, its script taken from a number of diaries, letters, and journals, the final chorus begins: (Alternating) We must make the voyage of life alone...
...However, a more complex relationship between the culture of feminism and the dominant culture has also emerged...
...Re-vision —the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction —is for women more than a chapter in cultural history...
...Done collectively during the past several years, it has become both an event and a symptom—of modern women's growing freedom from economic dependence on men and on certain systems of control...
...So Marge Piercy, in Small Changes (1973), a severe and serious novel, both tells of Cambridge radicals and offers patterns of heroism for radicals to follow...
...Complex enough in itself, the quarrel about the origins of female sexuality has been only one aspect of the still vital argument about the causes, the extent, and the permanence of the differences between female and male, feminine and masculine...
...more cultural than political presence...
...theologians engaged upon spiritual, even occult, quests...
...Among the influential anthologies were Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful (1970) and Toni Cade's The Black Woman (1970).4 4 I have deliberately listed writers and texts without distinguishing among them...
...They were the "Other" in an existential struggle for identity between "subjects," who seek the certainties of a stable self and control, and "others," who gratify such longings through submission...
...In the early 1960s, de Beauvoir's concerns, her sense of women as problematical, became a discernible element of American public consciousness...
...In 1978, Olsen called her collection of prose about women and culture Silences...
...In brief, to discuss sexual differentiation is to query the very power of culture...
...A common theme of such protests to feminism and its works, despite their incompatabilities, is the fear that women might abandon their "femaleness," a biological condition granted a dark, inherent, unyielding power that immerses woman in the coils of the erotic, the fecund, and the maternal...
...Defeated, he accepts her rebellious act of will, while she, "overcome by her own triumph," buries her face in her apron...
...lesbian feminism, which finds central bonds between women...
...They have stimulated, too, the study of women's contributions to mass culture, particularly the popular novel...
...black feminism, which organizes the women who must endure both sexism and the racism that white women too often act out...
...Any change, any growth in their lives would perhaps register more quickly in culture than in politics...
...Anna's meditations were disturbing because this new New Woman seemed to endorse both psychoanalytical notions of femininity and older beliefs that female sexuality obeys the laws of nature, not the influence of history...
...Some, from people with reputations for sophistication, claim the didactic privilege of exposing feminist error...
...303 series The Children of Violence, which Lessing started issuing in the 1950s, had become a symbolic figure...
...Both dry and impassioned, distrustful of and compelled by the flesh, The Second Sex had approved of such quasi-tabooed carnalities as lesbianism and adultery...
...If so, did women create it for themselves, for others, or for both...
...Without always being credited, other postmodern forces were congenial to the reassessment of cultural traditions...
...In part, its critical and commercial success is due to the capital craftiness with which John Irving took enough from feminism to meet some needs, and rejected enough to satisfy others...
...gender distinctions between "feminine" and "masculine" have disappeared, in which sex distinctions between "female" and "male" are minimal, but in which men and women are together...
...a version of Sleeping Beauty in which the Prince is absent...
...However, Jenny Fields is an "accidental" feminist who remains a compellingly sturdy mother for her family and friends...
...Nevertheless, they were victims...
...If the modernization of women persists, and if women continue to name their own experience, such acts of imaginative representation will occur...
...Isadora Wing was like a female Tom Jones who had been in a consciousness-raising group...
...A clear extension of the American ideological commitment to equality, this longing expresses itself in the promises of less radical feminists...
...On Halloween 1968, demonstrators cheerfully claimed to be witches who hexed the patriarchs...
...They prefigure the feminist accusation that the demands of femininity, which modern psychiatry and medicine enforce, drive women crazy...
...As they became more prominent, between 1968 and 1972, they excited far more notice, largely but not only among women...
...To be accurate, Piercy's poem is about life in general as well as culture...
...Though Friedan only referred to de Beauvoir once, though her language was far more journalistic and snappily accessible, she adapted, reductively, The Second Sex to American middle-class life...
...She asserted that women could become free, responsible, reciprocal, and creative subjects...
...Among the causes for the growth of the new consciousness was the fact that American women, of all races and classes, were sufficiently literate and educated to use public culture to express the changing circumstances of their productive, familial, and private lives...
...He also permits difference...
...We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us: we leave it alone under circumstances peculiar to ourselves.' For others, the questor must also try to reground the self within a just community...
...The first, "awakening," arose from Protestantism...
...In 1971, a paperback publisher reissued Mary Beard's Woman as Force in History, which symbolized the development of another body of theory...
...She lived much of her brief adult life in England and died there...
...The mingling of realistic and first-person narratives, common in the 1960s and 1970s, was an immense popular success in Marilyn French's novel, The Women's Room (1977...
...The explosion of consciousness was reflected most often in print, then in the visual and performing arts, and most reluctantly in the mass media...
...feminism—in politics, in culture—abysmal...
...a culturally sanctioned, even celebrated, autonomy...
...Daly is a spirited example of the use of and change of de Beauvoir...
...They found, re-found, and reinterpreted women's literature and art...
...Feminists or not, women have had more cultural than political prestige and power...
...At the same time, each has a nontraditional interest in the domestic, the psychological, and the cultural, in its most inclusive sense...
...Culture, broadly defined, became as great a battlefield as politics, narrowly defined, for a second reason as well...
...Grafting the Flapper to her, the new New Woman had social and sexual aspirations as well...
...So doing, she helped to incite a cultural force inseparable from feminism...
Vol. 27 • July 1980 • No. 3
