FEMINISM, COMMUNITY, FREEDOM

...nonseparatists...

...or the woman who puts in long hours teaching handicapped children...

...We live in a society in which a few adults defend sexual relations with young children on the grounds of "free choice," theirs and the child's, and because such "freedom" is an attack on "the hideous institution of the authoritarian family...

...but we do not slough off previous identities, nor should we...

...besides, as Irving Howe suggested some years back, it's steady work...

...I am free to try to stop the state from building a superhighway through my family farm," a farmer says...

...But there is an alternative reading that casts the Inquisitor's peroration as a cautionary fable of a rather different sort...

...She could neither affirm nor deny this idea for she would find it senseless...

...some) Marxist and liberal feminists who see cultural feminists as conservative "essentialists...

...You omit any discussion of the tension between authority and freedom, or between the dual claims of individual liberty and community obligation...

...You evince no apparent concern with the power of the State—any state but most especially a socialist state, which must centralize authority in order to plan and control—in the matter of freedom...

...Yes, they want "freedom": freedom to have a steady, decent job...

...Forced to be free, she used her freedom in ways that modern men and women have always used it: to form new families and build new communities...

...As you well know, most forms of communal life, past and present, are complex systems of freedom with constraint, liberty and authority...

...Your well-turned-out prose creates a hall of mirrors that distorts my views and reflects your own images and ideals, doubly enhanced, back into your already bedazzled eyes...

...In my words, we live in a society that makes it more and more difficult for people to be connected, to have the sense of caring and responsibility that goes with a commitment to "these people," to "this place...

...My essay was specific concerning those aspects of traditional belief and practice I claimed as one locus for the creation and sustenance of moral and social values and as a necessary foundation for any ongoing way of life...

...Each is false but interestingly so...

...but I suspect that most women will prefer to bear it by and for themselves...

...They feel their work has made them more alive, fuller and freer human beings...

...to repeat it interminably means your defense must wear thin, the chimes of your freedom flashing will sound tinny in our ears...

...The development of critical standards in the assessment of tradition is an important task—I grant you that—so important, indeed, that I cannot understand why you find the creation of such standards unnecessary in extolling freedom "for anyone and everyone...

...You turn my grandmother into a latter-day Sartrian existentialist: "Oh, let's see, who shall I be today...

...it would certainly lighten our load...

...But I would remind you that this world was, historically, one importantly defined by women and suffused with values sustained by women...

...Anthropologists might be interested in this bit of news...

...At times this community has all but disappeared from public view...

...Because you have come to regard me as a born-again foe of freedom, and no friend to either feminism or socialism for that matter, you relegate me from the start to a political netherworld...

...But his "freedom" to struggle to hold on is coupled with the freedom of the state, or the corporation, to "take away...

...Declaring or assuming the full, untroubled compatibility of liberty, socialism, and feminism250 as if each were of a piece and each, in turn, supportive of the other—you allow yourself an uncharacteristic moment of self-pity...

...YOU END on a piece of puffery—freedom, you declare, is "the vital force that generates and sustains all communal life...

...Do you really think it better for those of us who have strong feelings to quash them, for us to silence our misgivings if some official "line" is going in a direction with which we disagree...

...As for the forms of work that are better-paying, that offer advancement, and that appear interesting to the women who engage in them, Elshtain uses a number of phrases to stigmatize both work and workers: "possessive individualism," "narcissistic self-absorption," " 'getting yours,' " "middle-class careerism," "the norms of market society," and so on...

...Or the Navaho Indians...

...Recent election returns suggest that this view of the folks out there is already out of date, and that "ordinary Americans" have increasingly come to reject the New Right for many of the reasons that feminists have condemned it all along...

...Once here, she had to decide who unsere Leute were going to be...

...You give no force or credence to any form of antimodernist critique...

...Rather, I see some good in the old days...

...cultural" feminists, including many ecological and pacifist feminists vs...

...All the ideals that have animated the liberal movements and revolutions of modern times—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the rights of man and citizen—are thrown into a huge bin, marked POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM, to be discounted and thrown away...

...You skew Dostoevsky in order to set up an antinomy between freedom and community that you say is my own and then insist that I have opted against freedom, for community...

...This is sheer silliness...

...Instead, I condemned a system that compels female wage labor at illpaying, dead-end jobs, forcing women into the 252 market out of economic necessity...

...It is in this community that Elshtain emerged as a thinker and a writer...

...Outside this "ideal city" there is no truth to be found, no "good" to be embraced, no practice to be rescued or remembered...

...Regards, Jean P S. My letter was written in response to the first version of your comment...

...THIS BRINGS ME to your version of "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor...

...Possessive individualism of the sort I decry erodes the "space" within which the morally autonomous individual may emerge, squeezes out the terms for disinterested political action, deflects glimmerings of civic virtue...

...the left had better get rid of these types if it wants to be acceptable to "ordinary Americans"*—if this mentality ever got translated into policy, there would be few surer ways for the left to destroy itself...

...the women who do them are chronically frustrated, always exploited, often oppressed...

...I challenged, remember, "the terms of entry" into the public world if they are those of a rapacious civil society embraced as one's "freedom...

...Better to strive for something less quixotic: why not community without liberty...

...You charge me with nostalgia as I look back...

...You are right that those of us who would contest the ground of tradition must think carefully about the ideals, practices, institutions, and virtues we would rescue and resituate in the present in order to carry them forward, transformed, into the future...

...Yes, this is a precious legal freedom but it emerges from the dire necessities of a social situation that should be remedied in order that such desperate "freedom" is no longer so widely required...

...In fact, they don't...

...The only way modern men and women can ever become a community will be by "bringing their freedom to us and laying it humbly at our feet...

...Somehow your hallowed freedom of choice recedes when the question at hand is the woman who prefers not to go out and work but must...

...What has Elshtain got that other women supposedly lack, that makes a fusion of work and love, dedication both to herself and to others, possible for her alone...

...There are two things I want to say in response...

...But your evocations are increasingly out of touch with current social reality, including, among others, the self-understanding of those working-class and underclass communities and neighborhoods in whose behalf your dream of socialist freedom is being dreamed...

...Elshtain is apparently willing to do the same for womankind...

...For instance, much of my work goes on in a liberal arts program that is run jointly by the City College of New York and a number of labor unions: we give courses in union halls at night, on the CCNY campus on Saturdays, leading eventually to a B.A...

...but it has had a continuous existence, going back at least two centuries, and it has a body of traditions and a sense of honor all its own...

...to enjoy moments of leisure...

...Rather than condemning the society that makes it more and more difficult for people to sustain intergenerational bonds, you celebrate the tenacity of heroic individuals striving to fend off decay and disaster —because they have freely chosen to do so...

...all are or have been married, and have children of all ages...

...The women who work at these jobs do so only because they are forced to, "just to make ends meet...

...In your terms, she is pursuing her freedom...

...All the forces that these movements and revolutions fought against are thrown into another box, marked TRADITION, where they are lovingly cultivated and uncritically embraced...

...She claims that "My aim is to contest, not to abandon, the grounds of tradition...

...separatists vs...

...Solidarity and mutuality will be infinitely easier to attain if only we learn to leave our obdurate desire for freedom at the door...

...Unless it is to be the big rock candy mountain, there will be forms of social authority, rules, norms, practices, evaluative judgments, and appraisals...

...in a better society, "an economy that [could] provide decently for its families" would return these women to the domestic circle of love, where they really want to be and ultimately belong...

...So might the Amish...

...to provide for their children...

...Tradition," you say, is what I want—solid and rocklike...

...That you seem to think this treason saddens me...

...it has given her tools, jobs, opportunities, comrades, audiences (including the readers of Dissent), a sense of agenda and vocation...

...You suggest that I believe all women in working-class or so-called pink-collar jobs would and should, if given the chance, race for home and stay there...

...Whatever identifications she eventually made, her new identity couldn't flow from her blood or grow from her soil: it had to emerge from her decisions and choices...

...Dostoevsky's Inquisitor is convinced that this can never be...

...It comes as no surprise to me that many women want what men (or elite males) have had—success, power, glamour, entree to board-rooms, all the rest...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain's essay, "Feminism, Family and Community," rings out with the old inquisitorial note...

...The imperious, self-defining, unconstrained self...

...She could no more think of herself outside the tissue of `unsere Leute' than she could fly...

...These women are secretaries, maintenance people, computer operators, child care workers, teachers' assistants, bookkeepers, hospital cooks and nutritionists, and so on...

...In fact, no old community could ever survive, and no new one could ever be formed, 248 without it...

...We shall be completely communitarian and totally free: it is this vision that parts company with current realities...

...we may move on...

...You are silent concerning this devaluation...

...Most of my students in this program are working women, from 30 to 60 years old...

...I find myself in the company of the Grand Inquisitor and those hoary arbiters of autocracy and royalism, Maistre and Bonald...

...If Elshtain's vision of work and working women were right, they would hate their work, and dream only of windfalls that would allow them to get back to the shelter of their homes...

...At the moment, feminists are divided along a number of serious lines of cleavage: Women Against Pornography vs...

...It follows, for you, that any thinker who expresses anything less than your own boundless faith slides toward the Inquisitor, toward apostasy...

...That world is no longer new or strange but the old identity is neither gone nor forgotten...

...No, the differences go deep...

...It is not that one has been thrown overboard to attain the other...

...I do not seek a return to the good old days...

...create a synthesis of all good and decent things...

...Elshtain's grandmother, of sainted memory, probably understood this better than she does...

...degree...

...I make it clear that it is the prevailing terms of market society that have a corrosive effect on nobler ideals of the free, morally autonomous individual, a person, in my words, "mindful of higher duties as a member of a political community...

...This is the core of my defense of a certain image of the family, a defense I will not repeat here...

...You claim that there is "a community of radicals" and that I have, in some way, treated this "community" with contempt, betraying all it has done for me (nearly everything if you are to be believed...

...If you mean for us to share your dream of a "truly free form of community" you must be more candid...

...You note all this and then, remarkably, turn matters inside out and upside down...

...Instead, in the Inquisitor's 251 world, there is neither freedom nor community...

...As she remarked last summer, "Ach, so much of this self-self-self business...

...You do not even consider the possibility that some modern forms of feminist protest may embody, as the French feminist Julia Kristeva has suggested, not a radical dissent from capitalist rationalism but the completion of its project...

...But my grandmother isn't nearly so cocksure as you are, Marshall, about what constitutes a "better life...

...There is more to this country, and its people, than a radical community centered in New York City—your reference point...

...In No Place for Grace, Jackson Lears suggests that Dostoevsky envisions "the coming triumph of modern bureaucratic authority" as he pictures a world of false comforts and a glutted mass who have "exchanged spiritual freedom and moral responsibility for economic and psychic security...

...Nobody seems to be neighborly no more...

...Presumably you find, as I do, such "freedom" a self-serving rationalization to justify the exploitation of the vulnerable...

...Maybe she believes that she is bearing the burden of freedom for all...

...You cannot do this, it seems, for in your world all "freedom" is created equal—the freedom of the female corporate officer to evade public regulation and fix prices with the best of them and to rise to the top perhaps in the name of "feminism," along with the freedom of the political activist traveling and organizing for the nuclear freeze, perhaps also in the name of feminism...

...But these admirable human qualities presuppose a force that Elshtain seems to deplore: free choice...

...Or citizens of Rousseau's just republic...

...Freedom to do or become what...

...But this momentary relief at being spared the embrace of the radical right gave way to a disheartening recognition that you had got my argument so wrong...

...You claim that I fear freedom, want to "save" other women from it, and deplore free choice...

...That ideal city in speech again...

...Apparently there are two kinds of work, and two kinds of working women...

...Elshtain's attacks on feminists need to be seen in a broader context, as just one part of a much larger agenda...

...She has never severed freedom from responsibility...

...Those who are not "with" your freedom are clearly against it and they— including myself in your estimation—produce, at best, murky negatives that should be allowed to rot in the dark room of unfreedom...

...There is proletarian labor, low-paying, dead-end, mechanical and/or brutal...

...You ignore perhaps the most striking and important feature of modernity—the growth of bureaucratic rationalism and antidemocratic social engineering...

...Second, as for the intimations of guilt, blame, and purge that echo throughout Elshtain's recent writing—feminists are morally responsible for Reaganism, the Moral Majority, etc...

...IT IS HARD, and often dispiriting, to be a democratic socialist: fighting for liberal values more seriously than do the liberals themselves, keeping alive the dream of a truly free community that never was on sea or land...

...My attack on the free-market model of "civil society" did not involve a repudiation of richer notions of autonomy, the rights-bearing citizen, and democracy...

...he and his fellows generously offer to bear the burden for them...

...But all this comes too easily...

...In the matter of "career" women, you charge me with hypocrisy or, at best, self-serving blindness, wondering why I exempt myself from charges I level at others...

...First, there are a great many of us out there who would die for our families, and yet who would die before we would submit to a loyalty oath to "the family...

...As I read, I kept wanting to yell: Hey, Jean, remember us...

...But they are damn glad to be out there, and they would not go home for good, even if they could...

...When she proclaims, right at the start, that "there is no way to create real communities out of an aggregation of 'freely' choosing individuals," her target is not only the current movement for reproductive rights—in which women's free choice is a central theme— but the whole modern idea and dream of freedom itself...

...Do you really mean to suggest that I—or you, for that matter, given your socialist ethos—should cheer uncritically from the sidelines every time a woman does anything she wants to or finds "fulfilling...

...She, like thousands of others, had no choice at all about leaving her home country and journeying to America...

...255...

...The U.S...

...But I would also never tell a harassed, exploited woman worker that labor outside the home was her freedom, whether she wanted it or not...

...To keep any sort of community together in the modern world—whether a family, a neighborhood, a town, a church, a school, a labor union—requires enormous dedication and tenacity...

...That you call this cage "freedom" doesn't make it any less a conceptual prison...

...But the crucial point, which Elshtain somehow manages to miss, is that she did fly: born in the Volga German colony of the old Russian Empire, she decided to leave the Volga, leave the Germans, leap ten thousand miles into the American West—and a lucky thing she did, for the Volga Germans were to suffer a dreadful fate...

...Instead, I am trying to bring what I believe to be widespread misgivings and ambivalence to the surface so that more open debate on key questions can take place—among those open to debate...

...antimilitarist feminists, on and on...

...Your butterfly definition of freedom flits all over the place but, lighting nowhere, is likely to be blown away by the first strong breeze...

...defenders of "sexual freedom," including consensual "s and m" and pornography...

...They hold onto a fragile thread of belief in this country and themselves in order to preserve important values, including the images of family and community of which I wrote...

...She sees individual freedom as a corrosive force that dissolves all community...

...You read Dostoevsky's tale as "the most trenchant" argument against democratic socialism...

...So I shall add this brief afterthought...

...To persist in proclaiming what Hegel would call an "absolute" hence hollow and abstract freedom as your end and means...

...The latter are a far cry from what passes for citizenship now—a groupie promoting his or her narrow interests, getting a "piece of the pie...

...But you sentimentalize the future and stigmatize in the present any suspected recrudescence of antimodernism as a threat to your project of freedom...

...ELSHTAIN'S DISCUSSION of the theme of community exudes a similar sense of unreality...

...But the totalism of her thought, with its abstract negations of freedom and modernity en bloc, acts as a lead shield that keeps her from hearing what women really are saying...

...This flies in the face of all community studies with which I am familiar...

...the stakes are high...

...Freedom requires roots and roots involve communities and no community has ever existed without constraints of some kind...

...Holding on to the old notion of "our people," some refused to learn English or to become citizens...

...You grant no weight to tradition...

...As our society moves into newer forms of social discipline, plainly visible in proposals for "reindustrialization," in entrenched forms of bureaucratic behavior, you dream of a world of automatic—or nearly so—goodness, all our free choices and ends harmonizable with those of others and with socialism and freedom to boot...

...Certainly, any woman who wants to go that route has the right...

...A powerful picture, grounded in your language of reflection and critique, holds you captive...

...This language reproduces the same image over and over...

...You begin by declaring that I pine away for a return to Gemeinschaft, to communities fixed in the cement of blood and authority...

...But your defense of this accusation serves, instead, to make my point...

...I shall attempt to bridge the gulf between us, not so much to convince you, for you are too locked into the dance of modernity to trip the light fantastic to some different tune, but in order to clarify for myself and others how it is that two scholars of the left, each concerned with feminism and socialism, could reach such an impasse...

...Besides, isn't it a bit late in the day to speak of "free covenants" as if somehow the conditions for their creation will emerge if modernity just keeps on modernizing...

...Freedom is the only medium in which communal life can live and move and be...

...to live in a safe neighborhood...

...For the most part these women feel that the work they do is valuable, and they are proud of doing it well—just as they are proud of bringing up their children well...

...Neighborhoods are savaged by developers...

...You evoke, uncritically, all the talismans of the faith...

...communities are threatened by illegal dumping...

...That would have been more like love...

...Elshtain says repeatedly that we need to be guided not by theory but by actual life...

...I prefer not to lose touch with my own moral location, nor will I treat it contemptuously...

...The bind I pose that you ignore, perhaps because it poses a tough challenge, is one noted by several other feminist thinkers: if we find that the private sphere, at its best, nurtured a morality that emphasized concern and responsibility for others, and we find these values worthy of sustaining, perhaps even extending, then we must think long and hard about what would be lost if the private realm were abandoned in the name of an abstract ideal of liberation...

...Does freedom require no critical standards...

...You never really respond to my essay because you cannot see it for what it is...

...If I were discussing these matters with you facetoface I might very well give in to my own moment of self-pity along these lines: "There are times when offering a critique of current understandings of feminism, socialism, and freedom within a left tradition we broadly share—or did until I was sent to join the ghosts of authoritarianism past—is more dispiriting yet...

...It has incubated both the socialist and the feminist movements, and many more...

...Faced with this diversity of ways of being and social roles, can we not, following Hannah Arendt, "think what we are doing...

...Why cannot the publicists for "the very idea of" freedom, most importantly yourself, accept the possibility that we might use "freedom" to gain the whole world and, in the process, lose our souls, defeat the better angels of our nature...

...This emerges in her discussion of work...

...One day, you hope, these terms will aptly characterize our collective attainment of a "new kind of community...

...How, and why, should men and women struggling to preserve what they have freely covenanted give birth to your new world...

...You discuss the ways in which the trajectory of capitalism has rendered community bonds—as I have stressed— precarious and vulnerable...

...Your use of "men" is instructive here, not as some egregious sexist slip, but because, historically, theories of social contract portray adult males "freely" contracting to create political society without acknowledging the parasitism of their new order, and its "freedom," upon older forms of community, including families...

...I would never tell any women who claimed such work made her life fuller that she was wrong-headed...

...A gallery of many of our most important social critics, including some who have written in these pages, have marked this dynamic...

...Don't they, too, demonstrate a human capacity of free choice when they dump toxic canisters and buy up choice land...

...I know this is a free country, and Elshtain has the right to speak in any voice she likes...

...She and many people of her and neighboring villages settled in the sugar-beet fields of northern Colorado...

...She unfolds a wholly negative vision of the modern world, worthy of a de Maistre or a Bonald...

...What is striking about your piece is what you leave out...

...In the real world, however, nothing is more precarious and vulnerable than communities and communal bonds...

...The words, as you reverently and repeatedly evoke them, are chiseled out of democratic granite, three conceptual profiles in courage none but the fainthearted, the cynical, or the mean-spirited can, or would, deny...

...Ignoring my discussion of community, you go on to set up another antinomy, claiming that it is mine, this time between "possessive individualism" (bad) and "tradition" (good...

...Finally, what constraints would be operable in your "truly free" society...

...But, Marshall, this is perverse...

...There was, and is, no doubt about who "unsere Leute" were—though there are not many left...

...That vision is grounded in moral particularity as the basis for the education of the heart and the mulch for our fundamental humanity...

...Such a bureaucratic "welfare state" bears no relationship—none—to my vision of community...

...You are right—she would never disparage "the very idea of freedom...

...Surely, Marshall, a more insidious foe is the grand total of celebrants of our future "freedom" as more of what we've already got—consumer goods, social engineering, technological wizardry, a "satisfied" populace...

...Although I was stunned to find myself linked up with these characters, fictional and historic, my first response was an ironic sigh...

...Once this is done, the trinity of "miracle, mystery and authority" will bind them together like glue...

...For example: you claim that "we must grasp and affirm the ongoing struggle of feminism . . . " as part and parcel of our march toward the free future...

...intimate lives buckle under pressures generated by the structure of work life...

...individual autonomy from social obligation...

...Even as Elshtain exalts the value of community, she seems to be indifferent to the needs and welfare of the community she lives in, the community of radical intellectuals...

...You see only freedom's magic wand being waved in the fact that overpowered victims are free to fight the bastards in court...

...You close by evoking my grandmother—fortu253 nately she is not a woman of "sainted memory" as you rather sarcastically describe her...

...Freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for men will never, never be able to share among themselves...

...I challenge you to find textual support for this claim...

...By showing man so much respect, you acted as though you'd ceased to have compassion...

...Feminism, Socialism, and Freedom" are the stars that illumine our gropings toward the future and the repository of hopes that captivate you and to which you are captive...

...The once revolutionary Dostoevsky, having become an apostate from freedom, has his Inquisitor trounce his own early dream, declaring the fusion of liberty and solidarity, in your words, "impossible...

...You thereby hint that I adhere to some version of a socialist agenda that would seem not to fit me for drinks and dinner with Maistre and Bonald...

...This is way off the mark...

...They have security but the price they pay is the loss of both community and liberty...

...But this is empty rhetoric...

...You argue that I extol the past uncritically, seeing history through a misty golden haze...

...They want more pay and better working conditions, more power and responsibility on the job—along with support services for their families, for instance, day care...

...I have been arguing that we must affirm feminism as a vital part of our work, and defend women against those who would protect them from themselves...

...She paints a picture of blood-and-soil Gemeinschaften as palpable and immutable as the rocks, the sea, the sky: everyone out there belongs to these communities, and loves them, except where they are undermined by feminists and the left, whose seductive dreams and promises of freedom destroy this primordial life...

...Its fortunes have risen and fallen mercurially over the years...

...Do you really believe that a daily battle against powerful outside forces enriches and sustains community life in the long haul...

...And I bet Elshtain's grandmother hoped, as mine did, that her children and grandchildren would enjoy still more freedom and a wider range of life options than her own...

...Census Bureau tells us that the average American family moves once every five years...

...We may leave...

...Is Elshtain really certain that they are wrong...

...YOU CHARGE ME WITH STIGMATIZING WORK and workers, including women who "have to" work as well as those who "want to" work...

...Alas, in recent years Elshtain's voice has become accusatory and vindictive, eliciting anger, bitterness, and polarization in the people she aims at...

...But, 254 Marshall, as you have often pointed out, no modern community can long survive without space for internal dissent...

...It is hard to imagine this wise old lady disparaging the very idea of freedom, or lamenting the modern world as nothing but a nihilistic void, as her granddaughter does today...

...You offer no concrete and convincing image of your alternative reality...

...Until that moment of historic epiphany, your secular trinity serves as a modernist's version of Plato's Republic, an ideal city "in speech...

...Why should they exhaust themselves in rear-guard actions against irresponsible corporate power...

...At least," I mused, "he has ranked me with `heavy' defenders of views he finds anathema rather than insisting that I pack my ideological bags and ship them, and myself, off to Phyllis Schlafly and the Eagle Forum," a course urged on me by several less formidable critics than yourself...

...We require critical standards, Marshall, to distinguish between the monstrous and the wonderful, to the extent we still can...

...But this is your dualism, not mine...

...Read this way, your claim that the Inquisitor's is an argument that there is either community or liberty, or that solidarity and mutuality can be attained at the cost of freedom, is a setup to make your case at the expense of mine...

...She was a nine-year-old girl and her parents were compelled, in sorrow and reluctance, to emigrate given Czarist crackdowns on the autonomy of the Volga German communities...

...Has your picture blinded you to the many powerful critiques of interest-group politics and the privatizing, self-absorbed individualism it encourages, thereby derailing possibilities of reaching for a common good...

...Freedom in our time requires a more mordant, less frothy defense—one that tackles questions of authority, liberty, and community rather than blinking them away in the presumption that by waving the rhetorical magic wand, one can (poof...

...You should have asked less of him...

...But so, then, is the woman who works full-time, at a subsistence level, as an ecological activist...

...For my grandmother, the 'I' of the self was always a 'we,' located within a dense web of human ties...

...As a defender of freedom, and a person of conscience, where would you begin to make some critical assessments here...

...Maybe it makes sense, as the Grand Inquisitor and his many successors have said, to simply strike freedom off the radical agenda...

...But this is a rather trivial point...

...This is not necessarily because people and families want to move, but, very often, because they have to move, because the neighborhood or the city or the countryside around them is changing swiftly and drastically under their feet...

...Many a monster can march about flying the banner of "freedom" or "feminism...

...I hope we can join together in this effort...

...If one adds to this the fact that these "feminisms" exist in a complex relationship to the majority of American women who do not self-consciously define themselves as feminist, and whose attitude toward feminism as they understand it ranges from partially supportive to ambivalent to downright hostile, you find a densely textured social question that will not be wished away by celebrations of "feminism...

...It is interesting that Elshtain applies none of these strictures to herself: she has made a career as a writer and professor, edited magazines, attended conferences, given speeches, traveled all over the world, and been a wife and mother, bringing up four children, without evidently abandoning her nearest and dearest or losing the capacity to love and care...

...In asking for a free communion freely arrived at, "You asked too much...

...Moreover, in any community that depends on its members' active commitment, one of the basic human bonds is speech: the forms and tones in which people talk to each other...

...Unless you can take one tentative step outside the picture that holds you captive, you may find yourself in the circumstance of that Kafka bird, the one who found the cage for which he searched...

...This voice sounds less concerned with defending families than with attacking feminists, demanding that they defend themselves against her charges of subverting and sabotaging "the family...

...My point was to question a culture of productivity (and, by implication, any future vision that requires—as socialism traditionally has—mobilizing its people around the goal of future growth) that measures worth by the market, a world in which everyone has a price but fewer and fewer have a dignity...

...More important are your broad charges...

...Feminism, Socialism, Freedom," you proclaim...

...to own a home...

...Thus it isn't merely women's freedom that Elshtain fears: it's freedom for anyone and everyone...

...We do not choose this community and we cannot, at some later point, simply shed it as a snake does its skin...

...But in fact she offers no contest, because she presents no critical standards that might enable us to condemn some religious, political, or social traditions, while approving others...

...It is sometimes dispiriting, you say, to be a "social democrat," a dreamer of "a truly free form of community that never was on sea or land...

...Dostoesvky's mass are "pitiful" and "childlike" in the worst sense—hardly a community, hardly exemplars of mutuality...

...Marshall, what does this mean...

...I am not aiming at a "community" of the already convinced who are unreflective about their beliefs and claims...

...The argument here is that the ideal of a fusion of liberty and solidarity is an impossible dream...

...Most of their jobs are low-paying, and many of them are dead-ended...

...Which version of feminism would you have us embrace...

...There is a real nobility in this quixotic quest...

...No, her new identity grew on her, willy-nilly, as she lived life each day in a strange, new world...

...With this segue you evade the pressure the Inquisitor puts on your faith: can individuals sustain a sense of moral responsibility and nurture spiritual freedom if all their needs are supplied by some benevolent order...

...Why are you unwilling to distinguish between forms of feminism and to make some judgments...

...Your title—"Feminism, Socialism, Freedom" —promises no coy defense, no half-hearted celebration...

...Surely, the task we should be up to, a task rather more sober, less buoyantly romantic than yours, is determining how the left can offer a critique of the present and an alternative other than the "taking over" of current structures of institutional power by "good guys" or a fall into simplistic Rousseauism that promises, as an article of faith, that once we freely recreate the political community, this community will generate abundant supplies of "mutuality" and "solidarity" as its automatic, uncoerced effluence...

...But most of us are not yet willing to kiss the libertarian dimension of socialism goodbye...

...or the woman who sits alone all day parsing out a poem...

...it flows too readily from your primed pen...

...249 Jean Elshtain Replies An Open Letter to Marshall Berman Dear Marshall, Your impassioned attack on "Feminism, Family, and Community" is a defense of your deeply held democratic socialist faith and another of those paeons to modernity we have come to expect from you...

...The fact that many women want this work, and even undertake legal and political campaigns to get it, only shows how thoroughly corrupted they are, how inwardly hollow, devoid of heart or soul...

...But you are all wrong in your fantasy of her life...

...My claim, over the past years, is that certain radicals and feminists, on certain issues, have lost touch with some of the deepest aspirations among their own (putative) constituencies...

...They, with so many others, intended to return and, with so many others, they came as groups—whole extended families, sometimes entire villages...

...My grandmother did learn the new language—her children were being taught it in the public school—but her "American identity" is not the result of conscious decisions or an intentional choice of your "freedom...

...The debate here, as you know, is not over what a crude empiricist, failing to understand that language structures and helps us to imagine forms of life, might call "mere semantics...

...The Inquisitor explains, to a resurrected Jesus whom he holds prisoner, that "nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man or a human society than freedom...

...And yet, in the bleak polarities of her current view of the world, it is as if this community, its ideas, its hopes did not exist...

...You find me a hater of the present and, in a rather murky turn of the argument, you imply that I favor striking freedom off the socialist agenda...

...But she has no right to kid us—or herself—about her love of community: that voice serves not to sustain community, but to shatter it, as surely as Oskar Mazerath's scream breaks glass...

...There is no ongoing struggle of feminism as such...

...the second, containing additional accusations that I have betrayed feminism and the left, arrived after this letter was sent off...

...to send their kids to a decent public school...

...And it makes a mockery of freedom...

...Let me sort this out...

...Yet you write of moving toward a "free covenant," creating a "network of free institutions...

...Your triad becomes the prima facie embodiment of all social good...

...Of course, she wanted a "better life" for her children, her grandchildren, and her greatgrandchildren...

...Yet we all, even freely covenanting men, are born into a world of prior social determination, into a language community...

...I seek a democratic alternative, one that requires a revitalized public-political sphere, and I hope to make some modest contribution to its achievement...

...We are part of a "we" before we become language-using "I's...

...If we forget that their fight is ours, we will be forgetting, or worse, forsaking, who we are...

...Doestoevsky's Inquisitor believes that the great mass of mankind doesn't want to be free 247 and, even if they did want it, couldn't bear it...

...And there is no way to develop any critical standards for the scrutiny of traditions, so long as she goes on expending her spirit in casting a rosy glow over them all...

...I challenged the devaluation of that world and its values under terms of male-dominant society...

...you provide no notion of how such "free institutions" ("never before seen on sea or land") will differ from what we know or have known...

...Finally, you administer the coup de grace, the (apparent) knock-down argument, which culminates in pitting my grandmother against her reactionary granddaughter...

...right-tofight feminists vs...

...By democratic socialism I mean the demand that men should come together to create a new kind of community, one that will generate mutuality and solidarity, as communities always have, but also one that will be created through a free covenant, and will operate through a network of free institutions...