A Letter to Jirina Siklova: On Feminism and Gender Democracy
Rosen, Ruth
April 1991 DEAR JIRINA, In June 1990, we sat in your Prague apartment sipping tea as a soft summer breeze floated through opened windows. I asked you endless questions about the experiences...
...Separatism—also part of the late sixties political climate—also hurt the women's movement...
...Efforts to proclaim feminism dead or to espouse a "new traditionalism" fall on deaf ears of women who work to support themselves...
...To a large extent, feminism arose to redress these unarticulated grievances...
...I asked you endless questions about the experiences of female dissidents and the problems facing Czechoslovakian women after the fall of communism...
...Some women, tired of trying to change men, fed up with homophobic attitudes, or simply seeking a safe community, created a separatist women's movement...
...By the end of the 1950s, housewives, working women, and their daughters bore many grievances for which there existed no language, no political expression, and little public awareness...
...You helped me understand why a social democratic left that could promote women's (or workers') rights still reeks, for many people, of communist betrayal...
...Meanwhile, I extend my solidarity and best wishes...
...The inspirational slogan "Sisterhood Is Powerful" embodied the wistful hope that women everywhere would band together to create a more egalitarian society...
...What will you target as your most important goals and priorities...
...It was not surprising, then, that young feminists would romanticize women's gains in "socialist" countries and Third World liberation movements, proclaim themselves to be the "true" vanguard, and imagine that patriarchy, a term used to describe a male-centered society, would soon crumble...
...Black women redefined feminism to address the legacy of racism...
...The popular press pilloried them—and especially the few feminists—as indecent mothers, sex-starved neurotics, or social misfits...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...Sentenced to ten years in prison for smuggling manuscripts to the West, she spent one year in jail, and was a signatory of Charter 77...
...law, NOW presumed that women could and should aspire to the conditions of men's lives...
...She has now founded a new department of applied sociology at Charles University and in the fall of 1991 will teach the first course in gender studies...
...The social movements of the 1960s ignited a cultural and political civil war...
...Strongly influenced by Maoism, some feminists trashed their own leaders, particularly those with expertise, and thereby retarded the growth of genuine political leadership...
...We discussed the Christian groups who now will try to limit abortion...
...As a result, some American women came to blame feminism— not men or the government—for their poverty or exhaustion...
...Daughters of the fifties, sensing the bitterness of their mothers, or rebelling against the cultural ideal of the housewife, entered a new decade eagerly mapping escapes...
...laws concerning rape and the treatment of its victims changed in most states...
...The growth of this women's culture spawned much vital music, literature, and art...
...The effort to reclaim the sexual revolution on women's terms has consumed many activists for the last two decades...
...Leadership was another quandary for both the New Left and the women's liberation movement...
...This revulsion toward family life, however, must be understood historically as a visceral reaction to the feminine mystique...
...However, I can imagine some interesting comparisons...
...As we finished, you suddenly turned and asked me a difficult question...
...and a network of battered-women's shelters, rape crisis centers, and women's health centers dotted the nation...
...For the most part, they did not reject the ideal of sexual revolution...
...Some wanted to abolish prostitution and pornography, for example, while others, committed to protecting prostitutes' rights and free speech, sought to loosen sexual mores while educating men against sexual exploitation and violence...
...For the purpose of this letter, I want to define feminism as the gender consciousness that people employ FALL • 1991 • 531 American Feminism and Gender Democracy to improve women's situation in a particular society...
...During the 1970s, different female populations in the United States redefined feminism 534 • DISSENT American Feminism and Gender Democracy according to their own needs and experiences...
...Ignoring the economic and cultural needs of families prevented the movement from reaching across class and racial divides...
...Fueled by rising expectations and frustrations, NOW was founded to pressure agencies and to end all sex discrimination...
...sexual harassment at workplaces became illegal...
...At the same time, younger women activists in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements of the 1960s began to create the women's liberation movement...
...But working women dared not complain...
...Soon hundreds of "consciousness raising" groups spread across the nation...
...The idea that the personal is political was also limited...
...I do this with humility, knowing the limits of my knowledge...
...Thanks to the courage and boldness of radical feminists, American culture had to confront the dark underside of women's lives...
...During the 1970s, feminists largely ceded family concerns to the New Right and squandered the opportunity to appeal to a broad constituency...
...The movement's emphasis on sexual exploitation and sexual crimes transformed American society, even as it alienated many conservative Americans...
...Every wave of feminism, wherever and whenever it appears, targets different problems, flashes different symbols, uses different political discourses, confronts different adversaries, and seeks different solutions...
...They knew they wanted to exorcise the feminine mystique— but they had precious few models of independent women who led fulfilling lives and still enjoyed family life...
...you make...
...In contrast, the American housewife emerged as the true cold warrior against the red menace...
...I write in a "prerevolutionary" form, then, to underscore the invisibility of women's needs and the fact that "gender democracy" has yet to rise up from underground and take its place among the larger human rights of the revolution...
...In her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan described the despair, boredom, and isolation of collegeeducated housewives as "the problem with no name...
...Affectionately, RUTH q FALL • 1991 • 537...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...Because McCarthyism had discredited all efforts at social change as communist-inspired, the New Left tried to find a way to be noncommunist yet committed to radical social change within a participatory democracy...
...Someday, a revolution within the revolution will begin...
...During the 1960s, Congress passed laws guaranteeing women equal pay for equal work and ending legal sex discrimination in federal employment...
...Movement culture became a totalitarian nightmare...
...This is what I mean by "gender democracy...
...Our mistakes will not be yours...
...Many new laws and judicial decisions recognized women's grievances as legitimate...
...Working women, whose number doubled during the fifties, encountered sexual harassment, a sex-segregated labor force, and sex discrimination in pay, hiring, and promotion...
...Within a year, the movement had become a household word—often ridiculed, but infectiously appealing to large numbers of educated women in their twenties and thirties...
...Some men in the left trivialized women's issues as bourgeois problems, to be addressed "after the revolution...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...As a result, much of the legislation that has given women "equal rights" has meant that women could have it all if they did it all...
...In popular culture, working women became associated with the East Bloc, where women worked outside the home and child-care centers tended their children...
...What mistakes did Jirina Siklova, a Czechoslovakian sociologist, was banned from Charles University after 1968...
...Hardly an area of women's lives went unscrutinized...
...Efforts to improve women's lives and ensure their human rights have spread around the world...
...Lacking a way to see that their troubles had public roots, housewives experienced them as personal, and kept silence...
...One revolution is over...
...How one lived became equated with one's politics...
...on the contrary, they sought to reclaim it on terms that would ensure women's equality...
...During the next decades, many of these revelations changed U.S...
...Stripped of their traditional sexual veto—by which women had formerly extracted promises of male financial support and emotional commitment— many young women began to regard the sexual revolution as a male-defined proposition...
...Some of the feminist movement's greatest strengths and weaknesses can be traced to the political culture of the New Left...
...By default, the movement allowed the media to create unrepresentative feminist stars...
...It is difficult to evoke the sense of discovery, the rage that accompanied revelation, the naive belief in immediate change...
...Not until the mid-eighties, amid scarce resources and a conservative political climate, did feminists agitate for economic, social, and family policies that could appeal to women of all backgrounds...
...Not surprisingly, many women outside the movement initially feared that becoming a feminist meant that one had to forsake motherhood and marriage...
...FALL • 1991 • 533 American Feminism and Gender Democracy One of the most important contributions of the women's liberation movement was to grasp the political dimensions of personal life...
...Feminism is a product of political culture, even as it helps shape that culture...
...And when that time comes, my friend, may you find the determination necessary to withstand the cultural and political convulsions that accompany the effort to create a gender democracy...
...The media, too, reinforced the image that feminists were lonely career women who knew no form of love...
...The belief that an individual should solve his or her own problems runs deep in American political culture...
...Later, as they aged and no longer feared replicating the lives of 1950s middle-class women, radical feminists rediscovered in mothering many values with which they hoped to transform society...
...As political activists, they came to see themselves as the equals of men...
...At first, many young women celebrated the new freedoms...
...John F. Kennedy, moreover, created a special task force in the early 1960s to investigate the status of American women...
...Through their participation in radical organizations, these "daughters of the fifties," raised under the feminine mystique but determined to carve out new lives, had learned new skills and gained confidence...
...Some young women began to question the use of their bodies as sexual objects—whether by movement "brothers" or advertisers...
...they sometimes treated their female coworkers as personal secretaries and denied them leadership roles...
...Among political and intellectual circles in East Central Europe there is still resistance to identifying the gender-specific problems women confront in society—rape, sexual harassment, wife beating, lack of contraception or abortion, informal cultural devaluation, and formal occupational segregation...
...Before I end, I want to try to make a few observations on the very different circumstances you face...
...By the late 1960s, however, many people in the New Left had slid into Marxist or Maoist sectarian groups that romanticized Third World liberation movements, adopted Marxist or Maoist vocabularies, and believed they were part of a "vanguard" destined to lead the oppressed through an impending revolution...
...law that recognizes the need for parental leave and child care and supports family life...
...The gradual emergence of global feminist networks constitutes one of the more astonishing and irreversible results of American feminism...
...McCarthyism, moreover, successfully associated some feminists with communism...
...But young separatists tended to confuse ends with means...
...Will you be able to expand the language of human rights, which so powerfully fueled the democratic opposition...
...feminists have criticized a legal system that forces women to choose between protective legislation and an equality based on men's experience...
...It will not be as dramatic as toppling a communist state...
...At its inception in the early 1960s, the New Left had tried to avoid the dogmatism and authoritarianism of the Old (American communist) Left...
...Survival, not women's grievances, is your most pressing issue at present...
...society...
...In this setting, a few women started small groups to discuss their confusion and anger...
...With the ghost of totalitarian states haunting the democratic opposition, it may be difficult even to discuss women's needs without sounding "too much like a communist...
...High rates of divorce and growing poverty among women and children make it necessary for a majority of mothers to work...
...The desire to have more time with children may blind some women to the humiliation and subordination that can accompany economic dependence in a market economy...
...This is the way dissidents in the democratic opposition often communicated their ideas with one another...
...This is not to suggest that feminists by themselves caused the powerful right-wing backlash in American political life...
...We don't have time to make the same ones...
...Working-class women organized to promote specific changes in offices and factories...
...By challenging gender relations, feminism pushed issues related to the family and sexuality to the top of the national political agenda...
...From the civil rights movement they inherited the strong belief that "separate but equal" would never guarantee equality...
...In their haste to leave behind communist institutions, many women may agree to give up important social welfare policies that have protected them and their children from poverty...
...If and when a women's movement does arise, you may well face some familiar problems...
...Revelations tumbled upon revelations...
...The strong critique of the nuclear family hurt the movement in profound ways...
...You may also discover that women of different classes, religions, and nationalities will disagree about what constitutes female emancipation...
...Throughout the fifties, women's "difference" had been used as the basis for exclusion from much of American cultural and economic life...
...Politics had always been associated with government, from which Americans were increasingly estranged...
...Early activists were largely middle-class, young, heterosexual women whose personal concerns—identity, sexuality, and sex discrimination—did not address the needs of all women...
...My task, however, is not to excuse or condemn but to comprehend the historical context from which these flowed...
...But the enforcing agencies regarded women's grievances as frivolous...
...Abortion became legal...
...This was a dark side of the idea that "the personal is political...
...Meanwhile, the problem of "vanguardism" haunted the movement from its earliest days...
...Small numbers of women met in each other's homes and began to redefine their individual problems as social problems...
...We talked about the ingenious political strategies women devised when they were dissidents...
...We spoke about economists' plans to "retire" women to the home in order to ease unemployment...
...During the mid-seventies, many lesbians dogmatically insisted that a true feminist had to join them and separate from men...
...In large cities, umbrella organizations arose to maintain some form of cohesion and help initiate the thousands of women who wanted to join small groups...
...You explained why, after decades of state-coerced labor, many women will view this as progressive...
...Black women rightly accused white women of racism, but sometimes used their double burden of oppression to avoid useful political coalitions...
...As women flaunted their new sexual freedom—clad scantily in miniskirts— new forms of sexual aggression and exploitation greeted their apparent sexual availability...
...I am left with questions...
...Many women therefore took their agitation for feminist issues elsewhere—to the workplace, to government agencies, to universities, and to cultural arenas...
...Despite the cultural backlash, by 1990 a majority of American women described themselves as sympathetic to feminist objectives...
...Now, young feminists began to inquire into the politics of everyday life and adopted the slogan "The Personal Is Political...
...Since then I have given it much thought...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...Revolutionary romanticism and cultural feminism excluded many ordinary American women...
...Instead, they questioned social and "private" arrangements — women's responsibility for housework and child care, society's devaluation of women's traditional work and their status as the lowest paid workers, their exclusion from professional careers, the sexual double standard, and sexual dissatisfaction and exploitation...
...Political orthodoxy often foreclosed debate and, even worse, diminished support...
...Like women in former communist societies, American women work two shifts and experience leisure as the ultimate scarce resource...
...Since the late sixties, many U.S...
...from the New Left they inherited an idealistic commitment to expose every instance of inequality and hypocrisy in American society...
...The National Organization for Women (NOW), founded in 1966, grew directly from the Kennedy administration's unwillingness to live up to its own liberal promises...
...Chicanas, heirs to a strong family tradition, tried to advance their own rights, without adopting the antifamily attitudes that had infused the first years of the women's liberation movement...
...You are facing a period of great economic A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...Thanks to the work of liberal feminists, legal sex discrimination became more difficult, and affirmative action helped draw many women into new occupations...
...Still, the accomplishments of this wave of feminism have been extraordinary...
...The availability of the Pill and the so-called "sexual revolution" of the mid-sixties, moreover, also generated new frustrations...
...It will be more subtle, more culturally threatening, but profoundly revolutionary...
...As your new friend and colleague, I can give you nothing less than my honest reflections...
...Can competing visions of female freedom be reconciled...
...Increasingly, families require two incomes to survive...
...By 1980, issues raised by the women's movement had seeped into American culture and national politics...
...Each group tried to claim that, because it was the most oppressed, it therefore was entitled to lead the movement...
...These were exciting times...
...Such revolutionary romanticism inevitably alienated the mainstream of American women, who feared the radicalism of the New Left and the sexually extravagant and drug-happy youthful counterculture...
...Will you redefine the concepts of citizenship and civil society...
...As gender consciousness emerges, women confront different political traditions and discourses within a political culture...
...Even after twenty years, neither men nor the government has been willing to step in and acknowledge that child care and housework are everyone's responsibility...
...Efforts to encourage men to take more responsibility for household work and the care of children largely failed...
...From our discussions, you already know how much hope and meaning feminism has brought to my life and the lives of millions of American women...
...Feminism bashing" —blaming feminism for other unresolved social problems—became quite a national sport in the 1980s...
...The most subtle opposition...
...Once race relations had been challenged, it was a small step toward questioning the "natural" presumption of women's subordination in society...
...Will they support women's choices, or will they argue, as revolutionaries have always argued, that women's needs can be addressed later...
...The very words "women's emancipation" were contaminated by communist regimes' effort to coerce female participation in the labor force...
...During the fifties, the American middle class, enjoying an unprecedented affluence, came to idealize an ideology of domesticity...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...The tragedy is that the collapse of communism represents such an extraordinary opportunity to rethink how women and men can more fully participate in civil and private life...
...Inevitably, there were errors and excesses...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Who will offer the strongest opposition...
...The moral clarity of the civil rights movement to desegregate the South inspired many Americans...
...The level of women's rage—which grew out of their shock at men's incomprehension of the female experience and their sense of entitlement in a democratic culture—helped publicize the issues, released much repressed anger, but also scared many potential male and female supporters...
...532 • DISSENT American Feminism and Gender Democracy With no other choice under U.S...
...What political discourse can you employ to both improve and protect the conditions of women's lives...
...Taken together, these changes not only created the preconditions for a second wave of feminism but also set its agenda...
...Lesbians, who still suffered enormous discrimination, publicized the reality of homosexual experience and sexuality...
...Starved for consumer goods and time with their families, some of you may well romanticize the unbridled market and consumer society of the United States —just as some American feminists romanticized "socialism" and Third World liberation movements...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...In hindsight, however, American feminism now seems an inevitable result of the massive economic, social, and cultural changes of the postwar era: the large number of women who entered the work force during the fifties and sixties, the increased life span of women, the revolution in birth control technology and attitudes toward sexuality, the elevated expectations—and disillusionment— of thousands of women who swelled college enrollments, the development of movements and an insurgent counterculture that rejected traditional authority...
...Feminism in the mid-sixties caught many Americans by surprise...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Mistakes, errors in judgment, failures of imagination—yes, there were many...
...536 • DISSENT American Feminism and Gender Democracy dislocation and deprivation...
...The women's liberation movement proceeded to spin away from the New Left...
...When the second wave of feminism emerged in the 1960s, it both drew upon American ideas of individual freedom and equality and tried to redefine the meaning of those words at the same time...
...Still, you predicted that a "hard feminism" might emerge within five years to redress the grievances of women in your society...
...Committed to challenging all authority and received wisdom about women's and men's roles, women's liberationists initially shunned liberal efforts to change laws or enforce government regulations...
...During the 1970s and 1980s, feminists "named" many sexual crimes: sexual harassment, wife battering, incest, as well as marital and date rape...
...Working-class women often tried to make middle-class women feel guilty for being privileged...
...I choose the form of the "private letter" intentionally...
...In the name of "political correctness," some separatists began surveilling each other's personal lives for political orthodoxy...
...In consciousness-raising groups, women gradually observed that many of their personal problems were shared by other women...
...In the nineteenth century, American suffragists demanded that the United States live up to the promises of its Declaration of Independence...
...The liberal political culture of the early 1960s accelerated this process...
...The brave and moral men who helped topple the old regime rarely considered the role women would play in the new civil society...
...New grievances will be heard...
...We talked, too, about the difficult economic dependence some of those women may eventually confront...
...The idea of complete equality with men was therefore extremely appealing...
...And there they have remained, still debated, still contested...
...But now I must speak of the opportunities we squandered...
...Women's loneliness, the high divorce rate, men's impotence, eating disorders, the feminization of poverty, infertility, and all manner of ills were blamed on feminism...
...Like the liberal political culture from which it emerged, the organization emphasized individual rights and claimed for women the same rights men enjoyed in American society...
...Lesbian activists simultaneously proclaimed the legitimacy of love between women...
...But feminists did not agree on such matters...
...One day, the pendulum will swing again...
...You've had twenty years of feminism...
...The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan was riddled with appeals for a FALL • 1991 • 535 American Feminism and Gender Democracy renewed "traditional" nuclear family, patriarchal authority, an end to abortion, and "traditional values" —code for women and minorities knowing their place...
...What can we learn from your two decades of feminist activism...
...As yet, there exists no "equality with a difference" under U.S...
...The ghost that haunted many young women was a housewife wrapped in an apron...
...Abortion remained unavailable or illegal...
...Whereas we rebelled against a coercive ideology of domesticity, women in East Central Europe will be reacting against state-coerced labor...
...The integrationist impulse of the civil rights movement had been eclipsed by Black Power activists and black nationalists...
...At the same time, paradoxically, the cult of domesticity was being undermined by the growing number of married, middle-class women entering an expanding labor market...
...At movement conferences, young women began voicing their frustrations, but suffered further humiliation when their early feminist demands were ridiculed by some male counterparts...
...The self-righteous moralism of those who claimed they were the most oppressed or the most politically correct drove other women to fear personal attacks and social stigma...
...10017 (212) 595-3084...
...Regrettably, young men in the movement were not as quick to grasp these changes...
...The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), which deeply infiltrated the movement, fed the fears of leaders and helped sow distrust and envy among women...
...They confided stories of illegal abortions, rapes, beatings by their husbands, sexual harassment, faked orgasms, and lesbian experiences...
...Political support for parental leave or child care—all social democratic goals of the early women's movement—was slim...
...From the late New Left, however, they also acquired an apocalyptic revolutionary utopianism that shunned structure and leadership and required activists to live as though an altogether transformed future had already replaced the present...
...Still, we could have done better...
...lesbians won many rights...
...Every feminist movement decides whether it can build upon existing political culture or must avoid a political discourse contaminated by past political experience...
...But the sexual revolution was incomplete, and gradually young women recognized that fact...
Vol. 38 • September 1991 • No. 4
