A new attack on Feminism

...SEGREGATED SISTERHOOD: RACISM AND THE POLITICS OF AMERICAN FEMINISM, by Nancie Caraway...

...Perhaps most important, Tavris questions the conventional male/female polarization of personality characteristics supported by the work of academic cultural feminists...

...News about women— even "success stories" —is usually peppered with suggestions that successful women are unhappy and lead lives of stress or are deprived of the pleasures of traditional family life...

...Lenore Weitzman, for example, wrote in an influential book, The Divorce Revolution, that no-fault divorce had taken a severe economic toll on women because its assumption of equality removed the bargaining advantage that their dependent status had conferred...

...23.00...

...But its bashing of white feminists, many of whom have identified the social processes that oppress all women, is not useful or enlightening...

...The work of Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Tavris, a Ph.D...

...This kind of article reporting the "good news" is rare, Faludi reports...

...Faludi especially indicts those who wrote about women's supposed disaffection in the workplace — articles, for example, about women in high-level jobs who dropped out to return to the home...

...The work of Black feminist theorist Patricia Collins represents such an embodied project of reconstructed or reinvented otherness and alterity...

...Other scholars claimed that the feminist movement had erred in pressing for equal treatment of women in several realms...

...Abandoning the sixties' women's movement's belief that equality meant a sharing of responsibilities in the home and equal treatment at work, some feminist scholars reaffirmed traditional mandates—the notion, for example, of women's special propensity for caring" roles...

...we see not only the "invention" of the signifying systems of Western phallocratic and white feminist theory, but the resulting material consequences to the Black women who have been literally and symbolically "subject/ed" by its codes...

...282 pp...

...As I have found in an overview of research studying sex differences in cognition and personality, most beliefs about male/female differences are typically "deceptive distinctions...

...Simon and Schuster, 1992...

...Susan Faludi's Backlash provides a scorching look the popular media and the academics responsible for the accounts that denied women's hard-won progress toward equality in the 1970s and 1980s and the accomplishments of the women's movement...

...Nancie Caraway's Segregated Sisterhood is a little known book, but is of interest as an example of a strand of "politically correct" feminist writing...

...The Republican National Convention gave the private, family-centered woman Barbara Bush a very public and political role as a highlighted speaker, while the Democrats pressed Hillary Clinton, the assertive attorney and advocate for children's rights, to retreat to the role of supportive wife and mother...

...and that women's health was not impaired by demanding jobs...

...Her bibliography indicates a limited acquaintance with the work of feminist social scientists other than those of the postmodernist network...

...Like the authors Faludi refers to in Backlash, Caraway attacks feminists—white feminists—in this case for their middle-class biases and implicit racism...

...Other scholars maintained that the feminist movement had achieved little in the way of economic progress for women, except for a handful of elite white women...

...The traditional cultural models are emphasized not only in folk culture and the popular media...

...398 pp...

...Suddenly the right wing, which had always held that the old way was the best way, found support from "cultural feminists," such as Carol Gilligan, whose book In a Different Voice was an unanticipated academic best-seller...

...Though the movements of the 1960s and later challenged traditional views of "woman's place" and precipitated wide-ranging legislation, rapid social changes made even many "emancipated" working women uncomfortable about taking advantage of new opportunities and departing from traditional roles...

...Her title is a play on Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man, which showed that scientists' bias about the intelligence of minorities resulted in findings that supported their prejudices...

...Though Americans have been experiencing structural changes aplenty over the past decade, our mythology refuses to acknowledge them...

...As the New York Times reported in October, recent studies by three economists showed that the economic situation of women has steadily improved over the past decades and continues to show a steady upward surge...

...For example, referring to the contribution of black feminists, she comments: [Black feminist] reconstructions take on the immediacy of lives lived beyond discourse...

...Caraway sees only good among black feminists' work, calling it transformative...

...A white feminist who decries elitism, Caraway writes in an obscure jargon guaranteed to be limited to a select few...

...This message is part of the backlash Faludi points to...

...Faludi points out, among other things, that not only were women not dropping out of the workplace to return to the home, their numbers in the workplace were increasing steadily...

...The focus of Tavris's book can be found in its telling subtitle, "Why women are not the better sex, the inferior sex, or the opposite sex...

...The American public's attraction to what William J. Goode has called the "classic family of western nostalgia" is testament to the power of myth...

...University of Tennessee Press, 1991...

...124 • DISSENT...

...She examines such issues as the "creation" by the medical establishment and the drug industry of women's physical ailments such as premenstrual syndrome (PMS), the view that women contribute to their own victimization because of psychological problems such as codependency, and the propagation of particular views of women's sexuality (for example, the books and articles devoted to the existence and location of the "G-Spot...

...Faludi notes that the sources for the problems depicted were not WINTER • 1993 • 123 to be found in women's movement activism but in traditional discriminatory attitudes and institutions...

...Tavris examines many social science studies to show how deep-seated cultural prejudices result in preferences for theories that support them and how evidence that questions received knowledge goes unheeded...

...But she also questions the studies that found negative consequences of equality and nontraditional behavior, concluding that they were not supported by additional research and further statistical analysis...

...These issues must be examined with steely-eyed caution and insistence on evidence...

...that a majority of divorced women reported that they were happier divorced than they had been in their painful marriages and that a year after divorce their economic situation, at first quite poor, had improved substantially...

...The press, ever vigilant to the dangers flowing from social change, had a field day depicting women's participation in the labor force as a source of strain and pain for women and their families...

...She cites the academics mentioned above as well as popular writers who gained wide attention with misleading stories about the negative impact of no-fault divorce on women, of day care on children, and of employment on women's health...

...The right's attempt to equate the traditional family with morality and to label alternatives as radical and destructive seized media attention—although voters wisely seemed to worry more about the economy than whether the couple in the White House should be like Ozzie and Harriet...

...in psychology who is also a popular writer and former editor of Psychology Today, indicates it is time to apply common sense—educated, cynical common sense—to the cultural myths about men and women perpetuated in part by the media and by segments of the academic community...

...Bias in the social sciences, in the medical profession, and in the press is also documented by Carol Tavris in The Mismeasure of Woman...

...America's ambivalence about the roles of women today was played out most ironically in the past presidential campaign...

...The problems they raise are of crucial importance...

...But the many news reports and op ed pieces about whether Hillary Clinton harmed her husband's candidacy and the polls, which consistently registered higher admiration for the whitehaired grandmotherly Mrs...

...Never mind that many have no basis in reality and never did have...

...they have considerable support in the academy and in intellectual circles...

...Bush than for the blonde Mrs...

...that controlling for quality, children benefited psychologically and intellectually from day care (and many faced a greater probability of abuse in their own homes than in nursery schools...

...Clinton, showed that although the public might not let "family values" decide its vote, the mythic view of the traditional division of labor in the home was still popular on Main Street...

...Of course, Faludi acknowledges that women do need help in attaining more highly skilled jobs, higher pay, governmentsupported child care, and freedom from sexual harassment...

...THE MISMEASURE OF WOMAN: WHY WOMEN ARE NOT THE BETTER SEX, THE INFERIOR SEX, OR THE OPPOSITE SEX, by Carol Tavris...

...The questions of women's equality, the problems of the family and care of children should not be subject to posturing or faddish dabbling in new terminologies...

...Following the work psychoanalytically oriented theorists in the United States and Europe, Gilligan suggested that girls' earliest experiences created identities with an orientation to morality based on relationships (in contrast to a male orientation toward abstract justice) that accounted for their placement in traditional roles—as mothers, wives, and nurturers in the home, and as nurses, teachers, and social workers in the workplace...

...Sylvia Hewlitt (a former Marxist economist) wrote that women had A Lesser Life because of their multiple roles and lack of child care, for which she faulted the women's movement...

...Her book is certainly useful in bringing to attention the contributions of black feminists...