Feminism at the Crossroads

...It's not so surprising, then, that we find women who consider themselves to be feminists shifting back and forth between these two camps...

...Grade-school teacher or college professor...

...Feminism has also, as Susan Faludi demonstrated so cleverly in Backlash, been blamed for making women miserable, for causing everything from infertility—see...

...In that sense, then, protectionist or difference feminism is at bottom a nostalgic project, which I think today appeals to women at least partly because it seems to protect them against new and uncertain social forms and understandings— the sexually predatory behavior, for example, of many male college students, which in previous situations was directed toward women of inferior social class rather than those of their own...

...that seems likely to remain the case, even if the family-values crowd succeeds in making abortion harder to achieve or divorce more difficult to obtain...

...If I had to predict which road feminism will take, I would have to say that the material conditions for protectionist or "difference" feminism seem to be steadily eroding...

...More respect for individual variations among women or more respect for traditional feminine traits and roles...

...Although I'm sure Andrea Dworkin would take issue with me here, I see important continuities between the antipornography movement and, say, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU): both use powerful Puritan energies already present in American society in order to mount a challenge to male domestic irresponsibility and violence: men will be tamed by being deprived of their evil pleasures (rather than: women will be empowered by confronting inequality head-on...

...And then, of course, being feminists, we'll all congratulate ourselves over how right we were to choose what was, in fact, the only possible path—equality, which will at that point be understood to mean not women being the same as men, but both sexes sharing a more or less common life...

...Families are small and not very stable...

...I argued that the different social styles of the two sexes are more apparent than real and do not, in any case, translate into moral and political differences in the public realm, and that it was a great mistake to base claims to political power on, for example, the supposed superior altruism and honesty of female politicians...

...But what it really did was ensure that women would do all the domestic labor—after all, they had those days off, free for the asking— and enshrine in law ideas about menstruation that seem fairly fantastic today...

...There's a debate around sexuality issues, which tends to be played out over pornography...

...I will quarrel a bit with that metaphor later, but first I'd like to observe that a crossroads is a much more exciting place to be than a graveyard, so clearly we are making progress...

...In her interesting book, Feminism Without Illusions, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese argues that there is a contradiction between the individualism at the heart of the modern American women's movement and the demands it also makes, or ought to make, for more collective responsibility for the disadvantaged...

...you will notice that stay-at-home childless wifehood, once also a common lifestyle, is no longer even discussed as a rational choice...

...But the political effect of Hill's testimony could not have been more activist: women, the lesson was, must win political power in order for their concerns to be addressed...

...But many women, including myself, don't see it as an either/or situation...

...both mistake a symbol for a cause...

...both share a certain sense of women as pure and nonsexual and better than men: Frances Willard, the head of the WCTU, even espoused the ideal of marriage without sex entirely...

...Fewer and fewer women can afford to make stay-at-home motherhood the basis for a full identity...

...Or fight for the upward valuation of the traditional female jobs...

...In 194 • DISSENT Feminism at the Crossroads the short run, this might even genuinely help women—but it also assumes that gender roles in the family aren't going to change, even though they are rapidly doing so, even as we speak, and throws its weight behind keeping those roles the same...

...It may be true that at some deep philosophical level there is a contradiction between wanting more sexual freedom and wanting less pornography, or wanting to see women's experience reflected across the academic board and wanting independent women's studies departments, or wanting to break down the gender-segregated workforce and wanting comparable worth for the historically underpaid jobs in which women predominate...

...When the Soviet Union, in its early days, instituted a policy whereby women could take off from work while they had their menstrual periods, that probably seemed the height of compassion, common sense, and enlightened social policy...

...In the workplace, gender barriers are slowly breaking down: that women are naturally more caring than men may suit the self-image of nurses and social workers, but doesn't really do much for, say, bartenders and marines...

...But if one street sign reads freedom and another protection, we can see that there are problems with our crossroads metaphor...

...So it's with great pleasure and some relief that I observe that we are not gathered here tonight to debate whether feminism is actively bad or just irrelevant, but to discuss its future direction...

...A very good example of how close the two different strains of feminism can be is the response to Anita Hill...

...Consider the recent census report that 20 percent of fathers care for children while their wives are working...

...Women today are enjoying a lively debate on a number of issues, although perhaps "enjoying" is not the mot juste here, given how acrimonious these debates can become...

...They want to have sexual adventures and not to be raped or abused...

...Fight for the right of women soldiers to enter combat, or fight the military itself...

...Now there's certainly a way to read Hill's charges that fits in with SPRING • 1994 • 193 Feminism at the Crossroads protectionist, women-are-better feminism: as many pointed out at the time of the Thomas hearings, not every woman would be disgusted, bowled over and physically upset by off-color remarks of the sort she claimed Thomas made to her—plenty of women, indeed, have been known to make such remarks themselves...

...For example, the "mommy track" says, look, we all know women do most of the child care and most of the housework, so let's make it easier for them to get through the double day of paid employment and domestic responsibilities...

...The idea that men and women are radically different species of being, which not so long ago struck so many as an indisputable fact of nature, is more and more coming to be revealed as a historical construct, connected to the rise of the bourgeois industrial household, a social form whose end we are living through...

...And historically, indeed, both have achieved some success...

...And today's pro-sex feminists can trace their lineage back to Frances Wright, Victoria Woodhull, the Utopian feminists of the Oneida community, and other early nineteenth-century social experiments...

...And if that line doesn't work, there are always children, as in: feminism is all right for women, but what about the kids, foisted off on day-care centers run by child molesters and deprived of paternal authority by divorce, which in this version of life is always initiated by women...

...To oversimplify greatly, one can pose the question as, which do women need, more freedom or more 192 • DISSENT Feminism at the Crossroads protection...

...It should not, perhaps, surprise us that in daily life, and in the political realm as well, feminists, and many women who resist the label too, should find themselves traveling all roads at once rather than marching firmly down one path or the other...

...As Ann Snitow suggested in "Pages from a Gender Diary" (Dissent, Spring 1989) this is a misleading picture, which better fits hardened crusaders of the movement than it does most women...

...women who resent men's interest in pornography also have forced Harlequin romances to include semi-explicit sex scenes...

...Protectionist or difference feminism says, in effect: this is what women are like, this is the kind of life they lead, so let's shape social policy and the law to acknowledge and reflect it...

...So perhaps the real way feminism will resolve its indecisiveness at the crossroads is that it will continue to debate and hesitate and try both roads at once until one day it sees that in fact the crossroads has disappeared...

...Protectionist policies of the past have a way of outdating themselves...

...There's a debate about work itself: should women enter the male-dominated professions on terms already laid down, or change them...

...A second problem with our crossroads metaphor is that it assumes that, along the special/equal or protection/freedom divide women will line up on one side or the other...

...Little by little, the genders are converging: they are educated more alike and raised more alike than ever before, and out of economic necessity as much as anything else, their roles within marriage are converging too...

...But the fact is, many women have no trouble at all believing simultaneously that women are morally superior to men and that they are also equal to men...

...Feminism at the Crossroads" —that sounds dramatic, doesn't it, full of promise, or is it threat?—of challenge at any rate, opportunities to be seized or missed, of signposts that if rightly read will send women onto the broad main highway of civic life and personal happiness but if misread or wrongly chosen will send them down some ill-lit alley, or even up the proverbial garden path...

...On the whole, however, I would say that feminism's best hope lies with equality, because although equality has the defect of sometimes seeming rather counter-intuitive — why legally treat pregnancy like an illness when we all know very well it isn't an illness—it has the great advantage of being open-ended...

...And in the other, we find those who see gender as a more fluid social construction, with the sexes sharing a broad range of traits and ways of life, and who see their feminist task as opening every social possibility/opportunity to women...

...Women who have abortions also have babies...

...In the first place, if standing at the crossroads means having to choose a direction, it will immediately become apparent that American feminism has been divided over which path to take for over a century...

...The truth is, though, that it can't protect them, it can only make them feel better for a little while, like praying in a foxhole...

...In the same way, women can both admire Hillary Rodham Clinton because she is a smart, powerful working mother, and live with the unfortunate fact that her current political position was achieved through marriage...

...But at the practical level of lived daily life, one finds surprisingly few women who feel compelled to take a hard and consistent line...

...What are the street signs on the feminist crossroads...

...Feminism, like Broadway, the novel, and God, has been declared dead many times...

...you waited too long to get pregnant because you were hell-bent on a fancy career and didn't settle for that nice boy next door twenty years ago, and now look—to poverty and divorce, which in this version of life is always initiated by men...

...I still think I was right, despite the suspicious fact that of all the essays I've written for the Nation, this was the one that got the most favorable comment from men...

...What all these debates have in common is that they tend to divide into two broad camps: In one fall those who would shore up and protect some notion of women as different than men—whether by nature, nurture, or more or less immutable social function—who, because of that difference, need special protections in order not to be disadvantaged by a maledominant social order...

...Similarly, the debate over whether women need more protection or more equality at work has a long history, with surprising people lining up on both sides of the issue: Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because she believed it would expose women to increased exploitation in the workplace, and supported so-called protective legislation that limited the hours of working women...

...Last year, to give an example from my own work, I wrote an article attacking the wing of feminism I called "difference feminism," that is, the notion that women are more or less immutably different than men in ways that have important moral consequences...

...And there's a debate about gender roles in marriage, which is expressed around issues of, say, the "mommy track" at work, whereby women would trade professional advancement for a schedule that would make it easier for them to fulfill a modified version of traditional domestic roles at home: you'll notice that nobody calls it the "parent track...

...Nurse or doctor...

...This article is taken from a talk given at the New School for Social Research in New York City in the fall of 1993...

...To be both women and human beings...

...are married and know that marriage these days may well not be for life...

...Indeed, unlike those other items, it has been declared dead almost since its birth—by which I mean its modern rebirth in the 1960s...

...For example, that women are kinder, gentler, more harmonious, and less competitive than men...

...SPRING • 1994 • 195...

...This reflects women's real condition: most women work and have children...

...Her ten-year silence also fits a certain vision of women as unable to defend themselves, thus needing lots of extra help from the law and the state...