CHAPTER 15
MANIFESTATIONS OF FEMINISM
Introduction
This chapter gives a brief survey of some historical forms of Feminism. It is not intended primarily as an attack on Feminism, because that has been the function of the rest of this book. Rather, it is to give an historical account of the Feminist ideology and political movement, which has also been known as the Women's Liberation Movement, or the Women's Movement. The difference between these terms is that the word "Feminism" is sometimes used to refer purely to a theory or ideology, whereas the terms "Women's Movement" and "Women's Liberation Movement" also refer to political activities.
Individualist/Liberal Feminism
Individualist Feminism received its first substantial formulation in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). This was in the tradition of 18th century Individualist social and political theory, deriving ultimately from John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689), according to which the supreme law was to be the welfare of the people. It was a fairly small step from that stated principle to looking at various categories of people – such as women – and asking what the "system" was doing to or for them. From our vantage-point, we might question the bias of the people who decided what categories of people to investigate, but that is another issue.
Wollstonecraft noted that when people referred to "people" or "humans," they almost always meant men. Women were viewed principally in relation to men; i.e., as sexual partners and rearers of men's children, and so on. She asserted women must be looked on primarily as people in their own right, and only secondarily as the housekeepers and wives, etc. of men.
An important contention in her book is that men used education to train girls to play the dependent "womanly" roles men have mapped out for them. This, indeed, is a recurrent theme throughout the Feminist literature. Wollstonecraft demands equality of civil rights between men and women. She does not say much about political rights for women, though there are indications she intended to write something on that topic, too.
John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women was an important 19th Century Feminist work, written under the influence of his late wife, Harriet Taylor. Mill's proposals are similar to those of Wollstonecraft. But he goes further, saying that women should have the vote. As far as employment is concerned, he too says women should be free to enter the occupation of their choice (including marriage and child-rearing, if that is their preferred option).
Fundamental to Mill's philosophy, Utilitarianism, is the idea of optimizing the greatest good for the greatest number of people; that is, ethical priority was accorded to the greatest good of the greatest number of people. According to most authorities on Mill's works, the notion of "equality," which is so basic to Feminist writings in general, did not seem to obviously follow from Utilitarian principles. It is not logically necessary that "equality" between different groups or individuals in Society would inevitably be a means of producing the greatest good to the greatest number of people.
It might be argued, for example, that some people are better at producing wealth than others. Therefore, if you want to maximise the wealth in a given Society, you have to accord special rights and privileges to such people in order to attain your overall goal of maximising the material well-being of the population as a whole. Mill had to add the principle of equality on almost as an afterthought before he could construct his Feminist argument.
Nevertheless, he does try to demonstrate how everybody would benefit from granting women legal equality with men by arguing that the liberation of women will result in a net gain in the quantity of happiness for mankind. This is because, according to Locke's previous work, the "servitude" of women in marriage makes many of them miserable. He also says that mankind (by which he meant, in present day Feminist parlance, "humankind") will benefit if woman's full potential is freed, educated, and employed to the benefit of all. And marriages would be happier if men and women were equally well educated. He believed happiness in marriage depended on the partners being as similar and unified as possible.
In the course of the nineteenth century, Feminists obtained greater educational opportunities in schools and universities and the admission of women to the professions. Laws relating to divorce, the property rights of married women, and control of children in marriage were also modified in a direction that favoured women. Moreover, by the early 20th Century, at the latest, women gained the franchise in most western countries. The first breakthrough for the Feminists came in 1869, when women got the vote in the American State of Wyoming, and the first sovereign state to grant women the vote was New Zealand – in 1893. However, in no country did men force women to become liable to be drafted into the front line, in return for getting the vote. This shows how little thinking was done about equality of rights and responsibilities.
After the franchise for women had been achieved in many countries, the Second World War intervened. This possibly caused a hiatus in the Feminists' political struggles, perhaps because they did not want to be forced to serve as front-line soldiers. Such an obligation might reasonably be expected of them had they continued agitating during the war. And when the war was over, people needed time to forget the men who had lost their lives and/or limbs in the War.
But sure enough, after a decent interval, a peacetime mentality soon evolved in western societies to which the hypocrisy of some of the Feminist demands for "equality" did not seem so glaringly obvious. This was no conspiracy – the process is a natural one, as most people prefer to treat war as a bad dream they want to wake up from as soon as possible! And from a Lesbian Feminist perspective, men are always expendable.
This postwar period marked Feminism's true Second Wave, a time when it seemed natural to focus more and more on the way women's role in the family prevented them from having careers to the extent men did. This attitude implied that the roles of wife and mother were somehow inferior to that of income-earner in a workplace (or wage-slave in the rat-race, as others might phrase it).
One book pushing this line within the Individualist Feminist tradition was Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), which followed relatively closely on the heels of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1953) (see below). Friedan's aim was for society and women's lives to be organised to maximise the ability of women to have a career as well as a family. She thought that American middle-class, suburban, white, heterosexual housewives were bound to feel unfulfilled and bored, unless they had a full-time job outside the home:
“Science should not relieve housewives of too much drudgery; it must concentrate instead on creating the illusion of that sense of achievement that housewives seem to need.” (The Feminine Mystique, 4th Dell Printing, June 1964, p 172)
This would, of course, not be such a problem in countries and social classes where labour-saving devices were unaffordable. But what is most interesting here is how Friedan seems to take it for granted any sense of achievement felt by housewives would be necessarily an "illusion". This is a very subjective view. Obviously, Friedan obviously does not feel that a sense of achievement in a career outside the home would be illusory – either for men or women. Nor does she believe a woman can be both feminine and fully human:
“(B)y choosing femininity over the painful growth to full identity, by never achieving the hard core of self that comes not from fantasy but from mastering reality, these girls are doomed to suffer ultimately that bored, diffuse feeling of purposelessness, nonexistence, noninvolvement with the world that can be called anomie, or lack of identity, or merely felt as the problem that has no name.” (The Feminine Mystique, 4th Dell Printing, June 1964, p 172)
This is the same gender-role confusion which has affected many Feminists; somehow, they manage to equate femininity with a lack of a identity. What this really demonstrates is the frustration that bisexual middle-class Feminist writers felt with the need to conform to "feminine" role-models, and why they wanted to convert more women to their more masculine personalities. They wanted to take power away from the feminine and attractive women, whose personas were centred around cooperating with men, and create a cohort of women whose personas would centre around competing with men. Overtly Lesbian Feminists are merely at the extreme end of this covertly Lesbian movement. From this perspective, Friedan's famous "problem that has no name" is actually the "problem" of heterosexuality – it couldn't be given a name because its true name would repel converts. Despite this, some found her less radical than her predecessors:
Betty Friedan's 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, was in some ways less 'radical' than Wollstonecraft's, Taylor's or Mill's. Despite Friedan's implicit understanding of woman as a powerless sex class, she often wrote as if individual women can, through sheer effort, advance to the ranks of the powerful sex class known as 'man'. Her tendency, at least in The Feminine Mystique, was to forget that this is easier said than done, so long as men are generally in charge of hiring and promoting. (Tong 1989, 22)
Tong believes Friedan's emphasis on individual "self-improvement" constitutes a diversion from radical activity aimed at changing society through political means, and criticises Friedan for not being analytical enough to look for barriers to women achieving careers outside the home. Many years later, however, Friedan remedied this omission to some extent with a second book, The Second Stage:
“In the first stage, our aim was full participation (of the woman's movement), ... But we were diverted from our dream. And in our reaction against the feminine mystique, which defined women solely in terms of their relation to men as wives, mothers and homemakers, we sometimes seemed to fall into a feminist mystique which denied that core of women's personhood that is fulfilled through love, nurture, home.” (Friedan, op. cit., 27)
So the main emphasis in Liberal/Individualist Feminism was on removing barriers that prevent women from competing with men on an equal footing in paid employment. And this remains its main emphasis, although many of these barriers no longer exist. Ironically, a strict interpretation of the Liberal/Individualist Feminists paradigm does not sit well with the dominant Feminist thinking today: If women still don't achieve as well in public life as men do, responsibility rests solely with the individual (a Liberal Feminist would say). You can't just look at any inequality between men's and women's achievement in the workplace and deduce from it that there must still be some sexist barriers to women's achievement.
This issue is relevant to such questions as what happens to women when they return to the workforce after a break of several years, during which they have been busy raising their children. Some Feminists argue such women should reenter the workforce at the same level of pay and seniority as enjoyed by their (male and female) colleagues who had a continuous career throughout the period in question. I consider this Feminist position unjust for three reasons:
First, the employer grants seniority (in theory, anyway) not on the basis of age, but experience and skills gained. A person who has been absent from the workplace has presumably not acquired the same level of experience and skill. Feminists respond that being a mother provides much relevant experience and skill – but this is a brain-dead argument. It depends on what occupations are involved.
Obviously, being a mother is somewhat relevant to a career as an au pair, nanny, cook, nurse, or childcare worker. However, it is irrelevant to a career as an office-worker, laboratory technician, police officer or miner! An analysis of the relevant job description can be conducted by any halfway intelligent person, then compared with that of a housewife/mother. Anyone who buys the blanket Feminist argument that being a mother is equally relevant to any occupation should not be allowed to handle sharp implements, operate a motor vehicle or occupy any position requiring more than rudimentary reasoning ability. Their argument reeks of intellectual incompetence.
Second, what about people who are absent from a certain workplace for other reasons? It would be absurd and unjust to grant them the same seniority and pay as their colleagues who had stayed in the same workplace – yet it would be equally absurd and unjust to deny them this while granting it to returning mothers.
Finally, women who have children (usually) do this voluntarily, and bringing up children is a very rewarding occupation in its own right. It is not as if anyone was forcing them to do it. Those Feminists who believe all men are involved in a pervasive patriarchal conspiracy to subjugate all women are paranoid.
Certainly, some men derive satisfaction from being the breadwinner and being waited on hand-and-foot by women, and some men and women actively promote this vision of Society. But that is a quid pro quo arrangement – the man has burdens he must carry in wartime and other emergencies. It is also true that men are usually not the ones who have to choose between children and careers; on the other hand, men are also denied some of the joys of motherhood, so it is only equitable that women should be unable to have their cake and eat it too – especially as the mothers are more likely to be granted custody of the children after separation or divorce.
The time came when Individualist Feminism achieved most of its goals in western countries. A cynic might add that Feminism was therefore in need of new demands to make. Certainly, once a political movement has achieved certain political gains, those gains become part of the status quo and the political movement involved is at liberty to examine the new status quo to see if it is completely satisfied with it, or whether it thinks further "improvements" could or should be made.
Generally, when activists achieve their political goals they tend to rest on their laurels to some extent, and there is often a hiatus until succeeding generations grow up taking these achievements for granted and consider mounting new campaigns. However, the recent institutionalisation and financing of perpetual Feminism through Women's Studies departments, Ministries of Women's Affairs and state-funded and privately sponsored women's organisations are countering this tendency.
Socialist/Marxist Feminism
Socialist and Marxist Feminism are very similar to each other as Tong explains:
“Whereas socialist feminists believe that gender and class play an approximately equal role in any explanation of women's oppression, Marxist feminists believe that class ultimately better accounts for women's status and function(s). Under capitalism, they say, bourgeois women will not experience the same kind of oppression that proletarian women will. What is distinctive about Marxist feminism, then, is that it invites every woman, whether proletarian or bourgeois, to understand women's oppression not so much as the result of the intentional actions of individuals but as the product of the political, social, and economic structures associated with capitalism.” (Tong 1989,39)
It was Socialist Feminism, together with Radical Feminism (see below), which made up the vanguard of Feminism's Second Wave. Socialism (including Marxist Socialism/Communism) has been a very diverse movement. Yet, with few exceptions (such as the French writer Proudhon), Socialists favoured Feminism from the outset. There were possibly two reasons for this: First, Socialism arose at a historically later stage than Individualism, when Feminism was already an up-and-coming ideology; second, Socialism was generally antagonistic to the institution of the family. This was attractive to those Feminists who wanted to disconnect women from their role in the family.
In most forms of Socialism, there was to be no private property for the family to own and pass on to later generations. So there would be no need to rear children privately or tie women to the home.
One of the most important works in the Socialist Feminist tradition was Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, she was an Existentialist as well as a Marxist. Juliet Mitchell's Woman's Estate (1971) was another influential Marxist Feminist work. She agreed with the efforts of the Radical Feminists (see below) to encourage women to analyse their own situation, but she thought the results of this process of analysis would need Marxist theory superimposed on it for it to make any sort of sense.
One of the main issues concerning Marxist Feminists is household work. They maintain that even when women have full-time jobs their household workload remains both undiminished and undervalued: if women weren't doing it for free, someone would have to be paid to do the shopping, cook, clean the house, and look after the children, etc. But capitalist societies, they contend, view women as mere consumers (using the money their male partners earn as producers).
Some Marxist Feminists believe women are oppressed because they see women as basically parasitical, the work of a housewife as easy, and of little value. They have therefore argued for the socialisation and collectivisation of women's household work. What they want is for people to live communally, so child-rearing, cooking and housework are carried out on a large scale by paid workers. This work will then acquire a monetary value and its worth will be thereby officially acknowledged – even if it is still mostly women who do it.
Other Marxist Feminists argue that a woman's household work in an individual household should attract a wage. This wage should be paid by the government. According to Tong (1989), however, there is another Marxist Feminist point of view which has it that paying women to do housework has three disadvantages:
1.It would make it more likely that women would be isolated in their own homes. Their work would become increasingly trivialised, as more and more labour-saving devices became available to them. They would become more and more prey to suburban neurosis.
2.The relationship of the woman to the rest of her family would be put onto a commercial footing, when many Marxists would like to get away from what they see as Capitalism's tendency to commodify everything.
3.It would entrench the traditional sexual division of labour – making it more likely that men would keep on working outside the home, and women inside the home.
Existentialist Feminism
As stated above, de Beauvoir was both an Existentialist and a Marxist. This leads authors such as Tong (1989) to classify her as primarily an Existentialist Feminist, rather than as a Marxist Feminist.
To fully understand Existentialist Feminism, one would have to understand Existentialism, and it would be outside the scope of this book to digress into the details of Existential theory. However, the essential characteristic of Existentialist Feminism is that it takes the positive, active categories of Existentialism and applies them to men, and takes the negative, passive categories and applies them to women – thus making women out to be disadvantaged and oppressed.
“Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, probably the key theoretical text of twentieth-century Feminism, offered an existentialist explanation of woman's situation. De Beauvoir argued that woman is oppressed by virtue of otherness. Woman is the Other because she is not-man. Man is the self, the free, determining being who defines the meaning of his existence, and woman is the Other, the object whose meaning is determined for her. If woman is to become a self, a subject, she must, like man, transcend the definitions, labels, and essences limiting her existence. She must make herself be whatever she wants to be.” (Tong, op. cit., 6).
Cultural Feminism
Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) was the first significant Cultural Feminist work. Cultural Feminism sets out to persuade us that men and women are not only different from each other, but that women's values are superior to men's and women's values should supplant men's values. In other words, this is Female Supremacism.
What about women who behave badly? Most Feminists insist such are the result of socialisation, education and upbringing in a patriarchal society. By the same logic, however, the supposedly "positive" aspects of "women's values" must also derive from the same source. This means both the positive and negative aspects of women's values and behaviour might vanish as a result of the social engineering proposed by the Cultural Feminists!
Where 19th century Liberal Feminists concentrated on political and legal issues, Cultural Feminists examined institutions such as religion, marriage, and the home. They looked beyond the possibility of political and legal equality between women and men to the changes in society they believed could or should result from such equality. The idea, simply, was that men had been making a mess of things and women would do a better job of running, or helping to run the world.
Some Cultural Feminists believe in the myth of a primordial matriarchy, when pacifism, cooperation, nonviolent settlement of differences, and a harmonious regulation of public life were the order of the day -- in contrast to the destruction, tyranny, and war which are supposed to have characterised patriarchy. By using the word myth, I don't mean this belief is necessarily incorrect – just that it is an unproved tale about historical events which is central to a particular explanation of Society.
Unable to find any "Matriarchies" in the present day, many Feminists resort to inventing an idyllic Lost Matriarchal Paradise in the dim mists of prehistory. Even though there is no acceptable scholarly evidence for this, it has become an accepted fact in 'Women's Studies'. (www.patriarchy.com/~sheaffer/patriarchy.html)
Social Darwinism (Spencer, 1851) was an important influence on Cultural Feminism. This theory applied the quasi-Darwinian notion of the "survival of the fittest" to human societies, races and individual people. It implied that any successful society achieved its success by virtue of characteristics that made it "fitter" than rival societies. Societies could be "fitter" in various ways, including:
1. birthrate;
2. infant mortality rate;
3. longevity;
4. food production;
5. total population;
6. total land area;
7. success in warfare, etc.
Social Darwinism placed high value on male aggression and competitiveness. Some Social Darwinists even favoured murderous competition and war as appropriate selective mechanisms. However, another, less-publicised school of Social Darwinist thought, such as Charlotte Gilman's Women and Economics (1898), foresaw a different trend. They believed Humanity was evolving toward a more collective organisation, requiring more cooperation and less competition, more altruism and less egoism.
Psychoanalytic Feminism
The core thinking of Psychoanalytic Feminism goes something like this:
“Psychoanalytic Feminists find the root of women's oppression embedded deep in her (sic) psyche.... the Oedipus complex, the process by which the boy gives up his first love object, mother, in order to escape castration at the hands of father. As a result of submitting his id (or desires) to the superego (collective social conscience), the boy is fully integrated into culture. Together with his father he will rule over nature and woman, both of whom contain a similar irrational power. In contrast to the boy, the girl, who has no penis to lose, separates slowly from her first love object, mother. As a result, the girl's integration into culture is incomplete. She exists at the periphery or margin of culture as the one who does not rule but is ruled, largely because ... she fears her own power.” (Tong 1989, 5)
Psychoanalytic theory, however, is highly speculative, and not disprovable enough to rate (in my view, anyway) as a truly "scientific" theory. In addition, I find aspects of the above picture somewhat implausible -- particularly the notion that females are less integrated into culture than males. Females mature (socially, as well as sexually) earlier than males, and females typically show a more complete internalisation of cultural norms – i.e., they are "better behaved" – than males. Society really reflects female values more than male values and directs male behaviours toward supporting and protecting females. The idea that nature resembles women more than men is also highly debatable.
Radical Feminism
Radical Feminists tend to reject the State itself, not to mention many institutions within it, as a patriarchal framework. They believe it is neither a neutral institution which mediates between forces – the result of a flexible consensus – nor a forum within whose constraints women can achieve their political goals (as Liberal Feminists see it).
Radical Feminism is a product of the Second Wave and took over where previous factions left off. Fewer of its ideas have been implemented than is the case with Individualist Feminism or Socialist Feminism, however:
“(I)t is radical feminism which has been most theoretically innovative, rejecting traditional definitions of both politics and theory, while condemning all previous political theory as patriarchal. Unlike the Marxist approach, it has not struggled to incorporate women into a preexisting political framework, but instead attempts to shift our whole perception of society, to restructure it in terms of a radically new set of woman-centred meanings. Its aim has been to recast political identities; to reclaim language and culture from their masculine forms; to relocate significant political power; to reassess human nature and to challenge traditional values. (Coole, D. H., 1988: Women in Political Theory, p. 235)”
The main difference between Radical Feminism and other types of Feminism is that the former denies any Psychological differences between the sexes. Upbringing and education are claimed to be the causes of different male and female behaviour patterns, according to this view. And the function of differential upbringing and education for men and women is supposed to be to support the institution of male dominance (patriarchy). Radical Feminists demand the abolition of all sexually differentiated roles and the creation of an androgynous society. Needless to say, this is a philosophy created by lesbians to suit Lesbians.
“Some radical feminists ... pursue the logic of their analysis to a point where a united women's movement of the broad left becomes difficult to realize. In their view, women's physiological capacities for reproduction are analogous to the material production of the working class in traditional Marxism. Women, then, constitute a class in the same way that workers do. Just as the working class must become a class for itself by taking control of production, so, too, must women take control of their reproduction in order to become free. An absolute extension of the class analogy must lead to the idea of the destruction of the previously dominant class – men; or, at least, separation from it. Radicals demand that lesbianism be considered not merely a matter of freedom of choice but as essential political practice for feminists.” (Meehan, Elizabeth (1990): British Feminism from the 1960s to the 1980s. pp. 191-2)
One of the best-known Feminist works on sexuality is Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1971). This book is one of the classics of Radical Feminism. It is radical in the sense that it claims that people such as Betty Friedan did not go far enough. Setting up a female Establishment in opposition to the male Establishment, as Friedan suggested, did not help most women, according to Greer.
Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970) comes under the category of Socialist Feminism as well as Radical Feminism. This book is unusually intelligent, clear, lucid, and thorough in its approach, by Feminist standards. This does not mean that what it claims is true or undistorted. She eventually ended up in a psychiatric institution, and I don't find this very surprising.
Shulamith Firestone is one influential Feminist writer who used Marxism as a starting-point. She begins by citing the 19th Century German Communist theorist Engels with approval, though she thinks he did not go far enough:
Engels did observe that the original division of labor was between man and woman for the purposes of child-breeding; that within the family the husband was the owner, the wife the means of production, the children the labor; and that reproduction of the human species was an important economic system distinct from the means of production. (Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 1971, New York: Bantam, pp. 4-5)
Even if we take a narrow, purely physical view of reproduction, Engels' analysis is very distorted. The male, along with the female, is part of the means of sexual production. And many acts of sexual intercourse are usually required for each fertilisation. Moreover, the male usually expends much more energy in these acts of coitus than does the female. If there is foreplay, the man is typically much more energetic in this phase of intercourse as well as in the actual coitus.
Additionally, the ultimate "owner" of the children varies greatly from culture to culture, and time to time. The ultimate test, I would say, is who gets custody of the children in cases of separation or divorce. In the western world, this is almost always the mother. Thus, in the contemporary western world, at least, women are the real "owners" of the "product." In about ninety percent of cases, according to the consensus of fathers' rights activists on the Internet, mothers gets sole custody of their children after a divorce or separation. This bias against fathers often takes the form of the "Natural Caretaker Doctrine" – the belief that the person who has the most day-to-day contact with children is the person best suited to have custody after separation or divorce.
It is a well documented fact that fathers have a very difficult time obtaining custody due to the pervasive anti-father prejudice that still exists in many parts of the Family Court system. (www.deltabravo.net/custody/index.shtml).
What's more, reproduction properly includes all the years devoted to rearing (feeding, housing, educating, etc.) the children. Typically, as the primary breadwinner, fathers expend a substantial proportion of their time and income for that purpose. If, as argued above, it is the mother who is the real "owner" of the children, then it is really the mother who is exploiting the father in this particular economic system. When you get right down to it, men are an oppressed minority in western society today. They are a genuine minority, unlike women, who are a privileged majority dressed up by Feminists as an oppressed minority.
Firestone thought that where Radical Feminism and human biology disagreed, it had to be human biology that gave way! In other words, she was lucid enough to see some conflicts between Radical Feminist theory and reality, but like so many other ideologues tilting at windmills, she didn't let that stop her. More recent Feminists have solved such problems by lying about the facts and bullying entire societies into believing arrant nonsense (as we have seen in previous chapters). When entire societies believe lies, this is called "ideology," "superstition" or "religion".
Firestone bases her own analysis on the following, in part uncontroversial, assertions to do with what she calls the "biological family":
1.That women throughout history before the advent of birth control were at the continual mercy of their biology – menstruation, menopause, and 'female ills', constant painful childbirth, wet nursing and care of infants, all of which made them dependent on males ... for physical survival.
2.That human infants take an even longer time to grow up than animals, and thus are helpless and, for some short period at least, dependent on adults for physical survival.
3.That a basic mother/child interdependency has existed in some form in every society, past or present, and thus has shaped the psychology of every mature female and every infant.
4.That the natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division of labour at the origins of class, as well as furnishing the paradigm of caste (discrimination based on biological characteristics) (ibid, 8-9).
The terms "at the origins of" and "paradigm" seem to imply the sexual division of labour was a precondition for the emergence of the phenomena of class and caste. Firestone makes this claim explicit (though she still provides no evidence for it) in her definition of historical materialism:
Modern technology makes it feasible, she thinks, to overthrow the biological basis of the present sexual power-structure. This is where her psychosexual utopia comes in. She argues that women should take control of "the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of childbearing and child rearing." More radically, in her utopia there would be no such thing as family or community, but only disconnected individuals toiling for the moment:
“(G)enital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality -- Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' – would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either.... the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general.... The division of labor would be ended by the elimination of labor altogether (cybernation).” (op. cit.)
One of the most influential Feminist works in recent times has been Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Her central thesis is that one can characterise the relationship between the sexes in political terms. This insight apparently derives originally from Wilhelm Reich. It would be fairer to be more balanced than the Feminists are about the actual political relationships that exist between the sexes. Millett starts from the following assumptions:
a) the United States (and similar countries) are "patriarchies";
b) this is evident from the fact that politicians are mainly males;
c) this rule by men over women applies to all components of society, including the family.
She doesn't makes these claims very clearly or explicitly, but it is evident she believes them. And Feminism has become established to such an extent that these tenets are popularly regarded as virtually self-evident throughout the western world.
Two concepts that typify Radical Feminism are the theoretical maxim "the personal is political" and its practical corollary, "consciousness-raising".
“Within the consciousness-raising group each person's experience, each woman's life-story was a matter of interest. We understood that through listening to an individual's experience we could draw a much richer picture of how society was put together. Sexual politics provided an understanding of how society works both at an ideological level and at a material level and deepened the understanding the left had of human experience. The Women's Liberation Movement built an analysis of society founded on the nuts and bolts of individual life experience. It enlarged and challenged previous understanding of the social, economic and political basis of society.” (Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach: Outside In. Inside Out. Women's Psychology: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Account, Harmondsworth:Penguin,1982,12)
I would liken this process to the gathering of data to prove a scientific hypothesis, with the major difference that consciousness-raising has a built-in bias which can be easily demonstrated by asking the (rhetorical, of course) question, "How many consciousness-raising groups did the Feminists hold to enable men to discuss how they had been oppressed by women in their lives?" In other words, "consciousness-raising" is a near-synonym to "brainwashing," "instruction" or "conversion." Radical Feminist theory (sexual politics, as conceived of by Feminists) provided the framework for women to reinterpret their lives much as religions do for converts.
Postmodern Feminism / French Feminism
A cynic might characterise Postmodern Feminism as a stage or type of Feminism that makes a virtue of the fact that contemporary Feminism is splintered and apparently directionless:
Postmodern feminists worry that because feminism purports to be an explanatory theory, it ... is in danger of trying to provide the explanation for why woman is oppressed, or the ten steps all women must take in order to achieve true liberation. (Tong 1989, 217)
Feminism is unable to do these things. Indeed, no Feminist has objectively demonstrated that women are (more) oppressed (than men) and, therefore need to be "liberated." Such an objective demonstration is a precondition for the explanatory theory they lack. The splintered nature of Postmodern Feminism is the inevitable result of the fact that none of the various factions of Feminism have been able to construct an explanatory theory. In turn, these schisms have created an environment in which the so-called "backlash" has been able to emerge.
Women's Studies
"Women's Studies" is a curious academic subject. Partly because it is new, but mostly because it has more in common with theological or ideological training than with other academic disciplines in (say) the Social Sciences.
“Women's studies, like feminism itself, presents two approaches to the question of inequality. One approach, using anthropological, biological, historical and psychological evidence, argues that women are essentially no different from men, and that therefore in a differently structured society it would be possible for divisions based upon sex or gender differences to disappear, leaving us with an equal society. The other approach argues that women are essentially different from men and that inequality results in an undervaluing of female activities and characteristics.... Women's studies can thus be seen to be linked to two concepts of equality, which we may call 'plain equal' or 'equal but different'.” (Ruth, Issues in Feminism: A First Course in Women's Studies, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980, p. 5)
It is a characteristic of the ideology of a social movement that it tries to "marry" contradictions in an attempt to maximise the political clout of the movement. Purely academic disciplines, on the other hand, tend to focus on contradictions in an attempt to reach a conclusion as to which theory is correct.
Because Women's Studies is not really an academic subject, however, we cannot expect it to objectively examine such questions as whether men are oppressed in society, whether they are oppressed by women, and whether they are oppressed more than women. Women's Studies takes the oppression of women (by men or by "Society") as a self-evident truth which no right-thinking person would even question. Even Women's Studies lecturers admit this bias toward political action rather than rigorous scholarship:
(T)he ideas, methods, curricula, and theories of Women's Studies exhibit great diversity and resist easy definition. Those now working in Women's Studies have called it variously a process, a field of inquiry, a critical perspective, a center for social action, and/or the academic arm of the women's movement. It is all of these and more. (ibid, p. 3).
Ruth is aware of the charge that Women's Studies is biased. She responds by claiming male bias (which she calls "Masculine-ism," "Masculism" or "Androcentrism") has always been a feature of Society. This may well be so, but proving many male academics have been biased does not prove Women's Studies is not biased, nor does it justify Women's Studies being biased, if it is.
Masculists/Men's Rights activists are not responsible for what male bias has existed and does exist. We do not need to defend male bias, where it exists. If Feminists reveal male bias, that is not a bad thing. However, Feminists do more than just reveal male bias, they also create female bias. One of the main aims of this book is to reveal cases of female bias. Here are some of the examples covered in this book:
1. the definition of political power and identifying who has it;
2. attitudes toward male as against female circumcision;
3. evaluating male and female courtship roles in the context of rape legislation;
4. the dissemination and interpretation of the facts of domestic violence;
5. the dissemination of information on various types of child abuse;
6. the evaluation of the legal system's treatment of men and women;
7. the evaluation of employment issues involving men and women;
8. the compilation and dissemination of UN and other statistics on gender equity;
9. the choice of issues where gender equity is demanded;
10. the definition of gender equity.
