And today? Nearly three decades of revolution later, it seems as though the whole world is kvetching. Despite victories that include two Supreme Court justices and the first Disney heroine in history who’d rather read than get married, complaints about the women’s movement are piling up. According to a spate of newbooks, the problem with the movement is that it’s all about lesbians. Or abortion. Or political correctness. Or anything, runs the criticism, except ordinary women struggling with jobs and families.
No question about it, some of these complaints have merit. The excesses of feminist correctness are detailed with relish by Christina Hoff Sommers in Who Stole Feminism? (320 pages. Simon & Schuster. $23), likely to be the most talked-about manifesto since Susan Faludi’s “Backlash.” Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., collected much of her evidence at feminist conferences, traditionally places where the worst inanities of the movement swarm like gnats. She describes conferences breaking up into grievance groups-Jewish women, Asian-American women, fat women, old women-as well as the inevitable subgroups (“The Jewish women discovered they were deeply divided: some accepted being Jewish; others were seeking to recover from it”). Then there were the campfire-type songs, the healing rituals, the group hugs and the victim testimonials.
But on the substantive issues driving feminism today, Sommers is dead serious. She sees what she calls gender feminism in the ascendancy, a movement devoted to nurturing femaleness in various treacly ways, at the expense of “equity feminism,” dedicated to achieving equal rights. Such phony issues as date rape and self-esteem preoccupy gender feminists, according to Sommers; they’re also busy transforming academia. “While male students are off studying … engineering and biology, women in feminist classrooms are sitting around being ‘safe’ and ‘honoring’ feelings,” she writes.
There is enough truth in Sommers’s accusations to make them important, but not enough to make them completely convincing. Her analysis of rape statistics, for instance, indicates that they may indeed be inflated; but her definition of rape -a gender-blind crime of violence, nothing misogynistic about it - is ludicrous. And while she skillfully attacks two widely publicized studies purporting to show that girls lack self-esteem and get less attention from teachers than boys do, it’s hard to go along with her conclusion that girls are doing just fine. Teen-pregnancy rates, eating disorders and disappointing scores on standardized tests tell another story.
Sherrye Henry also finds the cur-rent movement beset by radicals out of touch with ordinary women, in The Deep Divide (452 pages. Macmillan. S25). Henry, a longtime radio-talk-show host in New York, ran for the state senate in 1990 and lost. The defeat inspired her to investigate a compelling (certainly to her) question: why don’t women support feminist candidates? (In 1992 several feminists were elected to Congress, but Henry notes that dozens more lost.) She turned up some provocative data.
Through polling and focus groups, Henry learned that many women just don’t get it. Even though they suffer the indignities and injustices that feminists have been talking about for eons, women haven’t made the connection. A married secretary with three children, back at the office after a too short maternity leave, forced to do extra work because so many people in the company have been laid off, whose husband “helps” but doesn’t take charge of any housework, tells a focus group she’s worn to a frazzle. “It never occurs to her,” writes Henry, “that what she needs includes flextime or job-sharing … guaranteed family leave … and more consistent help from her husband, all of which are tenets of feminism.”
Henry suggests that the women’s movement essentially repackage itself as a movement for women, children and families, shoving most other issues into the back-ground. “Lesbian rights, although basic in a democracy … will never energize the majority,” she writes. She calls for new feminist leaders, nicely dressed, please (“Those who appear too ‘mannish’ will not gain as much support for their causes”), who will politely distance themselves from messier sorts working on abortion rights, wife-battering and other icky problems. It’s unclear why she is so certain that designer suits and wholesome issues will win the day for women candidates, unless she really believes that those who lost in 1992 wore hip-waders on the campaign trail and ran on a platform of’ same-sex marriage rights.
But give Henry credit: she knows the difference between the media-generated monsters of “women’s lib” and the real women’s movement. Not so Anne Taylor Fleming, who made her name writing about feminism for numerous publications (including NEWSWEEK) beginning in the ’70s. Fleming describes herself in Motherhood Deferred (256 pages. Putnam. $23.95) as part of a “sacrificial generation,” young feminists who put off pregnancy for work, waiting so long that they lost the chance. Infertility is her punishment, writes Fleming, for falling under the spell of “those angry, childless and unmarried ideologues of yore.” Oddly, she had no trouble fending off the feminist rhetoric against men and marriage; she got married at 22. But then the “anti-motherhood bandwagon” rattled by and she leapt on board. Twelve years later she began trying to conceive, had no luck and finally entered the cold domain of high-tech baby-making. She had lots of company: more women “with the Scarlet ‘I’ writ, if not across our foreheads, certainly across our hearts… modern-day Hester Prynnes… who had … put work ahead of motherhood.”
This is sticky stuff It badly misrepresents the women’s movement, which did a lot more agitating for day care than issuing decrees against childbearing. True, the powerful focus on work sent pregnancy to a remote file drawer labeled SOME OTHER TIME. But Fleming barely admits the possibility that her infertility might have roots someplace other than her politics. As for her politics, Fleming’s own writing shows her to have been anything but a hapless zombie of the women’s movement. Her first article, published in 1974, urged women not to get ahead by thinking like men but to bold on to their “specialness,” their “female ethnicity.” Another article was a defense of flirting, which Fleming herself admits had a touch of backlash about it.
When Fleming turns to the infertility business she knows so well, the book picks up considerably. Her account of baby-making in labs, the hope followed by the disappointment followed by a fresh round of hope, is genuinely gripping-and it captures the sadness of her plight.
After the mudslinging in these books, what a pleasure it is to find Susan Douglas and Gloria Steinem, a couple of unrepentant, unreformed feminists who liked the women’s movement just fine and still do. Douglas’s engagingly written “Where the Girls Are” provides a first-rate analysis of the music, movies and TV imagery that helped shape female psyches beginning in the ’50s. Dissecting TV coverage of the early years of the movement, she also sheds light on the way “feminism” turned into a dirty word. Organizers of the first major event of modern feminism, the Aug. 26,1970, Women’s Strike for Equality, issued three demands - “which you can read with a wistful sigh,” writes Douglas, “since none of them has been achieved: equal opportunity for women in employment and education, twenty-four-hour child-care centers and abortion on demand.” TV coverage that day and thereafter conceded the merits of equal pay, but much of the liveliest air time showed feminists as loonies. Meanwhile, a few truly radical feminists also had their moment on camera. Shulamit Firestone, for instance. told CBS News that “pregnancy is barbaric,” and Ti-Grace Atkinson likened marriage to cancer. That kind of TV has legs. Today, when ordinary women like those in Henry’s book hear about feminism, they automatically think man-hating. Nobody exactly rushes to bring up day care.
But a lot of ordinary women admire Gloria Steinem, radical though she seems-they like her looks and they buy her books. Her new collection of essays, Moving Beyond Words (296 pages. Simon & Schuster. $23), has its strengths-there’s a fascinating piece about how Ms. Magazine tried to lure traditional women’s magazine advertising (eye makeup) without running the traditional stories supporting it (new ideas for eye makeup). But more often Steinem seems to claim the role of rebel without living it. There is little new thinking here.
OK, let the record show that pregnancy is not barbaric and marriage is not cancer. hut one reason it’s taken so long to win the mainstream demands of 1970 may be that the radical edge of the movement has dwindled into the kind of trivial self-absorption excoriated by Sommers, and demonstrated in Steinem’s last book, “Revolution from Within.” Nobody’s pushing back the herders anymore. opening up space for change. The American women’s movement has always had an avant-garde: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suffrage leader whom Sommers calls the very model of’ equity feminism, mortified her colleagues in the mid-19th century by demanding divorce rights and terming marriage “legalized prostitution.”
In an essay on turning 60, Steinem writes: “I’m looking forward to trading moderation for excess” which is good news. And there’s a precedent. In 1895 Stanton finally published a book she had been planning for many years: a roaring attack on the Bible for its misogyny. The book was a best seller, the horrified suffrage association voted to censure her and to Stanton’s pleasure, “the clergy jump round … like parched peas on a hot shovel.” She was 80. Now that’s a feminist.
