Feminism (15 page)

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11. Perhaps the most influential of all 20th-century Western feminists,
Simone de Beauvoir remains important still, for her autobiographies
and novels as well as for her great piece of feminist theory,
The Second

Sex
.

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But Beauvoir’s four autobiographical volumes –
Memoirs of a
Dutiful Daughter
,
The Prime of Life
,
The Force of Circumstance
, and
All Said and Done
– as well as the 1964 book about her mother, ironically entitled
A Very Easy Death
, take us on a uniquely detailed, remarkably frank, and often very moving journey through her own experiences. She never suggests that she is a model for others; but she evokes her own life as a successful example of how one girl escaped the feminine role of ‘object, Other’. She is almost apologetic about concentrating on women’s issues when ‘some of us have never had to sense in our femininity an inconvenience or an obstacle’. But she admitted that a woman who takes up the pen inevitably provides

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a stick to be beaten with . . . if you are a young woman they indulge
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you with an amused wink. If you are old, they bow to you
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respectfully. But lose that bloom of youth and dare to speak before
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acquiring the respectable patina of age: the whole pack is at your heels.

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And her autobiographies, as well as her novels, are all the more
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moving, and certainly speak more directly to women readers, because, perhaps against Beauvoir’s conscious intentions, they evoke her own – inevitable – frustrations and uncertainties,
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whether about Jean-Paul Sartre’s infidelities during their long relationship, about her own affairs with the American writer Nelson Algren and with Claude Lanzmann, or about her own childlessness.

But to the end, Beauvoir remained open to new experiences. In 1955, after she and Sartre visited China, she wrote
The Long March
, acknowledging that it had ‘upset my whole idea of our planet’, as she came to understand ‘that our Western comfort [is] merely a limited privilege’. Her last major theoretical work,
Old Age
(1970), in which she struggles to maintain her cool rationality in the face of the ultimate, the inevitable, defeat, is perhaps her most moving book.

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Betty Friedan’s 1963 book
The Feminine Mystique
exploded the myth of the happy housewife in the affluent, white, American suburbs; ‘the problem that has no name’, she wrote, ‘burst like a boil through the image of the happy American Mystique’. The idea for the book began with a magazine article she wrote after she had attended a class reunion, and asked other women there, ‘what do you wish you had done differently?’ Their answers alerted her to a vague but pervasive discontent. She has been criticized, correctly, for being narrowly middle class; for a simplistic argument that urges suburban women to plan their lives ahead so that they can move from family duties to work outside the home, while ignoring the numbers of less fortunate women already desperately juggling housework with outside jobs, usually poorly paid. For poorer Americans, the black feminist bell hooks argued: liberation means the freedom of a mother finally to quit her job – to live the life of a capitalist stay at home, as it were . . . To be able to work and to have to work are two very different matters.

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But Friedan’s book was a well-researched, sharply written, even passionate indictment of the fact that
even
affluent middle-class women lead restricted lives, and too often lapse into a depressed acceptance of that restriction. She insisted that each woman must at least
ask
what she truly wants. Then she may indeed realize that ‘neither her husband nor her children nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her a self ’.

Friedan’s own background had been in radical politics, and her earlier writings, particularly, display a keen awareness of social inequalities. Moreover, with a group of other women, some from the Union of the Automobile Workers, she went on to become one of the founder members of NOW, the National Organization of Women, which set out ‘to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society, now, assuming all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men’.

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12. Betty Friedan in New York, 1970.

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Friedan, like some of the older women in the movement, was concerned that the new feminist rhetoric ‘rigidified in reaction against the past, harping on the same old problems in the same old way’, instead of moving forward. In
The Second Stage
(1981) she admits both how much has changed for women – and how little.

Despite arduous and prolonged attempts to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed, some states still reject it. Perhaps inevitably, there was a widening gap between Friedan and the new generation of feminists, though it is hardly fair to accuse her of going along with a ‘backlash’. She approvingly quotes a Toronto journalist: I don’t want to be stuck today with a feminist label anymore than I would want to be known as a ‘dumb blonde’ in the fifties. The libber label limits and short-changes those who are tagged with it. And the irony is that it emerged from a philosophy that set out to destroy the notion of female tagging.

Her criticism may be unfair, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand.

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Within Western feminism – or Women’s Liberation as it soon came to be called – there was initially, at least, great variety, and an energy that sprang in part from anger at having been excluded in existing leftist groups, in part from fruitful disagreements within the emerging movement itself. Many younger women – in the student movement, amongst anti-Vietnam protesters and New Left activists – had felt they were being sidelined by their male comrades. Women among the American Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) announced in 1965 that, having learned ‘to think radically about the personal worth and abilities of people whose role in society had gone unchallenged before’, a lot of women in the movement ‘have begun trying to apply those lessons to their relations with men’. Two years later, SDS women insisted that their

‘brothers . . . recognize that they must deal with their own problems of male chauvinism’. Some women issued a news-sheet called ‘Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement’, along with a manifesto from New Left activists who found themselves sidelined by male 104

comrades, and who were infuriated by Stokely Carmichael’s infamous remark that ‘the place of women in the movement is prone’.

bell hooks, in her
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre
(1984), was sharply critical of the whole movement, arguing that the women ‘who are most victimized by sexist oppression . . . who are powerless to change their condition in life’ have never been allowed to speak out for themselves. Current feminism, she insists, is racist, and has left many women bitterly disillusioned. Movement women have consistently ignored the deeply intertwined issues of race and class; the emphasis on the common ‘oppression’ of women has in fact ignored terribly real inequalities within American society.

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White women behaved as if the movement belonged to them, hooks
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insists; they ignored the fact that women are divided by all kinds of
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prejudice, ‘by sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege’. hooks recalls
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her own experience in feminist groups: ‘I found that white women adopted a condescending attitude towards me and other non white participants.’ Black feminists rightly argue that ‘every problem
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raised by white feminists has a disproportionately heavy impact
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on blacks’.

In America, expressions of feminism ranged from Gloria
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Steinem’s accessible and glossy
Ms
magazine, first published in 1970, to the Sisterhood of Black Single Mothers. In her book
Sexual Politics
(1970), Kate Millett set out to analyse ‘patriarchy as a
political
institution’. Politics, she insists, refers to all ‘power structured relationships’, and the one between the sexes is a

‘relationship of dominance and subordinance’ which has been largely unexamined. Women are simultaneously idolized and patronized, she argued, backing up her thesis with a scathing analysis of the patriarchal attitudes of writers from different periods and cultures: Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet. She saw little immediate hope for women; ‘it may be that we shall . . . be able to retire sex from the harsh realities of politics’, she concluded, ‘but not until we 105

have created a world we can bear out of the desert we inhabit’.

Other political statements included the American Shulamith Firestone’s
The Dialectic of Sex
(1970), which argued that the basic division, the most profound oppression, in society was not class but sex; she hoped for a true ‘feminist revolution’, but argued that revolution would demand

an analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism was for the economic revolution. More comprehensive, for we are dealing with a larger problem, with an oppression that goes back beyond recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.

In England, the Australian-born Germaine Greer’s lively and provocative
The Female Eunuch
(1970) challenged the ‘sense of inferiority or natural dependence’ which women have too often accepted placidly, passively, allowing it to distort and impoverish their lives. There are chapters on the middle-class myth of love and
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marriage; on why being ‘an object of male fantasy’ actually
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desexualizes women, and on the way ‘cooking, clothes, beauty and housekeeping’ can become compulsive, anxiety-producing activities.

Sheila Rowbotham’s
Liberation and the New Politics
(1970) and Juliet Mitchell’s
Woman’s Estate
(1971) were both written in response to the emerging Women’s Liberation movement in England. Though that movement, Mitchell argued, was international ‘in its identification and shared goals’, and was for the most part ‘professedly, if variously, revolutionary’. Her book cites, briefly, women’s movements in Europe (Holland, Sweden, and France) and in the United States. Everywhere, she argues, women are ‘the most fundamentally oppressed people and hence potentially the most revolutionary’, and she goes on to examine four areas of their lives that must be transformed: production, reproduction, sexuality, and the socialization of children.

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Lesbian feminism

In the late 1960s, many lesbians felt themselves sidelined
both in the women’s movement and in the emerging gay
liberation groups. Betty Friedan, president of NOW, notoriously described women advocating lesbian issues as a ‘laven-der menace’. Her denigration was angrily rejected in a brief
manifesto called
The Woman-Identified Woman
. In 1973, the
well-known American journalist Jill Johnston published

Lesbian Nation
:
The Feminist Solution
, which included a
witty satire on heterosexual romance: ‘it begins when you
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sink into his arms, and ends with your arms in his sink’.

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Some lesbians insisted that they were central to women’s
liberation because their very existence threatens male
supremacy at its most vulnerable point. Lesbianism was
sometimes suggested as the most, or even the only, politically
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correct choice for a woman. Rita Mae Brown argued that the
difference between heterosexual and lesbian women was ‘the
difference between reform and revolution’. In
No Turning

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Back: Lesbian and Gay Liberation of the ’80s
, the male
and female writers attacked both the common assumption
that every household should be heterosexual, as well as
the widespread ‘belief in the inherent inferiority of the
dominant-male/passive-female role pattern’.

These writings sprang from, and encouraged, the new but rapidly growing women’s movement, in various European countries including England, but also, and perhaps crucially, in America.

Women within the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Movement, and Students for a Democratic Society complained that, too often, they were treated as ‘typists, tea-makers and sexual objects’.

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Protests at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City in November 1968 and in 1969, when feminists mockingly crowned a sheep, gave the emerging movement high visibility. Protesters argued that the beauty contest was a symbol of the way women in general are objectified, diminished, and judged primarily on appearance. ‘Every day in a woman’s life is a walking Miss World Contest’, one feminist remarked wearily.