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| ISBN-13: | 9780822375678 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/27/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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The Feminism of Uncertainty
A Gender Diary
By Ann Snitow
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7567-8
CHAPTER 1
A GENDER DIARY
In the early days of this wave of the women's movement, I sat in a weekly consciousness-raising group with my friend A. We compared notes recently: What did you think was happening? How did you think our own lives were going to change? A. said she had felt, "Now I can be a woman; it's no longer so humiliating. I can stop fantasizing that secretly I am a man, as I used to, before I had children. Now I can value what was once my shame." Her answer amazed me. Sitting in the same meetings during those years, my thoughts were roughly the reverse: "Now I don't have to be a woman anymore. I need never become a mother. Being a woman has always been humiliating, but I used to assume there was no exit. Now the very idea 'woman' is up for grabs. 'Woman' is my slave name; feminism will give me freedom to seek some other identity altogether."
On its face this clash of theoretical and practical positions may seem absurd, but it is my goal to explore such contradictions, to show why they are not absurd at all. Feminism is inevitably a mixed form, requiring in its very nature such inconsistencies. In what follows I try to show first, that a common divide keeps forming in both feminist thought and action between the need to build the identity "woman" and give it solid political meaning and the need to tear down the very category "woman" and dismantle its all-too-solid history. Feminists often split along the lines of some version of this argument, and that splitting is my subject. Second, I argue that though a settled compromise between these positions is currently impossible, and though a constant choosing of sides is tactically unavoidable, feminists — and indeed most women — live in a complex relationship to this central feminist divide. From moment to moment we perform subtle psychological and social negotiations about just how gendered we choose to be.
This tension — between needing to act as women and needing an identity not overdetermined by our gender — is as old as Western feminism. It is at the core of what feminism is. The divide runs, twisting and turning, right through movement history. The problem of identity it poses was barely conceivable before the eighteenth century, when almost everyone saw women as a separate species. Since then absolute definitions of gender difference have fundamentally eroded, and the idea "woman" has become a question rather than a given.
In the current wave of the movement, the divide is more urgent and central a part of feminism than ever before. On the one hand, many women moved by feminism are engaged by its promise of solidarity, the poetry of a retrieved worth. It feels glorious to "reclaim an identity they taught [us] to despise." (The line is Michelle Cliff's.) Movement passion rescues women-only groups from contempt; female intimacy acquires new meanings and becomes more threatening to the male exclusiveness so long considered "the world."
On the other hand, other feminists, often equally stirred by solidarity, rebel against having to be "women" at all. They argue that whenever we uncritically accept the monolith "woman," we run the risk of merely relocating ourselves inside the old closed ring of an unchanging feminine nature. But is there any such reliable nature? These feminists question the eternal sisterhood. It may be a pleasure to be "we," and it may be strategically imperative to struggle as "we," but who, they ask, are "we"?
This diary was begun to sort out my own thoughts about the divide. I have asked myself, is the image of a divide too rigid, will it only help to build higher the very boundaries I seek to wear down? Yet I keep stumbling on this figure in my descriptions of daily movement life. Perhaps the problem is my own. But others certainly have shared the experience of "division." Maybe the image works best as a place to start, not as a conclusion. A recurring difference inside feminism seems to lie deep, but it is also mobile, changing in emphasis, not (I'm happy to say) very orderly.
Take as an example my checkered entries about the women's peace movement. A number of feminists, myself included, felt uneasy about the new wave of women-only peace groups of the early 1980s. As feminist peace activist Ynestra King characterized the new spirit: "A feminist peace sensibility is forming; it includes new women's culture and traditional women's culture." Some saw such a fusion between traditional female solidarity and new women's forms of protest as particularly powerful. Others felt that the two were at cross-purposes. Might blurring them actually lead to a watering down of feminism? The idea that women are by definition more nurturant, life giving, and less belligerent than men is very old; the idea that such gender distinctions are social, hence subject to change, is much more recent, fragile, counterintuitive, and contested. Can the old idea of female specialness and the newer idea of a female outlook forged in social oppression join in a movement? And just how?
A study group met for a time in 1983 to talk about women's peace politics. I was the irritating one in our group, always anxious about the nature of our project. I was the one who always nagged, "Why a women's peace movement?"
I argued with a patient Amy Swerdlow that women asking men to protect the children (as Women Strike for Peace asked Congress in 1961) was a repetition of an old, impotent, suppliant's gesture. Men had waged wars in the name of just such protection. And besides, did we want a world where only women worried about the children? "So what's your solution?" the good-tempered group wanted to know. "Should women stop worrying about the children? Who trusts men to fill the gap?" Amy described how the loving women, going off to Washington to protest against nuclear testing, filled their suburban freezers with dinners so their families would miss them less.
I tried to explain the source of my resistance to the motherly rhetoric of the women's peace movement. During the 1960s, some of us had angrily offered to poison men's private peace, abort men's children. We proposed a bad girl's exchange: We'd give up protection for freedom, give up the approval we got for nurturance in exchange for the energy we'd get from open anger.
Of course, I knew what the group would ask me next, and rightly, too: "Whose freedom? Which rage? Isn't abandoning men's project of war rage enough? And is women's powerlessness really mother's fault?" Although I reminded the group that the new wave of feminists never blamed motherhood as much as the media claimed, we did run from it, like the young who scrawled the slogan on Paris walls in 1968: "Cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derriére toi." (Run, comrade, the past is just behind you.)
This scene is caricature, but it begins to get at the mood of our group. Fractious, I was always asking the others if they didn't agree that peace is assumed to be a women's issue for all the wrong reasons. I argued that if there is to be no more "women-only" when it comes to emotional generosity or trips to the laundry, why "women-only" in the peace movement? Maybe the most radical thing we could do would be to refuse the ancient women-peace connection? The army is a dense locale of male symbols, actions, and forms of association, so let men sit in the drizzle with us at the gates of military installations. Even if theorists emphasize the contingent and the historical and say that peace is an issue that affects women differently from men because of our different social position, we are trapped again in an inevitably oversimplified idea of "women." Are all women affected the same way by war? Or is class or age or race or nationality as important a variable? What do we gain, I asked the group, when we name the way we suffer from war as a specifically women's suffering? And so it went.
Until one day Ynestra King tactfully suggested that perhaps I was seeking a mixed group to do my peace activism. (Mixed is a code word for men and women working together.) I was horrified. We were laughing, I'm pleased to recall, as I confessed myself reluctant to do political work in mixed groups. The clichés about women in the male Left making the coffee and doing the xeroxing were all literally true in my case. (I blame myself as well; often I chose those tasks, afraid of others.) Only by working with women had I managed to develop an intense and active relationship to politics at all. Not only had my political identity been forged in the women-only mold, but the rich networks I had formed inside feminism were the daily source of continued activism. My experience of the women-only peace camp at Greenham Common, England was to become a source of continued political energy and inspiration. Women-only (the abstraction) was full of problems; women-only (the political reality in my life) was full of fascination, social pleasure, debates about meaning in the midst of actions taken, even sometimes, victories won.
The political meaning of these sides changes, as does the place they hold in each woman's life. But no matter where each feminist finds herself in the argument about the meaning of women-only, all agree that in practical political work, separate women's groups are necessary. Whatever the issue, feminists have gained a great deal by saying, "We are 'women,' and this is what 'women' want." This belief in some ground of shared experience is the social basis from which any sustained political struggle must come.
Even feminists like myself, anxious about any restatement of a female ideal — of peacefulness or nurturance or light — are constantly forced in practice to consider what activists lose if we choose to say peace is not a women's issue. We keep rediscovering the necessity to speak specifically as women when we speak of peace because the female citizen has almost no representation in the places where decisions about war and peace are made — the Congress, the corporation, the army.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter fired former congresswoman Bella Abzug from her special position as co-chair of his National Advisory Commission for Women because the women on the commission insisted on using that platform to talk about war and the economy. These, said the President, were not women's issues; women's role was to support the President. Carter was saying in effect that women have no place in general social debate, that women, as we learned from the subsequent presidential campaign, are a "special interest group."
What a conundrum for feminists: Because women have little general representation in Congress, our demand to be citizens — gender unspecified — can be made only through gender solidarity; but when we declare ourselves separate, succeed, for example, in getting our own government commission, the President turns around and tries to make that power base into a ghetto where only certain stereotypically female issues can be named. So, however separate we may choose to be, our "separate" has to be different from his "separate," a distinction it's hard to keep clear in our own and other minds, but one we must keep trying to make.
This case may seem beside the point to radicals who never vested any hope in the federal government in the first place. But the firing of Bella Abzug was a perfect public embodiment of the puzzle of women's situation. The idea that "women" can speak about war is itself the unsettled question, requiring constant public tests. It is no coincidence that Bella Abzug was one of the organizers of Women Strike for Peace in 1961. She must have observed the strengths and weaknesses in the public image of mothers for peace; then, on the coattails of feminism, she tried to be an insider, a congresswoman presumably empowered to speak — as a woman, or for women, or for herself — on any public topic. People with social memory were able to witness the problem that arises for the public woman, no matter what her stance. Feminism is potentially radical in almost all its guises precisely because it interprets this injustice, makes the Abzug impasse visible. Once visible, it begins to feel intolerable.
By traveling along the twisted track of this argument, I have made what I think is a representative journey, what feminist historians such as Joan Kelly and Denise Riley have called an "oscillation," which is typical of both feminist theory and practice. Such oscillations are inevitable for the foreseeable future. In a cruel irony that is one mark of women's oppression, when women speak as women they run a special risk of not being heard because the female voice is by our culture's definition that-voice-you-can-ignore. But the alternative is to pretend that public men speak for women or that women who speak inside male-female forums are heard and heeded as much as similarly placed men. Few women feel satisfied that this neutral (almost always male) public voice reflects the particulars of women's experience, however varied and indeterminate that experience may be.
Caught between not being heard because we are different and not being heard because we are invisible, feminists face a necessary strategic leap of nerve every time we shape a political action. We weigh the kinds of powerlessness women habitually face; we choose our strategy — as women, as citizens — always sacrificing some part of what we know.
Because "separate" keeps changing its meaning depending on how it is achieved and in what larger context its political forms unfold, there is no fixed progressive position, no final theoretical or practical resting place for feminists attempting to find a social voice for women. Often our special womanness turns into a narrow space only a moment after we celebrate it; at other times, our difference becomes a refuge and source of new work, just when it looked most like a prison in which we are powerless. And finally, although women differ fundamentally about the meaning and value of "woman," we all live partly in, partly out of this identity by social necessity. Or as Denise Riley puts it, "Women are not women in all aspects of their lives."
Peace is not a women's issue; at the same time, if women don't claim a special relationship to general political struggles, we will experience that other, more common specialness reserved for those named women: We will be excluded from talking about and acting on the life and death questions that face our species.
Names for a Recurring Feminist Divide
In every case, the specialness of women has this double face, though often, in the heat of new confrontations, feminists suffer a harmful amnesia; we forget about this paradox we live with. Feminist theorists keep renaming this tension, as if new names could advance feminist political work. But at this point new names are likely to tempt us to forget that we have named this split before. In the service of trying to help us recognize what we are fated — for some time — to repeat, here is a reminder of past taxonomies.
Minimizers and Maximizers
The divide so central as to be feminism's defining characteristic goes by many names. Catharine Stimpson cleverly called it the feminist debate between the "minimizers" and the "maximizers. "Briefly, the minimizers are feminists who want to undermine the category "woman," to minimize the meaning of sex difference. (As we shall see, this stance can have surprisingly different political faces.) The maximizers want to keep the category (or feel they can't do otherwise), but they want to change its meaning, to reclaim and elaborate the social being "woman," and to empower her.
Radical Feminists and Cultural Feminists
In Daring to Be Bad: A History of the Radical Feminist Movement in America, 1967–1975, Alice Echols sees this divide on a time line of the current women's movement, with "radical feminism" more typical of the initial feminist impulse in this wave succeeded by "cultural feminism." Echols's definition of the initial bursts of "radical feminism" shows that it also included "cultural feminism" in embryo. She argues that both strains were present from the first — contradictory elements that soon proclaimed themselves as tensions in sisterhood. Nonetheless, the earlier groups usually defined the commonality of "women" as the shared fact of their oppression by "men." Women were to work separately from men not as a structural ideal but because such separation was necessary to escape a domination that only a specifically feminist (rather than mixed, Left) politics could change. Echols gives as an example Kathie Sarachild, who disliked the women's contingents at peace marches against the Vietnam War: "Only if the stated purpose of a women's group is to fight against the relegation of women to a separate position and status, in other words, to fight for women's liberation, only then does a separate women's group acquire a revolutionary character. Then separation becomes a base for power rather than a symbol of powerlessness."
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: The Feminism of Uncertainty: I 1
Part I. Continuing a Gender Diary
1. A Gender Diary 21
2. Critiquing a Gender Diary 59
Part II. Mothers/Lovers
3. Introduction to Mothers/Lovers 71
4. Dorothy Dinnerstein: Creative Unknowing 80
5. From the Gender Diary: Living with Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923–1992) 93
6. Changing Our Minds about Motherhood: 1963–1990 97
7. The Sex Wars in Feminism: Retrenchment versus Transformation 123
8. The Poet of Bad Girls: Angela Carter (1940–1992) 139
9. Inside the Circus Tent: Excerpts from an Interview with Angela Carter, 1988 148
10. The Beast Within: Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo, by David Garnett 153
Part III. The Feminist Picaresque
11. Introduction to The Feminist Picaresque 159
12. Occupying Greenham Common 163
13. Feminist Futures in the Former East Bloc 191
14. Feminism Travels: Cautionary Tales 204
15. Who are the Polish Feminists? (Slawka) 216
16. “Should I Marry Him?” Questions from Students 228
17. The Peripatetic Feminist Activist/Professor Spends One Day in a Small City in Albania 238
18. Certainty and Doubt in the Classroom: Teaching Film in Prison 241
Part IV. Refugees from Utopia
19. Introduction to Refugees from Utopia 273
20. Remembering, Forgetting, and the Making of The Feminist Memoir Project 275
21. The Politics of Passion: Ellen Willis (1941–2006) 293
22. Returning to the Well: Revisiting Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex 297
Part V. The Feminism of Uncertainty
23. Introduction to The Feminism of Uncertainty 307
24. Life Sentence: My Uncertainty Principle 310
25. Doubt’s Visionary: Doris Lessing 316
26. Utopia, Downsized: A Farrago 328
27. The Feminism of Uncertainty: II 330
Appendix: Publication History 335
Bibliography 339
Index 355
What People are Saying About This
"Ann Snitow’s writing brims with brilliance, subtlety, and fresh insight on every page. Mixing personal essay with complex theoretical thinking, these essays stimulate and enlighten. One of those rare activists who tries to understand rather than demolish her political adversaries, Snitow manages here to be at once deeply committed and open-minded, presenting each side as sympathetically as her own. For anyone confused by the controversies within feminism, reading Ann Snitow is guaranteed to bring clarity."
"In this rich and varied collection drawn from a lifetime of engagement with feminist politics, Ann Snitow combines and recombines theory and activism to make something living, fresh, and dare one say it, hopeful out of what have proved to be surprisingly resistant circumstances. I found thought-provoking insights on every page, and so will you."