The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  And let’s not forget social constructionism, which figures in all identity studies but plays an especially significant role in Women’s Studies—after all, a key tenet of the discipline is that gender itself is a social construction. But Women’s Studies deploys social constructionism in a highly selective and self-serving way: as Patai and Koertge note, “It’s as if everything they dislike about ‘women’ gets dismissed as social construction, while all the rest is the Real Thing. As for men, most everything about them is not socially constructed, since that would, in some sense, let them off the hook, so men get heavy doses of essentialist attributions while the students imagine they’re espousing a straight constructionist line of analysis.”

  Foucault’s notion of hegemony—the claim that power in a democracy like America is more potent than power in a dictatorship because it’s invisible—is also a critical element of Women’s Studies ideology. The irony is that while the power of the U.S. government is not, in fact, a good example of “hegemony” as described by Foucault, many Women’s Studies programs are: on the surface, there’s plenty of pretty rhetoric about women’s mutual support and nurturing and openness to diversity; the underlying reality, however, is one of hard-core ideological indoctrination and enforcement. As one Women’s Studies professor told Patai and Koertge,

  “feminist process” in the classroom winds up being . . . a push toward conformism and toward silencing dissent. It’s all done under the rubric of being nice and open, and not being an authoritarian, old-fashioned type of teacher. But this winds up being tremendously more coercive. Because with authoritarian teachers you know they’re being authoritarian, and you can resist. You know who’s doing what to you. But the other way is manipulation, which is far worse than straight coercion, because students are being led someplace without any clarity as to whose accountable for what and who’s leading them there.

  You could hardly come up with a more nearly perfect description of Foucault-style hegemony.

  It’s striking how many of the NWSA session titles seem unrelated to feminism. Just take some of the queer-related topics, which include “Pushing the Limits of LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender] Equality and Queer Theory,” “Queer Meditations on Race and the Nation,” “Queering the Middle Eastern Cyberscapes,” “Queering Pop Culture,” “Complicating Visibility: Recognizing Diverse Queer Identities,” “Troubling Queer of Color Critiques,” “Queer Performance and Spectatorship,” “Fat and Queer Perspectives,” “What Counts as Queer?,” “Queering Queer Visibility,” and “The Paradox of Queer in (De)Colonial Orientations.” To understand exactly what Women’s Studies is today, I will certainly have to dip my toe into those waters. But since I want to start off with something echt feminist, I choose to attend a panel titled “Beijing +15: Difficult Dialogues at the 54th Commission on the Status of Women.” It’s a roundtable of women, most of them quite young, who attended a recent United Nations “practicum in advocacy” that took place fifteen years after the Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing. In all, there are seven participants, including the moderator, Sandra L. Spencer, an older woman who teaches at the University of North Texas.

  The session turns out to be, in large part, a meditation on the state of feminism in the world today. Spencer introduces the proceedings with a few words in favor of “transnational solidarity” among women, but the first speaker, Minjon Tholen, a dark-skinned young Dutch graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, insists that the term is “problematic.” Case in point: at the UN practicum, she charges, two Muslim women were “silenced” by “white Western hegemony.” She further asserts that “the lifestyles of many women in the West are made possible by the exploitation of women” in the non-Western world—that, in other words, “the privilege of some women relies on the lack of privilege of other women”—and that this fact is “not easily reconciled with” the idea of “feminist solidarity.” (She doesn’t need to explain to the audience, for it is implicitly understood that when she refers to the exploitation of non-Western women, she does not mean by their fathers and husbands, but by the West.)

  Two other young panelists, Sara Alicia Cooley of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Deneil Hill of the State University of New York at Binghamton, have different issues on their minds: Cooley is concerned that there is still a widespread belief that “all women are mothers, want to be mothers, or ought to be mothers”; Hill maintains that “all [academic] departments need to offer courses that address women’s issues” and predicts that “women’s studies will play a major role” in eliminating “gender prejudice” from American universities. Both Cooley’s and Hill’s “arguments” are Women’s Studies clichés, reflecting the fact that it’s safer in these parts to march in lockstep than to step out of line and risk being branded an apostate. (Thus the odd combination, in these young women’s presentations, of texts that are assertive to the point of stridency with body language and styles of delivery that convey a palpable fear of straying so much as a millimeter from orthodoxy.)

  Cooley and Hill are followed by the oldest panelist, Christine Marie Willingham of Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida—who, to my surprise, actually challenges certain aspects of Women’s Studies dogma. Specifically, she rejects the rote linkage of men with an “ethic of justice” and “individual rights” and of women with an “ethic of care” and collective thinking. “Perhaps both women and men are capable of a wider range of behaviors,” she says—a commonsensical statement that, as we shall see, is well-nigh heretical in these realms. Willingham is the first of what will prove to be several middle-aged to elderly women at the NWSA convention who dare to dissent from the current Women’s Studies orthodoxy as articulated so reliably by the younger likes of Cooley and Hill. To be sure, Willingham is no Luther in this Vatican: when it comes down to it, she, too, seems to buy into most of the gender stereotypes that are a cornerstone of the discipline, referring to women’s supposedly innate “reluctance to enter into debate” and asking (as if no one had ever asked it before) a question that has been posed thousands upon thousands of times in the decades since Women’s Studies came into being: “As women navigate masculine institutions, should they copy men’s behavior or try to introduce more female atmospheres?”

  The heresies of the panel’s elder stateswoman are followed by a plea on behalf of the rising generation of Women’s Studies practitioners. Jasmine Winter of Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, who identifies herself as a “young feminist,” bemoans that “feminism . . . is faltering in my generation” and that the “gender divide between older and younger feminists” is at a critical point. Young women feel they’re “not being heard” and can’t find “mentors.” How to “pass feminism from one generation to the other” under such dreadful circumstances? Some young women out there, she says (meaning in the real world), feel that the “war has already been won”; they “don’t want to be identified as feminists” and “don’t know what the fight is for.” Jasmine wonders—and worries: has feminism become a “strictly academic” phenomenon? Young feminists such as herself, she urges, need older women “to teach feminist history so we can have a feminist future” and “make room for new goals.” Winter’s presentation, even more than those by Cooley and Hill, is a farrago of familiar Women’s Studies formulations; the utter absence of any sign of original reflection is, in its own way, awe-inspiring.

  As if in response to Winter’s plea, the final speaker, Kristin Marie Alder, describes herself as a teacher of “young feminists” from “diverse” backgrounds and says she deplores “traditional notions of pedagogy” that oblige her to “speak for [the] experiences” of others. When she stood at the front of her first Women’s Studies classroom, she confides, she saw in the students’ “gaze” that because she was white and middle-class, she was, in their view, “the authority on the subject of women’s lives”—a result, she laments, of the influence upon them of those “traditi
onal notions of pedagogy.” She’s learned, she tells us, to ask herself: “How does what I do in this classroom . . . inform the actual practice of feminism?” She’s also learned that she and other Women’s Studies teachers “must critically examine our constructions” and how we “introduce unequal power relations.” Sighing that “we make so many women feel alienated from feminism,” she warns against “hegemonic feminism” and “colonial feminism.” She recalls a black student who “felt there was no home for her in feminism simply because she is black” and declares her sympathy for “hijab-wearing” students who don’t feel completely included.

  Alder’s brief reference to the hijab speaks volumes. Instead of frankly addressing the symbolism of the hijab, which, of course, betokens female subordination to Muslim male patriarchy, Alder has chosen to put a safe twist on reality and to view the hijab as an innocuous form of attire the sight of which causes many Western women—presumably out of some objectionable racist or Orientalist impulse—to look down upon and (in effect) oppress the women who wear it. In 1970, Women’s Lib preached universal sisterhood and resistance to “patriarchy” anywhere and in any form; today, Women’s Studies, like contemporary establishment feminism generally, is meekly multicultural, treating non-Western social practices with deference even when they involve the brutal subjection of females. For an illustration of the changes that the movement has undergone, one need only look at the shifting self-description of the National Organization for Women: according to its original Statement of Purpose, written in 1966, its goal was “to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men”; today, however, NOW describes itself as a “multi-issue progressive” group that “stands against all oppression, recognizing that racism, sexism and homophobia are interrelated, that other forms of oppression such as classism and ableism work together with these three to keep power and privilege concentrated in the hands of a few.” This view of things can be fairly described as the current Women’s Studies orthodoxy. “Who are we leaving out of the narrative?” Alder asks plaintively. “Who are we privileging?” Her point is that her heart bleeds for Muslim and other women whom Western feminists like herself unthinkingly exclude. Yet by whitewashing the hijab she is herself effectively complicit in the oppression of Muslim women by Muslim men—and is therefore, in the name of multicultural sensitivity and opposition to racism, engaged in the very “privileging” of Western women, and exclusion from the feminist tent of non-Western women, that she professes to deplore.

  During the Q&A, in an unconscious echo of Greer’s reply to Trilling on that long-ago evening at Town Hall, a member of the audience complains that “women abuse each other, and women destroy each other”—explaining that in addition to the terrible blight of “white privilege,” there are conflicts between older and younger women, between mothers and nonmothers, and so on. “It’s a question,” she says, “that any oppressed group has to deal with.” In response to this hand-wringing, Alder returns to the topic of Islam, lamenting that her students are “preoccupied with female genital cutting, hijab, and honor killing,” but that they fail to “see connections” between these phenomena and “problems in the West.” In other words, her students don’t realize that it’s politically incorrect to concern themselves overmuch with the violent oppression and abuse of women in non-Western cultures, and that if one does pay attention to such matters, it’s obligatory to find some way to blame them on Western colonialism (never on the non-Western cultures themselves) or to play moral-equivalency games (pretending, that is, that men in the West are every bit as oppressive, in their own hegemonic way, as men in the Islamic world), or both. Minjon jumps in, fervently agreeing with Alder and asserting that her own students’ interest in female genital mutilation makes it clear that they don’t grasp the “larger framework,” the “comprehensive framework.” Another audience member nods, complaining that her students, too, simply “don’t understand why they should be criticizing the culture they live in” instead of poking their noses into other cultures’ business. This, she avers, is “a huge problem.”

  Returning to the subject of women abusing women, Tholen notes that at the UN practicum she attended “there was competition” between different groups of women and that “we need to try to let go of competition.” (Competition, as we shall see, is a dirty word in Women’s Studies nowadays.) In a reference to the alleged “silencing” of those Muslim women at the practicum—they were, she says, actually booed—Tholen charges that too many feminists demand that everyone agree with them about everything. Since nobody has spelled out the details of that “silencing,” I speak up from the audience. “Exactly what were the Muslim women saying,” I ask Tholen, “that led them to be booed?” She replies that the Muslim women “didn’t share our Western preoccupation with hijab” and other such matters but wanted to focus instead on issues like water supplies and shelter. Alder adds that “Islamic feminists” reject the “Western feminist ideal.” It’s interesting how tolerant these young feminists can be of dissent from the otherwise sacrosanct “Western feminist ideal” so long as the dissenters are women in hijab. (One difference between the feminism of Friedan’s and Greer’s era and that of today’s Women’s Studies establishment is that now, thanks to multiculturalism, many Western feminists readily accept that a woman dressed in a garment symbolizing her inferiority to men can be legitimately considered a feminist.)

  But not everyone, it turns out, agrees with Tholen and Alder. Willingham, the older feminist, breaks in, saying she feels compelled to explain that those Muslim women at the UN practicum, which she also attended, “hogged the mike” and that she found them “aggressive.” There were eight thousand women present, she says, and this handful of Muslims tried to hijack the entire event—their motive apparently being to shift the focus away from women’s rights. In short (though this is not Willingham but me saying this), those “Islamic feminists” would appear not to have been authentic feminists but, rather, stooges for Muslim men and apologists for sharia. Far from being “silenced,” they were themselves trying to stifle discussion of the plight of women in the Islamic world. It’s no coincidence that Willingham—the older feminist, closer in age than the others to the movement pioneers of the 1960s and ’70s—is the only woman in the room who seems willing to at least partially acknowledge the eagerness of some Muslim women to defend their own oppression.

  The feminism that was on display at Town Hall on that boisterous evening way back in 1971 is now known as second-wave feminism; its current intersectional, multicultural incarnation, as represented by the young women on the “Beijing +15” panel, is third-wave feminism. The first wave, which flourished mainly in England and America and focused largely on suffrage, may be said to have begun in 1792, when Mary Wollstonecraft, the wife of anarchist William Godwin and mother of the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft made the then-revolutionary argument that women are by nature every bit as gifted as men, that what may seem their inferiority is a result of their subordination, and that if they enjoyed equal rights they would boast equal accomplishments. The first major work by an important male writer in support of this proposition was The Subjection of Women (1869), in which John Stuart Mill argued that women might not be as good as men at everything, but that if women’s rights were expanded, it would soon be clear what exactly women were good at that had been denied to them, and that permitting them to engage in these activities as full and active members of society would be to everyone’s benefit.

  Meanwhile, in the United States, feminist pioneers like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone were making the case for women’s suffrage, which a now-legendary 1848 convention in Seneca Falls, New York, put on the national agenda. In most Western countries, however, women would not win the right to vote until around the time of World War I—in Britain, 19
18; in America, 1920. Following this triumph, the women’s movement went into abeyance; as Kate Millett would later put it, “when the ballot was won, the feminist movement collapsed in what can only be described as exhaustion.” The 1920s—the “Jazz Age”—transformed female lives: only yesterday, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, women and girls had been protected, patronized, and put on pedestals; now young ladies were smoking, dating, dancing, bobbing their hair, and gulping cocktails at speakeasies. The Depression (and the repeal of Prohibition) put an end to all that, and though World War II saw millions of women taking up traditionally male jobs freed up by men who were off at war, when the soldiers came back the women married, followed their husbands to newly built suburbs, and began lives as homemakers (then called housewives) and as mothers to the baby boom.