by Bruce Bawer
MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s efforts led to a number of ordinances prohibiting the sale of pornography in various U.S. jurisdictions, although many of these laws, faced with opposition by civil libertarians, were later declared unconstitutional. One of MacKinnon and Dworkin’s major achievements was a 1992 Canadian Supreme Court decision permitting the confiscation of materials deemed (under a broad definition) to be pornographic. Among those who rejected MacKinnon and Dworkin’s brand of feminism were Friedan and Greer, who, whatever their failings, stood, when it came to such matters, for freedom, not for constraints on freedom, and who found MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s hostility to men and to sex over-the-top; they recognized rape-crisis feminism as nothing more than puritanism under a new name, a return to a 1950s-style concept of women as helpless creatures in need of protection.
But Friedan and Greer’s movement had passed them by: rape hysteria became fully integrated into mainstream feminism, resulting in such events as the so-called Take Back the Night rallies at colleges around America, which are premised on the idea that when darkness falls over the quad, male students metamorphose, werewolf-like, into potential rapists. Typical of the inflated rhetoric that currently surrounds sexual violence on campus is the following, which appeared on the website of the Women’s Resource Center at the University of Houston in 2010: “October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. . . . Did you know that almost one-third of college students report dating violence by a previous partner and almost one-fourth report violence by a current partner? Dating violence can include coercion, stalking, jealousy, isolation, victim blaming, and emotional, sexual, and physical abuse.” Even “jealousy” and “emotional . . . abuse” (which, of course, can mean almost anything), then, are now considered “violence.”
The influence of second-wave feminism on Western culture was profound. A range of phenomena viewed as scandalous when Friedan wrote her book—including abortion, single motherhood, and stay-at-home dads—are now considered thoroughly unremarkable. In the 1950s, Western popular culture communicated the idea that Father knew best and that Mother belonged in the kitchen; now we’ve had at least a generation of TV series, commercials, and the like in which Dad is an idiot and Mom is a sage. Today, from kindergarten onward, children are taught not to think in terms of stereotypical gender roles—even though it’s widely acknowledged (except in Women’s Studies) that certain gender-distinct interests are, in fact, innate. On such matters, feminism has been self-contradictory, one minute fiercely denying any natural biological tendency for boys and girls to have different interests or strengths, the next celebrating women’s supposedly distinct—and, of course, always superior—“ways of knowing.” Meanwhile, there has been increasing concern about boys raised in a feminist society. Christina Hoff Sommers speaks of the “war against boys,” who grow up being told by teachers and textbooks that they are intrinsically violent and that in a world without men there would be no war.
The great irony here is that even as feminists continue to paint men as oppressors, women are now, as Hanna Rosin noted in the Atlantic in 2010, “the majority of the workforce.” Far more women than men get college degrees. We are living in a world-historic moment: “Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed.” Even in places like India, China, and Southeast Asia, male domination is crumbling. (The major exception, of course, is the Muslim world.) In explaining this revolution, Rosin invokes gender essentialism: we live at “the end of the manufacturing era,” and “[t]he attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. . . . [S]chools, like the economy, now value the self-control, focus, and verbal aptitude that seem to come more easily to young girls.” These passages illustrate the double standard feminism has implanted in Western society: while it’s perfectly acceptable to say that men are worse than women at certain things, to suggest the inverse is to reap the whirlwind. (Just ask Lawrence Summers, who lost his job as president of Harvard because he suggested that men might be more predisposed than women to success in science.)
The success of a movement can be measured by the degree to which it withers away as its goals are achieved. Hence, as feminist attitudes became absorbed into mainstream American culture, the movement itself steadily waned. The National Organization for Women, once a powerhouse, declined in profile and influence. Though more and more young women attended college, pursued careers, and led independent lives—embodying the foremost ideals of second-wave feminism—more and more of them, as noted at that Beijing +15 panel, rejected the label feminist—which, in their minds, conjured up images not of worthy activism on behalf of social and legal equality but of shrill man-hatred.
Yet even as feminist ideas became mainstream ideas, and feminist self-identification and explicit feminist activism faded away in American society at large, feminism became an increasingly visible presence at colleges and universities. While the movement itself shriveled, in short, Women’s Studies grew apace. It began with isolated courses in English or social science departments; then interdisciplinary programs (drawing on faculty members from a variety of humanities and social science disciplines) began to spring up; then full-fledged Women’s Studies departments were formed, some of which at first offered only minors; over the years, more and more of these departments offered majors, then master’s degrees, then Ph.D.s.
It was the founding of Black Studies that first opened second-wave feminists’ eyes. If the oppression of blacks justified the establishment of a new academic field, what about women? Weren’t women oppressed, too? Sheila Tobias, who taught the first Women’s Studies course at Cornell, recalls that “[t]he Cornell community was educated and inspired (if sometimes terrorized) by its African American community,” members of whom “‘took over’ the student union” in 1968, an act that led to “the establishment . . . of a significant black studies program under an African American director—a program that would serve as a model for women’s studies.” Similar stories underlie the conception of many of the earliest Women’s Studies courses—and, in 1970, the first two Women’s Studies programs, at San Diego State College and the State University of New York at Buffalo.
From the beginning, Women’s Studies has been less about education in any traditional sense than about political indoctrination. In an anthology of articles from Feminist Teacher, the journal’s editors declare that they’re a “collective” whose motto is “politics and teaching do mix” (italics in original). Significantly, the founders of Women’s Studies were not celebrated thinkers like Friedan and Millett but ideologues with backgrounds in civil rights and New Left activism. What distinguished these “socialists, communists, and careerists,” as Phyllis Chesler puts it, was that they knew how to “tak[e] over institutions.” “The best of us,” she recalls, speaking of the women who defined second-wave feminism, “were anarchic, eccentric, and highly independent nonconformists” who “spoke truth clearly, not in postmodern academic voices.” Women’s Studies, by contrast, was the creation of “grassroots feminist nonauthors”—Chesler labels them “the sisterhood”—who were neither original nor courageous.
In the introduction to The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers (2000), an anthology about the origins of the field, Mari Jo Buhle acknowledges that many of the first teachers of Women’s Studies believed in “alternative styles of learning” (aka “politicized learning”) that were “[i]nspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” The women who established SUNY Buffalo’s program, for example, declared that “[t]his education will not be an academic exercise; it will be an ongoing process to change the ways in which women think and behave. It must be part of the struggle to build a new and more complete society.” According to Buhle, “race, class, and sexual orientation” were “central” to Women’s Studies from the b
eginning; Josephine Donovan, one of the book’s contributors, recalls that “all we thought about” in those early days were “racism, colonialism, and imperialism. Feminism added gender to the mix.”
Another contributor to The Politics of Women’s Studies is Nancy Hoffman, who started out in the 1960s as a self-defined “radical student activist” at Berkeley, where she served time as an organizer and antiwar protester. “Our goal,” she remembers, “was to open up the university to scrutiny, to challenge institutional power, and to take some for our own purpose. . . . We saw the youth on campus as ripe for radicalizing and organizing.” After “living in Paris during les années soixante, participating in political rallies from Copenhagen to Milan,” she got a job at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where “my department chair gave his permission” for her to teach a course on women and literature. (She mentions in passing that she and her students viewed “revolutionary women in North Vietnam” as role models.) From there she went to Portland State University, where, after being hired by the English Department “with little more than a casual interview,” she cofounded one of the first Women’s Studies programs. “For me,” she recalls, “the women’s studies classroom became the place . . . where you could teach in the radical style set out in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” Hoffman “applied community-organizing skills to the student community” and made sure that “[c]ollectivist practices characterized women’s studies at PSU.” Similarly, Sheila Tobias emphasizes that the first Women’s Studies course she taught at Cornell was “forged by a collective” and proffered a “radical feminist program.” (The importance of the conceit that Women’s Studies is a collective enterprise cannot be overstated: as Tobias puts it, “[p]atriarchy, according to feminist theory, involved hierarchy; women’s work need not.”) Only two years after that first course, Cornell had a full-fledged Women’s Studies program.
Women’s Studies was, and is, the “academic wing of feminism,” devoted to “consciousness-raising” and to helping young women liberate themselves and their sisters. In retrospect, it’s remarkable how quickly and easily Women’s Studies became a firmly rooted presence in American higher education. This growth, notes Buhle, “seem[ed] to happen overnight.” By 1974, more than a thousand institutions had Women’s Studies courses, and eighty had Women’s Studies programs. By 1976, there were already “270 programs and 15,000 courses spread across the campuses of 1500 institutions” with 850 teachers. And by 1981, “the number of women’s studies programs had increased to 350.” Meanwhile organizations and journals sprang up: the Feminist Press and the journals Feminist Studies and Women’s Studies were founded in 1972, the journal Signs in 1975, the NWSA in 1977, and the journal Feminist Teacher in 1985. If in 1930, notes Buhle, “one in seven Ph.D.’s was granted to a woman” and by 1960 “the proportion had dropped to approximately one in ten,” by 1976 the figure had jumped impressively, with women forming “45 percent of the undergraduate population.” Between 1978 and 1985, more than 13,000 students wrote dissertations in Women’s Studies. As of 2000, according to Buhle, there were about 615 Women’s Studies programs in the United States, and about 12 percent of American undergraduates were enrolled in Women’s Studies courses, meaning that more American students were taking Women’s Studies than were taking courses in any other “disciplinary field.” Today about 600 American institutions of higher education offer Women’s Studies in some form. In 2009, 408 institutions and 2,011 individuals held NWSA membership; at this writing, the NWSA database contains the names of 661 institutions with undergraduate programs, 43 that award master’s degrees in Women’s Studies, and 15 that grant Ph.D.s.
One fact emerges clearly from The Politics of Women’s Studies: although the founders of Women’s Studies are routinely portrayed as brave pioneers who struggled valiantly against the patriarchy to carve out a space for themselves in the male-dominated academy, they would in fact never have gotten so far, so fast, if not for the readiness of liberal male administrators and faculty to approve and fund Women’s Studies. Indeed, the very rise of Women’s Studies belies its own rhetoric about the ruthless hegemonic power of the patriarchy. As Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge point out, not one of the testimonies in The Politics of Women’s Studies mentions any “concerted male resistance” to the rise of the discipline. On the contrary, as the testimonies themselves document, Women’s Studies received extremely generous support, at a very early stage, from governments, universities, and foundations—especially the Ford Foundation, which seems to have played a larger role than any other single funder in helping to launch the new discipline. (In addition to funding individual programs and departments, the Ford Foundation provided the money that jump-started the NWSA and the Feminist Press.) As Jean Walton testifies in The Politics of Women’s Studies, the deans, trustees, and faculty at the Claremont Colleges were highly supportive of efforts to create a joint Women’s Studies program there; and Nancy Topping Bazin, who was the first coordinator of Women’s Studies at Rutgers, recalls that while “some male professors expressed skepticism” about the program, “they approved it without delay.” Even though such accounts, as Patai and Koertge point out, “implicitly reveal the presence of [a] favorable climate” in regard to Women’s Studies at universities, a number of “the contributors show little recognition” of this fact, and indeed “seek to convey struggle and effort—on a grand scale and against formidable and entrenched forces.”
Impressive though the statistics about the growth of Women’s Studies are, moreover, they don’t come close to reflecting the discipline’s real influence. Women’s Studies approaches have, after all, become commonplace throughout the humanities and social sciences, and are finding their way into more and more secondary and even primary school classrooms. Women’s centers have become fixtures on campuses, where they tend to be closely aligned with the Women’s Studies department or program itself; their purported objective may be gleaned from this official description of the Center for Women at Emory: “We advocate for gender equity throughout the University; provide resources and skill-building opportunities; and bring faculty, students, practitioners, activists, and other learners together to examine gender issues and work toward ethical solutions.”
At many universities, furthermore, there are other women-specific groups that collaborate regularly with Women’s Studies. At Northeastern University, for example, the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program “works closely with the independent, student-run Feminist Student Organization to sponsor programs for Women’s History Month and other events of special concern to women and LGBT students”; at Clark University, the Women’s Studies Program “is part of the Worcester Consortium in Women’s Studies, comprised of seven institutions of higher education, each with their [sic] own faculty active in women’s studies research and teaching.” At some universities, it can be hard to keep track of all the organized feminism: at the University of Minnesota, for instance, as Christina Hoff Sommers has noted, there is not only a Women’s Studies Department and Women’s Center, but also the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies, the Center for Women in International Development, the Young Women’s Association, the Center for Continuing Education for Women, the Humphrey Center on Women and Public Policy, and the offices of not one but two feminist journals, Signs (the leading periodical in the field) and Hurricane Alice.
In many cases, moreover, Women’s Studies has metamorphosed into, or been fused with, something called Gender Studies, which the NWSA website describes as “an evolution from the women’s studies programs founded in the 1960’s and after. In recent years some campuses have changed the name of their women’s studies program to ‘gender studies,’ while others who [sic] have not previously had a women’s Studies program have begun a new program using the name gender studies. Additionally many programs combine the names and are called ‘women and gender Studies,’ or the ‘study of women and gender.’ In some settings, gender studies may reflect additional atten
tion to masculinities or sexuality studies.” The Gender Studies Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, offers this rather exhaustive explanation:
Gender Studies addresses such issues as femininity and masculinity; gender and the body; gender and culture; gender and knowledge; current and historical inquiries into the relationships between the sexes; gender and aesthetics; gender as an organizing factor on social, political, and familial institutions and policy; gender role development and institutionalization; feminist theory; sexual orientation; sexual identity politics and history, queer theory, and lesbian cultural criticism and other interdisciplinary inquiries related to sex, gender, sexuality, reproduction, and feminist theory. It examines ideas of femininity and masculinity across cultures and historical periods and how these concepts are represented within cultures (e.g., literature, popular culture, the arts, science, and medicine).
What all this comes down to is that in addition to “studying” female experience and female sexuality, students of Gender Studies also explore male experience and male sexuality—almost invariably, however, from a feminist perspective. With few exceptions, in short, Gender Studies “interprets” men’s lives in light of the doctrine that men are by definition oppressors, warmongers, potential rapists, and the beneficiaries of patriarchal social structures, and that the only proper way to comprehend sexual identity and sexual relations is by viewing them through a feminist lens.