The Undivided Past

by David Cannadine

  There were also the competing claims of international gender loyalty versus national solidarity comprising both sexes. As a global movement, “first wave” feminism was far from cohesive: it was divided between the moderate International Council and the more radical Suffrage Alliance; its congresses and meetings expressed only the vaguest of aims; and the competing claims of nation in the end proved more appealing. When the First World War broke out, the majority of feminists pledged their loyalty to their homelands: even the most determined British suffragettes abandoned their disruptive campaigns for the duration of the conflict. To be sure, a small minority preferred global pacifism to nationalist belligerence, and they met at the International Congress of Women at The Hague in April 1915 to persuade the bellicose male powers to end the war. They did not succeed.96 By then, what remained of first-wave feminism was long past its peak, and the granting of the vote to women in many countries in the years 1918–20 effectively brought it to an end. There is little evidence that the massive extensions of the franchise to women during those years was the result of feminist lobbying; it had more to do with the need to reconstruct large parts of Europe in the aftermath of the First World War or to buttress the increasingly beleaguered position of white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the United States. At that point, the issue of votes for women largely stalled, and it was not until after 1945 that the franchise was extended to them in most of Latin America, in France, Italy, and Portugal, in eastern Europe and Communist China, and in the newly independent states created out of the rapidly dismantling European empires.97

  From the 1920s to the 1950s, little effort was made to address women’s issues beyond the franchise, as the Western world was preoccupied with depression, war, and recovery.98 But just as first-wave feminism had developed in the West in response to the unprecedented prosperity of the second half of the nineteenth century, so “second-wave” feminism was the offspring of the unprecedented affluence of the consumer society that came into being in the years of peace after 1945. Developing some of the arguments first advanced by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, Betty Friedan depicted the world of 1950s American suburbia as a terrible time and place of female enslavement to the separate, segregated sphere of domesticity: while their husbands were at work, women were incarcerated in the “comfortable concentration camps” of home, suffering “a slow death of mind and spirit” because of the limited opportunities for education and a career. Yet in reality, second-wave feminism, for which The Feminine Mystique was such an inspirational book, was brought about not so much by frustration at the diminishing opportunities and circumscribed freedoms as by the hopes and challenges of rising expectations. For in many ways, Friedan exaggerated the plight of her housewives: during the 1950s, middle-class American women had more money and more leisure than ever before, being a homemaker consumed less time and less energy than it had in earlier decades, and as life expectancy increased, women faced many active years after child-rearing was over. What were they to do with them?99

  These issues and questions were beginning to surface by the early 1960s, and they gained momentum from the popular disturbances that erupted during that decade among blacks and students. The resulting Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination not only on the grounds of race, but also on the grounds of gender. It also generated its own feminism as black and white women activists were radicalized by the received condescension of male colleagues, for whom they were often mere cooks, secretaries, and camp followers. The experience of what would be termed “male chauvinism” in the student protests of the time had a similar effect on many women undergraduates, who were more engaged by Germaine Greer’s radical The Female Eunuch than by Friedan’s reformist Feminine Mystique, and who also drew inspiration from the teachings and the categories of Marx and Engels. Some even came to believe they could make a revolution of their own in which bourgeois patriarchy would be overthrown by women who proudly proclaimed themselves to be both feminists and socialists.100 This in turn led to the creation of new American organizations expressing female solidarity and promoting women’s collective identity, including the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, of which Betty Friedan was the first president, and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. The previous year, the Women’s Equity Action League began filing class-action suits against the discriminatory practices of graduate and professional schools, and the impact was immediate: women entrants to medical school rose from 9 percent in 1969 to more than 20 percent in 1975.101

  Here was the mobilization of women in America on an unprecedented scale, as “consciousness-raising” sessions (a phrase and a concept also derived from Marx and Engels) enabled them to break out of the domestic isolation that Beauvoir and Friedan had vividly depicted and deplored, to discover a shared sense of collective identity and gender solidarity, and to join up with crusading and campaigning feminist organizations.102 One result was congressional passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 (although it would never be ratified by the states); another was the Supreme Court decision the following year in Roe v. Wade to legalize abortion on demand during the first three months of pregnancy. By then, the contraceptive pill had also become widely available to women and the last state laws banning either its use or sale had been repealed or struck down. By the early 1970s, Ivy League schools had opened their doors to women, which meant their numbers in previously all-male professions soon grew, developments further assisted by the provision of daycare centers for working mothers, and a gradual but growing awareness of issues of sexual harassment in the workplace. “Sisterhood is powerful,” proclaimed Robin Morgan in one of the most resonant slogans and influential books (“conceived, written, edited, copy-edited, proofread, designed and illustrated by women”) of the time, and by the end of the 1970s, women had organized themselves in many western European nations, where they campaigned successfully for abortion and the pill, for greater access to higher education and the professions, for equal pay, and for improved rights and facilities at work.103

  The women’s movement not only was influential in the United States and Europe, but was also increasingly international in scope, reaching out to women in the Third World. In recognition of these developments, the United Nations designated 1975 to be “International Women’s Year,” and in June a two-week conference was convened in Mexico City, attended by delegates from 133 countries, including Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi of Iran, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, the world’s first female prime minister. There were also informal sessions, involving some six thousand women, mostly from North and South America, who discussed such practical issues as health, nutrition, and education; and they agreed on an action plan for a UN Decade of Women, with conferences in Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Beijing (1995). This sequence of meetings helped to spread information, raise consciousness, and establish international women’s networks; they also placed “women’s issues” on the map and encouraged Western governments and philanthropists to support women’s organizations concerned with Third World development.104 The result was the creation of “a cosmopolitan body of women whose loyalties to sex transcended their national identities,” and this unprecedented sense of a global women’s identity was celebrated by Robin Morgan, who, a decade and a half after declaring that sisterhood was powerful, proclaimed in 1984 that it was also global. Thus were the women of the world exhorted to unite in “a consolidated feminist network on the cross-national front.”105

  As a result of these developments, many women in many parts of the world are better educated, are more in control of their own bodies and lives, are enjoying more fulfilling sex, are freer from the threat of male violence, are economically more independent, and are occupying positions of greater power in both the private and public sectors than ever before. Even if women will always be biologically different from men, the cultural constructions of gender hierarchy have been significantly dismantled in many countries, where women are no
longer now regarded as the “second sex.”106 Part cause, part consequence of these developments has been the burgeoning study of the history of women and of the history of gender, which has been one of the most marked phenomena in academe during the last fifty years. These histories have (among other things) recovered from oblivion the lives of the “other” half of the human population that hitherto were largely unknown, and they have explored how notions of femininity and masculinity were constructed. In so doing, they have helped to consolidate women’s sense of collective identity and to strengthen feminist campaigning agendas. These changes have been so significant that Robin Morgan has recently concluded that sisterhood is not only powerful and global, but is “for ever,” that “feminism is the politics of the twenty first century,” and that “new world women have just begun.”107

  Yet despite these undoubted successes, second-wave feminism has been riven and divided from the outset. Many women writers who have become canonical feminist authorities did not think much of the mass of ordinary women whose lot they nevertheless claimed they wanted to improve. This had earlier been true of Mary Wollstonecraft, and it was also true of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: they held themselves apart from the female commonality about whom they presumed to write, and they often portrayed women as unsympathetically as men frequently did, both in terms of their unappealing anatomical attributes and their weaknesses of intellect and character.108 The same held good for some exceptionally successful female professionals and politicians, such as the American historian Lucy Salmon, who recognized the disabilities under which women labored in her profession, but insisted that these “must be removed … by women individually rather than collectively,” and Margaret Thatcher, who was not a feminist and did not think of people in collective categories, least of all women.109 And most of the early feminist leaders were relatively well-off, college-educated, and middle-class, and their writings on women reflected these limitations of experience, empathy, and imagination. Betty Friedan’s world of frustrated and alienated housewives was confined to the affluent suburbs of greater New York; Germaine Greer later admitted that “The Female Eunuch does not deal with poor women (for when I wrote it I did not know them) but with the women of the rich world”; and Maureen Dowd’s recent book is confined to the men and women who inhabit the rarefied political cum journalistic world of Washington, D.C.110

  As this suggests, the claim of some feminists to be speaking on behalf of all women, and to be mobilizing the newly self-aware sisterhood into a state of shared collective consciousness, has not been valid even in the West, where no more than a tiny percentage of women were ever enrolled in feminist organizations at their peak of membership during the 1970s and 1980s.111 Most active feminists were in their twenties and thirties, and their agendas and priorities reflected their youth: they showed little interest in the particular concerns and preoccupations of their middle-aged and elderly sisters. They also tended to be secular liberals or radical campaigners, to whom the politics of right-wing parties and the patriarchal Catholic Church were alike anathema; but ever since women had been enfranchised, many had voted conservatively, attended church regularly as devout Catholics, and were in favor of “family values” and opposed abortion.112 Even among well-educated, middle-class Western women, then, there were many who felt no solidarity with the younger and more radical members of the women’s movement, while most black and working-class women, whose main concerns were with keeping body and soul together, were largely indifferent to the actions and aspirations of what they saw as a self-indulgent and privileged group pursuing an essentially self-interested agenda, occasionally acknowledging in a lofty manner those less fortunate than themselves. All of this helps explain why black feminists like bell hooks have accused white, well-educated, middle-class Western activists of being both condescending and racist.113

  Meanwhile, second-wave feminists in the West fell out among themselves over how to campaign for the equal treatment of women in work and society: should the appeal be based on the argument that women were essentially the same as men, or essentially different from men? In the latter case, compensating accommodation in the private sphere would be needed to make justice in the public sphere possible.114 In the United States, Betty Friedan and the members of the National Organization for Women were “genteel” liberal reformers, whose approach was integrationist and egalitarian: they wanted to campaign with the support of men (despite its acronym, NOW was by choice and design an organization for women, in which men were welcome, not of women, which would have kept them out), so that both sexes could enjoy equal rights in public life in the name of their common humanity. But to Friedan’s dismay, they soon found themselves outflanked by younger radical activists, who were inspired by the “ungenteel” writings of Germaine Greer, and more concerned with the special issues of women’s bodies and sexuality (“the personal is the political”); they saw men as the problem rather than as the solution, and inclined toward separatism rather than egalitarianism, demanding dedicated female institutions to avoid co-optation into the patriarchal order. Still more radical were those lesbian feminists whom Friedan scornfully dismissed as “man-haters,” and who preferred to collaborate with homosexual men in pursuit of gay rights rather than with their heterosexual sisters in pursuit of women’s rights. These cracks and fissures first appeared among American feminists, but they later opened up among European feminists too.115

  Such have been the limitations of appeal, the deep divisions, and the competing agendas of women’s movements in the West since their emergence in the early 1970s, and once sisterhood aspired and began to go global, these cracks and fissures became more pronounced. It was at the United Nations conference in Mexico in 1975 that transnational antagonisms first emerged; indeed, it would later be claimed that they crystallized in an angry confrontation between Betty Friedan and Domitila Barrios de Chungara, the militant trade union leader from Bolivia. This row was said to expose a gaping divide between First World women, who were liberal, middle-class and white, and primarily concerned with sex-specific issues such as reproductive freedom, wage equity, and women’s educational and professional opportunities, and Third World, Marxist, working-class, and nonwhite women, who were more concerned with structural problems of economic inequality and poverty. In fact, no such showdown between the two women ever took place. But the deep divisions in the nascent international women’s movement were real enough: between rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, North and South, West and non-West, capitalist and Marxist, middle-class and working-class, reformist and radical, heterosexual and homosexual, white and nonwhite.116

  These fissures have continued to undermine subsequent attempts to sustain and strengthen a transnational feminist consciousness. As the black American poet Audre Lorde argued in 1983, the notion of sisterhood as being powerful and global glosses too easily over “differences of race, sexuality, class and age.”117 Such competing claims, conflicting identities, and “diverse feminisms” also undermine the idea of the “universal woman” as a global, unifying symbol. But whereas the universal epithet of “man” was false because it claimed to embrace and subsume all women, the feminist universal epithet of “woman” is also misleading because it makes “wild, improbable leaps across chasms of class and race, poverty and affluence, leisured lives and lives of toil, to draw basic similarities that stem from the shared conditions of sex.” In the nineteenth century, feminists filled in the outlines of universal woman with images of female slaves, prostitutes, and impoverished seamstresses; in our own times, “extravagant universals reach around the world, plucking out Third World sex workers, Cambodian entrepreneurs, and African female farmers, among others, to add to the imagined figure of woman.”118 Even if all women are biologically similar and also the victims of culturally constructed discrimination, this attempted universalism, expressed in the ostensibly all-encompassing sisterly pronoun of “we,” has never quite rung true, and by the late 1990s the political philosopher Jodi Dean
conceded that “no one really knew who ‘we’ were” anymore.119

  Among those who do not know are historians of women, who have found it difficult to agree what this history looks like, whom it is about, how it should be written, and what it shows.120 There are affirming, identity-creating narratives, celebrating the ascent of women to collective consciousness and public prominence; but other historians have questioned the construction of this “imagined lineage for defiant women,” pointing out that women’s organizations have been ephemeral and their successes limited.121 Some scholars concentrate exclusively on the lives of women, ignoring men; others look at gender relations and at the interconnections between the two sexes. Some historians focus on the modern period of first- and second-wave feminism; others with earlier interests deplore such “presentism” and “modernist self-absorption.”122 Some feminists write only for each other, in highly technical language; others deplore the retreat of feminism from the pressing issues and messy circumstances of the real world into the rarefied halls of the academy, and into arcane jargon and inaccessible prose.123 As Daniel T. Rodgers notes, having surveyed the recent battle-scarred landscape of feminist scholarship, “conceptions of womanhood” have become “more complex and fractured,” and “visions of a common sisterhood,” founded on shared experiences, have been given up as a result of a “cascade of disaggregation,” deconstruction, and particularity. Even some committed feminists accept that being female is not their only identity, and that feminism is not necessarily a cause to be embraced for life, but something from which women might be well advised to take a break.124