Free Women, Free Men

by Camille Paglia

  Huge sacrifices were made by the first-wave feminists, who showed enormous courage and daring in their demand not just for the vote but for reform of laws preventing women from entering contracts or owning property. Nineteenth-century satirical cartoons portrayed suffrage leaders as mutant pseudo-males, flaunting male trousers and cigars and threatening to dethrone men from their positions at home and in the public sphere. When women suffragists first gave speeches in the streets, it was considered a scandalous affront to propriety. It is intriguing that the first states to give American women the right to vote after the Civil War were in the Western territories. But the Northeast, the nation’s intellectual and cultural capital, held out. Even in 1915, the state governments of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey rejected the woman suffrage amendment. It was the frontier states, where men and women worked side by side doing manual labor, that first viewed women as equals, whereas the East was still ruled by the genteel persona of the “lady,” with her code of delicacy and decorum. Ladies and gentlemen in the East and Deep South seemed not to belong to the same species.

  The 19th Amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote was finally passed in 1920 after a series of increasingly intense protests: beginning in 1907, there were massive parades in New York and Washington with horses, banners, and floats, a lavish pageantry that American feminists had borrowed from their British counterparts. British feminists, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, were paradoxically more aggressive, more drawn to militant confrontation and direct action. Feminists in London broke windows and barged into government meetings. In 1910, they tried to force their way into the House of Commons. There was a six-hour fracas, followed by mass arrests and imprisonment. Barbaric methods of forced feeding were later employed against jailed feminists in both England and the United States.

  In 1917, the public image of American feminism was damaged by the tactics of women protestors outside the White House. Holding placards demanding votes for women, they kept a silent, dignified vigil for months. But male passersby turned abusive and then violent when the messages, in that time of war, became more provocative. One sign called then president Woodrow Wilson “Kaiser Wilson.” Hostile crowds began to gather daily; the signs were immediately ripped to pieces and the women themselves buffeted. The demonstrations were finally banned by the police as a threat to public safety and order. Dismayingly, feminists had begun to seem like unpatriotic subversives. Hence it can be argued that the upsurge of anti-feminist rhetoric before, during, and after World War One in both England and the United States was not necessarily anti-woman per se but in some cases may have been a comprehensible response to what had become an ideological extremism and fanaticism in some suffragists.

  Many of the lively, sexually adventurous women of the Roaring Twenties who drank, smoke, cursed, and did wild dances like the Charleston disassociated themselves from the feminist label. And indeed, the suffrage movement was only partly responsible for the revolutionary change in women of that decade. The disillusionment following the cataclysmic First World War produced a flood of anti-authority sentiment, which weakened the prestige of father figures in government, religion, and the family. Second, there was a mammoth cultural impact from African-American jazz as well as from Hollywood movies, a new medium that so transformed sexual expectations and behavior that demands for the regulation of the industry came from ministers, teachers, journalists, city officials, and women’s civic groups. Out of that protest movement would come the infamous studio production code, which ruled Hollywood with an iron hand until the early 1960s.

  The 1920s and ’30s were a glory period for exceptional, accomplished women, such as Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Thompson, Clare Boothe Luce, Amelia Earhart, Babe Didrikson, and Katharine Hepburn. Feminism may have dissipated as a political movement, but women’s achievement and public visibility were very strong. It is depressing that second-wave feminism would initially dismiss those enterprising, path-breaking women as “male-identified” and allegedly indifferent to the needs of women as a group. I would maintain that inspiring female role models are always crucial to demonstrate what personal ambition and initiative can accomplish and to model an attitude of pride and self-respect that may be invaluable to other, less outspoken women struggling to establish their independence from domineering parents or spouses as well as from capricious or dictatorial bosses and co-workers.

  The beckoning promise of that period in women’s history was canceled by the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Europe, and the outbreak of World War Two. While men were at the front, women had to take over their factory jobs: this was the heyday of Rosie the Riveter, flexing her biceps. But when the veterans returned, women were expected to step aside. That pressure was unjust, but after World War Two, there was a deep longing shared by both men and women for the normalcy of family life. Domestic issues came to the fore, and gender roles repolarized. With so many weddings, there was an avalanche of births—the baby-boomers who are now sliding downhill toward retirement. In the late 1940s and ’50s, movies, television, and advertisements promoted motherhood and homemaking as women’s highest goals. It was this homogeneity that second-wave feminism correctly and admirably rebelled against. But too many second-wave feminists extrapolated their discontent to condemn all men everywhere and throughout history. In other words, the ideology of second-wave feminism was or should have been time- and place-specific. Post-war domesticity was a relatively local phenomenon. The problem was not just sexism; it was the postindustrial social evolution from the working-class extended family to the middle-class nuclear family, which left women painfully isolated in their comfortable homes. They had lost the companionship, instruction, and shared labor of the joyous, centuries-old, multi-generational community of women.

  Second-wave feminism was launched by Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. Its analysis of the anomie felt by suburban housewives struck a chord with a broad audience. Three years later, Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, the first political group devoted to women’s issues since suffrage had been won nearly fifty years before. Two major points were missing in early assessments of Friedan: she was not simply a housewife, as she had portrayed herself, but had been a leftist labor activist in the 1950s. Second, Friedan’s debt to Simone de Beauvoir’s magisterial 1949 book, The Second Sex, was obscured by herself and others. When Friedan died two years ago, the outpouring of testimonials in the American and British media rightly acknowledged her importance but exaggerated the role she had played in women’s lives. It is categorically untrue that Friedan single-handedly opened the door for my baby-boom generation of professional women, who were already heading with determination toward college and careers when she arrived on the scene. We had been animated from childhood by the can-do spirit inherited from our parents, who had lived through the Depression and war. For example, Friedan did not produce Germaine Greer, who was already a firebrand in her native Australia. Nor did Friedan produce me in the snow belt of upstate New York: in the early 1960s, before Friedan’s book was published, I was an adolescent absorbed in an eccentric, three-year research project on my feminist idol, Amelia Ear-hart. The organized women’s movement of the late 1960s was only one important strain among many other elements that characterized my feisty generation.

  Almost immediately, a split opened within NOW which would force Betty Friedan out of the group she had co-founded. Younger, more militant women, alienated by the sexism of their male fellow radicals in the anti-war movement, clashed with the older, married women of Friedan’s generation, who were often uncomfortable with homosexuality. Like the nineteenth-century suffragists who feared that sexual issues would derail the movement, Friedan felt that militant lesbians (“the lavender menace,” in her words) would drive mainstream women away from feminism. Friedan herself was pitifully marginalized when Gloria Steinem, a journalist whom she had brought into the movement, stole the media spotlight because of her telegenic goo
d looks. Steinem, who had made her name through infiltrating a Playboy Bunny club for an exposé for New York magazine, played a crucial early role in normalizing the image of feminists. With her flowing blonde tresses, hip aviator glasses, and soothing voice and manner, she made feminism seem reasonable and unthreatening. In 1972, Steinem founded Ms., the first glossy, mass-market magazine devoted to feminist issues. Its name would enter the language and transform how women are addressed to this day.

  Despite her Smith College education, however, Steinem was neither an intellectual nor a theorist. She was a tireless, peripatetic activist, but virtually from the start, she played the role of stern guardian of a victim-centered ideology that did not permit alternate viewpoints. Playboy, for example, which Steinem excoriated, had laid the groundwork for the sexual revolution; Hugh Hefner, a descendant of New England Puritans, had been progressively forward-thinking in refining the post-war macho image of the American male toward a more sophisticated European model of pleasure-loving connoisseur of food, wine, sex, and jazz. Steinem’s male-bashing was overt: she famously said, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Meanwhile, she kept from public view how vital a role men played in her private life in Manhattan. Steinem also unapologetically aligned feminism with partisan Democratic politics, thus limiting its reach over time.

  In the first ferment over the revived feminism, women athletes such as Billie Jean King played a central role. Like Martina Navratilova after her, the blunt, hot-tempered King adopted a startlingly aggressive style on the tennis court that inspired a generation of women to play competitive sports. The passage by the U.S. Congress in 1972 of Title IX, a section of the Educational Amendments, radically expanded campus sports programs for women but sometimes at the expense of men’s programs like wrestling, which were too often cut by ruthless college administrators.

  In the 1970s, women’s studies courses and programs were created in profusion. There has been no honest study of the institutionalization of women’s studies and of the effects it has had on feminism. Women’s studies was assembled haphazardly and piecemeal, without due consideration of what the scholarly study of gender ought to entail. The victim-centered agenda of the current women’s movement was adopted wholesale, an ideological bias that neither women’s studies nor its successor, gender studies, has been able to shed. Furthermore, because so many of the first women’s studies professors came from literature departments, science was completely excluded. But without a grounding in basic biology, neither students nor teachers can negotiate the tangle of nature and culture that produces human sex differences.

  As a new field, eager to gain a reputation for seriousness, women’s studies, like the equally new film studies, was woefully vulnerable to European poststructuralism, which began to infiltrate American humanities departments via Johns Hopkins and Yale universities in the early 1970s. Poststructuralism is uniformly social constructionist, denying that gender has any basis in biology and bizarrely attributing all sex differences to language alone. Academic feminists at the elite schools soon devoted volumes of labyrinthine theory to their interrogation of gender assumptions—a project that they mistook for revolutionary action which would have utopian social results.

  In the real world, however, two major events marked 1970s feminism. First was the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973, which legalized abortion in all 50 states. This was an epochal expansion of women’s reproductive rights, which I support without qualification. Unfortunately, abortion would come to dominate American feminism and eventually, I submit, would distort and weaken it. The second event was the creation by Phyllis Schlafly, a lawyer, Republican activist, and mother of six, of STOP ERA, a group devoted to defeating the Equal Rights Amendment, which was slowly wending its way through state legislatures. This was a watershed moment in American politics, because Schlafly’s grassroots organizing would lay the foundation for the future revival of conservatism. Feminist leaders, trapped by their own ideology, which was becoming increasingly dogmatic, demonized Schlafly without adequately responding to the concerns that she had raised—which included basic questions about whether women would be drafted or whether unisex toilets would be mandated. After a ten-year struggle, the Equal Rights Amendment failed in 1982 to pass the requisite number of states, and it died. But this defeat did not stimulate self-analysis among feminist leaders; on the contrary, it hardened their oppositional attitudes. They now saw the world simplistically divided between feminist and anti-feminist.

  By the 1980s, a chasm had opened up between academic feminism, then under the fashionable spell of Jacques Lacan, and mainstream feminism, which was geared to action. Central to the women’s studies curriculum were the polemical writings of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who asserted that pornography causes rape and that it should therefore be banned. Here is a typical sample of their pronouncements: “The pornographers rank with Nazis and Klansmen in promoting hatred and violence.” What hysterical agitprop, unworthy of modern women thinkers. MacKinnon and Dworkin’s activism led to the passage of anti-pornography ordinances in Indianapolis and Minneapolis that were later declared unconstitutional. MacKinnon’s cultural dominance was shown by the way she was virtually canonized in a 1991 cover story of The New York Times Magazine. A parallel phenomenon in the late 1980s and early ’90s was an increasing campus focus on rape, and specifically date rape. News magazines and TV talk shows took up the theme with a vengeance. This was an important social issue, yet the way it was promoted on campus and off was turning women once again into helpless victims.

  But a sea change was coming in feminism. In the mid-1980s, the explicit sexual imagery and semi-nudity used by Madonna in her pioneering music videos, broadcast to the world through the new medium of cable TV, electrified a younger generation of women. Madonna started the process of liberalization that led to what many commentators, on both the left and the right, have been recently lamenting as the “pornification” of America. Within feminism, a revolt against the MacKinnon-Dworkin tyranny began in the 1980s in San Francisco, where there were pitched battles over lesbian sadomasochism and butch-femme role-playing. By the early ’90s, “lipstick” lesbianism had gained national attention—a drastic switch from the image of the lesbian feminist as a drab, granola-eating, earth-shoe-wearing political ideologue. The third-wave feminists of the ’90s—a term first used by Rebecca Walker—took different stances on these issues. Despite her early puritanism about beauty, Naomi Wolf eventually espoused a pro-sex position close to my own, while Susan Faludi adopted the Steinem party line about the systemic anti-feminism of popular culture.

  While both academic and mainstream feminists have always claimed to foster a diversity of viewpoints, the reality was far from that. I came close to fistfights with other feminists in the early 1970s over hard rock music, which was then dubbed sexist, and over the question of hormones, which I saw as a factor in sex differences. In the late 1980s, Christina Hoff Sommers, then a philosophy professor at Clark University, hit a wall at academic conferences when she tried to initiate debate with other feminists on fundamental issues. When my first book, Sexual Personae, was published by Yale University Press in 1990, that 700-page tome on art and culture was compared by Gloria Steinem, who clearly had not bothered to read it, to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. When an op-ed I wrote on date rape for New York Newsday in January 1991* was reprinted via syndication across the United States, there was a huge reaction, including what was clearly an organized campaign of vilification: the president of my university in Philadelphia was besieged with calls from around the country calling for me to be fired from my teaching job. Fortunately, the president took the enlightened line that faculty members have the right to express themselves freely on all public issues. I was also lucky enough to have tenure. Younger teachers, then and now, would be far more hesitant to express heterodox views. When, three years later, Katie Roiphe published her 1994 book, The Morning After, on campus rape ideology, the vicious attacks on her by the older women
of the feminist establishment were outrageous and unconscionable. That, in my view, was one of the lowest, most amoral moments in contemporary feminism.

  The stridency of old-guard feminism was intensifying even as feminism was losing the war. The Web, which became a near-universal tool by the mid-1990s, thrives on diversity. When pornography moved to the Web, feminists also lost the ability to track and stop it. While the Web is a spectacular resource for feminist networking and discussion, it may also be one reason that feminism has seemed to fall below the radar, because websites can become far-flung niches attracting only true believers.

  There was one last grand act for mainstream feminist leaders in the 1990s: their staunch defense of Bill Clinton, from the lawsuit filed by Paula Jones in 1994 through the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. Suddenly, the arguments presented about sexual harassment during Anita Hill’s testimony were dropped and reversed—even though Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, was making far more serious charges against Clinton than Hill ever did against Clarence Thomas. Although I had voted for him twice, I was appalled by President Clinton’s exploitation of the young Monica Lewinsky, a furtive series of squalid encounters in taxpayer-funded office space in which there was a gross disparity of power, which feminists usually claim makes informed consent impossible. The openly partisan tactics and special pleading of feminist leaders during Clinton’s impeachment crisis killed their credibility and damaged core feminist issues.

  One thing is clear: the feminism of the future will be created by women who are young now. The doctrinal disputes and turf wars of the older generation (including me) must be set aside. I reject the term “postfeminism,” which became a glib media tag line in the 1990s and is often attached to me. There is no such animal. Feminism lives but goes through cycles of turmoil and retreat. At present, there is no one leading issue that can galvanize women across a broad spectrum. Feminism certainly has an obligation to protest and, if possible, correct concrete abuses of women and children in Third World nations. But feminism might look very different in more traditional or religious societies, where motherhood and family are still valorized and where the independent career woman is less typical or admired.