The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Trumped by the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan became the forgotten conflict for five years. But its impact on sexual equality and its possibilities for a peace hospitable to women’s aspirations were largely lost in the tsunami of anti-American, anti-Bush sentiment. The prospects for pushing for better funding, more troops, and solid backing for the new government went largely unconsidered in the women’s movement.87

  As for Afghan women, they had brought about an alliance across borders that prepared the way for Western intervention, but they had also witnessed the calamity that America had fostered for twenty years with its covert and then overt funding for the anti-Soviet insurgency; they saw thugs turned into national liberation heroes with CIA money, including, most recently, the Taliban. Their country was devastated. So while there was relief that the Taliban were ousted, and immediate efforts to organize as civic life awoke and exiles and expatriates returned, their reactions were ambivalent. Sonali Kolhatkar, an exile and soon-to-be radio journalist in California, spoke for the exile group Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan when she welcomed the war but insisted “this combat against terrorism cannot be won by bombing this or that country.”88 They, too, focused on the urgent needs of putting women in positions to hold power in the reconstruction.

  The problem was that the war, with too few troops and underfunded, underequipped, and badly pursued, dragged on, and reconstruction faltered. Women in Kabul could function again with some normalcy; NGOs flooded the city. Afghan women won some representation inside the government: The new constitution formally recognized their rights. But the country’s ordeal continued. The Taliban regrouped in strongholds in the south and along the border with Pakistan; rural women were never free from the threat. NGOs built girls’ schools in the countryside, and girls came from miles around to attend, but when coalition troops left the area, the Taliban came and burned the buildings down or threw acid on the little girls who dared defy them.89 Global feminist concern strengthened Afghan women’s position, but the attention was inconstant. The intolerable discomfort over American intervention coupled with raging protest against the war in Iraq made it difficult for those outside the country to focus on what they might do to help women inside the country.

  In the distant past, international feminists had always made solidarity between women seem as easy as dropping by the neighbor’s to lend a hand with the baby. Did not all women suffer from lack of power and recognition vis-à-vis men, ruling groups, and states? Did not all women suffer from war? Was it not indisputable that the world would be a better place if their ideas were implemented and their needs honored? And this, of course, was the message of global feminism in the twenty-first century.

  Yet even as feminist questions moved to the center of international deliberations, the assumptions of unity that underlay this stance seemed threadbare. The bank secretary whose supervisor pressed her to go out with him was not in the same situation as the Cambodian rice farmer whose access to water depended on giving sexual favors to the village headman who controlled irrigation. Pakistani physicians and lawyers were not in the same relation to upholders of Muslim tradition as were Afghan women of all classes under the Taliban. Some of the most murderous ethnic and religious conflicts of the last decade of the century involved zealous women perpetrators: the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda, and Hindu violence against Muslims in India in 1992–93.

  What was the best course for Western democracies to take? Feminists deflected the difficult task of answering that question onto the easier task of denouncing the United States and the Bush administration. What might a feminist-minded foreign policy look like—not in utopia, when the world will be peopled by angels, but in the here and now? What would an efficacious feminist opposition to the use of terror be, not in the great hereafter but in the real world? The habitual position of criticism was from outside governments, in permanent opposition to male power. But this meant that feminists stood aside from any advocacy of state responses. The problem became acute as Muslim women under duress battled against religious extremism. Denunciations of the West, the global North, neo-imperialism, American hegemony, and right-wing Christians were louder among American feminists after 2001 than condemnations of Islamic extremists and their attempts to extirpate longstanding women’s rights movements throughout the Middle East.

  These were large impasses before grave questions, and women’s difficulties in negotiating them reflected feminism’s coming of age. Could the rights of women be a basis for power in the affairs of this world? Could women’s rights generate the pragmatic alliances to wield power, rather than to criticize power or oppose the use of power? Could feminists aspire to state power, as socialists and democrats had before them?

  No longer simply a family romance, the commitment to women in this century when so much is at stake depends undeniably on the fact that women must take their place with a new generation of brothers in a struggle for the world’s fortunes. Herland, whether of virtuous matrons or daring sisters, is not an option. Many of the stumbling blocks to women’s full participation are the same; but the stakes of success are that much higher. In the twenty-first century, the well-being and liberty of women cannot be separated from democracy’s survival.

  CONCLUSION

  FEW FEMINISTS sign on for life. Like others, I was a curious and intrigued but reticent recruit when, in 1969, I first began to call myself a feminist. Friends say that their plunge into the women’s movement was like falling in love, but for me it was more like an abduction. I could not have dreamed that I would be writing a book on the subject so many years later. I anticipated a quick exit, because the cause seemed so indisputably just and the remedies so obvious. Surely it couldn’t take too long. Knowing nothing about the history of feminism—really nothing!—except that Victorian ladies once campaigned for the vote, I assumed that a chastened American public would rise to meet the challenge, pushed and pulled along by the millions like me who were suddenly blazing to abandon womanhood as we knew it for something much bigger. We were after the business of being fully human. And in the late 1960s, achieving full humanity seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

  Forty years later, the expectation of imminent, thoroughgoing change is gone. And there has been no quick exit, for me or anyone else. Feminists, to be sure, won some stunning victories. The issues of women’s rights have moved into the heart of the great struggles of liberal democracy: for economic parity, religious tolerance, human rights, sexual expression, bodily ease and health, education, and the dignity of human attachments. The morning papers bring news about the devastation of illegal abortion in Africa, the Taliban’s bombing of girls’ schools in Pakistan, Iranian women’s massive turnout in the tumultuous 2009 presidential election, and the feminist features of American foreign policy under a new secretary of state who has made the human rights of women a centerpiece. A year ago in 2008, that same secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, fought for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, the first time an American woman made a serious run for the executive (although readers will recall that Belva Lockwood and Victoria Woodhull gave it a go). Clinton’s candidacy, which started out carefully distanced from gender issues, over time and under fire brought ideas about fair treatment for women into the center of the campaign. The desire for a new deal for women migrated out of a female constituency and won over a huge portion of the Democratic electorate, men as well as women.

  But the centrality of women’s issues to national and international concerns and debates, impossible to foresee in 1969, does not mean that the classic wrongs of women have been righted. Women are still handicapped and excluded in innumerable ways. True, their sorrows and social difficulties are not removed from the human condition—men, too, suffer from poverty, the psychological debilities of a multitude of prejudices, and many forms of political tyranny. Manhood can be more of a burden than a privilege in a world where traditional sources of male confidence and esteem in breadwinning
and communal authority are eroding. But while many of women’s difficulties are not entirely their own, the basic injustices done to them over the last two centuries persist.

  You, the reader, may be familiar with some of them. The psychology of gender: Men talk a lot—a lot! Women complain about it to one another, and they respond more often than not to the problem by cutting themselves off, compressing what they’re saying, minimizing its importance in order to squeeze into their allotted time. Sexuality: Women’s magazines offer endless articles on how to please men; men’s magazines dish up more fare on how women can please men. Virginia Woolf’s observation about this asymmetry still bears thought: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” The deference and erotic subservience that Wollstonecraft deplored is still with us, modernized into self-actualizing sexuality that still hinges on male approval.

  Labor discrimination: Outside the home, women are no longer boxed into a tiny number of occupations—the classic source of nineteenth-century discrimination. Now they are dispersed through more sectors of the labor force, but they are still underpaid. Men earn more money—much more, despite all the laws and policies and talk about fair pay; they still dominate public office and high-status employment. Household labor and child rearing: Women do more housework and take care of children more than their male partners do, even when they are also working outside the home. Go into supermarkets: They are full of women of all races and ethnicities. They are sitting in pediatricians’ and clinic offices; there they are out front of schools to pick up children, buzzing about the merits of teachers and trading playdates while the stray man shifts about uneasily on the sidelines.

  Marriage has been more amenable to change. Feminism has certainly helped make marriage something better than the prison for women that it was in the 1800s, in part by making nonpunitive divorce readily available. The women’s movement also helped foster the idea that marriage can provide psychological and sexual intimacy and a place to nourish the life aspirations of both spouses, a change in the psychology of the institution that has contributed to the appeal of gay marriage.

  At the same time, marriage still matters less to men than it does to women. Divorce is easily an economic and social calamity for women and children, while for men it is a financial boon (despite the stories about men depleted by alimony). In many ways, we live in a post-patriarchal society, where decreasing numbers of men worldwide live with women and children, because of divorce, desertion, and labor migration. Many men meet their obligations as fathers and partners from afar or not at all, while preserving traditional patriarchal privileges. For working-class women across the board, single motherhood is so common and divorce so frequent that marriage and stable longterm heterosexual companionship are rapidly becomes scarce goods.

  None of these divisions between the sexes are hard and fast. Other relations of subordination come into play. The male immigrant restaurant worker defers to the female manager; he most likely earns more, though, than the maid at a nearby hotel. And the less power a man has, the more his plight resembles a woman’s. Ill-paid janitors and busboys clean up after people, as women have been doing for centuries; downsized professional men find themselves taking part-time, uninsured, sporadic work to get by, joining educated women who have been doing this work for years. Yet women, taken together, still earn only about three-quarters of what men do. When you factor in part-time work, the proportion has hardly budged since the women’s movement publicized the figure of sixty-nine cents for every dollar in 1970.

  One has only to consider the prospects for American girls to see how much things have changed, and how much remains to be changed, and how ideals come up against ideologies that bear little relationship to social facts. For forty years, since Title IX began to enforce equal treatment in secondary schools, America has been turning out gifted girls—star athletes, student leaders, artists, writers, science whizzes. They are mostly the coddled daughters of the middle class, but immigrant and minority girls, too, slip through the barriers into the privileged world of the gifted and talented. Cheered on by parents, teachers, coaches, and demanding mothers, they go to college and do brilliantly. Routinely, they head off to graduate and professional schools and then to demanding positions in business, medicine, the law, and teaching.

  They do everything asked of them and more, but unaccountably, as they draw closer to the future for which they’ve long been preparing, a cloud gathers. By turn hectoring and anxious, a gloomy chorus of relatives, friends, and journalists, reinforced by the norms of popular culture, announces that success will deplete them of love and cheat them out of the families they want to have. As girls turn into women, they falter; they pull back; they take themselves out of the picture. Too often, no one steps in to stop them, because too many people believe this is true. New Womanhood collapses; a late-twentieth-century version of traditional womanhood steps in—baffled, beleaguered, and quietly conflicted.

  None of this is supposed to matter, because American women—once yearning, ambitious girls—now can supposedly choose, as adults, with their own free will to work for money or remain at home as full-time wives and mothers. Their choices are assumed to translate into blessed lives free of the threats of lost love, desertion, and divorce. Antifeminism at the turn of this century, like its earlier expressions, has enfolded gains that are here to stay (women’s education and contraception) into a neodomestic ideal that fundamentally opposes women’s desires to be fully in the world. The result is a mishmash of objections to equality that takes the guise of being pro-woman.

  Looking around the world, the American obsession with a single question—can women who work outside the home sustain a satisfying family life?—looks disturbingly static. Flurries of controversy recur in five-year cycles, kicked off when some new apostle of affluent neo-domesticity appears in the press (or on the Internet), briefly makes merry with lighthearted anecdotes about the romps and pratfalls of her charmingly wacky postmodern family, and slides into irrelevance. Feminists in so many places work in an entirely different theater of gender politics, where the fate of women rests on the fate of the autocratic, corrupt, and dysfunctional regimes that control them. The questions they face are among the most important ones in the world; the answers are by no means obvious. How to stop the plague of sexual violence and terror that afflicts central and east Africa? And how to halt the feminized epidemic of HIV/AIDS on the continent? In the Islamic world, feminists argue with one another and the public about religious piety and secularism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, modernity and tradition. Basic questions are up for grabs about interpretations of the Koran and Muhammad’s teachings on women’s rights and duties. These are not academic matters.

  Yet the situation is fluid. Who really ever cared before about girls’ schools except feminists and the students and their parents, but now in Afghanistan for instance, these schools start to appear as institutions worth fighting for; for their own sake, yes, but also for what their existence means to an entire people. Thus, fleetingly, questions about human liberty and prosperity are fused with the destiny of women in new and unprecedented ways.

  The copious feminist past, replete with achievements and fluent adaptations—as well as mistakes and second thoughts—has often dropped out of sight. Historical amnesia always has consequences, and feminism has suffered through compulsive repetitions of old mistakes, old arguments, old quandaries. Seldom has a new generation, however elated and inspired, set forth with a sense that the past was backing them up, that this time (to paraphrase Seamus Heaney) history and hope might rhyme.

  But this need not be. Certainly many of the paths modern feminism has traveled have trailed off. Yet other roads open, if we have the curiosity and conviction to follow them. I’ve written this book for the twenty-first century, that it may transport the riches and assurances of the past, along with its sobering lessons, to the women and men who
now take up the task of making good on feminism’s democratic promise.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I OWE a great deal to the advice, encyclopedic knowledge, and intellectual company of colleagues: Martha Nussbaum, Rosalind Petchesky, and Ann Snitow; Carla Hesse, Susan Pedersen, David Nirenberg, and Philip Nord; Dorothy Sue Cobble, Ellen Carol DuBois, and Dirk Hartog; and especially Nancy Cott and Susan Faludi. Stephanie McCurry has read and mulled over virtually every argument and interpretation of the book.

  Leon Wieseltier, my friend and editor of many years, gave me the idea for the book. To his devoted care and intellectual passion, I owe the chance to explore these issues first in the pages of The New Republic.

  The Radcliffe Institute gave me a year to write the book in the best of circumstances. A year’s stay in Cambridge also provided the peerless delight of working with the fine staff of the Schlesinger Library.

  Janette Gayle and Alix Lerner brought precision, creativity, and curiosity to difficult tasks along with mundane ones. Cary Franklin lent me her scrupulous and extensive understanding of legal history.

  I thank Sean Wilentz for his support, counsel, and abiding engagement with my ideas. James Wilentz embodies the feminist promise of a new generation every day. To my daughter, Hannah Wilentz, and the dear friends with whom I have shared so much happiness and so many satisfactions in life and work, I dedicate the book.

  NOTES

  SHORT BIOGRAPHIES of many individuals discussed in the book can be found in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James and Janet Wilson James (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) and the subsequent volume 4, The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (1980), and volume 5, Completing the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Ware (2004); and in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Bloomington, Ind., 1993).