Feminism without Contradictions

Even to suggest that feminism’s theoretical foundations need reworking might seem a tad risky. Well, gee, that’s tough. As I sometimes said when I taught Philosophic Foundations of Feminism: “If I wanna be pushed around, I don’t need other feminists. I can find a man to do it.” . . .


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Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. She is the author of Confessions of A Young Philosopher (forthcoming), which is a woman's "confession" in the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau. She writes a weekly online column, "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column" along with "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Podcast," where she explains why women's lives are highly interesting. Many of her articles are accessible at https://brooklyn-cuny.academia.edu/AbigailMartin. She edited The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes's Secret; Spinoza's Way by her father, the late Henry M. Rosenthal. She is married to Jerry L. Martin, also a philosopher. They live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She can be reached a dearabbiesilvousplait@gmail.com.We live under the sheltering umbrellas of our worldviews.  To the point where we would feel naked if we were caught in the street without them.

Transcript

Feminism without Contradictions


In “Thought Faces the Future,” my column of October 1, only one short paragraph was devoted to philosophic feminism. All I said was that, by continuing to define womanhood as completely “socially constructed,” current feminist theory has left real-life women defenseless against the claims of biological men to compete on equal terms in women’s sports and to intrude aggressively in other private arenas. By way of remedy, I recommended that current theorists of feminism go back to the drawing board.

One book I’m currently looking at, The End of Woman by Carrie Gress, seems to take this recommendation all the way back to the women’s movement’s 18th-century beginnings – finding merely that it started badly and continued worse. So far I’ve only glanced at it and can’t say it looks like a great book. But you don’t need a great book to set you thinking about ideas that have played a part in the culture of our time.

Even to suggest that feminism’s theoretical foundations need reworking might seem a tad risky. Well, gee, that’s tough. As I sometimes said when I taught Philosophic Foundations of Feminism: “If I wanna be pushed around, I don’t need other feminists. I can find a man to do it.” In other words, the liberation of women is not the exchange of one form of social control for another.

Anyway, a glance at Carrie Gress’s revisiting of the tangled, often romantically-deluded private lives of the earliest 18th– and 19th-century feminists set me to recalling some of the lives of leading 20th-century feminists whom I’ve known personally. What came to mind was something I seldom think about: how they treated themselves and how they treated each other.

Here’s what I recall about one of the iconic names (perforce anonymous in this retelling). In her naïve belief that no one who qualifies as Oppressed would oppress someone likewise Oppressed, she took a lover (or lovers, I don’t know the number) from a different Oppressed cohort and they beat her! Since she was neither poor, undereducated, nor socially desperate, she did not belong to the class of women who are often defenseless against male predators. What made her vulnerable was not her biological or social condition. It was her ideology!

* * *

Another woman I knew – had known since teenage – became rather eminent and influential in the second wave feminist movement. I’ll call her Julie, though that wasn’t her real name. I believe Julie did a power of good for women vulnerable to the one-size-fits-all contraceptive prescriptions of the day. In her pioneering work, it’s likely that she felt supported by her husband, a psychiatrist. Him I had known even longer – since childhood. He conducted his practice as a psychotherapist in a home office within their spacious, West Side apartment. Though the walls were thick, Julie had no trouble discerning the words of one patient, whose therapeutic hour was punctuated by piercing shrieks. And what, by the by, was this patient shrieking? 

“Kill Julie!”

Eventually, Julie was able to piece together these and other clues and file for divorce on the grounds of adultery. The psychiatrist husband claimed that it hadn’t been adultery because it wasn’t consummated. Not completely, anyway.

* * *

At a later point, at New York’s “Top of the Sixes” restaurant, Julie’s second (and subsequent) husband staged a gala celebration of his wife’s feminist life and career. At my table, the guest whose name plate was next to mine turned out to be Betty Friedan. Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, had played an important part in launching second wave feminism. She arrived so late that dinner dishes had been cleared away. But I, out of respect for this Founding Mother of the Movement, went into the kitchen and persuaded the staff to put together a belated dinner plate for her.

Setting the dinner before Friedan, I said to her – taking in the multiple tributes to Julie then being voiced round the room – “It’s truly ‘feminism without contradictions’!” As it happens, I was referencing the title of an article that I’d published some years before in The Monist, which is a well-regarded philosophical journal.

Friedan rejoined, “I bet you don’t even know what a contradiction is! You live your whole life in cliches!”

* * *

A few years down the road, the seemingly supportive second husband decided to divorce Julie. She confided to me that, during the months when he was making up his mind to leave her, Friedan had been her husband’s chief confidant.

* * *

The last time Julie and I had dinner, she told me that the latest feminist fashion statement was a skirt covered all over with safety pins. She asked me whether I was still looking for Mister Right.

I said I was, though (at that time) I hadn’t found him yet.

“If you find him,” Julie replied, “I’ll believe in God.”

* * *

I have lots more such stories. If I wanted to, I guess I could name names, put them all together in a book, and be a hero of the post-feminist movement, when and if there is one. But perhaps we can let these few stories stand in for the rest and just ask what I make of such encounters.

Normally, I try not to think about them. 

When I get together with women friends, one of the things we talk about is what makes us different – and our destinies different – from the men we know. We don’t happen to talk about how horrible men are – except where some particular man really is horrible. In such cases, we don’t talk as if it’s his biological sex that made him so bad. Nor do we talk as if women – as if sisterhood – is an ever-trustworthy ally in the struggles we may have as women, even if these are typically feminine struggles – not struggles that men are ever likely to face.

Yet, although novels and memoirs may shed light on the topics we raise, no theory of feminism that I can think of gets referenced in these confidential conversations. This was not the case in discussions that took place between women during feminism’s earlier decades. But it is so now.

Because I loved my mother, I have a sympathy for other women and for myself as a woman. But, if there’s any book on the right way to shape one’s life as a woman, on the perils, the predicaments, the eyes on the prize, so far as I know –

the true book

has yet to be written.