dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Dave Gross) (08/18/90)
Western Feminism Sounds More Like Antifeminsim by Cathy Young Washington Post, 20 May 1990 [presumably reprinted without permission... --CLT] Feminism, at its cutting edge, has taken a remarkable turn: It is becoming barely distinguishable from antifeminism. Imagine the hue and cry if, for example, William F. Buckley or Allan Bloom were to say that women writers should not busy themselves with great truths but only with the little things women do. It's all right, though, for Prof. Lynda Bundtzen, chair of women's studies at Williams College, to state at a recent symposium that "the canonization of unique genius" denotes a male bias, and that the inclusion of women authors would add to the canon "a discordant woman's voice saying `I'm not creating this poem for eternity, I don't want to celebrate transcendent truth, I want to celebrate the little things in women's lives ... the small nurturing things that women do." The main thesis of the feminist gospel of the `80s, "In a Different Voice," by Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, is that the sexes have different moral sensibilities. Men, who define selfhood as autonomy, place a high premium on rights, justice and principle, while women define the self through connection to others and value relationships, communication and caring. Feminists once accused psychologists of stereotyping women as dependent and self-effacing; Gilligan criticizes them for not incorporating these stereotypes into theories of moral development and taking the male model as the human norm. At least Gilligan grants equal validity to the "male" and "female" visions and believes that a fully developed human being should combine elements of both. Other feminist writers -- Marilyn French, Anne Wilson Schaef, Dale Spender -- are unequivocally hostile to "male values." Men, they preach, are driven by destructive impulses: to invent and change things, to subdue nature, to transcend the body. Women, on the other hand, are one with the organic wholeness of the universe. The old maxim that women are incapable of abstract thought is gleefully resurrected: Abstract thought is what enables men to invent weapons of mass destruction; women could never be that detatched from Life. (Never mind that there were women scientists involved in research that led to the creation of the nuclear bomb.) At its extreme, the "new" feminist ideology can be summed up as follows: Women think with their wombs and all other organs except brains; reason and logic are male attitudes. True, few people read this stuff, but it has consequences nevertheless: it degrades intellectual discourse at one level, and gradually trickles down into the mainstream at another. Environmentalist and peace groups, for example, begin to speak of Woman, the bearer and keeper of life, and Man, the destroyer, alienated from Nature. Women rulers, we are told, will dismantle nuclear missiles and feed the poor. The question for now is not whether government by Earth Mothers would be a good thing. The "women's agenda" is really little more than a particularly gooey variety of socialism, hardly a female invention. In real life, women in power have never been much different from men, it's just that there have been fewer of them. Feminists are putting themselves in the unenviable position of having to argue that a Margaret thatcher, who clearly does not fit their mold, is not a real woman, just as, in th 1950s, ambitious women were not "real women." Part of my discomfort with the current direction of feminism admittedly stems from the fact that I subscribe to such "male values" as individualism, reason, the quest for great truths, the spirit of excellence and discovery. Of course people. male and female, have every right to challenge and reject all or some of these ideals, as plenty of male thinkers -- Rousseau, Wordsworth, Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence -- have done. But there is no evidence that philosophy is -- or should become -- a matter of gender. Was Rachel Carson, the founding mother of American environmentalism, moved by a "female" vision of harmony with nature and reverence for life? In fact, she drew much of her inspiration from Albert Schweitzer, clearly one of _them_. And did Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the 19th-century champion of women's rights, buy into a male ethic when she wrote that the basis of feminism was "the Protestant idea of the individuality of the human soul"? It is also useful to remember that the supposedly female vision of universal interdependence has been the dominant ethos in most non-Western societies -- where the status of women has been anything but high. (A writer in Working Woman magazine once claimed that women executives might be uniquely receptive to the more intuitive, interpersonal Japanese management approach -- fully oblivious to the irony of characterizing an extremely male-dominated business culture as more "feminine.") Originally, feminism meant that we were all human beings first, men and women second. To the extent that this original meaning survives, it causes contradictions and occasional absurdities. The thorniest contradiction of all: If our brave new feminists hold "female values" so dear, they should deplore the effects of the women's movement, which has lured so many women away from small, nurturing things and into the hard-driving competitive male world, even into such big, un-nurturing things as science, engineering and the military. As for occasional absurdities: A "Gender in Art" exhibit was held in New York last August, where the label with the artist's name on each work was covered with a flap -- which the viewer was supposed to life after making a guess about the painter's or sculptor's gender. The whole point, ostensibly, was that there is no male or female way to paint and scuplt. Right? The show's organizer, Roy Moyer, has been quoted as saying that the art world excludes women by emphasizing "masculine values -- `bold,' `dynamic,' `forceful,' etc. This really eliminates the female standards." At least we can see that not all males are guilty of the sin of logic. -- ************************* dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU ************************* ******************************************************************************
marla@lucerne.Eng.Sun.COM (Marla Parker) (08/21/90)
In article <26c9e7d6.6b7f@petunia.CalPoly.EDU> dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Dave Gross) writes: >Western Feminism Sounds More Like Antifeminsim >by Cathy Young >Washington Post, 20 May 1990 I enjoyed this posting VERY MUCH! Thanks for typing it in. > Originally, feminism meant that we were all human beings >first, men and women second. It would be interesting to know when exactly "Originally" was. The only thing that is clear to me about feminism is that what it "means" evolves and changes over time. For instance, Lucretia Mott is sort of the grandmother of the women's rights movement in the US, yet when Elizabeth Cady Stanton at first proposed they include the right to vote on the Declaration of Sentiments she was shocked and said, "Thee will make fools of us!" She did come around on this point, though, and in any case, she was unquestionably an active feminist (one of her half-dozen successful careers...). To me, every "feminist" group that promotes separatism and claims "differences" between the sexes, actually deficiences in the opposite sex, is a sort of living oxymoron. Saying things like men reason and women nurture but nurturing is Superior, so There! is almost too absurd to take seriously. Because we are still discriminated against, subtly in some places and horribly in others, the thought that we are actually superior after all is very seductive. But it really is silly. The quoted statement above, that we are all human beings first, men and women second, is as important, absurd, and essential to civil liberties as the statement that "all men are created equally". Anyone can see that all men are most certainly NOT created equally, yet it is necessary to treat them all as if they are in fact equal because we are incapable of divinely judging the "worth" of one man vs. another, and because it would be morally reprehensible to even try. We are not in fact all equal, but we should guarantee an equal chance, i.e. equal rights, to all. (Now if only our white, slave-holding, male founding fathers could have said "All people are created equal"....but they did pretty well for their time.) -- Marla Parker (415) 336-2538 marla@eng.sun.com
falk@Sun.COM (Ed Falk) (08/22/90)
In article <141003@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> marla@lucerne.Eng.Sun.COM (Marla Parker) writes: > >The quoted statement above, that we are all human beings first, men >and women second, is as important, absurd, and essential to civil >liberties as the statement that "all men are created equally". Anyone >can see that all men are most certainly NOT created equally, yet >it is necessary to treat them all as if they are in fact equal because >we are incapable of divinely judging the "worth" of one man vs. another, >and because it would be morally reprehensible to even try. We are >not in fact all equal, but we should guarantee an equal chance, i.e. >equal rights, to all. I read an interesting variant on that statement once: "All people are created differently. It is the duty of society to make sure everybody has an equal chance to rise or sink to their own level" (or something along those lines.) -ed falk, sun microsystems -- sun!falk, falk@sun.com "What are politicians going to tell people when the Constitution is gone and we still have a drug problem?" -- William Simpson, A.C.L.U.