Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ora!daemon From: rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: How feminism has failed me Message-ID: <48573@bbn.COM> Date: 21 Nov 89 01:21:27 GMT References: <48390@bbn.COM> Sender: ambar@ora.ora.com Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA Lines: 64 Approved: ambar@ora.com I'm not at all sure that a man has any business responding to this very interesting article. But, I'll risk it. I really have thought about many of these issues, though of course from a different perspective. Feel free to post or send email (rshapiro@bbn.com) if you think it's inapproriate. In article <48390@bbn.COM> eboneste@BBN.COM (Liz Bonesteel) writes: >To me feminism means believing that a person's dreams and accomplishments >should not be restricted by their gender... >Our limitations should be just >that: *our* limitations, not the limitations other people have told >us we have. The problem is: how do you distinguish these two? I think it's a confusion between the two (and perhaps a bit of over-optimism) which is at the root of the failure you mention ("feminism, as practiced today, has failed me"). The crucial issue you focus on is having a family & children: > I want a >family more than I want a career. I'd rather not have to make a >choice; but if I do, it's already made. And you know what? I feel >*guilty* because of that. OK, consider for a moment the state of feminism. It's an in-progress revolution, not a finished one. All of us are, to one degree or another, in-progress people, part way between one gender system and another. The single most salient characteristic of this half-way state is the need to *relax*, to stop struggling against something as formidable as a gender system. And what does this need to stop struggling feel like? It can manifest itself precisely as if it were a personal choice. What I mean is, it doesn't feel any different from a personal decision because it *isn't* any different. The whole point of ideology (eg the gender ideology which makes women "family oriented") is that it works through individuals JUST AS IF we were making our own choices of our own free will, choices which "just happen" to be in conformity with that ideology. Thus the guilt. Something in you knows what's happening ("a voice starts whispering 'Traitor!'") and why. What happens when you give up your job to raise children? Are you married in the conventional way? Did you make that choice yourself? Since you're not working, do you wind up economically dependent on a wage-earning man? Since you're at home anyway, do you wind up doing the housework? Do you begin to defer to your husband on issues involving public (as opposed to private) life? You can make each of these choices, or seem to, and they can appear quite rational taken one at a time. And yet..what does it seem to be leading towards? Is it surprising you don't feel quite right about the whole thing? >By neglecting that which has always been traditionally feminine, we >are shooting ourselves in the foot. True but...at this point, there's nothing else to be done. It's like giving up an addiction. You have to give it up, completely; you can't hang on to it no matter how comforting it is, and no matter how beneficial it might be in another, very different context. If you do, you'll never really have made a choice at all. These are very hard and serious problems that strike at the core of why feminism is so hard to maintain. It isn't easy to live in a relentless state of struggle. I don't think feminism has failed you. It's just showed you that much remains to be done.