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From: dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Dave Gross)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Western Feminism Sounds More Like Antifeminism
Message-ID: <26c9e7d6.6b7f@petunia.CalPoly.EDU>
Date: 18 Aug 90 15:23:13 GMT
Reply-To: dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Dave Gross)
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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.




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************************* dgross@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU *************************


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