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Chapter 1
THE FRUITS OF UNREASON
1 The undermined foundations
Some time ago, as the recent wave of feminism was rising to its full intensity, a group called the New York Radical Women put out a statement of principles, beginning like this:1
We take the woman's side in everything. We ask not if something is 'reformist,' 'radical,' 'revolutionary,' or 'moral.' We ask: is it good for women or bad for women?
At about the same time, and apparently not a thousand miles away, was produced another document, the Redstockings Manifesto, which contains a similar statement:2
In fighting for our liberation we will always take the side of women against their oppressors. We will not ask what is 'revolutionary' or 'reformist,' only what is good for women.
Now these are both formal statements of principle, presumably deliberated over and agreed on by the members of the groups concerned, and therefore the sort of document to which an outsider might reasonably turn for an indication of what was going on in feminism. Nevertheless, the thought that anyone might do this should be horrifying to any feminist who regards the movement as dedicated to achieving justice for women. This is because, taken as they stand, these statements imply that in their determination to advance the cause of women, the feminists who formulated them are prepared to throw all constraints of morality to the winds; that right or wrong, fair or unfair, they will pursue anything whatever which is to the benefit of women.
The basis of this accusation is not only the explicit statement that questions about what is moral are not to be raised. As well as that there is the resolution always to be on the side of women, with no apparent concern about whether the side of women in any particular case happens also to be the side of justice. And to reinforce the case still further, there is the fact that both documents state that the only questions to be asked are about what is, or is not, good for women. It is true that 'good' can be used to mean 'morally good', but it is quite impossible to interpret it that way in this context; to say that something is good for a group means only that it is to the group's advantage. Apparently, therefore, moral considerations have no weight at all with these two feminist groups.
This conclusion cannot be avoided by arguing that since women have been badly treated throughout history there is now a balance to be restored, and women will have to be given far more than equal shares with men if justice is to be done. That is no doubt true, but it does not affect the point. If women need more than men in order to achieve sexual justice, the principles of justice will themselves determine how much more they need. There is no point at which it is reasonable to forget about the principles and concentrate only on the advantage of the oppressed group. However badly it has been treated, it is always possible that if it thought of nothing but its own interests it might eventually get too much, and begin to treat its former oppressor unjustly.
Nevertheless, someone might reply, even though that may well be true as a matter of theory, it is quite irrelevant to practice. In day to day activities, where we have to make decisions in far too great a hurry to allow for elaborate computations of justice, we have to be guided by rules of thumb. And since it is most unlikely in practice that women could ever achieve more than was their due, we are justified in taking the advantage of women as our general guide to action.
That is a stronger argument, but it still does not work. Even if sexual oppression is the worst type of oppression (a question to be left open for the time being), and even if the most oppressed people in the world are women (which is probably true), sexual oppression is still not the only form of oppression, and women are not the only oppressed people. Many men are far more oppressed than many women, and any feminist who was determined to support women in all situations would certainly encounter some where her support of women against men would increase the level of injustice in the world. Even though we may often have to make very rough guesses about the fairest thing to do, and even though in doing so we may often justifiably favour women against men, we cannot make a general rule that we should always do so. Or at least, if such a rule is justified, it needs far more elaborate defence than it has ever been given, and the onus is on any feminist who thinks it ought to be defended to provide reasons.
No feminist whose concern for women stems from a concern for justice in general can ever legitimately allow her only interest to be the advantage of women. Does this mean, then, that the New York Radical Women, the Redstockings and others like them have to be regarded as pursuing a different sort of feminism, one whose motivation is not moral? That is certainly what the evidence so far seems to suggest, but the trouble with that conclusion is that it seems completely at odds with the tone of the rest of the two statements from which the quotations are taken; the parts not quoted here. They are full of anger about suffering and abuse, disregarded feelings and unfair privileges, and convey the fiercest possible moral indignation. Even in the passages quoted above, chosen for their explicit non-moral stance, there is some indication of this where the Redstockings write of the oppressors of women. 'Oppression' is not a morally neutral word. To claim that women are oppressed by men is not simply to say that men are in a position of advantage or power over women, but to imply that that power is unjustly held. But if all this is true, it looks as though it is after all a wish to see justice which motivates these feminists.
In other words, there is a contradiction. On the one hand there is the description of what is wrong with the position of women, written in terms of moral censure; on the other there is the statement of intended action, which seems to admit of no moral constraint at all. How can we explain this?
We could of course just conclude that some feminists, like many other people, were out for all they could get for their group, but also like other people found it convenient to give a moral gloss to their selfish intentions, and cast their intended victims in the role of villains. But although there may have been something of this in the background of the two feminist statements, it seems far more likely that what happened was something like this. These feminist groups really did start by wanting to achieve a just society, and having decided what a society of that sort would be like, looked at the position of women and saw that it was exceedingly unfair.3 The more they looked, the worse the situation turned out to be: much of what was wrong had been hidden or taken for granted, and far more would be needed to put things right than even well-intentioned people dreamed of. This led to a good deal of justifiable indignation. But where passions are high it is easy to lose a sense of proportion, and the feelings generated their own momentum and went too far. The perception that women were ill-treated came to fill the whole field of vision, until it seemed that nothing women could achieve could be more than they were in justice entitled to.
This conclusion, however, does not follow from the original ideas of a just society, and worse still, it is actually in conflict with them. No matter how oppressed women have been, to fight with nothing in view but the good of women is to fight for an unjust society, the opposite of the intention which generated the fervour in the first place.
Perhaps that artificially chronological account obscures the real criticism. The complaint being made is not that these feminists started out with one intention but somewhere during the course of their activity changed their minds, and started pursuing something else. People often change their minds during times of political activity, and a group of women who started out by worrying about injustice and women's oppression (as opposed to their simply not having everything their own way) might well decide after a while that morality did not amount to much and might as well be forgotten. That could be objected to, of course, but the objection would not be the logical one which is being made now. The point about these groups is that they have apparently not abandoned their original concern for justice. What they seem to have done is allow their perception of the extent of women's oppression to extend itself until the elimination of women's suffering has become the criterion for justice. But this cannot be done. No matter how great the suffering of an oppressed group, and no matter how much it will have to be given before justice is done, its advantage can never be the same thing as justice. To identify the two is to allow for the possibility of the oppressed group's being given too much, and to set out on a path which leads to injustice, injustice according to the very principles by which it was established that women were op-pressed in the first place.4 The heavenly city is being built with stones stolen from its own foundations.
It is no doubt true that since the original principles have never wholly been lost sight of, these feminist groups would probably not, when it came to the point, support any flagrant injustice to men. But it seems equally certain that in borderline cases, where there might be injustice but it was not obvious, a group whose principle of action was to support women would probably not look too hard to see whether men might be being treated unfairly. No group whose concern is for justice can reasonably be complacent about carelessly formulated principles which might lead away from fairness while appearing to support it.
2 The extent of the mistake
If we take it that the proper aim of feminism should be to establish a society in which there is sexual justice, it is obviously important that feminists should take care not to fall into moral confusion, and accidentally start on a course which could itself lead to injustice. However, important as that is, pointing it out was not the real purpose of the argument of the previous section. Its real importance was to illustrate a certain sort of mistake, which is just as serious for any feminist with no particular interest in morality as it is in the context of justice. Whatever your aims, it must go against your interests to act according to a hastily formulated maxim which is actually in conflict with those aims, and may lead by a different route to the position which you were trying to escape.
Here is another example of the same mistake, this time having nothing at all to do with morality. A feminist of my acquaintance said that the members of her group would not be interested in going to an evening class working on a non-polemical analysis of feminist issues. She said that they would have no interest in hearing evidence which might try to show that traditional ideas about women were right after all. People had for ages been producing spurious arguments to prove all kinds of absurdity about women, and there was no point whatever in listening to any more such nonsense.
Since evenings are scarce, nobody can be blamed for deciding there are better things to do than go to unappealing evening classes. However, if the remarks are taken to show attitudes to evidence, rather than timetables, they are serious. If feminists now have a better idea of what women are like than people used to have, that is only because some people eventually got round to looking at evidence about the nature of women, instead of being blinkered by prejudice and seeing only what happened to support what they wanted to believe. But now, it seems, some feminists may be falling into precisely the same mistake. Having used new evidence to revise the old ideas about women, and to put forward theories of their own which they find more attractive, they elevate them to too great a height, and presume them true. Having done that, they use their new theories to dismiss any further incoming evidence which conflicts with them.
But this way of going about things once again cuts the ground from under feminist feet. The whole point of challenging the traditional view of women was to prevent their being forced into uncongenial positions in society by people's wrong ideas about them. If feminists at any point start to presume their current theories in sociology, psychology or anything else can be taken as certainly true, when in fact there is always an overwhelming probability that the truth has not yet been reached, they are only heading for the same unhappy state of things by a different route. If we really want to make society as well suited to people's natures as possible, we cannot afford to ignore any evidence; not even when it is produced by the opposition.5
The mistake is of just the same structure as the one described in the previous section. There, feminists were in search of justice; here, they want to understand the nature of women, to make an attack on the superstitions which are used to justify forcing them into uncongenial social situations. There, the perception that women were unjustly treated slipped into the idea that the well-being of women was the criterion for justice; here, the recognition that the original theories were wrong has slipped into the conviction that the new ones are right. In both cases the hastily reached conclusion has outgrown its roots and taken on an independent existence, and has become a tool for undermining the very principles which were used to support the conclusion in the first place. An attack on injustice has turned unnoticed into a device for perpetrating injustice; a determination to find out the truth about women has become an obstacle in the way of the truth's being found.
These are not just isolated examples. It seems to be a common phenomenon in feminism (though of course not only in feminism) for enthusiasm to result in an idea's getting dangerously out of hand and working against its supporters. Another illustration of this is the idea some feminists have of trying to get away from what is male, on the grounds that what is male is oppressive to the female, or, more generally, just bad. Now of course feminists are on strong ground when they argue that much of what is and has been accepted by male-dominated societies is bad. However, it is disastrous to go from there to the idea that what we ought to be doing is setting out to eliminate all that is male and encourage all that is female, because, quite obviously, unless everything male is bad, eliminating the male is going to mean eliminating much that is good as well.
Nevertheless, some feminists do seem to slip into the idea that maleness can be used as a criterion for badness. One of the most amazing recent examples of this is an argument against cloning as a method of sexless reproduction. Some feminists suggested women might try reproduction by cloning as a way of getting rid of the male even in what seemed to be his one essential function, but others have raised an objection. To do this, they say, would be to make use of male science, and if women are tempted to do that they will escape one form of male domination only to put themselves under another.6 This must be one of the silliest feminist arguments in existence. I have nothing whatever to say in defence of cloning as a means of reproduction, since the present method seems a good deal better, but this reason for its rejection is appalling. If feminists are going to construct their brave new world for women on the principle of using only material untouched by male hands, they will have to abandon just about everything, all the good along with the bad. Once again, no matter how black they may think the male soul, and no matter how much they may think that the male is inimical to the female, they cannot use maleness as the criterion for badness: the conclusion that men left so much to be desired could have been reached only by having an independent criterion by which to assess their moral worth in the first place. To lose sight of that independent criterion is to risk, in their determination to root out whatever is male, returning to a bad state of things by a different way.7
Another example of the mistake is often connected with the idea of conditioning. Feminists quite rightly want women free, choosing for themselves what happens to them, but realize that as a result of the thoroughness of men's control over women, some women are not in a position to be able to choose effectively even when they seem entirely unconstrained. This may account for women's resistance to some feminist ideas. From there, however, it is all too easy to slide into the convenient idea that whenever women make choices which feminists think they ought not to make they must be conditioned, so giving feminists an excuse to discount those opinions. But if that happens there is obviously a risk of forcing women again, even though in a different direction from before, because the nature of someone's choice is not enough to show that it comes from conditioning. The attempt to free women turns into a different way of coercing them. (This is discussed more fully in Chapter 3.)
The examples go on and on. Feminists object legitimately to the tyranny of sexual roles, and complain if men and women are expected by virtue of their sex alone to do different sorts of work. But if, like some feminists, we go to the extent of presuming that we have not got rid of the tyranny until men and women are doing the same sorts of work, we risk a different problem: that of forcing them to do the same things even though they may possibly have inclinations (on average) to do different things. Or we complain about sexism, meaning that people count sex as relevant in contexts where it is not, and then slip into accusations of sexism whenever anyone has the temerity to suggest that there are any differences between the sexes. To do that is to say that sex should not count under circumstances where it is relevant, and that is a kind of sexism (making a special case of sex) in itself. Sometimes this self-defeating elevation of feminist insights into the standards by which everything else is to be tested even becomes quite formal. Irene Peslikis (one of the Redstockings) has a list of 'Resistances to Consciousness',8 ideas which might beguile feminists into questioning prevailing ideology and are therefore to be rejected outright, apparently even when it looks as though there may be good evidence for believing them. No reason is given for rejecting most of these things other than that their effects would be contrary to feminist conclusions. They are not shown to be false.
When feminist theory is presented in that sort of way there is a special danger, because it conveys the impression that anyone who is against the dogma is against feminism. B...
