Feminist Theory Today

An Introduction to Second-Wave Feminism

Judith Evans, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN:
  9780803984790
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473946088
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This stimulating text presents a concise and accessible introduction to feminist theory today. Covering all the major variants of feminist political thought, it offers a unique examination of the archive of modern feminist theory from the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963 to current postmodernist and legal feminist texts. It provides both an intellectual history and a political critique of contemporary feminism in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Judith Evans focuses on the divergence within, as well as between, feminist schools, and on protests from women marginalized by `the movement? - including those who are lesbian and those who are black.

Feminist Theory Today contends that the early feminist demand for radical equality has gone, contributing to its drastic undertheorization. While brilliantly reconceptualizing this concept, the author documents the changes in socialist feminism from its revolutionary origins to its current focus on modifying liberal democratic forms.

1

Introduction

In 1972 the United Nations declared 1975 to be the … International Year of the Woman. Among the world’s women … reaction was not all good. Was this … an admission that everything else was the Year of the Man?¹

Through the centuries, women have endured the Year of the Man. Ever, some have rebelled. If feminism is a protest against women’s oppression, there is no confining its story, by country, culture, or time. We know of the suffragists who campaigned for the franchise. Do we remember Emily Davison, who died in its cause? Do we recall those arrested time after time, brutally force-fed, that we might vote?²

It may be, we do. Do we know of the Indian women who have for decades fled patriarchal laws and led gangs of bandits; famous among them, released in 1993, Phoolan Devi, the ‘Bandit Queen’?³ Or the Chinese women who fought in rebel armies; and to the end of the nineteenth century, fleeing foot-binding and other cruelties, formed roving bandit gangs? Though few could escape, so strongly were they held in submission, except by death at their own hand.⁴ The women of Muslim Central Asia, forced to give birth in squalor, subjected to innumerable other cruelties, spied for the Bolshevik invaders of the 1920s, to gain a better world. And their reward? The defeated men joined the Bolsheviks: women were subjugated once more.⁵

This book is born of a different and mainly later history, much of which is nonetheless unknown, or partly hidden, now. It is not only the story of the unhappy housewives of the best-known early books, like The Feminine Mystique and The Captive Wife.⁶ It also tells of those who fought for socialism in the 1960s Left in the US, Germany, and the UK; women who denounced their male comrades for preaching liberation for all the peoples of the world: all except women. This is a story far milder than those above. But there are analogies, for, as Robin Morgan said, a woman of the New Left ‘could be declared uptight or a poor sport if she didn’t want to be raped’, while a leading black militant announced that ‘the only position for women in [the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee] is prone’.⁷ And the story, once more, tells of promises broken, a contract unfulfilled.

My book is not a biography of these women, or a political or social history of feminism’s Second Wave, which they began. Rather I address Second-Wave theory, which is not, early writings apart, necessarily the ‘movement’ voice. For feminist theory has become an enterprise all of its own. There is a gulf between activism and the academic writing that emerged; a gulf that has widened with time.⁸ The reasons for and consequences of this are not my topic here.

The writing I address ranges from 1963 to 1994; beginning with the publication of The Feminine Mystique, and covering Second-Wave feminism’s first thirty or so years. I do not attempt to discuss it all; that is impossible, given the amount and range of feminist thinking now. Nor is there a generally accepted – and certainly no ideal – way of deciding what authors and texts to include, and how they should be grouped. So I have had to make difficult choices.

I chose writings in two ways. First, I decided to study ‘schools’ like liberal feminism and within them, to focus on significant texts. This raises the question, which ones? I do not want to suggest I tried to include all the major works, or even the most important writers. I do not even want to say I chose the writings most representative of a given school, though of course I would have liked to do that. Formidable problems of definition and classification ruled it out. Second, I chose, when reading these texts, to concentrate on two concepts which have been central to feminism more or less throughout: the concepts of equality and difference. These have of course normally been taken to mean sex equality and difference. But they are more widely employed than that, and will be used more broadly here.

I suggest that there is a tension between these concepts that runs through the schools, and exists within individual thinkers, too. Though I do not expect to show this in every case. It may not be the same tension, given that the concepts are used in various ways, and have given rise to more than one dispute.

In the remainder of this chapter I introduce the meanings of difference encompassed here: between the sexes; between groups of women; between individuals and ‘within woman’. I then explain in more detail how and why I have structured the book by ‘schools’ of feminist thought, and the problems that can result. I note that various of the writings are neither conventionally ‘theoretical’ nor specifically concerned with the debates, so I have had to tease their views of equality and difference out. Finally I address the problem of language within feminist writing, of for example the over-inclusive ‘we’ that overrides the differences feminist writing seeks to grasp; and how I have tried to cope with that.

I begin by outlining aspects of feminism’s ‘equality–difference’ debate, which concerns equality of, and differences between, women and men.

The equality and difference debate

feminism means that we seek for women the same opportunities and privileges the society gives to men, or … that we assert the distinctive value of womanhood against patriarchal denigration. While these positions need not be mutually exclusive, there is a strong tendency … to make them so. Either we want to be like men or we don’t.⁹ [italics mine]

The sex equality–difference controversy is key to my book. It is what these concepts tend to evoke, that is, when feminist thinkers hear the terms together, they normally think of that debate. I outline it briefly, here.

In its most basic form, the argument concerns women’s similarity to or dissimilarity from men. That, though, is not its starting point; that is, it is not its primary motivation to find out what sex differences, beyond the most basically biological, there are, and how they are caused. Rather, in its origins at least, it concerns the quest for equality of the sexes – equality of rights and of opportunities, and more radically, of condition.

Equality and difference are counterposed here because of the view that women can only be equal if they are the same as men, though clearly, ‘same’ is not ‘identical’ and means, say, alike. Hence the stress on, for example, IQ test and examination results, and on finding non-biological reasons for any differences that emerge. Though as time has gone by, as the debate has become formalized and cast as a dispute among feminists, as well as between them and their opponents, matters have become more complex.

Feminists are so used to the debate that, disagree violently over the issues though they do, they may not see the immediate problem it poses for newcomers to the field. That is the problem of its name. Those new to feminist thought might well think that ‘equality–inequality’ would be the more appropriate opposing terms. However these would be misleading, initially at least, as they could be taken to imply first that we know what equality means, and second that there are ‘inequality feminists’ who favour a situation in which women are regarded as men’s inferiors, or held subordinate to them.

‘Sameness–difference’, which some feminists employ, might be a better axis, even though there is no doubt that equality is in some way involved in the debate. For ‘sameness’ feminists undoubtedly seek equality with men:¹⁰ they ask to be treated as men are, and justify this on the grounds of sameness, though ‘likeness’ might be a better term. So they ask, for example, for equal entitlement to consideration for jobs. To a suggestion of sex differences which ruled that out, they would reply that there are none, or rather that they are small in number and size, trivial in type, and irrelevant to the equality of women and men.

I continue the ‘sameness–difference’ discussion as if the two formed an axis, and equality was placed with sameness as though they were automatically linked. However, before moving to difference, I note that we might want to ask whether equality does necessitate sameness. For there are some who would say not. We might then want to see ‘equality’, ‘sameness’, and ‘difference’ as forming not a continuum, but, three corners of a triangle. Then the notion of ‘equality in difference’ enters in. (This is the idea that we merit equal though not identical treatment; equal in the sense of ‘equally good, and more appropriate to us’.) Though so does ‘equality through difference’, as opposed to ‘equality through sameness’:¹¹ my ‘sameness’ category above.

These ideas have implications for what we think equality is. One is this: to treat people equally, it is not necessary to treat them in exactly the same way. To treat people as equals may require that they not be treated the same way. This is a difficult point, and I delay discussion of it until later in the book. I shall first deal with what might be called more basic views of equality, beginning, in detail, in Chapter 2.

The equality–difference debate generally implicates ‘sameness’ feminists in a male world. A strict equality feminist would not wish to change that world; and for her, ‘as good as men’ means ‘the same’. Her harsher detractors – ‘strong difference’ feminists – would tend to regard this as bad in itself, believing men’s qualities whether innate or not to be a force for ill, and a ‘man-made world’ to be inimical to more than female advance. (Of course, there are various positions between these extremes.) I want to consider a point made by such detractors here, though it is mainly relevant to Chapter 10.

‘Sameness’ is shorthand for women’s sameness, for purposes relevant to women’s advance, with men; as opposed to men’s sameness to women. This point may sound odd. Are not these identical? Certainly ‘sameness’ feminists would think so. But their view is thought by others to leave them open to attack.

What have ‘sameness equality’ feminists failed to see? Why is asking whether men are the same as women different from asking whether women are the same as men? Difference feminists would say this: to compare women with men, to be concerned with the way women differ from men, is to write not only difference, but inferiority, or at best, deviation from a social standard, into the question itself. So whatever the answer, its implications – that women are the ones who are different, deviant, even abnormal – are decided in advance. And the notion, if not indeed the fact, that men are the standard, that ‘man’ indicates and defines ‘human’, is entrenched.

Such feminists would add that society is ordered according to what men need, or are thought to need, and that this is seen as the normal and rational state of affairs. To order society so as to cater for women’s needs, too, requires ‘special arrangements’. This is because those who see the current position as natural think providing for men is catering for people; providing for women is adding something else. To exaggerate their view somewhat: men simply ask for their rights, women for affirmative or compensatory action. Women are given to ‘special pleading’. That is how feminist demands for fair and indeed equal treatment are seen. Or so one type of ‘difference feminist’ indictment runs.

I am not going to take a stand here on these ideas. I shall however quote a feminist lawyer who rejects equality and difference, as the terms are used now; Catharine Mackinnon:

Men’s … needs define auto and health insurance coverage … their perspectives and concerns define quality in scholarship, their experience and obsessions define merit … their image defines god, and their genitals define sex. For each of their differences from women, what amounts to an affirmative action plan is in effect, otherwise known as the structure and values of American society.¹²

The ‘values of … society’, she and others say, are geared to men. To grasp this view is to see how great the stakes in the argument are. Even within the ‘equality–difference’ or ‘sameness–difference’ debate – as opposed to the broader question of how these concepts are employed by feminists, and their general consequences for feminist thought – massive implications lie. Here is a discussion that latently, anyway, goes far further than the extraordinarily difficult task of achieving parity of the sexes in society now; or even gaining it by revolutionary means by which the general oppressions perpetrated by our system are overthrown.

For here we move towards a declaration that our entire value system is male. And we will see in Chapter 10 an argument – whose premises are not the same – that the very terms of the debate are, too. Clearly at some stage along the way to the wholesale rejecti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Equality and Difference in Feminist Thought
• 3 Early Liberalism: Feminism’s First Equality
• 4 Essential Tensions? Liberal Feminism’s Second Stage
• 5 Radical Equality: the Early Fire
• 6 Cultural Feminism: Feminism’s First Difference
• 7 Woman’s Kindness: Cultural Feminism’s Second Face
• 8 Socialist Feminism: from Androgyny to Gynocentrism, Equality to Difference
• 9 The Postmodernist Challenge
• 10 The Legal Challenge
• 11 Conclusion and Afterthoughts
• Select Bibliography
• Index