No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

Feminism Without Freedom

Feminism Without Freedom movement and its new left progenitors, one of the charges that flew our way, along with "man-hater" and "lesbian," was "bourgeois individualist." Ever since, left criticism of the movement has focused on one or another version of the argument that feminism(at least in its present forms) is merely an extension of liberal individualism and that, largely for this reason, it is a movement of, by, and for white upper-middle-class career women. At first this attack was crude and frankly preventive, aimed at heading off the whole idea of feminism as serious radical politics before it got started. Later, as the power of that idea became ineluctable, as leftist women—even those who were hostile or ambivalent to begin with—began to take it for granted as a reference point, the argument was tempered and recast as dissent over the meaning of feminism and its proper direction. But the basic issue remains: whether the demands for independence, personal and sexualfreedom, the right to pursue happiness that have set the tone of feminism's second wave are the cutting edge of cultural revolution, or on the contrary, sociallyirresponsibleand irrelevant to most women's economic and familial concerns. That there are selfproclaimed feminists and leftists on both sides of this debate issymptomatic of a larger division—the split between cultural radicals and left cultural conservatives that has been widening for yearsand is now taking on the proportions of a major political realignment. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's presumptuously titled Feminism Without Illusions: A Critiqueof Individualism—haven't we had enough of intellectuals who imagine they have no illusions?—dives into these roiling waters.The author, who describesherself as "temperamentally and culturallyconservative" and committed to feminism "despitefirm uring the earliest skirmishes between the women's liberation D N O M O R E N I C E G I R L S I 5 Z opposition to some of its tendencies that I regard as irrational, irresponsible , and dangerous," rejects the liberal democratic proposition that individuals have inalienable natural rights and therefore the idea that women have an inherent right to self-determination. Insisting that the claims of society are prior to individual rights, and that all such rights are socially derived, she calls on the feminist movement to break with its individualist roots and find a rationale for women's rights in collectively determined values and interests. Nor, in Fox-Genovese's view, maythe collectivityin question be women as a group: for her the concept of sisterhood, whether defined as political solidarity in fighting male supremacyor ascommonality based on some version of "female values" (she makes no distinction between the two) is itself an extension of individualism that obscures differences of race and class while denying women's stake in a common human culture and the legitimate claimsof society as a whole. Feminism Without Illusions is not a systematic argument but a series of loosely related essays with considerable overlap, held together (often just barely) by a sensibility—characteristic of contemporary left conservatism—that merges two disparate strains of anti-individualist thought. One is a socialist materialismthat defines human rights primarily in terms of distributive justice, the other a communitarian, cryptoreligious moralism that laments the decline of traditional forms of social authority, especially the family. Neither philosophy has much use for individual freedom,which isseenmainly as a threat to the social fabric. Both endow human beings with an amoral, insatiablewill to power that must be subject to external controls . Both object to the capitalist marketplace on the grounds that it unleashes the individual and undermines social and moral order. Both evince a puritanical suspicion of pleasure, particularly sexuality, that powerful manifestation of the anarchic, imperial will. For the socialist in Fox-Genovese, individualism leadsto Hobbes's nightmare war of all against all; for the communitarian, to a disastrous denial of any concept, "however secularized," of original sin. Her contempt for liberty is straightforward: on pornography she declares, "I would ban the more extreme forms without a second thought, and with precious few worries about the public expressions of healthy sexuality that might be banned along with them"; she takes issue with Feminism WithoutFreedom 153 the Supreme Court decision defining flag-burning ("an affront to our collective identity") as free speech; she rejects the idea of an absolute right to abortion, arguing that the question of when life begins must be decided collectively, not left to...