Professionalizing Feminism: What A Long, Strange Journey It Has Been
Each of us rose on the shoulders of women who had come before us. Move up, reach down: that was the motto of those worth knowing.
Anna Quindlen1
Since the nineteen-sixties the women's movement in the United States has sponsored two potentially divergent agendas: solidarity and professional success. These agendas do not necessarily conflict, although they do seem to work best in a particular sequence. When women emphasized solidarity first, they improved their economic and professional situation; when women emphasized professional ambition first, solidarity tended to go out the window at substantial cost to the women's movement. Now as then, solidarity is achievable through the development of newly respectful relationships among women. Now as then, professional ambition is not the place to start if you want to achieve that goal.
Professional ambition belonged to the part of the population that worked outside the home and that sought equality of opportunity and salary in the workplace. Perhaps it is up to professional academics like myself to say unequivocally that the greatest failure of the women's movement in the United States has been its betrayal of women who wanted to be housewives. Wanting a professional life was defined in the women's movement as an alternative to being a homemaker; social security for housewives was on the agenda only briefly. Even though it often was assumed that women would do both kinds of work, the new duality of waged and unwaged gave priority to paid work. There was no doubt on the part of many, if not most, housewives that they belonged to the downside of a negative definition and might even be slightly reactionary in their wish to stay home and raise families. The country has paid for that ever since and is paying for it today in blood, treasure, and constitutional crisis. There was a different way, a road not taken; the world has suffered from that choice, and for that choice we are responsible.
My experience of feminism has taken place in two very different contexts, one academic, one civic. I first came into contact with the women's [End Page 39] movement in Chicago during the late nineteen-sixties. One of the local leaders was Naomi Weisstein. I never met her and heard only one of her talks, but she continues to define for me the true feminist. She was smart, she was well educated, she had platinum credentials from institutions at the heart of academic prestige, she gave witty accounts of her encounters with misogynists, and she riveted attention unforgettably on the gestures and excuses used by academic patriarchs in posh places. But most of all, Weisstein understood the details of her experience as a feminist understands them: as symptomatic of an entire cultural matrix that defined the functions and possibilities of women, as grounds for uncompromising commitment to solidarity of women. By definition that solidarity included all women: not just this or that issue-group, demographic, or sexual preference, but all women from every issue group, every demographic, every sexual preference. In the same spirit, I unapologetically use the term "we" throughout this essay. Confronting and accommodating the differences among women, all women, remains the key to success in the women's movement, just as it has been key in the civil rights movement generally.
Naomi's talks were legendary, and she was much in demand as a speaker by all sorts of groups, from university women to the Rotary Club. But while her talks were popular for their entertaining exposé of misogyny, their main effect was to energize women. Feminism, especially its resistance to misogyny, wasn't just something to read about and contemplate in the abstract, it had a voice with timbre, a physical presence, a personal claim. It called for the exercise of your voice...
