In her second article addressing the absence of women at the
leading edge of cultural change, Elizabeth Debold calls for an
evolutionary elite to continue the work of women's
liberation.
“How odd it seems,” writes Naomi Wolf,
“that women, the majority of the human species, have not,
over the course of so many centuries, intervened successfully
once and for all on their own behalf.” Really odd, in
fact. Take the failed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as one small
example. This proposed amendment to the Constitution is a
straightforward guarantee that women and men will be treated
equally under the law. But women haven't posed enough of a
collective political threat to get it passed. When I was in my
mid-twenties, I was part of the efforts to rally support for the
ERA. With another young woman who became a close friend, I went
from house to house in a flat, featureless suburban neighborhood
of West Palm Beach, Florida, to speak with women about it. I'll
never forget the response of one woman, her Southern-tinged
twang edged with indignation: “I'm raising my son to be a
soldier and my daughter to be a lady.” This woman, whose
name I don't know and whose face I cannot recall, stood in her
driveway, chatting with a neighbor as her young son sped around
her on his orange plastic Big Wheel trike. We faced each other
briefly—me and my friend, this woman and
hers—wordlessly threatening each other with our different
assumptions about life. To me, she was one of the too many women
who were unaware of their own oppression and so were blocking
our collective progress, our ability to reach for success in the
world. To her, I may well have seemed irresponsible in
questioning what was natural between women and men, the security
that we find in traditional roles.
The potential of a “once and for all”
intervention such as Wolf is advocating, one that could actually
shift women's status across the board, is momentous. Even though
the women's movement itself has already created an enormous
transformation in Western culture, the notion that all women
will unite to make a further, irrevocable shift happen seems
far-fetched. Indeed, fundamental tensions within and among
women—like those felt on that suburban driveway in
Florida, between the drive for success and the pull to
security—make such a shift almost unimaginable. Now that
we have the freedom to choose our politics and passions, women
have spread across the political spectrum, developing positions
that either straddle or try to force together the often
contradictory aspects of our lives—our competing desires
for success in the world and for security in relationship.
Is there a way to move toward Wolf's “once and for
all” shift in women's status? Perhaps. But it is not going
to come from all women uniting in the shared pursuit of this
goal. The idea that there would ever be a monovocal movement
that includes every woman is absurd. Men don't speak with one
voice, and neither do women. The last phase of the women's
movement started with a radical fringe—leftist women in
the civil rights/Vietnam War era—whose efforts to raise
consciousness and demand equality between women and men sent
shock waves through the culture. Change, as evolutionary theory
tells us, never comes from the center, from the status quo, but
only from the edges. So an intervention that would shift the
whole will have to start, again, at the radical edge.
Transformation is an elitist process: not necessarily elitist in
terms of social or economic privilege (although that can help to
free one's energy for something more than mere survival) but
elitist in terms of urgency and perspective. For womankind to
move forward, for the possibility of an intervention “once
and for all” to become a reality, a significant minority
of women have to push the edge and develop a higher perspective
that meets the often conflicting demands of our chaotic world.
Where are the women who are willing to push this edge? Even
to recognize the need for an evolutionary elite goes completely
against the grain of egalitarian postmodern culture. The
liberation movements that ushered in postmodernism back in the
sixties—like feminism and civil rights—opened
Western culture to the value of diversity and difference and the
recognition of a plurality of views. Hence, postmodernism is
both radically egalitarian and individualistic. The notion of
universal truth—that there is one right way to
think—became outdated, which freed each of us to seek our
own truth. In this postmodern world of liberated individuals,
what feels right by me is my angle on truth, no better or worse
than yours. Of course, no one really believes this. We
each righteously hold on to “my truth” and look
askance at perspectives that are different from our own. In that
Florida driveway, I assumed that the other woman was expressing
false consciousness—a dupe of the oppressive forces in a
culture that wants to keep women sweeping the hearth. But her
consciousness was not “false.” It was based on a
different set of core assumptions. Her assumption that it is
right for men and women to have specific and different roles is
core to the modern worldview that has been ascendant in
Western culture since the late seventeenth century. I was
standing in her driveway to change that worldview—to bring
in a postmodern perspective that values a plurality of
options and choices. Today postmodernism is the dominant
perspective of the culturally liberal, educated class. But now,
for womankind to move forward, postmodernism is the edge that we
need to reach beyond.
In a world where we are exposed to so many different
perspectives, it is hard to distinguish where that postmodern
edge is. Each significant cultural shift of the last
millennium—from the traditional feudal societies to the
modern world of industrial capitalism and, most recently, to
egalitarian postmodernism—was triggered by a shift in the
consciousness of a relatively small number of people. Forty
years ago, the efforts of a very small minority of activists
started a larger movement that catapulted the culture from the
modern to the postmodern. While the resulting changes have had
some effect on everyone in Western society, there are still
large numbers of women who embody and express cultural
perspectives that predate the postmodern. Many, in fact, still
hold a traditional premodern religious worldview. And many more
hold the perspective of the modern world, a world divided by
gender, in which men occupy the public sphere of success and
women, the secure domestic sphere. However, the snug and secure
modern home was a microcosm of the feudal
system—that's the significance of the adage “a
man's home is his castle.” Thus, the leap that women made
over the span of a few decades through the feminist movement is
enormous: a jump from semi-feudal subservience in a man's castle
to self-determination in a diverse and globalizing postmodern
world. And frankly, not all of us—nor even most of
us—have fully made this leap, which makes finding the edge
from which to move forward even more difficult. Women of all
stripes are now offering profoundly different suggestions about
what should rightfully be our next step.
How do we recognize the real voices from the edge? I'll
offer one clue: those who argue that there is no longer any need
for an intervention “once and for all” are pretty
sure not to be expressing something new. Ironically, such voices
come from both ends of the existing political spectrum.
Conservative writer Kay S. Hymowitz declares that “we are
all feminists now,” citing a poll that shows that over
ninety percent of adolescent girls surveyed support equal rights
for women and almost as many don't believe that it's necessary
to have a man in order to be a success. But before victory is
declared, Hymowitz unequivocally states that the organized
movement of women called “Feminism” (with a capital
F) is dead: “It's over. As in finished.” Why?
Because she doesn't believe that most or even many women want
“to transcend both biology and ordinary bourgeois longings
[for material comfort and emotional security].” She
declares that “after the revolution, women want husbands
and children as much as they want anything in life.” This
is undoubtedly true—but Hymowitz uses the fact that the
majority of women want a family life to argue that there is no
further to go. While she acknowledges that it's inevitable that
there will continue to be “a deep tension between
. . . female ambition [and the desire for children] that
will spark many years of cultural debate,” Hymowitz
doesn't see any reason to question our cultural arrangements and
seems resigned to the fact that women will not reach parity with
men in worldly power. Because our fast-paced economy is rooted
in these gender divisions, it will always punish women who want
to divide their time between success at work and security at
home. As she puts it, “The very economy that stirs the
imaginations and ambitions of young people . . . is the same
economy that will never be particularly family-friendly and that
often leaves ambitious working mothers behind.” But if we
accept modernity's gender-based division of success and security
as a given, then Hymowitz is right: the majority of women will
end up choosing to have children and stay at home, if they can
afford to. However, using this fact to argue that nothing more
needs to change is misguided. If cultural transformation were
left up to the majority, very little would ever change.
The status quo will never fight for radical evolution—it
never has.