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Where Are the Women?


Toward a New Women's Liberation
by Elizabeth Debold
 

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.



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This article is from
Our Immortality Issue

 

September–November 2005