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"Choice Feminism"

June 20, 2006

Since Friday I've been what the astrologers call "void-of-course": in between jobs. This is a propitious time for reconciling three months' worth of bank statements, straightening out an invoice snafu, imposing order on my living quarters, practicing the guitar more than usual, going to Jemima's gig Friday night, etc. It would be a good time for paying bills, but the checking account is barely in triple digits until the checks start rolling in for jobs completed in late May and early June.

This morning I spent several hours reading and posting to an e-list I'm on. Here I'm maybe supposed to say "Mea culpa" because I wasn't reading the book I've been assigned to review or doing any "real writing." "Mea culpa" ain't in me: it was too exhilarating. It was "real writing": reading, assimilating, synthesizing, shaping my responses in words. This particular e-list, which is devoted to feminist fantasy/science fiction (f/sf), has been pretty moribund in recent years: it's become a repository for "writing wanted" and "job opening" announcements, varied infrequently with potentially interesting discussions that peter out quickly. So the sparks were encouraging, and blowing on them a bit was a pleasure. (It remains to be seen whether these now glowing embers will generate much heat, light, and even illumination.)

My only regret was all this list reading and writing didn't leave much time to blog, but aha! I thought: there must be a blog in here somewhere! I was right. Here it is.

The topic is liberal feminism, or "choice feminism" as it's widely known these days. The springboard was Linda Hirshman's essay in this past Sunday's Washington Post, "Unleashing the Wrath of Stay-at-Home Moms," which explores the explosive response to another essay that was published last fall in The American Prospect, called "Homeward Bound." I downloaded it when it was posted on AlterNet, where you can still find it: it's been retitled "America's Stay-at-Home Feminists." (The Post story is worth reading, but "America's Stay-at-Home Feminists" is the more important piece.)

In the Washington Post article, Hirshman surveys the reaction to "America's Stay-at-Home Feminists" and zeroes in "the relativists, who criticized me for trying to give feminism some context and boundaries. My favorite was the woman who dissed me for defining feminism and then said, 'Supporting other women's choices is the very essence of feminism, at least as I define it.'"

In recent years I've been trying to understand the whys and wherefores of why feminism's vibrant "second wave," of which I was a part, has fallen so far short of its promise. Reaganomics, the religious right, and the "me generation" are part of the explanation, but to blame it all on external forces is too easy. For two decades I blamed it all on the "sex wars," which were fought mostly between the born-again heiresses of the sexual revolution (liberation through s/m, liberation through butch/femme, etc., etc.) and those who thought pornography was the root of all evil. It was an epic illustration of Yeats's "Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all convictions, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity.

Blaming it on the self-styled sex radicals and the anti-pornographers was too easy. What can I say? I was furious. I was part of the center that couldn't hold -- the center of grass-roots feminism, that is; not the center where Hillary and Bill Clinton peddle their wares -- and I left. Physically I left; literarily I remained involved, but from a distance that was intellectual and emotional as well as physical. One way or another, a lot of us left.

The important question is "Why couldn't the center hold?" No answers yet, but something's definitely coalescing about the idea of "choice feminism," or liberal feminism, which is what Linda Hirshman is critiquing in her essays. Once upon a time this was one thread among several feminisms (radical feminism, socialist feminism, lesbian feminism, etc.). It's won out in the mainstream media for reasons that aren't hard to see: it's within the bounds of comfortable liberal discourse, and it doesn't ask messy questions about the political and economic power structure. "Be all you can be; you can be anything you want, you can fuck anything you want in any way you want," etc., etc., etc.

If "choice feminism" is going to work for anyone, it's women with considerable privilege (and women who are willing and able to pass in privileged circles). The reason Hirshman's article is so important for feminists is that she's arguing that even for these privileged women choice feminism isn't working. It's not working because the power structure hasn't changed, and -- especially -- because, as she puts it, "the real glass ceiling is at home."

On my e-list one woman accused Hirshman of being elitist. Hirshman's "elitist" for critiquing "choice feminism"? It's actually choice feminism that's elitist. There are only so many openings in "the master's house" (image courtesy of Audre Lorde) and admission is not unconditional. Why are those who critique choice feminism accused of being elitist? I'm being disingenuous here: I know bloody well it's because this tactic works wonderfully. It lets the privileged off the hook and makes the questioners look like intolerant zealots.

So why do I think liberal -- "choice" -- feminism is so inadequate? In no particular order:

Options (the things we get to choose among) do not come out of nowhere. A woman's options are influenced by her class, race, upbringing, ethnicity, nationality, money, age, physical appearance, health, and many other factors. The buffet table may indeed be laden with goodies, but a few women get first choice, a few more get the leftovers, and many, many, many aren't even allowed into the room. Who gets in and who doesn't is a political issue, an economic issue, and a feminist issue.

Some choices are mutually exclusive or mutually incompatible. Choices made by a few individual women may limit the options available to other women, or to women as a class. Fine for those lucky women, but feminism isn't just about, or for, lucky women. Quite the contrary.

All choices are not created equal. Some choices are better than others. Really. Some choices are big honking mistakes and some of them are just plain bad news. Women can choose to join the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi Party or the PTL Club; they can choose to condone or commit torture at Abu Ghraib; they can blockade clinics where abortions are performed, they can aid and abet the bombing of such clinics, they can even plant the bomb themselves; they can be suicide bombers. I want to know more about why women do these things -- I will listen to what they say and what they write -- but no, I do not support their choices.

So "Brava!" to Linda Hirshman for trying to give feminism "some context and some boundaries." Interestingly enough, a process that begins with imposing boundaries leads toward a feminism whose territory is unbounded. It includes all the women who don't have the options enjoyed by a handful of privileged women in a handful of privileged countries.

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