Wimmin are from Mars,
                                        women are from Venus

  Though chauvinist men remain their common enemy, feminists have become fiercely divided between
                            old-style radicals and new-style pragmatists

   

   IN THE beginning, there was the "first wave", the feminists of the late 19th and early 20th
   centuries who fought for women's suffrage. Then there was the second wave, the feminists of
   the 1960s and 1970s who fought for equality before the law and equality of opportunity.

   These two waves destroyed, at least in the West, the old belief that women were unsuited to
   many activities performed outside the home. Not long ago, it was argued without embarrassment
   that if a man was paid more than a woman for doing the same job, it was because he had a
   family to support; that if a stewardess was fired at the age of 30, she shouldn't want to be
   flying anyway; and that women just weren't cut out to be cops or marathon runners.

   That these arguments have been resolved in women's favour is one of the biggest social changes
   of our times. In effect, the debate about whether women should have equal pay, opportunities
   and responsibilities is over in the West. The battle for Women's rights is won. In this sense,
   everybody is a feminist now.

   After that victory, however, things got complicated. In Britain and continental Europe cracks
   began to appear in the feminist movement. Scandinavian feminists argued about whether a quota
   for women in parliament was an innovation or an insult; in Britain, feminists had similar
   worries about women's-only book prizes. But it is in the United States, where feminists took
   their ideas to the most absurd limits, that the movement is most deeply divided. So this
   article will concentrate on the fierce, indeed bitchy, arguments in America about the future
   of feminism.

   The turning point in America was the defeat in 1982 of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would
   have made equality of the sexes a constitutional principle. The fight for the ERA had had the
   effect of keeping the women's movement together, and when it faltered, splits developed. At a
   conference on the politics of sexuality at Barnard College in New York a week before the ERA
   finally died, for instance, things turned ugly when feminists who saw heterosexuality as a
   form of collusion with the "patriarchy" (in this view, clitoral orgasm is the only authentic
   expression of "gynocentric sexuality") had a well-publicised fight with those who did not see
   orgasm as a political issue.

   It was the shape of things to come. In the 1980s feminism became preoccupied with "identity
   politics". This meant a woman identifying herself according to certain categories—straight,
   lesbian, sado-masochist, Marxist, disabled, fat, and so on—as if such labels were sufficient
   to define a person's identity, social role and rights. In a not untypical example of the
   genre, Gloria Anzaldua is described in a collection of essays as "a Chicana tejana
   dyke-feminist poet, fiction writer, teacher and culture theorist." Well, fine, but what is
   this supposed to tell us about Ms Anzaldua?

   

   Big difference

   

   The most intellectually audacious of the feminist "isms" is "difference feminism", which
   argues that women have a different, and better, way of thinking, acting and being than men.
   Difference feminists reckon that women are equal to men (thus the relative shortage of female
   physicists and auditors is held to be evidence of sexism) except when they are superior (thus
   the relative shortage of female muggers).

   Moreover, according to the difference feminists, men are much worse than is generally
   recognised. Rape, they say, is the central metaphor for male-female relations and men's
   relationship with society, while pornography is a social weapon to subordinate women. Such
   reasoning led the National Organisation for Women (NOW), America's largest women's group, to
   proclaim in 1992 that American society regarded sexual assault as a cultural norm. "Feminist
   consciousness is consciousness of victimisation," argued Sandra Bartky, an influential
   theorist.

   For difference feminists, the solution to women's inferior status is to reorder society away
   from patriarchy and towards "female values". These they define as co-operation, collegiality,
   intuition and niceness, as opposed to the "male values" of competition, hierarchy, rationality
   and violence. An unwittingly humorous account of the establishment of Rag, a feminist journal
   at Harvard, reported that the founders "proposed a method of consensus for decision-making and
   suggested that the positions of facilitator, time keeper and vibes watcher (whose job it was
   to monitor the tension in the room and notice if people were being silenced) should rotate on
   a voluntary basis." In a result that could surprise only an Ivy League-educated radical
   feminist, this proved an unworkable basis on which to run a publication. Rag was shortly to
   close.

   American women notched up many achievements in the 1980s. They stormed the professions,
   started businesses by the million, attended university in greater numbers than men, narrowed
   the earnings gap, and even got men to do the laundry once in a while. A reader would hardly
   know that from feminist literature, which came to be defined by its excesses. The movement's
   least appealing adherents grabbed the most attention, and the feminist
   establishment—institutions like the National Women's Studies Association, NOW, Ms magazine,
   the Fund for a Feminist Majority and various state-funded commissions—failed to restrain them.
   Supposedly serious feminists argued, to audiences which did not snigger, that Newton's
   "Principles of Mechanics" and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony were rape fantasies.

   As Feminism became associated with humourlessness and hairy legs, the term became a pejorative
   one. By the early 1990s only a third of college women called themselves feminists—and this at
   a time when there were more than 600 women's studies programmes on American campuses. While
   feminist scholars were producing strikingly creative work in history, medicine, Bible studies
   and other fields, many women's studies programmes were explicitly ideological and
   intellectually vapid.

   One syllabus explained a course in feminist theory this way: "We will begin with feminist
   challenges to the inadequacy of Eurocentric male epistemologies, analytic categories and the
   masculinist world views which have structured the public world ... We will initiate our
   inquiry by demystifying malestream (this is not a misspelling) 'theory', ‘reason', and
   'science’."

   

   The backlash against backlash

   

   Many feminists attributed the failure of so many women to embrace feminism to base ingratitude
   or to "backlash". This is the idea broached in 1991 by Susan Faludi, a favourite theorist of
   the feminist establishment, that a host of American industries, from lingerie-makers to
   television producers, were trying to undermine women's rights. Though the evidence for the
   backlash hypothesis is dubious—women, remember, had advanced on all fronts—the idea has become
   a shorthand way for the feminist establishment to dismiss criticism. Anyone who dares to
   challenge the reality of backlash is accused of participating in it.

   

         

   

   In fact, a real backlash is underway, not so much against Feminism as against its excesses.
   The challengers call themselves power feminists, equity feminists or liberal feminists. They
   are often young, sassy and successful. Ms Faludi dismissively calls them "pod feminists",
   suggesting that, like alien pods in a science-fiction film, they are evil invaders of the
   women's movement.

   The pod feminists are led by writers and academics like Karen Lehrman, Anne Roiphe, Wendy
   Kaminer, Naomi Wolf, Camille Paglia, Cathy Young, Danielle Crittenden, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,
   Katie Roiphe (daughter of Anne), Christine Hoff Sommers and Rene Denfeld—a roll call to raise
   hisses at any conference on gender. They don't agree on everything, of course, but they are
   fundamentally sympathetic to capitalism and American institutions. They believe in individual
   rights, personal responsibility and equality before the law. They think group rights are For
   wimps and that vaginal orgasms are okay. And they wonder, if men are the enemy, what does that
   make the women who love them?

   More specifically, the Independent Women's Forum in Washington, DC, a leading pod group,
   campaigns for allowing single-sex education in state schools (on the grounds that this is good
   for girls), flexible working hours for women, mandatory AIDS testing for pregnant women (which
   traditional Feminist groups oppose) and repeal of affirmative action preferences (on the
   grounds that women don't need them, thanks very much). That may not be as expansive an agenda
   as overthrowing the patriarchy and feminising the economy, but it is an agenda of sorts.

   Ms Faludi has attacked the pods for taking money from conservative foundations and for
   publishing in Commentary, the New Republic and other centre-right journals. The pods don't
   care. The fact is, they argue, the reigning women's organisations are so overwhelmingly
   left-wing that they have to be attacked from the right. In 1992, For example, the platform of
   the 21st Century Party, a women's party funded by NOW, called for gender and racial quotas in
   politics and business, pay schemes that reward the "intrinsic worth" of jobs, and nationally
   subsidised day care. Is it mandatory, the pods ask, for a woman who calls herself feminist to
   subscribe to these goals? Wouldn't the women's movement be strengthened if it didn't shut out
   the 37% of women who voted for the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole?

   In the past, the answer From the feminist establishment has been no. Gloria Steinem, Founder
   of Ms, once referred to Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a moderate conservative, as a
   "female impersonator". Women's studies departments tend to be Republican-free. This
   ideological intolerance, say the pods, is a large pan of the reason why many women who are
   sympathetic to feminism are nevertheless unwilling to describe themselves as feminists. The
   point of feminism, they argue, should not be to impose a set of policy preferences but to
   broaden the choices that women are able to make. Too bad if some of these choices—to read
   pornography, for example, or to enter the Miss America pageant—may not meet with NOW's
   approval.

   Unsurprisingly, the pods hate difference feminism. A feminism that believes in the moral
   superiority of women, they say, is just a post-modern way of dressing up distinctly
   old-fashioned stereotypes. Middle-class Victorians also believed women to be more nurturing
   and compassionate—and used this as a reason to keep the little woman at home. The following
   passage sounds a lot like a statement of difference Feminism; in fact, it is from a letter
   quoted in Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique', published in 1963, arguing that college
   women should be specifically educated to be housewives:

   

   It would seem that if women are to restore their self-respect, they must reverse the tactics
   of the older Feminism which indignantly denied inherent differences in the intellectual and
   emotional tendencies of men and women. Only by recognising and insisting upon the importance
   of such differences can women save themselves, in their own eyes, of conviction as inferiors.

   

   Finally, the pods take issue with what they see as the importance of victimhood in much
   feminist thinking. Emphasising victimisation, they say, makes women appear permanently
   inferior. For example, broadening the definition of date rape to include any sex act which the
   woman later regrets—a definition of which many feminists approve—means that the man becomes
   responsible for determining whether his lover means "no" even if she is apparently
   enthusiastic at the time. The implication is that women are not capable of making a sexual
   choice, communicating it and accepting the consequences—hardly an assertion of equality.

   In sum, the pod feminists have attacked many of the totems of orthodox feminism. This has
   angered Ms Steinem, Ms Faludi and others, but it has also provided a breath of fresh air to a
   movement that was choking on its smug certainties. The establishment feminists are stuck with
   an angry, state-driven, quota-ridden 1960s mind-set that is looking dowdy.

   At the moment, with its base in the universities and public administration, establishment
   feminism is still stronger. But the pods are winning the argument, and are having more Fun
   with it, too. Their pens positively drip bile as they ridicule those who, for example,
   consider hanging a Goya painting to be sexual harassment.

   But attacking such excesses is relatively easy. Do the pods have a philosophy which is
   gripping enough to revive the movement? They agree that women have problems—ranging from
   family-unfriendly workplaces and absent fathers to uncomfortable shoes and a peer review
   process in the sciences that may discriminate against them—but think that these are best
   addressed individually. There is no really big idea here, except to keep plugging away. Even
   as women go from strength to strength, the Feminist movement is still short of a new rallying
   cry; and for all their appeal to younger women, the pods are not the third wave of feminists.

   

   (The Economist, June 21, 1997)