climbingtiger's Journal

Radical feminism: A call to action?
I am in the midst of reading bell hooks’ From Margin to Center. I am sorry I haven’t read it before now as she gives me great pause for thought. I am not finished with it yet (much to my dismay because, for some reason, it is very slow going), so I’m sure other things will come up for me but what her words are sparking for me now is the great avoidance and/or dismissal the feminist movement has given issues surrounding class, race and motherhood. I’ll get to all of this in a minute and I assure you there is a method to my madness.

I just perused the NOW website for fun, simply to see where liberal feminism stands and what issues they consider important. NOW’s “Top Priority Issues” are abortion, lesbian rights, violence against women, constitutional equality, economic justice and promoting diversity. I find this list illustrative of why so many women do not connect with NOW in any meaningful way. Economic Justice was simply about pay equity. Of course I support this but have to wonder why it’s considered a “top priority” issue when the majority of women work in the pink collar ghetto where pay equity isn’t on anyone’s radar. In other words, this is a class issue. In Promoting Diversity/Ending Racism, most of the action items have to do with Katrina and/or women of color conferences and get-togethers. There is so much more that could be done on this topic! Family– arguably the top topic that impacts the most women in this country – and Welfare are relegated to “Other Important Issues” status. The Family area is concentrating on family medical leave with one line from 2005 and then you have to go back to 2003 to even see something on it. Welfare is hardly better with 4 lines from 2004 where they advertise disseminating information about poverty. This is pathetic. You may wonder why I even brought NOW up on a radical feminist blog because they clearly do not and should not consider themselves radical. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I consider them somewhat irrelevant. Perhaps I am wrong (and really, I would love to be), but I do not see them having any influence or impact on policy, young feminists or the national conversation on women’s issues. But I bring them up because (a) Betty Friedan’s death has given them a lot of play; and (b) they are one of the few women’s groups out there who get any kind of coverage at all. And they all but ignore issues that go straight to the heart of most women’s lives.

If you want to really take a look at why radical feminism is necessary in this country (and the world but I will confine myself to the US for now), you have only to look at mothers and poor women who are, a lot of the time, the same group. Let me back up a moment and say that I am not an essentialist. From Anne Fausto-Sterling’s work and others, we know that gender is a continuum. There are people who are born with female genitalia, male genitalia, no genitalia, and people born with both forms. Sex is simply not binary and I think this fact is slowly infiltrating the public consciousness. Similarly, hormones are not static or evenly distributed so that some women have more “male” hormones than men and vice versa. Finally, exhaustive research on sex differences has found that there are more within sex differences (e.g., more differences among women as a group than between women and men) than between sex differences. People don’t want to admit this because it would have huge ramifications for society (for one thing, if there is no longer a binary classification of gender, then who you love becomes more a matter of personality than biology). For me, what this means is that so-called gender differences are because socialization makes it so. There can be no blanket statement that “women do this because they are biologically female” – it’s way too complicated for that.

However, when reproduction is thrown into the mix, it all changes. When you’re talking about women who mother, you’re a lot of the time talking about virtual second-class citizens. Pregnant women are infantilized and frequently are not allowed to control even the way they give birth. Mothers are considered unintelligent as a group, especially if they do not work for pay. Mothers who do work for pay frequently are discriminated against either through refusal to hire them, unreasonable demands of the workplace, low-paying positions with little chance of advancement, and the inability to find or pay for adequate childcare. Unless you’re well-off financially and/or have a job with benefits, adequate healthcare is a pipe dream. If their male partners leave them, mothers often find themselves living in poverty (2/3 of the people living below the poverty line – people who are basically living on no money at all – are women and children). And heaven help you if you qualify for and accept welfare because then you are just lazy and must be subject to the demands of the unkind state. A lot of mothers suffer from physical illness and emotional distress. In fact, married women with children are the group mostly likely to be depressed. How many women in this country are mothers? Yet the feminist movement (and yes, even sometimes radical feminists) acts like they are invisible. Poor women are also nowhere to be found and women of color often are left out as well.

While I believe that theory is necessary in order to crystallize beliefs, it can only take you so far. I will admit that I am impatient but the crux of the matter for me is action. I was listening to NPR’s oral history of Nelson Mandela today and was struck by some of their comments about how battling apartheid in the 1950s and 1960s was such an uphill struggle. Indeed, they didn’t succeed in ending it until some 30 years later. It all started with a solid plan to resist and raise awareness, a charismatic leader, hard work and much sacrifice. Listening to this very moving story I thought, “Damn! The feminist movement will never succeed in our goals because we don’t have this kind of commitment or, as of now, a charismatic leader.” Part of this is because feminist leaders had little experience in being leaders, in defining issues correctly (read: abortion), in having a bold, creative vision or in working out details of a plan, any plan. The best that liberal feminists could do was to try to be like men. Radical feminists are better in a lot of ways but don’t get the publicity or the inspiration that is necessary to catch on. I’m sorry, MacKinnon is brilliant and we need many more people just like her, but she is absolutely incomprehensible to some. I can understand her points but I am impatient; I want to know the bottom line. What is it we need to do? And here is where it gets tricky. If we ever want to see a post-patriarchy or even the path toward it, we have to involve men. There is just no other way around it. Bell hooks (see, I told you I would get back to her) recognizes this and even wrote a book about it (Feminism is for Everyone, a book I have yet to read). While some women can and do separate themselves from men, the majority cannot and probably do not wish to do so even if they could. Hooks makes the point that, especially for women of color and poor women, men are their partners in life’s struggles. They do not view them as the enemy. As long as any kind of feminist movement advocates or even hints at men being the enemy, it will not succeed. For example, I have a son and cannot even imagine myself in a struggle where he is excluded. I want him with me. The same can be said of my male partner. Does this mean that I don’t want or value women-only places? No. Does it mean that I am oblivious to the impact of male privilege? No. Does it mean that I don’t want to challenge men to refuse male privilege? No. If you turn this issue on its head, I don’t want my racial, class and sexual privilege to prevent me from struggling with others. I want people to help me change, so I, in turn, must try to help others. I think the bottom line is that feminists must figure out a way to include men in our struggle or nothing will ever change. And yes, I do believe that men are hurt by patriarchy, not as much as women, but it definitely hurts them. If we focus on a different distribution and enacting of power (as hooks suggests), then I think we really have something. So, the question then becomes: how do we do this? What is our first step?

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