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Books Ellen Willis FEMINISM WITHOUT FREEDOM Books contain more common sense than the rigid ideolo- limit the scope of the market and the power of gies that dominate public debate. They are often corporations without replacing them with a central- ambivalent but not necessarily contradictory or ized state bureaucracy. incoherent. Unfortunately, they find no expression in An abandonment of the old ideologies will not national politics, and it is for this reason, according usher in a golden age of agreement. If we can to Dionne, that Americans take so little interest in surmount the false polarizations now generated by politics. The explanations of political apathy and the politics of gender and race, we may find that the stalemate offered by other commentators empha- real divisions are still those of class. "Back to size procedural considerations—sound bites, cam- basics" could mean a return to class warfare, or at paign finance, the overwhelming advantages of least to a politics in which class became the overriding issue. Much will depend on whether men incumbency in congressional elections. Dionne's and women of good will shrink from this prospect, emphasis on substance is a tremendous improve- as they usually have in the past. ❑ ment. The problem is really quite simple: the political process no longer represents the opinions and interests of ordinary people. The solution, of course, is not simple at all. Ellen Willis Dionne probably underestimates the difficulties of FEMINISM WITHOUT FREEDOM finding an approach to family issues that is "both pro-family and pro-feminist." It is an admirable goal; but keeping the schools open all day—one of FEMINISM WITHOUT ILLUSIONS, by Elizabeth Fox- his suggestions—is not much of an answer. What is Genovese. University of North Carolina Press, needed is a restructuring of the workplace designed 1991. 348 pp. $24.95. to make work schedules far more flexible, career patterns less rigid and predictable, and criteria for advancement less destructive to family and commu- During the earliest skirmishes between the wom- nity obligations. Such reforms imply interference en's liberation movement and its New Left progeni- with the market and a redefinition of success, neither tors, one of the charges that flew our way, along of which will be achieved without a great deal of with "man-hater" and "lesbian," was "bourgeois controversy. individualist." Ever since, left criticism of the The problems confronting American society (or movement has focused on one or another version of any other advanced industrial society) can't be the argument that feminism (at least in its present understood simply by taking account of "what forms) is merely an extension of liberal individual- Americans believe," though that is certainly a step ism and that, largely for this reason, it is a in the right direction. Polls reveal "far more room movement of, by, and for white upper–middle-class for agreement" than we might think, as Dionne career women. At first this attack was crude and argues, but they hardly add up to a public frankly preventive, aimed at heading off the whole philosophy. As Dionne himself admits, the country's idea of feminism as serious radical politics before it ambivalence often shades into schizophrenia. Amer- got started. Later, as the power of that idea became icans have a "split personality, which by turns ineluctable, as leftist women—even those who were emphasize individual liberty and the importance of hostile or ambivalent to begin with—began to take it community." for granted as a reference point, the argument was These are by no means completely irreconcilable tempered and recast as dissent over the meaning of values, but neither can they be neatly balanced feminism and its proper direction. But the basic simply by splitting the difference. As a guide to issue remains: whether the demands for indepen- sound political practice, schizophrenia is not much dence, personal and sexual freedom, the right to better than ideological paranoia. A "coherent notion pursue happiness that have set the tone of femi- of the common good" —Dionne's concluding plea— nism's second wave are the cutting edge of cultural will still have to rest on difficult choices, even if revolution, or on the contrary socially irresponsible they are not the choices dictated by worn-out and irrelevant to most women's economic and ideologies. A public philosophy for the twenty-first familial concerns. That there are self-proclaimed century will have to give more weight to the feminists and leftists on both sides of this debate is community than to the right of private decision. It symptomatic of a larger division—the split between will have to emphasize responsibilities rather than cultural radicals and left cultural conservatives that rights. It will have to find a better expression of the has been widening for years and is now taking on the community than the welfare state. It will have to proportions of a major political realignment. 590 • DISSENT Books Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's presumptuously titled them"; she takes issue with the Supreme Court book (haven't we had enough of intellectuals who decision defining flag-burning ("an affront to our imagine they have no illusions?) dives into these collective identity") as free speech; she rejects the roiling waters. The author, who describes herself as idea of an absolute right to abortion, arguing that the "temperamentally and culturally conservative" and question of when life begins must be decided committed to feminism "despite firm opposition to collectively, not left to "individual conscience or some of its tendencies that I regard as irrational, convenience." irresponsible, and dangerous," rejects the liberal democratic proposition that individuals have inalien- able natural rights and therefore the idea that women Despite certain convergences between this brand have an inherent right to self-determination. Insist- of illiberalism and that of the anti-pornography ing that the claims of society are prior to individual movement, the project of assimilating it to feminism rights, and that all such rights are socially derived, is, to say the least, a challenge. Feminism is indeed, she calls on the feminist movement to break with its as Fox-Genovese puts it (with a disconcerting air of individualist roots and find a rationale for women's floating a daring new idea), "the daughter of rights in collectively determined values and inter- individualism" —not only because of its origins in ests. Nor, in Fox-Genovese's view, may the the demand that the ideals of the enlightenment collectivity in question be women as a group: for her apply to female as well as male individuals, but the concept of sisterhood, whether defined as because the market opened up alternatives to political solidarity in fighting male supremacy or as women's absolute economic dependence on the commonality based on some version of "female family. Furthermore, Fox-Genovese and I agree, values" (she makes no distinction between the two) contemporary feminism has uncovered the pro- is itself an extension of individualism that obscures foundly radical implications of the idea that differences of race and class while denying women's individual rights are innate. stake in a common human culture and the legitimate We differ, however, on what this means and how claims of society as a whole. to evaluate it. For Fox-Genovese, the depredations Feminism Without Illusions is not a systematic of individualism have been limited by restrictions on argument but a series of loosely related essays with who counts as an individual, and the claims of the considerable overlap, held together (often just dispossessed, women especially, are now demolish- barely) by a sensibility—characteristic of contempo- ing those saving limits. As I see it, the problem with rary left conservatism—that merges two disparate liberal individualism in capitalist societies is not its strains of anti-individualist thought. One is a liberating tendencies but its coexistence with, and socialist materialism that defines human rights masking of, systemic domination. Liberal social- primarily in terms of distributive justice, the other a contract theory assumes—can make sense only by communitarian, cryptoreligious moralism that la- assuming—an adult, putatively genderless but im- ments the decline of traditional forms of social plicitly male citizen engaging in a public political authority, especially the family. Neither philosophy and economic life, which in turn means taking for has much use for individual freedom, which is seen granted an apolitical sexual and domestic realm in mainly as a threat to the social fabric. Both endow which patriarchal relations are unquestioned. Capi- human beings with an amoral, insatiable will to talist ideology defines the economic rights of the power that must be subject to external controls. Both individual not simply as freedom to produce and object to the capitalist marketplace on the grounds exchange goods and services or to benefit from the that it unleashes the individual and undermines fruits of one's labor but as freedom for some social and moral order. Both evince a puritanical individuals to monopolize economic resources and suspicion of pleasure, particularly sexuality, that thereby control the lives of others. powerful manifestation of the anarchic, imperial From this perspective, the left-conservative (and will. For the socialist in Fox-Genovese, individual- right-libertarian) conflation of an unbridled market ism leads to Hobbes's nightmare war of all against
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