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 The problem is really quite simple: the political process no longer represents the opinions and interests of ordinary people.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.

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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 economy with the expansion of personal freedom all; for the communitarian, to a disastrous denial of comes apart. It is not, for instance, inconsistent—as any concept, "however secularized," of original sin. Fox-Genovese would have it—for feminists to Her contempt for liberty is straightforward: on ground their defense of abortion in individual rights pornography she declares, "I would ban the more while rejecting economic individualism in support of extreme forms without a second thought, and with comparable worth; rather, it is contradictory for precious few worries about the public expressions of employers to invoke "individual rights" —their own healthy sexuality that might be banned along with or those of workers in "male" jobs—to justify the

FALL • 1991 • 591 Books economic and sexist domination involved in system- in relation to men and children. How are women's atically devaluing "women's work." To be consis- rights to "derive from a collectivity" when the very tently for freedom and against domination does not, definition of human society has been so closely as Fox-Genovese claims, destroy the distinction linked with the definition of women as a resource? between freedom and license. Rather, it means Fox-Genovese makes passing acknowledgment of making that distinction at the point where my this problem, but it doesn't deter her from exercise of freedom interferes with yours: the true advocating a society that defines the common good equivalent of unconstrained capitalism would be as "the good of the whole, with the whole unlimited freedom to impose one's will through understood to have an existence in some way violence. independent of, or logically anterior to, the individ- A genuinely radical libertarianism is not uncon- uals who compose it" and that functions as a cerned with community. On the contrary, it requires collective conscience. In practice that means a communities committed to negotiating social con- society based on the repressive, patriarchal norms of flicts and deciding on social priorities in ways that Judeo-Christian morality and enforced by traditional maximize freedom and minimize coercion, that institutions, or some form of authoritarian collectiv- allow people the widest possible latitude in meeting ism based on a secular ideology and enforced by the their perceived needs while still respecting the rights state, or a combination of the two. of others, including the others in their own The implications for feminism are perhaps most households. It also, of course, implies equality of evident in Fox-Genovese's discussion of abortion. power, including the power of dissident individuals She asserts: and groups to resist coercion by majorities. In short, such a community is democratic —which means that The vast majority of women who seek abortions it gets its validation and its aims, which are always are still in their teens, unmarried, and poor. They provisional, from the individuals who participate in have scant, if any, prospects of providing bare it, not vice versa. essentials for a child, and the attempt to do so almost invariably destroys their own prospects. . . . The hard truth is that our society is not prepared to provide adequately for children. . . . Critics of social-contract theory have justly argued The argument for abortion as a woman's individ- that social life is a given of human existence: each of ual right, by conflating pregnancy and child us is born embedded in and dependent on social rearing, confuses sexual and economic issues. . . . relations. Indeed, the very idea of rights implies a Pregnancy itself does not long interfere with a society that recognizes and supports them. Still, we woman's opportunities to live the life she chooses; experience ourselves, primally, as individuals with child rearing frequently does. A woman can, in urgent impulses and desires—in relation to others, to principle, afford to share her body—and even to be sure, but also apart from and in conflict with give up drugs, alcohol, and tobacco—for nine them; any parent can attest to how early babies begin months without serious consequences. . . . to struggle, poignantly, for autonomy. Nor is this struggle synonymous with a destructive will to This argument accepts the entrenched assumption power: on the contrary, in my view, it is the that a woman's reproductive capacity is not an cumulative suppression of basic human needs for aspect of her selfhood but a social resource; it freedom and pleasure that has given rise to the ignores the pervasive impact of that assumption on sadistic rage at the root of this century's barbarities, women's alienation from their bodies, their sexual- from Nazism and Stalinism to the anomic violence ity, and their sense of themselves as agents; and it of today's inner cities. For those of us who draw that trivializes women's experience of unwanted preg- lesson from history, the idea that human beings have nancy, which often includes intense feelings of inherent rights and freedoms transcending any given bodily and psychic violation as well as the form of social organization is indispensable. This knowledge that every pregnancy has potentially ought to be particularly obvious in the case of "serious consequences." For that matter, its econo- women, who have been to varying degrees subordi- mism ridiculously oversimplifies the issues involved nated in all known cultures, whose sexual and in child rearing. Melodrama aside (it is simply reproductive functions—intimate aspects of their untrue that the "vast majority" of women who seek being—have always been collectivized. While men abortions are in dire economic straits), Fox- of oppressed classes and races may at least have Genovese is clearly suggesting that a good enough their subjectivity recognized within their own welfare state could restrict abortion without violating groups, women are everywhere defined as existing women's rights. If this is the socialist talking, the

592 • DISSENT communitarian surfaces in her endorsement of a antifeminist fashion, she dismisses the very idea that collective definition of life, linked to fetal viability: women's "special oppression" derives from gender without such a definition, the right to abortion "can as an individualist "temptation," which functions to logically lead to the right to murder with impunity." shore up capitalism by denying class and race. She Which is to say that the moment women are sees feminist consciousness raising as a form of permitted to determine whether and on what terms middle-class therapy ("The rising self-awareness they will give birth, Sodom and Gomorrah will brought many to confront how much of the early ensue. anger, presumably related to the male oppressors, in Fox-Genovese also disapprovingly equates "wom- fact derived from childhood relations with moth- en's right to liberation from the reproductive ers"), political only insofar as it freed women "from consequences of their own sexuality" with "their the continual replay of familial psychodramas." (For right to the male model of individualism," suggest- the historical record, rising self-awareness brought at ing that the desire for sexual freedom is both morally least some of us to confront how much anger, dubious and intrinsically male. (To give her her due, presumably derived from our relations with our the desire to be out in the world on "honorary male" mothers, in fact related to our oppression by men.) terms did have a lot to do with the passion of young, As for actual feminist successes in opening up new childless feminists in the early legal abortion opportunities for women, Fox-Genovese argues that wars—myself included.) In general, one of her more it is mainly middle-class women who are able to take traditionalist objections to individualism is her fear advantage of them, while working-class and poor that it leaches out the concreteness of biological women have been hurt by the attendant loss of difference, defining women as either abstract, patriarchal protections, especially the male backlash genderless atoms or surrogate men. Yet at the same (my word, not hers) against supporting children. time she rejects sexual difference or female (One might ask when poor women, black women in commonality as a basis for feminist politics. particular, ever enjoyed any patriarchal protections, This is not as contradictory as it sounds. but never mind.) Fox-Genovese is positively Gothic in her rendition At the start of her concluding chapter, the author of "the inescapable conflict between men and women": "As social facts, male strength and female writes, "However much this book is intended as a reproductive power pit the sexes against each other feminist critique of individualism, it is bound to in a conflict rendered only more poignant by the strike some—and perhaps many—as a critique of attraction that locks mortal adversaries in each feminism." The implication is that those so struck other's embrace." It follows that since this conflict are stuffy party-liners; feminism is, after all, the cannot be transcended or resolved, either through most various and contentious of movements. But in androgyny or through an unthinkable separatism, truth, little remains of feminism of any stripe by the there is no point in politicizing it. time Fox-Genovese gets through divesting it of I share Fox-Genovese's lack of enthusiasm for "illusions." While I don't doubt that she believes notions of solidarity based on women's alleged women ought to get a better deal, she resists any special qualities or values, as well as her refusal to possible means of translating that sentiment into a dismiss the entire corpus of Western culture as political challenge to male power and privilege. In a monolithically male. (Ironically, this sort of cultural key passage in her introduction, Fox-Genovese nationalism offers the most plausible framework for makes the familiar economistic argument that a feminism that subordinates invididual rights to feminism is a "symptom" of other social changes, collective norms.) Her denial that women have a particularly women's increased participation in the common political interest is another matter. In labor force—an argument that denies or plays down arguing against the reductive conception of sister- the role of feminism, as movement or as impulse, in hood as a bond that transcends race, class, and promoting the changes in question. The implicit cultural differences, Fox-Genovese is merely echo- corollary is that women's equality will also come ing what has been feminist conventional wisdom for about as a symptom of economic change. Fox- a decade or more. No feminist on the left would Genovese never says outright that the woman deny that radical feminists' insistence on gender as question will be resolved not by feminism but by the primary political division led to a crippling socialism; such claims are out of fashion, and for inability to confront the differences among women; good reason. Yet it seems clear that this is what she nor that an effective feminist politics must take means—and that the diffuse quality of her book women's complex, multiple identities into account. comes, in part, from the strain of not saying it. But Fox-Genovese goes further: in classic left The other major subtext in Feminism Without

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Illusions is perhaps best expressed by the following subject, as his subtitle indicates, is "the cultural personal anecdote: criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford." The first three Early in our marriage we enjoyed playing gin wrote for Seven Arts; the last, a generation younger rummy, and, as it happened, I frequently won. but terribly precocious, read the magazine, espe- Now my husband enjoys winning as much as anyone I know. And one day, when I had not just cially Bourne, and formed himself as an intellectual won, but won big, he turned to me with a wicked in its image. gleam in his eye and said, "Yes, but you don't Mumford is no doubt the best remembered of the have a penis." We had a good laugh. group. The other three writers, well known in their time, have not worn well, save, perhaps, for Bourne Evidently Fox-Genovese means this story as an as a sort of cult figure of those who admire his ironic cautionary tale about the tension between antiwar essays and his articulation of a cosmopolitan equality and difference, the battle of the sexes, and American culture. A brilliant writer, Bourne was a the ways we do and don't transcend it. Myself, I leader of the young prewar intellectuals, but his can't help hearing in her husband's joke the career was prematurely cut off when he died in the intellectual's sublimated equivalent of the truck influenza epidemic of 1918. Van Wyck Brooks's driver's dick-waving in Thelma and Louise. And in career falls into two phases. Blake is interested in Fox-Genovese's appreciative laughter I hear the the first half, when Brooks was a powerful critic of voice of all social conservatives, saying, in one way the genteel tradition inherited by his generation. His or another, settle for sublimation, it's the best you America's Coming of Age (1915) as well as other can ever get. If the past decade's defeats tell us early essays carried the message, as Lionel Trilling anything, it's that no illusion feminism has perpe- put it, "that ideas should be related to the actual life ❑ trated is half so devastating as this one. of a people, that the national existence should be of a kind that permitted ideas to affect it." Waldo Frank is least well remembered, although he does Thomas Bender not deserve such obscurity. At its best his criticism A GROUP OF CRITICS (as in Our America [19191) matched that of the other three, though he could drift off into mysticism. Casey Blake is the first to treat these writers as a BELOVED COMMUNITY: THE CULTURAL CRITICISM group, and he has written sensitive biographical OF RANDOLPH BOURNE, VAN WYCK BROOKS, analyses and penetrating criticism. But his book is WALDO FRANK & LEWIS MUMFORD, by Casey more than a history of an important movement in Nelson Blake. University of North Carolina Press, American cultural criticism; it is itself a work of 1990. 365 +_ xvi pp. $34.95 hardcover; $12.95 cultural criticism. While not uncritical of Bourne, paper. Brooks, Frank, and Mumford, Blake identifies strongly with their cultural critique. Yet I am more impressed by Blake the historian than Blake the Though it lasted only sixteen months, the critic. magazine Seven Arts (1916-17) defined an important Blake offers a novel perspective on these critics. cultural moment in the United States. Distinctively Beginning with Christopher Lasch's The New American but cosmopolitan, modernist in commit- Radicalism in America (1965), historians have ment but democratic and constructive in spirit, Seven tended to be uncomfortable about the intensely Arts was, in the phrase of Henry May, the "pure personal roots of the cultural criticism of the distilled essence" of the bohemian intellectuals of intellectuals associated with Bourne. Even those the 1910s. Seven Arts is probably best remembered drawn to their work have treated the psychological as the magazine that published Randolph Bourne's needs that impelled these intellectuals as at least brilliant, stinging critique of John Dewey, his partially disabling. Blake boldly turns this supposed teacher. His attack on Dewey's "pragmatic" support liability into an asset. of American participation in World War I resulted in The preoccupation of these writers with "person- the withdrawal of the magazine's patron, thus ality" is presented by Blake as a strength. He insists ending its career. that we ought to take more seriously the construc- Although Beloved Community does not make the tive, even radical, possibilities inherent in the Seven Arts magazine its centerpiece, it could have, modernist shift toward heightened awareness of the for the book is about a mode of cultural criticism inner self. Historians have been inclined to interpret first given form in that magazine Casey Blake's the shift from the nineteenth-century concern for

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