Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (14 page)

Initially contemporary feminism placed emphasis on civil rights and material gains without giving enough attention to spiritualism. Mainstream mass media called attention to feminist critiques of religion but showed no interest in highlighting the spiritual awakening that occurred among diverse groups of feminist women. Masses of people still think that feminism is anti-religion. In actuality feminism has helped transform patriarchal religious thought so that more women can find a connection to the sacred and commit to spiritual life.

Often feminist spiritual practice found acknowledgment and acceptance in therapeutic settings where women were seeking to heal from wounds inflicted by patriarchal assaults, many of which took place within the family of origin or in relationships. And it was in the context of feminist therapy that many women received affirmation for their spiritual quest. The private nature of this soul searching often means that the public is not informed about the degree to which feminist activists now acknowledge fully the necessity of attending to needs of the spirit - of spiritual life. In future feminist movement we will need better strategies for sharing information about feminist spirituality.

Choosing alternative spiritual paths has helped many women sustain commitment to spiritual life even as they continue to challenge and interrogate patriarchal religion. The institutionalized patriarchal church or temple has been changed by feminist interventions. But in more recent years the church has begun to abandon strides made in the direction of gender equity. The rise in religious fundamentalism threatens progressive spirituality. Fundamentalism not only encourages folks to believe that inequality is “natural,” it perpetuates the notion that control of the female body is necessary. Hence its assault on reproductive rights. Concurrently religious fundamentalism imposes on females and males repressive notions of sexuality which validate sexual coercion in many different forms. Clearly, there is still a need for feminist activists to highlight organized religion, to engage in ongoing critique and resistance.

While a world of wonderful, feminist-affirming spiritual traditions abound now, masses of people have no access to knowledge about these practices. They often feel that patriarchal religion is the only place where anyone cares about their spiritual well-being. Patriarchal religion has successfully used mass media, particularly television, to spread its message. Alternative spiritual paths must do likewise if we are to counter the notion that patriarchal religion is the only path. Feminist spirituality created a space for everyone to interrogate outmoded belief systems and created new paths. Representing god in diverse ways, restoring our respect for the sacred feminine, it has helped us find ways to affirm and/ or reaffirm the importance of spiritual life. Identifying liberation from any form of domination and oppression as essentially a spiritual quest returns us to a spirituality which unites spiritual practice with our struggles for justice and liberation. A feminist vision of spiritual fulfillment is naturally the foundation of authentic spiritual life.

To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality. A primary strength of contemporary feminism has been the way it has changed shape and direction. Movements for social justice that hold on to outmoded ways of thinking and acting tend to fail. The roots of visionary feminism extend back to the early ‘60s. At the very start of the women’s liberation movement visionary thinkers were present dreaming about a radical! revolutionary political movement that would in its reformist stage grant women civil rights within the existing white supremacist capitalist patriarchal system while simultaneously working to undermine and overthrow that system. The dream was of replacing that culture of domination with a world of participatory economics grounded in communalism and social democracy, a world without discrimination based on race or gender, a world where recognition of mutuality and interdependency would be the dominant ethos, a global ecological vision of how the planet can survive and how everyone on it can have access to peace and well-being.

Radical! revolutionary feminist visions became clearer and more complex as the movement progressed. However they were often obscured by the absolutism of reformist feminists who really felt safer working for change solely within the existing social order. While some reformist feminist activists were really eager to change economic discrimination based on gender so that they could have equality with men of privileged classes, others just believed the movement would create more concrete relevant change in women’s lives if energy was focused in the direction of reform. However ultimately forsaking the radical heartbeat of feminist struggle simply made the movement more vulnerable to co-optation by mainstream capitalist patriarchy.

Seduced by class power and/ or greater class mobility once they made strides in the existing social order fewer women were interested in working to dismantle that system. On one hand while we are told again and again by individual feminist thinkers like Carol Gilligan and others that women are more caring, more ethical, the facts of how women conduct themselves in relation to less powerful women suggest otherwise. The ethics of care women show in the ethnic or racial groups with which they identify do not extend to those with whom they do not feel empathy, identification, or solidarity. Women of privilege (most of whom are white but not all) have rapidly invested in the sustained subordination of working-class and poor women.

A fundamental goal of visionary feminism was to create strategies to change the lot of all women and enhance their personal power. To do that, though, the movement needed to move way beyond equal rights agendas and start with basic issues like literacy campaigns that would embrace all women, but especially women of poorer groups. There is no feminist school, no feminist college. And there has been no sustained effort to create these institutions. Educated white women as the central beneficiaries of job and career-based affirmative action programs reaped benefits in the existing structures and were often not motivated to do the work of creating institutions based on feminist principles. These institutions could never pay high salaries. But even independently wealthy feminist activists have not used their money to fund educational programs that begin to work with women and girls who are disadvantaged when it comes to basic skills.

While visionary feminist thinkers have understood our need for a broad-based feminist movement, one that addresses the needs of girls and boys, women and men, across class, we have not produced a body of visionary feminist theory written in an accessible language or shared through oral communication. Today in academic circles much of the most celebrated feminist theory is written in a sophisticated jargon that only the well-educated can read. Most people in our society do not have a basic understanding of feminism; they cannot acquire that understanding from a wealth of diverse material, grade school-level primers, and so on, because this material does not exist. We must create it if we are to rebuild feminist movement that is truly for everyone.

Feminist advocates have not organized resources to ensure that we have television stations or consistent spots on any existing stations. There is no feminist news hour on any television or radio show. One of the difficulties we faced spreading the word about feminism is that anything having to do with the female gender is seen as covering feminist ground even if it does not contain a feminist perspective. We do have radio shows and a few television shows that highlight gender issues, but that it is not the same as highlighting feminism. Ironically one of the achievements of contemporary feminism is that everyone is more open to discussing gender and the concerns of women, but again, not necessarily from a feminist perspective. For example, feminist movement created the cultural revolution that made it possible for our society to face the problem of male violence against women and children.

Even though representations of domestic violence abound in mass media and discussions take place on every front, rarely does the public link ending male violence to ending male domination, to eradicating patriarchy. Most citizens of this nation still do not understand the link between male domination and male violence in the home. And that failure to understand is underscored as our nation is called upon to respond to violent murders of family members, friends, and schoolmates by young males of all classes. In mass media everyone raises the question of why this violence is taking place without linking it to patriarchal thinking.

Mass-based feminist education for critical consciousness is needed. Unfortunately class elitism has shaped the direction of feminist thought. Most feminist thinkers/theorists do their work in the elite setting of the university. For the most part we do not write children’s books, teach in grade schools, or sustain a powerful lobby which has a constructive impact on what is taught in the public school. I began to write books for children precisely because I wanted to be a part of a feminist movement making feminist thought available to everyone. Books on tape help extend the message to individuals of all ages who do not read or write.

A collective door-to-door effort to spread the message of feminism is needed for the movement to begin anew, to start again with the basic premise that feminist politics is necessarily radical. And since that which is radical is often pushed underground in our setting then we must do everything we can to bring feminism above ground to spread the word. Because feminism is a movement to end sexism and sexist domination and oppression, a struggle that includes efforts to end gender discrimination and create equality, it is fundamentally a radical movement.

Confusion about this inherent radicalism emerged as feminist activists moved away from challenging sexism in all its manifestations and focused solely on reforms. Advancing the notion that there can be many “feminisms” has served the conservative and liberal political interests of women seeking status and privileged class power who were among the first group to use the term “power feminists.” They also were the group that began to suggest that one could be feminist and be anti-abortion. This is another misguided notion. Granting women the civil right to have control over our bodies is a basic feminist principle. Whether an individual female should have an abortion is purely a matter of choice. It is not anti-feminist for us to choose not to have abortions. But it is a feminist principle that women should have the right to choose.Parasitic class relations and the greed for wealth and power have led women to betray the interests of poor and working-class women. Women who once espoused feminist thinking now support public policies that are anti-welfare. They see no contradiction in this stance. They simply give their “brand” of feminism its own name. The representation of feminism as a lifestyle or a commodity automatically obscures the importance of feminist politics. Today many women want civil rights without feminism. They want the system of patriarchy to remain intact in the private sphere even as they desire equality in the public sphere. But visionary feminist thinkers have understood from the movement’s inception that collusion with patriarchy, even patriarchal support of some aspects of feminist movement (i.e. the demand for women to work), will leave females vulnerable. We saw that rights gained without fundamental change in the systems that govern our lives could be easily taken away. And we are already seeing that happen in the arena of reproductive rights, particularly abortion. Giving civil rights within patriarchy has proved dangerous because it has led women to think that we are better off than we are, that the structures of domination are changing. In actuality those structures are re-entrenched as many women move away from feminism.

Extreme anti-feminist backlash has also undermined feminist movement. A significant part of the backlash is the bashing and trashing of feminism done by opportunistic, conservative women. For example: a recent book, What Our Mothers Did Not Tell Us: Wry Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittendon, tells women that we should all stay home and mother to produce healthy children, that we should acknowledge basic differences in male and female psyches and that above all it is feminism that is at fault. Critics of feminism blame the movement for all the dissatisfaction modern women face. They never talk about patriarchy, male domination, racism, or class exploitation. While the anti-feminist books tend to be written in an accessible language that appeals to a broad readership, there is no body of popular feminist theory that serves as a counter to their message.

When I talk with radical feminists, especially those of us who are now in mid-life, between the ages of 35 and 65, I hear wonderful testimony about the constructive impact of feminism. It is essential that we document this work so that it stands as testimony countering the popular assumption that all feminism did was make the lives of women harder. Indeed it has made life far more complicated for women to have feminist thought and practice yet still remain within a patriarchal system of thought and action that is basically unchanged.

Visionary feminists have always understood the necessity of converting men. We know all the women in the world could become feminists but if men remain sexist our lives would still be diminished. Gender warfare would still be a norm. Those feminist activists who refuse to accept men as comrades in struggle - who harbor irrational fears that if men benefit in any way from feminist politics women lose - have misguidedly helped the public view feminism with suspicion and disdain. And at times man-hating females would rather see feminism not progress than confront the issues they have with men. It is urgent that men take up the banner of feminism and challenge patriarchy. The safety and continuation of life on the planet requires feminist conversion of men.

Feminist movement is advanced whenever any male or female of any age works on behalf of ending sexism. That work does not necessarily require us to join organizations; we can work on behalf of feminism right where we are. We can begin to do the work on feminism at home, right where we live, educating ourselves and our loved ones. In the past feminist movement has not provided individual females and male enough blueprints for change. While feminist politics are grounded in a firm set of beliefs about our purpose and direction, our strategies for feminist change must be varied.