The Undivided Past (27 page)

The women’s movement not only was influential in the United States and Europe, but was also increasingly
international in scope, reaching out to women in the
Third World. In recognition of these developments, the
United Nations designated 1975 to be “International Women’s Year,” and in June a two-week conference was convened in
Mexico City, attended by delegates from 133 countries, including
Betty Friedan,
Germaine Greer,
Princess Ashraf Pahlavi of Iran, and
Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka,
the world’s first female prime minister. There were also informal sessions, involving some six thousand women, mostly from North and South America, who discussed such practical issues as health, nutrition, and
education; and they agreed on an action plan for a UN Decade of Women, with conferences in Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Beijing (1995). This sequence of meetings helped to spread information, raise consciousness, and establish international women’s networks; they also placed “women’s issues” on the map and encouraged Western governments and philanthropists to support women’s organizations concerned with Third World development.
¹⁰⁴
The result was the creation of “a cosmopolitan body of women whose loyalties to sex transcended their national identities,” and this unprecedented sense of a global women’s identity was celebrated by
Robin Morgan, who, a decade and a half after declaring that sisterhood was powerful, proclaimed in 1984 that it was also global. Thus were the women of the world exhorted to unite in “a consolidated feminist network on the cross-national front.”
¹⁰⁵

As a result of these developments, many women in many parts of the world are better educated, are more in control of their own bodies and lives, are enjoying more fulfilling sex, are freer from the threat of male violence, are economically more independent, and are occupying positions of greater power in both the private and public sectors than ever before. Even if women will always be
biologically different from men, the cultural constructions of gender hierarchy have been significantly dismantled in many countries, where women are no longer now regarded as the “
second sex.”
¹⁰⁶
Part cause, part consequence of these developments has been the burgeoning study of the
history of women and of the history of gender, which has been one of the most marked phenomena in academe during the last fifty years. These histories have (among other things) recovered from oblivion the lives of the “other” half of the human population that hitherto were largely unknown, and they have explored how notions of femininity and masculinity were constructed. In so doing, they have helped to consolidate women’s sense of collective identity and to strengthen feminist campaigning agendas. These changes have been so significant that Robin Morgan has recently concluded
that sisterhood is not only powerful and global, but is “for ever,” that “feminism is the politics of the twenty first century,” and that “new world women have just begun.”
¹⁰⁷

Yet despite these undoubted successes, second-wave feminism has been riven and divided from the outset. Many women writers who have become canonical feminist authorities did not think much of the mass of ordinary women whose lot they nevertheless claimed they wanted to improve. This had earlier been true of
Mary Wollstonecraft, and it was also true of
Simone de Beauvoir and
Betty Friedan: they held themselves apart from the female commonality about whom they presumed to write, and they often portrayed women as unsympathetically as men frequently did, both in terms of their unappealing anatomical attributes and their weaknesses of intellect and character.
¹⁰⁸
The same held good for some exceptionally successful female professionals and politicians, such as the American historian
Lucy Salmon, who recognized the disabilities under which women labored in her profession, but insisted that these “must be removed … by women individually rather than collectively,” and
Margaret Thatcher, who was not a feminist and did not think of people in collective categories, least of all women.
¹⁰⁹
And most of the early feminist leaders were relatively well-off,
college-educated, and
middle-class, and their writings on women reflected these limitations of experience, empathy, and imagination. Betty Friedan’s world of frustrated and alienated housewives was confined to the affluent suburbs of greater New York; Germaine Greer later admitted that “
The Female Eunuch
does not deal with poor women (for when I wrote it I did not know them) but with the women of the rich world”; and
Maureen Dowd’s recent book is confined to the men and women who inhabit the rarefied political cum journalistic world of Washington, D.C.
¹¹⁰

As this suggests, the claim of some feminists to be speaking on behalf of all women, and to be mobilizing the newly self-aware sisterhood into a state of shared collective
consciousness, has not been valid even in the West, where no more than a tiny percentage of women were ever enrolled in feminist
organizations at their peak of membership during the 1970s and 1980s.
¹¹¹
Most active feminists were in their twenties and thirties, and their agendas
and priorities reflected their youth: they showed little interest in the particular concerns and preoccupations of their middle-aged and elderly sisters. They also tended to be secular
liberals or
radical campaigners, to whom the politics of right-wing parties and the
patriarchal
Catholic Church were alike anathema; but ever since women had been enfranchised, many had voted conservatively, attended church regularly as devout Catholics, and were in favor of “family values” and opposed abortion.
¹¹²
Even among well-educated, middle-class Western women, then, there were many who felt no solidarity with the younger and more radical members of the women’s movement, while most
black and
working-class women, whose main concerns were with keeping body and soul together, were largely indifferent to the actions and aspirations of what they saw as a self-indulgent and privileged group pursuing an essentially self-interested agenda, occasionally acknowledging in a lofty manner those less fortunate than themselves. All of this helps explain why black feminists like
bell hooks have accused white, well-educated, middle-class Western activists of being both condescending and racist.
¹¹³

Meanwhile, second-wave feminists in the West fell out among themselves over how to campaign for the
equal treatment of women in work and society: should the appeal be based on the argument that women were essentially the same as men, or essentially different from men? In the latter case, compensating accommodation in the private sphere would be needed to make justice in the public sphere possible.
¹¹⁴
In the United States,
Betty Friedan and the members of the
National
Organization for Women were “genteel” liberal reformers, whose approach was integrationist and egalitarian: they wanted to campaign with the support of men (despite its acronym, NOW was by choice and design an organization
for
women, in which men were welcome, not
of
women, which would have kept them out), so that both sexes could enjoy equal rights in public life in the name of their common humanity. But to Friedan’s dismay, they soon found themselves outflanked by younger radical activists, who were inspired by the “ungenteel” writings of
Germaine Greer, and more concerned with the special issues of women’s bodies and
sexuality (“the personal is the political”); they saw men as the problem rather than as the solution,
and inclined toward separatism rather than egalitarianism, demanding dedicated female institutions to avoid co-optation into the patriarchal order. Still more radical were those lesbian feminists whom Friedan scornfully dismissed as “man-haters,” and who preferred to collaborate with homosexual men in pursuit of gay rights rather than with their heterosexual sisters in pursuit of women’s rights. These cracks and fissures first appeared among American feminists, but they later opened up among European feminists too.
¹¹⁵

Such have been the limitations of appeal, the deep divisions, and the competing agendas of women’s movements in the West since their emergence in the early 1970s, and once sisterhood aspired and began to go global, these cracks and fissures became more pronounced. It was at the
United Nations conference in
Mexico in 1975 that transnational antagonisms first emerged; indeed, it would later be claimed that they crystallized in an angry confrontation between
Betty Friedan and
Domitila Barrios de Chungara, the militant trade union leader from Bolivia. This row was said to expose a gaping divide between First World women, who were liberal, middle-class and white, and primarily concerned with sex-specific issues such as
reproductive freedom, wage equity, and women’s
educational and professional opportunities, and
Third World,
Marxist,
working-class, and nonwhite women, who were more concerned with structural problems of
economic inequality and poverty. In fact, no such showdown between the two women ever took place. But the deep divisions in the nascent
international women’s movement were real enough: between rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, North and South, West and non-West, capitalist and Marxist, middle-class and working-class, reformist and radical, heterosexual and homosexual, white and nonwhite.
¹¹⁶

These fissures have continued to undermine subsequent attempts to sustain and strengthen a transnational feminist consciousness. As the black American poet
Audre Lorde argued in 1983, the notion of sisterhood as being powerful and global glosses too easily over “differences of
race, sexuality, class and age.”
¹¹⁷
Such competing claims, conflicting identities, and “diverse feminisms”
also undermine the idea of the “universal woman” as a global, unifying symbol. But whereas the universal epithet of “man” was false because it claimed to emb
race and subsume all women, the feminist universal epithet of “woman” is also misleading because it makes “wild, improbable leaps across chasms of class and race, poverty and affluence, leisured lives and lives of toil, to draw basic similarities that stem from the shared conditions of sex.” In the nineteenth century, feminists filled in the outlines of universal woman with images of female
slaves, prostitutes, and impoverished seamstresses; in our own times, “extravagant universals reach around the world, plucking out Third World sex workers, Cambodian entrepreneurs, and African female farmers, among others, to add to the imagined figure of woman.”
¹¹⁸
Even if all women are
biologically similar and also the victims of culturally constructed discrimination, this attempted universalism, expressed in the ostensibly all-encompassing sisterly pronoun of “we,” has never quite rung true, and by the late 1990s the political philosopher
Jodi Dean conceded that “no one really knew who ‘we’ were” anymore.
¹¹⁹

Among those who do not know are historians of women, who have found it difficult to agree what this
history looks like, whom it is about, how it should be written, and what it shows.
¹²⁰
There are affirming, identity-creating narratives, celebrating the ascent of women to collective consciousness and public prominence; but other historians have questioned the construction of this “imagined lineage for defiant women,” pointing out that women’s organizations have been ephemeral and their successes limited.
¹²¹
Some scholars concentrate exclusively on the lives of women, ignoring men; others look at
gender relations and at the interconnections between the two sexes. Some historians focus on the modern period of
first- and second-wave feminism; others with earlier interests deplore such “presentism” and “modernist self-absorption.”
¹²²
Some feminists write only for each other, in highly technical language; others deplore the retreat of feminism from the pressing issues and messy circumstances of the real world into the rarefied halls of the academy, and into arcane jargon and inaccessible prose.
¹²³
As
Daniel T. Rodgers notes, having
surveyed the recent battle-scarred landscape of
feminist scholarship, “conceptions of womanhood” have become “more complex and fractured,” and “visions of a common sisterhood,” founded on shared experiences, have been given up as a result of a “cascade of disaggregation,” deconstruction, and particularity. Even some committed feminists accept that being female is not their only identity, and that feminism is not necessarily a cause to be embraced for life, but something from which women might be well advised to take a break.
¹²⁴

“To go for a walk with one’s eyes open,” opined
Simone de Beauvoir, echoing
William Thompson, “is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two
classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests and occupations are manifestly different.” So, indeed, humanity is; and so, indeed, these individuals are.
¹²⁵
Between them, the two sexes constitute the whole of humankind in a way that no two
religions or nations or classes have ever done. But that fact has always hindered more than it has helped either sex’s potential for solidarity and for forging a shared identity, and for most of human history the identities of men and women
as men and as women
have scarcely been galvanizing or politically significant. While today there are probably more variants of maleness and more versions of femaleness in existence than ever before, and in their diversity and fluidity they constantly undermine, destabilize, and complicate such a single, simple divide. In the words of
Donna Haraway, “there is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women” (any more than there is anything about being male that naturally binds men).
¹²⁶
Mobilizing all women on the basis of their shared
gender has never been possible, while mobilizing even some women has hardly been easy, and mobilizing any men in this way has yet to happen. So it is scarcely surprising that there has never been for women
as women
a triumphantly revolutionary moment, their own version of 1917, when the forces of
patriarchy and male dominance were suddenly shattered and irrevocably overthrown.
Nor indeed is it clear how such a revolution would happen, or what form it would actually take.