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Is Feminism Alive and Well? |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Patricia Summerside |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1993 |
| Size: 5,235 Words, 33,367 Characters |
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RECLAIMING THE MAINSTREAM
Individualist Feminism Rediscovered
Joan Kennedy Taylor
Buffalo : Prometheus Books, 1992
271 pp., $24.95
FEMINISM WITHOUT ILLUSIONS
A Critique Individualism
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991
347 pp., $24.95 cloth, $12.95 paper
BACKLASH
The Undeclared War against American Women
Susan Faludi
New York: Crown Publishers, 1991
552 pp., $24.00
REVOLUTION FROM WITHIN
A Book of Self-Esteem
Gloria Steinem
Boston: Little, Brown, 1992
377 pp., $22.95
American feminism is a "top down" social movement. It has spread through American society from the top down, not as the result of a groundswell. Working-class and underclass feminist individuals and groups do exist, but the impetus and rationale came from the upper and upper-middle classes. And these comparatively privileged classes remain the feminist stronghold the social milieu in which feminist attitudes are a taken-for-granted part of everyone's "mental furniture."
This calls for a bit of caution regarding feminism's impact on other classes. Are America's culture and political elites composed of selfless altruists? Or do they possess a self-interest so enlightened as to be identical with the best interests of the citizenry as a whole... including its least privileged members? Nagging questions like these make many Americans male and female skeptical of feminist claims to speak for all women.
Equal rights or equal outcomes?
Four recent books address the failure of feminism to win universal acceptance. All were written from feminist perspectives. However, their differing diagnoses of the cause of the "problem" and their correspondingly diverse prescriptions for it's a chance to reexamine their assumptions regarding sex roles.
Joan Kennedy Taylor's Reclaiming the Mainstream also offers a chance to reexamine liberal and conservative assumptions about the role of the state in a free society. Her effort to set forth defensible principles and apply them consistently is refreshing in an area too often mired in polemics.
Taylor is a libertarian who believes that a powerful, centralized state is the chief enemy of a free society. She is also a feminist. But her libertarianism leads her to part company with feminists who have no qualms abut expanding the powers of the state as long as those powers expand in a direction that expedites their political goals.
Taylor argues that feminism has sold its individualist birthright for a mess of statist pottage by joining the scramble for welfare-state goodies in such forms as hiring quotas, subsidized day care, mandated benefits, and compulsory comparable worth. The primacy she assigns to freedom of the individual also leads her to disagree with those feminists who endorse legal restrictions on pornography.
But, by giving a libertarian interpretation to some mainstream feminist goals such as the Equal Rights Amendment and unrestricted abortion, she is able to identify herself with mainstream feminism in certain areas. Taylor's highly principled feminist stance can be summed up in the words of one of her favorite "foremothers," eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft: "Let there be no coercion established in society, and the common law of gravity prevailing,...
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...t such bonds are indispensable to the rearing of stable, achieving children- children who posses internal moral compasses to help them navigate a difficult world.
Such a society cannot guarantee social equality, but it can guarantee social mobility for willing and able individuals of both sexes within a stable, effective cultural framework. All of us woman, child, or man could do worse.
(3,451 of 33,367 characters)
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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