As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes
“Looked at one way – in the manner of Joan Didion, for example, in her harsh, oddly clouded but startlingly acute essay of 1972 on the Women’s Movement – the idea of feminism is obviously Marxist, being about the ‘invention’, as Didion put it, ‘of women as a “class”’, a total transformation of all relationships, led by the group most exploited by relations in their current form. So why did the libbers so seldom say so? Well, some came to the movement as Marxists, and did. Sheila Rowbotham wrote that ‘the so-called women’s question is a whole-people question’ in Women’s Liberation and the New Politics (1969); then in 1976 Barbara Ehrenreich stressed that ‘there is no way to understand sexism as it acts on our lives without putting it in the historical context of capitalism.’ Others shoved the categories in great handfuls through the blender: ‘sex-class’ must ‘in a temporary dictatorship’ seize ‘control of reproduction’ according to Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1970).
More prevalent, however, was what Didion called a ‘studied resistance to the possibility of political ideas’ – who, in any case, ever heard of a radical-feminist movement taking its understanding of historical change from a man? The entire Marxist tradition was repressed, leaving a weird sinkhole that quickly filled up with the most dreadful rubbish: wise wounds, herstory, nature goddesses, raped and defiled; sisters under the skin, flayed and joined, like the Human Centipede, in a single biomass; the fractal spread of male sexual violence, men fuck women replicated at every level of interaction, as through a stick of rock.
And so Women’s Liberation started trying to build a man-free, women-only tradition of its own. Thus consciousness-raising, or what was sometimes called the ‘rap group’, groups of women sitting around, analysing the frustrations of their lives according to their new feminist principles, gradually systematising their discoveries. And thus that brilliant slogan, from the New York Radical Women in 1969, that the personal is political, an insight so caustic it burned through generations of mystical nonsense – a woman’s place is in the home, she was obviously asking for it dressed like that. But it also corroded lots of useful boundaries and distinctions, between public life and personal burble, real questions and pop-quiz trivia, political demands and problems and individual whims. ‘Psychic hardpan’ was Didion’s name for this. A movement that started out wanting complete transformation of all relations was floundering, up against the banality of what so many women actually seemed to want.”
Jenny Turner’s article in the LRB, “As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes“
It’s a long and meandering survey of the state of contemporary feminism, and it’s excellent. Must-read, I’d say.
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towerofsleep reblogged this from annamack and added:
meandering survey...contemporary feminism,...it’s excellent....
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