So what is the future, or even, is there a future, for feminism? Is it, at least in the affluent West, needed any longer? In 1992 the American Susan Faludi argued cogently, and in chilling detail, that feminists have been experiencing what she terms a ‘backlash’, with women who had undoubtedly benefited from the movement — as well as men, who had perhaps also benefited, though they rarely acknowledged the fact — anxiously remarking that it had all gone too far. As Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley suggested in their third collection of essays, Who’s Afraid of Feminism? Seeing Through the Backlash, feminism makes many people uncomfortable, in part because the ‘whole subject of who women are and what they want challenges our division between public and private life’.
In the 20th century, ‘first-wave’ feminists had demanded civil and political equality. In the 1970s, ‘second-wave’ feminism concentrated on, and gave great prominence to, sexual and family rights for women. It is these demands, now, that have become the main target of reaction. ‘The personal is the political’ was a popular 1970s slogan that some contemporary feminists seem to want to reverse. The political is reduced to the merely personal, to questions of sexuality and family life — which, of course, also have political implications which still, and urgently, need to be considered..
Natasha Walter, in The New Feminism (1998), while admitting that
women are ‘still poorer and less powerful than men’, argues that the task for contemporary feminism is to ‘attack the material basis of economic and social and political inequality’. An important point — but she remains extremely vague about precisely what that attack would imply. In one interview, she remarked, as if she had come up with a new idea instead of one that had been around for decades, that ‘we want to work with men to change society and not against men’: ‘After all, especially if things are to change in the domestic arena, that’s about men taking on a fair share of domestic work as about women moving more and more out of the home.’ Or again, ‘we must join hands with one another and with men to create a more equal society’.
But if at one moment she criticizes the older movement for being too personal, a few pages later Walter remarks that it was too political — or, even worse, that its members were ‘humourless or dowdy or celibate’. (That is certainly not the way I remember it.) She goes on to describe Margaret Thatcher as ‘the great unsung heroine of British feminism’, who normalized female success. But Thatcher had no interest whatsoever in women’s concerns, and was notoriously unsupportive of other women politicians.
Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman (1999) was written partly in angry and effective response to Natasha Walter’s book and its ‘unenlightened complacency’. Walter, Greer argues, assumes that feminism is all about ‘money, sex and fashion’. Though, she adds:
it was not until feminists of my own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that feminism had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly. When the lifestyle feminists had gone just far enough, giving them the right to ‘have it all’, i. e. money, it would have been inexcusable to remain silent.
People are undoubtedly alarmed by the threat of personal change, as much as by change itself. So some cling, nostalgically, to an imaginary golden age of fixed gender identities, the dream of a
relationship between a man and a woman, that, whatever its inequities, was comfortably predictable. On the other hand, others insist — in Naomi Wolf’s vivid phrase — that there has been a ‘genderquake’, with more women than ever in powerful positions. Women, Wolf argues in Fire with Fire (1983), must give up what she styles ‘victim’ feminism, stop complaining, and embrace ‘power’ feminism. But, as Lynne Segal remarks, movingly, at the end of her 1999 Why Feminism?, the movement’s most radical goal has yet to be realized :
a world which is a better place not just for some women, but for all women. In what I still call a socialist feminist vision, that would be a far better world for boys and men, as well.
The long, and at times radically innovative, history of feminism is all too easily forgotten. When ‘second-wave’ feminism emerged in the late 1960s, it seemed, at the time at least, unexpected, surprising, exciting. One big difference during the years since then has been the way Western women have become much more aware of other feminisms — not just in Europe, but across the world — that, hopefully, may challenge our cherished ideas and certainties, and undermine any complacency that we may have developed.
That wider awareness is due to a number of factors. Technical advances are certainly important: the fact, for example, that feminists in different countries can now communicate quickly and effectively, share experiences and information with large numbers of people, through the Internet. Academic feminism has played an important role in this. A great many universities, certainly in most Western countries, now run courses on women’s studies, and specifically on feminism. Academic research has given us extremely valuable insights into women’s lives at other times and in other cultures; inviting us to think about differences, as well as about common causes. Academic theses, scholarly articles and texts, as well as conferences, have all helped disseminate important information about feminism across the world.
But there is perhaps a loss involved, which is not often addressed or even acknowledged. I often recall, affectionately, the remark by Rebecca West that I quoted at the opening of this book:
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is.
I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express
sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
All previous feminisms have had an air of excitement, of transgression, or of risk about them: sometimes the excitement of the pioneer, sometimes of the outsider challenging convention. More recently, perhaps, there has been, in addition, the excitement of rediscovering our past, but also — and therefore — of re-inventing something. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, women’s liberation was exciting. We felt that we were ‘making it new’, that we were exploring both past and present, committing ourselves to something that was new and radical and adventurous. But the girls I talked to recently have never had any comparable experience. They seem uninterested in feminism, partly because they see it simply as an academic subject — something fed to them, which they need not discover for themselves — and it is therefore respectably dull. (Except, of course, for the high-flyers who themselves aspire to academic jobs.) Feminism has, as it were, been spoon-fed to this younger generation of women, so, perhaps naturally and even healthily, they have a sneaking yearning to be politically ‘incorrect’. Rejecting academic feminism, at least, seems one way of moving forward. Re-inventing feminism in terms of their own experience may, in the long run, prove another.
But the other difficulty — and it seems to me a crucial one — is that academic feminism has developed a language that makes sense only to a closed circle of initiates. Too many women feel shut out, alienated. This is not only true of feminism, of course; this morning as I was writing this, I opened the newspaper to find an exhilarating attack by the journalist Robert Fisk on what he calls the ‘preposterous’, even ‘poisonous’, language so often used by
academics in general; used even, perhaps especially, by those who address urgently important political issues. ‘University teachers… are great at networking each other but hopeless at communicating with most of the rest of the world, including those who collect their rubbish, deliver their laundry and serve up their hash browns.’ He ends by jokingly quoting a famous remark by Winston Churchill: ‘This is English up with which I will not put.’ It would be all too easy to make the same case specifically against academic feminism.
Fisk’s point is one that we ignore at our peril. If feminism is to be something living and evolving, it will have to begin by re-inventing the wheel — which in this case means finding not just new issues, but a new language. In spite of everything, I still have faith that feminism will take us by surprise again, that it will re-invent itself, perhaps in unforeseen ways, and in areas we have thought little about. It will almost certainly come from outside the academy, and will probably — hopefully — challenge us in ways that, as yet, we cannot even glimpse.