Alas, a Blog

(This is the third of three posts on “equity feminism” and “gender feminism.”) (Part one) Part two)

Ironically, although self-dubbed “equity feminists” often say they’re continuing the traditions of first-wave feminism, it’s doubtful any first wave feminists would have signed on to an ideology so extreme in its pretense that feminism has nothing to say beyond formal legal equality that it believes that rape has nothing to do with misogyny or gender bias.

After Hoff-Sommers, the person who has done the most to popularize the concept of “gender feminism” is libertarian, “ifeminist” and Foxnews columnist Wendy McElroy. In Roderick Long and Charles Johnson’s essay on libertarian feminism, they consider Wendy McElroy’s use of “gender feminist.” (Long and Johnson are rare libertarian feminists whose feminism is distinguishable from anti-feminism.) At one time, they say, McElroy used “gender feminist” to refer mainly to radical feminism, but her definition has expanded over the years:

McElroy now clearly lumps liberal and radical feminists together as “gender feminists,” and opposes libertarian feminism (individualist feminism, ifeminism) to this aggregation. … “liberal feminism,” “left-of-center feminism,” and “gender feminism” are all apparently being treated as equivalent.

The implicit suggestion is that to regard something as a legitimate object of feminist concern is ipso facto to regard it as an appropriate object of legislation. On this view, those feminists who see lots of issues as meriting feminist attention will naturally favour lots of legislation, while those feminists who prefer minimal legislation will be led to suppose that relatively few issues merit feminist attention. But without the conceptual confusions that all too often accompany the authoritarian theory of politics, it’s hard to see any reason for accepting the shared premise. Certainly McElroy’s 19th-century libertarian feminist predecessors did not accept it.

…McElroy’s career has been a steady stream of books and articles documenting, and urging a return to, the ideas of the 19th-century libertarian feminists. Yet we know ““ and it is largely owing to McElroy’s own efforts that we know ““ that if there are any “gender feminists” lurking out there, the 19th century individualists, while libertarian, would certainly be found among their ranks.

* * *

One odd effect of Hoff Sommers’ formulation – in which “equity feminists” do not perceive any social problem of anti-woman beliefs (a position very at odds with first-wave feminist thought, by the way), and who additionally think feminism’s only legitimate goal is formal equality under the law – is that the category of feminists who can be considered “equity feminists” is astonishingly narrow. It consists of a handful of Republican activists and think-tankers, like Hoff Sommers herself and the IWF; and also some libertarians whose primary connection to feminism is opposing it, such as Wendy McElroy (who earns a living writing an anti-feminist column for Foxnews) and Cathy Young.

The way “equity” feminists like Hoff Sommers and McElroy discuss feminism is entirely binary; they don’t acknowlege that there are any feminists who don’t fit into the gender/equity dichotomy, nor do they suggest that any overlap between the catagories exist. Therefore, when “equity feminism” is drawn so narrowly, “gender feminism” becomes correspondingly broad. Virtually all feminists, apart from a handful of Republican and libertarian activists, are in practice derided as “gender feminists” by Hoff Sommers, McElroy and their fellow travelers.

In a comment on a HNN thread, Charles Johnson writes:

The popularity, in some libertarian circles, of Christina Hoff Sommers’ distinction between “equity feminism” and “gender feminism,” a pair of opposed categories that–so far as I can tell–actually track no historical tendency of thought and no shared premise whatsoever. (I don’t know what “gender feminism” is supposed to actually be, but I do know that if you put Kim Gandy, Andrea Dworkin, and Mary Daly into the same political boat, you are surely misunderstanding something.)

He’s got a point.

It can be useful, for the purpose of a particular article or thought experiment, to create a classification system from scratch. In her essay “Marooned on Gilligan’s Island” – one of my favorite pieces of intra-feminist criticism – Katha Pollitt makes up a category called “difference feminism,” which she contrasts unflatteringly with “equality feminism.”

But Pollitt’s category doesn’t have the effect of encouraging ignorance; although she posits a new category, “difference feminism,” she didn’t go on to make the difference/equality dichotomy her only lens for viewing feminism for decades on end. Since her difference/equality dichotomy wasn’t her sole and only approach to understanding feminism, her analysis doesn’t force her to lump together feminists whose intellectual traditions are actually strongly opposed. For Pollitt, “difference feminism” was an analytic tool, but not the only tool in the toolbox.

In contrast, most conservatives use the terms “gender feminist” and “equity feminist” less as a tool than as crutches; the simplistic duality between a handful of marginal libertarian and Republican feminists, and all other feminists, is their only means of understanding feminism. This means, of course, that they cannot understand feminism at all.

It’s as if someone divided all of cinema into two categories, “Arnold Schwarzenegger films” and “everything else,” and then remained committed to using this classification system, and no other, for decades. Is it really useful to have, as one’s exclusive classification system, an approach that pretends that the cinematic traditions that produced Fanny and Alexander, Mureal’s Wedding, Hero, and Monsters, Inc do not have any noteworthy distinctions?

An approach to feminism that divides feminists into “Hoff Sommers, McElroy and their allies” versus “all other feminists” is not useful to anyone who hasn’t already decided to hold the “all other feminists” catagory in contempt. Such an approach promotes lazy, stereotypical thinking, in which someone can read Mary Daly and conclude that he’s read all he needs to know about Katha Pollitt, Catherine MacKinnon or Martha Nussbaum, since they’re all from a single intellectual approach.

I can see why this approach is idealogically attractive to conservatives and anti-feminists; what I can’t see is how such an approach can be anything but intellectually vapid.