(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.
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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.
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Amp, I think your comments on this topic have been pretty fair, but I thought it might be interesting to add a perspective from the other side. I think a large part of the reason that conservative efforts to articulate ideas about women’s equality have been so poor is that they were begun entirely in the political arena as a response to the perceived political power of the feminist movement. This focus has been expanded to academia as well, but NOW and the Feminist Majority remain the defining feminist institutions for most conservatives simply because of their focus on what’s going on in politics (I’m definitely not trying to justify this approach, which I can’t stand, but merely to say that it is what it is).
Now, most people don’t appreciate all the subleties and nuances of political movements of which they are not a member. I still don’t know exactly how I should use the terms “liberal” and “leftist,” and I suspect that you might be equally disoriented in the middle of the internal arguments that go on over here on the Right (the recent abuse of the term “neo-con,” not necessarily by you, but by many, many, many people on the Left is a great example of this problem). Again, I don’t say this to excuse conservative dumb-ness when it comes to feminism, so much as to argue (lament, really) that as long as conservatives are focused soley on the politics of women’s issues, they won’t really ever manage to produce a deeper discussion of feminism.
Also, it’s easy to take shots at McElroy and Hoff Sommers, it’s even appropriate because, whether or not I like it, they are two of the most prominent spokeswomen for conservative and libertarian women. But there are a few conservative women out there who have undertaken a more serious discussion: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Frederica Mathews-Greene, and Maggie Gallagher (who has written about things besides same-sex marriage) are three writers who have, to varying degrees, influenced my thinking for the better (I hope). Not many, I know, but there are just so few conservative women equipped with the tools to articulate a well-informed argument about these issues.
This is largely conservatives fault – they have warned young conservatives away from taking gender studies courses, studying women’s history, or reading feminist thought (even the first wavers, whose banner we are supposedly carrying). At the same time, women’s studies as a discipline is created to be pretty hostile to conservative ideas (and people), so I doubt that conservative students would be rushing to register for their courses even if IWF didn’t publish things like this.
To be honest, I can’t imagine that feminists are entirely bummed out by conservatives’ inability to join this conversation with any seriousness. Heck, I’d be thrilled if the only person I had to argue against was Wendy McElroy :-)
Anyway, I think conservatives have let themselves get too hung-up on labels, too. They can’t decide whether they want to insist that they can be feminists, too, or instead keep using “feminist” as a dirty word. I fell into the first camp for a while, but it was seriously liberating when I decided I didn’t really care any more (okay, I still care a little bit – being called anti-feminist ticks me off, but I don’t feel the need to be recognized as “feminist”).
I think a large part of conservative rejection of feminism is economic, not theoretical.
Many feminists are socialist, or worse. And at least the feminists that I’ve talked with or read have identified that economic position as being important or even integral to what they consider feminism.
Since modern conservatism rejects socialism out of hand, such feminists do get dismissed across the board, even where there might be areas of agreement, or at least fruitful discussion.
Why, should I have said “most” feminists instead?
I don’t see a lot of capitalists out there. A few libertarians, but not many. If there are scads of economically right feminists out there, I have to confess being clueless as to where and whom.
Perhaps you can enlighten me.
Oh, merde. Is this gonna’ inspire yet another spin-off thread explaining why Socialism is or isn’t the Devil ? I can barely keep up as it is ! :o
Robert, I think your definition of “capitalist” may be narrower than that used by most of the posters here. Most feminists are capitalists in the same sense that most liberal democrats are capitalists.
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Sara, it’s nice to see you posting here! (I read your posts at FSB all the time, of course.)
And I think you’re right – the tendency to filter everything through political positioning does tend to make discussions rather shallow, whatever side of a debate you’re on. (I said the same thing, in a different context, on FSB recently).
[blockquote]Also, it’s easy to take shots at McElroy and Hoff Sommers, it’s even appropriate because, whether or not I like it, they are two of the most prominent spokeswomen for conservative and libertarian women.[/blockquote]
This is a digression, but are they really spokeswomen for women? I don’t know that Hoff Sommers speaks “for women” at all, and McElroy’s primary focus is, if anything, men’s rights (Echidne once joked that McElroy should rename her site imasculists.
I have very limited reading time nowadays, and I have to admit that I haven’ t been impressed with Maggie Gallagher’s work (“I sat next to an archtypical young man on a plane who by an amazing coincidence said things that proved my pre-exsiting points, and I’m not going to give his name so people can find out his perspective on our discussion” is one of the lamest arguments imaginable, right down there with columnists who write about how their salt-of-the-earth cabdrivers just happened to mention that they and everyone in their salt-of-the-earth families supports the columnist’s pre-existing views).
But if you’d like to do me a favor, and if there are particular essays you can recommend by those three writers which you feel represent their better work, I’ll certainly put them on my “to read” list. (I’ll do the same with books, too, but I’m more likely to get around to an essay sooner).
Hmmm, do Hoff Sommers and McElroy really speak for women? Oh, I dunno, they don’t really speak for me, but plenty of conservative and libertarian women seem to like them well enough. I guess one could say that McElroy doesn’t even really present herself as speaking for women, except for that “ifeminist” label she thought up, but I do think that Hoff Sommers tries to.
I’ll do some thinking about suggested reading and drop you an email, k?
I have read Fox-Genovese’s book about feminism. Can’t remember the name as usual, but it
was something about how feminism isn’t the life of the women that she talks about. I wasn’t impressed by her arguments or her use of data. The latter because the use of data isn’t that good, the former because Fox-Genovese assumes certain aspects of the societal arrangements to be unchangeable or ignores their influence altogether, and that for me omits most of the interesting discussions that I might have with a person who holds these views. She also uses anecdotal evidence far too much. For example, I remember her arguing that taking time off from a career path wasn’t damaging to her, because she now earns more than her husband. This says nothing about what she would have earned had she not taken time off, and it says nothing about the question of luck in individual lives or the statistical generalizability of her arguments.
As far as socialism and feminism are concerned, there is a socialist feminist theory, I understand, but the American definition of socialism is so different from the textbook definitions of socialism that any kind of argument that the government should fund something is here taken as socialist, unless the funding is for warfare or policing and prisons.
It’s difficult to decide how much feminism actually has to do with socialism because of this confusion of definitions, but I’m not a socialist, for example. I wouldn’t even be regarded as especially lefty in Europe, though here I seem to be viewed as such.
It’s interesting that Sara (whose blog I also enjoy) doesn’t define herself as a feminist. My definition of feminism is the old boring dictionary one, of equality of opportunity for all and of equal valuation of what is traditionally viewed as feminine and masculine in the society. When someone refuses the label of a feminist, I’m never quite sure what that means. Does it mean not accepting the idea of equality? Or something different?
To Robert (and others):
I would prefer a more laissez-faire capitalist system than the one we have in the United States today. At the same time, I believe that rape is the result of a pervasive misogyny that desperately needs to be eliminated. I think that contraception of all kinds should be readily available, including abortion. I affirm that homosexuality is a valid way to express love, and even if it isn’t about love, in the final analysis, it’s none of my goddam business. I also think it is unconscionable that anyone should pay women less for the same work that men do. I think that men and women should be treated the same way whenever this is humanly possible, and yet–perhaps this is a paradox–I also think that if you want to express yourself through gender roles in whatever way seems best to you, then have at it.
Does this make me a feminist? I’m still puzzled.
I don’t think that “feminism” means that all women must behave exactly as all men do and vice versa. I, a working single woman, don’t care whether the next female, or male, in the phone book is married, single, works, doesn’t work. I do consider it important for traditionalist women to have education and marketable skills sufficient to support herself and children **before** marriage and long-term at-home childrearing, simply because husbands can get laid off, get killed in a car crash, dump them for sexier models, abuse them or their children so that the only safe option is to leave, etc. And why do I think this is so important? Because this society does not consider children a corporate social good, even though those children are going to be the future labor force of the country.
Now do I think all traditional lifestyles are valid? NO. Domestic violence aimed against adults or children is always bad, and is usually performed by men against women and children. And yet this has been regarded as the traditional prerogative of husbands and fathers, so long as certain lines weren’t crossed. Twenty-five years ago, those lines used to be 1. for children, severe injury or death. Rape simply wasn’t talked about. 2. for wives, severe injury or death. There was no legal entity of rape within marriage, since marriage was presumed to give full consent to 100% of acts for 100% of the time. The lines are moving in a more humane direction thanks to the hard work of feminist domestic violence advocates.
There are traditionalist lifestyles that I disapprove of strongly on feminist bases, but which are not strictly illegal. The sorts of marriages where wives are isolated from family, forbidden to go anywhere without the husband’s permission on implicit threat of violence. These pre-violence homes may or may not have additional religious/cultic rationales for the coercion. These aren’t the subject of the law at that instant – but these share many of the characteristics of domestic violence households.
The nice middle manager who treats his stay-at-home wife and kids well, does not control their contacts with the outside world, does not brainwash them, and provides reliable financial support – that’s fine, and not my concern – as long as they do me the honor of not nosey parkering me and mine.
A majority of traditionalists do not hold the live-and-let-live philosophy in the case of the validity of gay and lesbian relationships. The last election showed this. A majority of traditionalists object to premarital sex, and to abortion in the abstract, though they do come to the clinics themselves in need. A large minority object to contraception and divorce in the abstract, though they use those options at need.
The conflict between libertarianism and feminism (and racial civil rights, and gay civil rights) comes in the attempt to implement change. If the economic institutions are overwhelmingly white, male, conservative, there is great opportunity for** rational** collusion to keep the wages of women and minorities depressed, to keep management jobs solely for hetero white males of a certain social background, to red-line certain areas based on predominant racial composition or certain applicants based on race or gender(no loans, no ability to become entrepreneurs!), to engage in the sort of cronyism and nepotism that ensures that contracts keep coming back to the same few people. If you are in power, you don’t want to open up opportunities to potential competition. This is entirely rational economic behavior for the people in power, who may be able to cut a deal for their personal women via the same cronyism. So, while libertarians may believe in the depths of their hearts that women and gays/lesbians/bi/trans and racial minorities deserve equal pay for equal work, equal chances to compete, etc – they don’t have a clue about how to implement equality in the face of entrenched dominant-group self-interest. That’s why most libertarians tend to be white men without physical handicaps. If gay, I would guess they are “masculine looking and acting” (in the personals ad cliche) and in employment sectors or parts of the country where gayness is not a huge issue.
All conservatives are capitalists, a much worse batting average than feminists and socialism.
“Most feminists are capitalists in the same sense that most liberal democrats are capitalists.”
Oh, in the pretending sense. Gotcha. :)
Ampersand, I’m glad to see you talking about the essay here! We’re also talking about it at ifeminists.
I consider myself a free-market feminist. I’m pretty radical in both ways (feminist and free-market advocate). I often agree with “gender feminist” ideology (at least I think so… I too am confused about the definition of that term) but I believe the best way to change things is through the exchange of ideas. Until I read the essay by Long & Johnson, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. Yes, libertarians can be radical feminists!
I’m also an economics major. I don’t think all conservatives are capitalists. Most of them think they are, but they are confused. Both Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman call themselves “liberal”. Other econ nerds like me will enjoy Hayek’s “Why I Am Not a Conservative”. Read it at http://hem.passagen.se/nicb/cons.htm.
Sorry, the period was included in my last hyperlink, causing it not to work. This one should work: http://hem.passagen.se/nicb/cons.htm
I would tend to concur with drumgurl about conservatives and capitalism. Most self-identified conservatives would also identify as free-market capitalists, but probing of the positions they (we) hold reveal that not to really be the case. Free-market capitalism might be the picture on the altar where we worship, but our rites really don’t run in that direction. (More voluntary communitarianism for most of us.)
Given the appalling state of economics education these days, I doubt many people accurately identify their economic values. My side of the aisle is no exception to that trend.
I’ll go ahead and make everyone mad with this post…
Most Americans are Keynesians who believe in managed capitalism. The difference is that Dems want to manage it to be pro-worker, and Repubs want to manage it to be pro-big-business. :)
Adam Smith was no friend of big business. He believed in “enlightened” capitalism. We tend to forget the enlightened part and buy products made from sweatshop/slave labor. And that’s why I just don’t think GW Bush is really pro-life.
Drumgurl, have you ever read any Friedrich List? His main book was “The National System of Political Economy”. I’d love to hear your thoughts on his ideas.
Bean, you are right about the “isolated from family, etc” being domestic violence, however it is not **prosecutable** domestic violence **unless** the woman makes a complaint or there is physical restraint of the woman (imprisonment in the home) that is discovered by an outsider, say a meter reader who discovers a woman or child chained to the wall next to the gas meter. Hence my term, “pre-violence”, meaning, DV situation in which cops can’t step in without other information. Threats of violence are not very prosecutable if these threats are not made in front of witnesses and the subject of the threat does not make a complaint. It is hard to know what to do to prevent these situations, other than the strategies like leaving hot-line numbers on the inside doors of women’s restroom stalls, having doctors insist that the man wait outside in a distant waitiing room while the physical exam (and DV questioning) is done, etc. I am no expert.
19th century libertarianism feminism as the basis for equity feminism? If we take J. S. Mill as typical of 19th century libertarian feminists, we find that he was definitely NOT merely concerned with legal equality. He also opposed customary gender roles (though he guessed that even without gender roles, there might be some sociobiological differences between men and women on average that faintly reflect gender roles), and believed that legal inequality was only one part (though a very imporant mpart) of women’s freedom.
I would consider myself about 70% free-market and 70% feminist. I’m not as hard-core on the feminism stuff as, say, Barry, and I’m not persuaded either way about evolutionary psychology-type arguments about natural male and female prospensities in mating, relationshps, etc, that so many feminists are confidently opposed to, and I’m also not really all that uncomfortable about cultural gender-role enforcing media (for example, I thought briefly about Sally’s “nagging supportive girlfriend” role and Jack Skellington’s “brash, arrogant man” role in “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” then though, “y’know, this isn’t worth worrying about.”) Overall, though, I think it’s pretty clear that sexism is still a fairly big problem in our society. (if men and women had an equal chance of getting elected to the Senate, then the probability that only 13 of them would be women would be 5.6*10^-15, not very likely) I certainly don’t accept the arguments of the likes of Hayek or Nozick who think that free markets are a high moral principle, and we are morally compelled to have them even if they make us all worse off. However, I think that in most cercumstances, the market handles things better than the state. That isn’t to say that markets are perfect, but that unless there are special circumstances, the imperfections of markets are usually smaller than the imperfections of states. Note the “unlesss there are special circumstances:” I hold state interventions guilty until proven innocent, but my category for “innocent” is pretty large. It includes both the classical market failures (correcting public goods, externalities, etc) and equity concerns like income and wealth distribution.
“Economic values”? Lord, save me from people who treat their economic theories like religion.
Hey, Drumgurl. Nice to see you here. (Did you know I was an econ major, too? Well, sort of. I did a design-your-own major in which I took mostly econ and women’s studies courses.)
If you’re any sort of feminist at all, odds are strong that you’re a “gender feminist.” I really don’t think it’s a meaningful catagory, though, for reasons explained in this post (and the two previous posts in the series).
Yup, I agree. However, despite your earlier claim that “most [repulicans] think they are, but they are confused,” managed capitalism is still a form of capitalism. And I agree with you regarding Adam Smith as well, of course.
Robert wrote:
And neither are you. The “only hard-core libertarians are capitalism, everyone else is something else” position is ideology, not textbook economics.
When I first started reading your blog – back when you did want to be called a feminist – I think that calling your viewpoint anti-feminist was fair (even if it ticked you off).
However, your views – or at least, those views you emphasize in your writings – have changed over the years. I’d no longer identify you as an anti-feminist. Ironcially, as you’ve moderated your views on being called a feminist, you’ve also (it seems to me) become more balanced and less anti- in your view of feminism.
Echnidne, I guess I don’t “refuse” the label of feminist; if someone wants to call me that, they are certainly welcome to. But nobody ever does, and I’ve decided that it’s not all that important to me. Frankly, I’ve just stopped seeing “feminist” as a useful label for me to define my views in relation to (either as feminist or antifeminist).
Some folks who would refuse the feminist label probably are also refusing to accept the idea of equality, but I can’t say I encounter those people all that much. More often, I would suspect, it’s because they don’t accept the particular vision of equality that is associated, fairly or not, with feminism, or, alternatively, they don’t accept the particular set of political positions that are associated with feminism. But usually it’s not because they think of themselves as anti-equality (obviously, whether or not they are, in fact, anti-equality is a separate issue).
On the alleged roots in nineteenth century feminism, one wonders if these pseudo scholars have ever spent any time reading the texts they claim as their genealogical legacy. JS Mill is a start, of course, but I am personally quite fond of the Grimke sisters. If given a choice between their brand of feminism and McElroy/Sommers, I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute to go back to hoop skirts.
And let’s not forget the strong links among feminism, labor, and progressivism in the early twentieth century. Somebody like Pauline Newman could teach some contemporary “feminists” quite a lot.
Amp, I didn’t know you were an econ major. I should have guessed, since I don’t usually see a list of lefty econ blogs on other sites. :) Yes, managed capitalism is still a form of capitalism. What I meant to say was that some Republicans just take part of what Smith had to say and use it to their own advantage, all the while claiming he’s their guy.
Robert, I have not read List’s actual works. Skousen talks about his ideas briefly in “The Making of Modern Economics”, however. I don’t want to judge List prematurely since I haven’t read his books, but I am interested in hearing what he has to see. From what I know, he basically makes the infant-industry protection argument. Skousen says, “In the long run, List agreed that free trade is the best global system once nations are fairly equal in development.” I think a case can be made for that. But then the counter-argument is that free trade helps them develop. But then look at how that is exploiting people right now… I am open to List’s ideas for that reason.
Duh, I meant to say I’m interested in what he has to “say”. Why don’t I re-read before making a post?
I have this philosophical problem with the way markets and governments are seen as two opposite ways of doing things in this country. In reality, we have all sorts of arrangements that slowly morph from one extreme (like the mythical perfectly competitive market which really hardly exists in reality) to the other etreme (like total control of a dictatorial one-person government). Think of country clubs or any of the nonprofit firms. They are very much like small governments in some ways, many even use voting procedures that are very similar to how we vote for governments, and they charge fees which are often unrelated to the actual use rates of various members, just like many taxes are unrelated to actual use rates. Then we have charity and so on. All these organizations require cooperation of larger groups of people, and of course so do governments.
At the same time, markets require a lot of cooperation, too, and without it we wouldn’t have the markets we have today. It’s as if we have simplified the way we view governments and markets and as if we look at them through purely emotional or even religious lenses, rather than actually analyzing what we have in reality. We mostly have mongrels of the two in reality, and the only thing that makes the final government different is that it can enforce payment of taxes much more than any other kind of organization.
Americans, especially, have inherited a view of the government as oppressive, which it can be, of course. Many Europeans have inherited the view of the government as the place where our common affairs are handled, and the two views are very different. Both are obviously simplifications of reality, but clearly it’s hard to discuss the issues when we have different emotional reactions to the very words we use.
All this is to explain why I don’t find that feminism and socialism and any relationships between the two is so very easy to debate. We tend to mean very different things with many of the terms. But I do believe that a totally unregulated “free” market economy will give us something that is very dictatorial, full of crime, with few very rich people and lots of very poor people. Such countries exist today, but not in this part of the world.
And Sara, thanks for explaining your term of feminism.
A totally free market, without securities or banking regulation, is not conducive to confidence in investment. This might be of interest to those who realize that there is a good deal of foriegn investment in the US, because hitherto we have been a predictable economy. We really need that foriegn investment.
So let me get this straight — if many feminists are socialists, then all feminism must be framed in socialist thought and criticized for being socialist? So if many of us eat pork chops, then all feminism must be considered pork-eaters — thus excluding women who do not eat pork?
I don’t see how my views on economics or social welfare or global imperialism or brand of chocolate affects my status as a feminist in any way. They might inform solutions I propose, but they really have nothing to do with feminism directly.
Either you believe women deserve equal protection under the law or you don’t. Either you believe male privilege is a problem, or you don’t. But I don’t see what it has to do with the price of tea in China.
Great series of articles, Ampersand! I’ve enjoyed the comment threads, too. Good stuff. I hope many more read it.