This is a very interesting article from Naomi Wolf about the future of global feminism and where she sees Western feminism as having gone wrong. It’s very optimistic about global feminism but not so much about Western feminism. To be honest, I have trouble deciphering what some of her criticisms mean for me as a Western feminist – am I being stupid or is Wolf being too restrained in explaining exactly what she doesn’t like? I also read her Q&A with readers and while I found it thoughtful I didn’t find it to be all that illuminating – but I think that was about the questions she was asked rather than Wolf being deliberately evasive.
Here are the two criticisms from Wolf that I find most compelling:
The 19th-century tradition also leads to organizational paralysis, as women’s groups fetishize “consensus”. It has led to feminism being so afraid of offending anyone that we have ironically recapitulated the voicelessness of the original “angel in the house”. A discomfort with conflict has reproduced conventional feminist wisdom at the expense of bracing and productive debate.
That has led to a kind of passivity in many western democracies, where a tradition of seeing oneself as being at the mercy of a powerful authority leads women in EU countries, or nations that have “women’s rights officers”, to yield the job of female assertion to official, even government, bodies. Western women have been left ill-prepared to do what is urgently needed: to field their own candidates, run for office themselves, to raise their own money, start their own institutions, draft their own laws and inaugurate their own media.
And also this from Wolf, which I think is a good framing of the problem with ‘choice feminism’:
Western women became very good at identifying what was crying out in their souls and kicking away the hindrances to self-fulfilment. That had value. Unfortunately, however, this message of self-assertion above all dovetailed neatly with the needs of consumer capitalism. From the 1970 onwards, our culture told both sexes that individual expression was paramount. And for women, that was defined as the right to choose an interesting a career, a high-status mate, the desirable handbag or vacation, the perfect family size, and a definitionally fruitless quest for “perfection”. This focus is why so many “feminist” debates tend to become lifestyle discussions: should women have facelifts? What about hiring nannies? What about stay-at-home moms versus working mothers? Frankly, if I – as a passionate feminist – am bored by two decades of such discussions, it is no surprise that everyone else is, as well. Lifestyle choices are not meaningful if no bigger questions are being asked.
I still don’t have big conclusions about any of this, I’m uncharacteristically quiet. I just want to think about it all more. And to read your thoughts. The end.
blue milk 
I do agree about the problems with “choice feminism”, but the problem with “Enlightenment feminism” is surely that it’s too easy to say: fine, let’s fight for human rights and democracy in the Middle East, rah rah feminism out there, but you lot over here got the vote, anti-discrimination legislation etc ages ago… what are you complaining about?
It’s not going to convince anyone that there are still important battles to be fought here in the developed world, is my point.
I love the last para. I’m personally sick and tired of so many of my well educated, feminist friends, in great jobs, with loving equal partnerships and two kids, only really being interested in vintage glass, the perfect winter boot and how to perfect the seating arrangement in their back room. They are quietly content to not think much about anything else. I enjoy all that, but only to a point, I need more. I can’t ignore the issues I see every day even in my over privileged, white, self-centered universe. Many of my friends would rather just call themselves feminists and not really DO anything or discuss anything that reflects that, other than demand their right to a ‘push’ present.
Hmm… perhaps I need some new friends.
I read (on a site that no longer seems to be up, but was put up by a seventies feminist) that the discomfort with conflict and organizational paralysis came from the seventies/eighties wave of psychotherapy: that women copied the “let’s process your feelings” approach of talk therapy into non-therapy situations. And that the middle-class women were the most likely to be uncomfortable with direct conflict; that where working-class women would have a loud confrontational argument and then move on, middle-class women would go for sneaky-but-nasty ways of aggressing with deniability. It sounded exactly like what gets called ‘mean girls culture’ now.
And now that I have read Wolf’s essay, I have to disagree with her identification of the roots of the problem. That nineteenth-century tradition of seeing women as spiritual and virtuous didn’t stop them from campaigning against the great social injustices like slavery and sexism. In a way, that tradition gave women the spiritual authority to speak on moral issues.
And seventies feminism was focused on structural analysis of power dynamics and uniting to wage a broad campaign. I read The Feminine Mystique – Friedan wrote about each individual housewife wondering what had gone wrong with her personal life as a prelude to showing the systems that railroaded them into suburban housewifery, and how it wasn’t her personal flaws but a natural human reaction to be unhappy at servitude.
The place where we went wrong was losing the solidarity. A bunch of reactionary forces, including the men who didn’t want to lose unearned advantages and the capitalist forces that don’t want us thinking beyond lifestyle choices, pushed hard and subtly to reframe everything as ‘individual choice’.
That, and that getting women a semi-equal chance at the sources of personal power (education, employment, money) somehow turned out to be a lot easier than getting men to shoulder a semi-equal share of the social responsibility (care for the young, the elderly, the disabled; the doing of household chores). Maybe because it’s easy to want more power and harder to get people who haven’t been brought up to it to want more responsibility?
“Lifestyle choices are not meaningful if no bigger questions are being asked.” THIS is amazing. This past week in insane US politics there was some really over-dramatized and invented ‘stay at home mom vs. ‘working’ mom’ war being waged but really the main point of that discussion AT ALL can be summed up in the above words by Wolf.
Sometimes when I get in a debate with friends or aquaintances about these choices that we get so wrapped up in when deciding what’s ‘feminist enough’ (often with the other person defending their position, assuming I find it not-feminist-enough) I just want to scream ‘IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU, per se, it’s amazing that you feel you got to make the choice you wanted, but these decisions are not made in a vacuum’
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