Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Naomi Wolf
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Introduction
PART ONE: THE DECLINE OF THE MASCULINE EMPIRE: ANITA HILL AND THE GENDERQUAKE
1. Fault Line
2. The Decline of the Masculine Empire
3. Genderquake: The Evidence
4. A Change in Consciousness: Women Learn to Imagine Triumph
PART TWO: WHAT WENT WRONG? HOW SO MANY WOMEN AND THEIR MOVEMENT PARTED WAYS
5. Out of Touch?
6. Plagues of a Movement: 60s Hangover, Dyke-Baiting, and Silencing on the Job
7. Media Omission and Intellectual Polarization: How to Suffocate the Ideas of a Revolution
8. Oxygen Deprivation Leads to 2-D Opinions
PART THREE: VICTIM FEMINISM VERSUS POWER FEMINISM
9. Two Traditions
10. Core Mythology of Victim Feminism
11. Case Studies
12. How the Traditions Clash Today
13. Victim Feminism’s Recent Impasses
14. The Turning Point
PART FOUR: TOWARDS A NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF FEMALE POWER
15. Are We Ready to Embrace Equality?
16. The Feminine Fear of Power
PART FIVE: WHAT DO WE DO NOW? POWER FEMINISM IN ACTION
17. New Psychological Strategies
18. What We Can Do Now
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
About the Author
Naomi Wolf was born in 1962 in San Francisco. She studied at Yale before becoming a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, and working in Edinburgh. She was catapulted to success in 1990 by her first book, The Beauty Myth, which was an international bestseller, published in fourteen countries. She lectures and writes on women’s issues all over the world, and lives in Washington.
About the Book
In her bestselling book The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf sought to change the way in which women see themselves in relation to their bodies. Now she focuses on how they see themselves in relation to power. She argues that the feminist movement has to change if it is to speak to a new generation of women, and that, even as women are gaining more ground than ever before, a wariness of feminist orthodoxies keeps them away from the only movement capable of putting political clout behind their personal success. The book represents a call to women to throw off centuries of conditioning about the relationship between power and femininity.
Also by Naomi Wolf
The Beauty Myth
Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How it Will Change the 21st Century
For David
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
– Audre Lorde
Fight fire with fire.
– Proverb
Acknowledgements
There are many without whose help I could not have written this book.
The following people took time from pressing schedules to grant me interviews: Katha Pollitt of The Nation; Marie Wilson of The Ms. Foundation; Nancy Woodhull of ‘Women, Men and Media’; Holly Ainbinder and Jim Naurekas of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting; and Andrea Berman of Mayor David Dinkin’s office.
I am grateful to the audiences of men and women across the country who shared with me their concerns about and hopes for the women’s movement. And I thank the groups of young women (particularly the WAC members of SUNY Geneseo, Jenna Soleo, Serena Morse, Noël Raley, Kirsten Konefal, Jill Scheltz, Nicole Montagna, Caycee Cullen, Anna Fleshler and Tammy Schultz) who allowed me to record their feelings about their relationship to the issues of power and leadership. Their voices stay with me.
Friends’ and colleagues’ work has enriched my understanding. Elizabeth Alexander of the University of Chicago discussed identity politics, race and feminism, and provided in her teaching and her poetry a role model for combining the progressive curriculum with intellectual rigour and broadmindedness. I also thank writer Susie Bright; novelist and safe-sex educator Karen Cook; Judy Coyne of Glamour, a consistently challenging ‘ideal reader’ in general; and Rhonda Garelick, of the University of Colorado. Catharine MacKinnon and Jeffrey Masson discussed some of the themes; Marcia Ann Gillespie, executive editor of Ms. magazine was an inspiration early in the writing process; Barbara Findlen and Julie Felner, also of Ms., gave me extensive, salient notes on early drafts; Ann Godoff was the ideal interlocutor for this project; Ann Hornaday, author of the original ‘PC/PI’ article, gave manuscript readings that have been unfailingly sharp and Susan Faludi made valuable suggestions. Nancy Frank and Susan Roxborough; Suzanne Levitt of Yale University; Tom Molner, Donna Minkowitz, Will Schwalbe, Amruta Slee, Dan and Tara Goleman, John Brockman, Katinka Matson, John Stoltenberg, Carmen Callil and Frances Coady all offered important insights. My mother and father, Deborah Goleman Wolf and Leonard Wolf, and my grandmother Fay Goleman, provided their reliable combination of vital critical commentary and general psychic nourishment.
Gloria Steinem merits special acknowledgement. She read and commented on a draft while under a deadline of her own.
Many people helped me meet this and other commitments: Enrika Gadler, Beth Pearson and the production staff at Random House (who made miracles of order from my cryptic notations and baroque system of inserts); Alison Samuel, my editor at Chatto & Windus; Helen Churko, Lucy LePage and Carlton Sedgley of Royce Carlton, and Bethany Saltman. Joan and John Shipley made their hospitality available to me, as did The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Finally, my gratitude to Anastasia Gochnour, who assists me, is profound. She oversaw the needs of the office with foresight and creativity and contributed in many other ways.
I would also like to thank Candida Lacey and the following organizations for their help in providing me with information for the British edition: The Association of University Teachers (AUT); The Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union (BECTU), especially Jane Paul, the Equality Officer; The British Film Institute; Nigel Dyckhoff of Spencer Stuart and Associates Limited; Emily’s List, UK; The Equal Opportunities Commission; Equity; The Institute of Directors; The Institute of Management; The Institute of Manpower Services, University of Sussex; The National Union of Journalists (NUJ); The 300 Group; Women into Business; Women in Management; Women in Film and Television; Women in Publishing; and The Women’s Broadcasting Committee.
Readers may be surprised to see that I appreciate on some pages thinkers or publications with whom I argue on others. Let this book be read with the thought in mind that drove me to write it: dissenting from another’s ideas is a form of honour, and taking a critical look at one’s own cherished movement is an act not of sacrilege but of love.
Introduction
The 1980s were the height of the backlash years, but from the autumn of 1991 to the present, a new era has begun – the era of the ‘genderquake’, in which the meaning of being a woman is changed for ever. The ‘genderquake’ started in America with the eruption of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment, rocked through 1991–2’s famous rape trials, flung into the light of day allegations of Senator Bob Packwood’s sexual harassment of colleagues, and of the sexual abuse of US Navy women at the Tailhook Convention; and provided the impetus for 52 new women legislators to take their seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate. From these beginnings, and with the election of pro-feminist President Clinton in the USA, the election of the first female Prime Minister of Canada, and the re-election – with the women’s vote – of socialist Prime Minister Paul Keating in Australia, a train of events has been set in motion that leads to one conclusion: women have become the political ruling class. And they have the historical distinction of being the only ruling class that is unaware of its status.
During this short time, contributions to women’s groups reached record highs in the USA; Emily’s List, the Democratic Women’s Political Action Committee, which funds the women candidates who have the best chance of winning, became the biggest lobbying force in the country, garnering millions of dollars for women office-seekers; advertising changed, with women depicted in positions of power, being worshipped by men; self-abnegating self-help books for women fell by the wayside, to be replaced on the bestseller lists by Women Who Run with the Wolves and Revolution from Within; a million women overwhelmed the Capitol in the largest pro-choice rally in a decade; and a spate of new women’s groups, with a media-conscious, take-no-prisoners attitude, mobilized at the grassroots in a frenzy of organizing unseen since the early 1970s: the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), the Women’s Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!), YELL, the Riot Grrls, and the Third Wave Organization, all were born.
Even in Britain, where there has been less cause for electoral celebration, several significant feminist victories have changed the climate of the times. Alison Halford’s courageous stand against sexual discrimination in the police force opened the door for other women and prompted an independent investigation that revealed, among other things, that nine out of ten policewomen had experienced1 sexual harassment2; Barbara Follett launched Emily’s List UK which aims to help ten women stand for parliament with every £30,000 raised; the Labour party elected a woman as deputy leader and passed a resolution that women must represent the party at the next general election in 50 per cent of its target seats; and, in the depths of the recession, in 1992, four feminist magazines were launched – Second Shift, Body Politic, Bitch and Bad Attitude.
In Australia, Prime Minister Paul Keating employed advisers on women’s policy to help him win his 1993 election and announced a campaign for judicial re-education to combat prejudice against women3 in the law courts. In May 1993 Senator Rosemary Crowley launched Women in Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ most comprehensive social report on the status of women.
But will women consolidate their gains? We have entered a time of great awakening and lightning-fast learning, as female perceptions begin to take their place alongside male perceptions in the daylight of public life. But while the new female power can feel like an unstoppable force, we cannot count on its momentum. Forward motion is up to us.
We will either understand that we are in the final throes of a civil war for gender fairness, in which conditions have shifted to put much of the attainment of equality in women’s own grasp or we will back away from history’s lesson, and, clinging to an outdated image of ourselves as powerless, inch along for another several hundred years or so, subject to the whims and wind shifts of whatever form of backlash comes along next.
The decision is ours.
In Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century, I will argue that we are at what historians of women’s progress call ‘an open moment’. Twenty-five years of dedicated feminist activism have hauled the political infrastructure into place, enough women in the middle classes have enough money and clout, and most women now have enough desire and determination to begin to balance the imbalance of power between the sexes. But three obstacles stand in our way: many women have become estranged from their own movement; one strand of feminism has developed maladaptive attitudes; and women lack a psychology of female power to match their new opportunities.
Part One, ‘The Decline of the Masculine Empire: Anita Hill and the Genderquake’, tells the story of how male prestige began to tarnish just as female psychology became emboldened. These two trends set the stage for the recent upheavals that brought us to this turning point.
Part Two, ‘What Went Wrong? How So Many Women and Their Movement Parted Ways’, came out of my experience of listening to audiences across the country explain why they often have strong negative feelings about the idea of ‘feminism’, and warns that we must heal the breach that has opened between millions of women and the movement to secure their rights. While a strong majority of women passionately endorses the goals of feminism, a large number avoid identifying with the movement itself. This estrangement impedes women from attaining the equality that they desire.
Old habits left over from radical feminism’s rebirth from the revolutionary left of the 1960s – such as a reflexive anti-capitalism, an insider-outsider mentality, and an aversion to the ‘system’ – once necessary and even effective, are now getting in our way. I will examine the other factors that led to many women’s estrangement from feminism: dyke-baiting; economic silencing; media omission of debate on ‘women’s issues’ so absolute that it amounts to a virtual news blackout; a tendency towards intellectual rigidity, and an ‘insider’ clubhouse mentality in some circles; mistranslated feminist theories that ‘trickled down’ into popular debate sounding bizarre; and a perception that the movement is anti-family, anti-male, exclusively white, and middle class. All of these contributed to many women’s resistance to what had become ‘the F word’.
Part Three, ‘Victim Feminism versus Power Feminism’, looks at ‘victim feminism’, a version of feminism that has come to dominate popular debate, and shows how destructive it is to women, and how wrong it is for the new era at hand. I’ll confront the growing voices of critics who are charging that all feminism is puritanical, man-hating, and obsessed with defining women as ‘victims’, and I will separate the nugget of truth in those charges from the destructive, categorical hype. I will explore what is indeed unhelpful about the way a small minority of feminists have phrased the theme of victimization. I will look at how women must recount the all too real ways in which they are often victimized, without creating an identity from that victimization. There are and have always been two different approaches within feminism. One – what I define as ‘victim feminism’ – casts women as sexually pure and mystically nurturing, and stresses the evil done to these ‘good’ women as a way to petition for their rights. The other, which I call ‘power feminism’, sees women as human beings – sexual, individual, no better or worse than their male counterparts – and lays claim to equality simply because women are entitled to it. Victim feminist assumptions about universal female goodness and powerlessness, and male evil, are unhelpful in the new moment for they exalt what I’ve termed ‘trousseau reflexes’ – outdated attitudes women need least right now. The reactionary reflexes of this feminism are understandable; feminists have been faithfully tending the fires for all women – including those most victimized – during the backlash years, with little thanks and more than their share of abuse. Given these conditions, it is not surprising that one narrow but influential strand of feminism has tried to help women survive the retrenchment by turning suffering into a virtue, anonymity into a status symbol, and marginalization into a mark of the highest faith. While we can sympathize with those who need this approach when times are bad, we must also realize that it proves dangerous when times change.
Victim feminism is obsolete because female psychology and the conditions of women’s lives have both been transformed enough so that it is no longer possible to pretend that the impulses to dominate, aggress, or sexually exploit others are ‘male’ urges alone. I will discuss why it is both empowering and moral for women to look honestly at the ‘dark side’ within them, emerging now into light.
Part Four, ‘Towards a New Psychology of Female Power’, asserts that our new opportunities will be wasted unless we develop a vision of femininity in which it is appropriate and sexy for women to use power. The fragility of many women’s self-esteem means that we might fail to attribute the genderquake to our own will and strength. And the penalties that many women associate with the use of power keep us convinced that leadership, or even winning, is not ‘really worth it’.
I will look at how girlhood social organization leads us into a situation in which, in Gloria Steinem’s phrase, ‘Men punish the weak while women punish the strong.’ Each of us, I believe, has a regal, robust, healthily self-regarding ‘will to power’ that has been submerged. I will argue that little girls start out with much more than the pre-adolescent ‘authenticity’ that researchers such as Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown have pinpointed; they start out with a desire to rule the world. I will look at how we can retrieve that wild child – the inner bad girl – in order to embrace those qualities of leadership and sexual self-possession, and the solid sense of entitlement that we are conditioned to disavow in ourselves, and to resent in other women.
The final section, ‘What Do We Do Now? Power Feminism in Action’, demonstrates that the feminist successes of the genderquake era have embraced the use of money, the electoral process and the mass media, and rejected a rigid, exclusive ideology. These successes point the way to a flexible feminism for the 1990s that can reclaim the majority.
I will propose specific strategies to make pro-woman action something that is effective, populist, inclusive, easy, fun, and even lucrative. Rather than relying on ‘converting’ mainstream women into a subculture that can sometimes feel as if it is for activists only, this approach brings the movement smoothly into most women’s – and men’s – everyday activities.
It is my passionate hope that these ideas can spark debate about how to close the gap between those women and men who long for gender equality, and the only movement that can win it for us. Only by closing this gap can we consolidate the clout of the unlabelled resurgence of power feminism that has already rocked our world.
Part One
The Decline of the Masculine Empire: Anita Hill and the Genderquake
Chapter One
Fault Line
THOSE WHO STUDY earthquakes know that they are not sudden, unpredictable events, but the result of aeons of silent tectonic pressure. The events that exploded with the Anita Hill hearings in Washington in October 1991 were the result of pressure that had been building up for years.
For a decade and a half, American women’s anger had been driven underground, to smoulder under the weight of the Reagan–Bush years of reaction. But while that weight kept the lid on their anger, women’s psychology was changing rapidly, even as masculine power was beginning to erode.
Anita Hill’s testimony merely ripped open existing chasms, driving the continental plates of gender assumptions against one another, freeing locked-up energy and bringing down landslides. As the quake subsides, we find we inhabit a new landscape that we have yet fully to understand. The story is now engraved on the international psyche as surely as the Boston Tea Party or the Tiananmen protests – like any myth of origin for the turning point of an insurrection.
As the hearings preceding Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to US Supreme Court drew near, rumours circulated in Washington: a young woman, it was said, had been sexually harassed by the nominee when she was his associate at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission a decade before. On 10 September 1991 the hearings to confirm Judge Thomas began. On 12 September, according to Timothy Phelps in Capitol Games, Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, telephoned Harriet Grant, the committee’s nominations counsel. Hill told the story of what she alleged had happened during her time at the EEOC, and gave Grant the name of her friend, Susan Hoechner, now a judge in California, to whom she had described her difficulties. She was assured that her statement would be given to members of the committee, but that her name would be kept confidential.
The hearings proceeded. When, after six days had elapsed, Thomas had ended his testimony and no one had contacted Hill, Judge Hoechner spoke to the committee and assured them she could vouch for Hill’s charges. On Friday 20 September, the final day of the hearings, the FBI was asked to investigate. Hill would have to come forward. On Monday, 23 September, she agreed to do so, and faxed a four-page statement to the committee.
On Wednesday, 25 September, Senator Strom Thurmond, on behalf of the Republicans, decided to ignore the report. Senator Biden scheduled a committee vote for Friday, leaving no time to examine Hill’s charges. On Friday, 27 September, after having seen Hill’s sworn statement, Biden declared, ‘For this senator, there is no question with respect to the nominee’s character, competence, credentials or credibility.’1
But by 6 October, Timothy Phelps, a reporter, had tracked down Hill and run the story in Newsday. Nina Totenberg interviewed Hill for National Public Radio. On 7 October, Hill herself held a press conference in Oklahoma, which was broadcast by CNN. The senators were outraged – not by the charges, but by the leak.
But then the phones began to ring. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s office was deluged by 3,000 infuriated calls; indeed, enraged constituents barraged every senator’s switchboard. The Senate phone network could not handle the number of calls. By early Tuesday, the place was in turmoil. Belatedly, the senators moved to delay the vote.
This is Phelps and Winternitz’s account of the palace insurrection:
At lunchtime, seven congresswomen marched from the House side of Capitol Hill . . . [and] climbed the steep steps to the Senate. The Senate Democrats, fifty-six men and one woman, were having their weekly luncheon and could not be disturbed. Twice the women of the House knocked on the closed door of the luncheon room, and twice they were shooed away . . . Undaunted, the congresswomen – led by Louise Slaughter of New York and Patricia Schroeder of Colorado – marched over to the office buildings in search of senators to lobby. Women staffers came out into the hallways and shouted encouragement to the representatives on their mission in the bastion of male power. ‘Right on!2 Right on!’ they yelled.
The vote was delayed, Professor Hill testified, the hearings were televised, and the balance of power as it relates to gender changed, possibly for good. The ‘story’ of sexual harassment and how men and women saw it differently shook the country; the ‘he said/she said’ dialogue went national.
We may never know the truth or falsehood of what was alleged in the hearing room, but what is certain is that something critical to the sustenance of patriarchy died in the confrontation, and something new was born. The sight of a phalanx of white men – notably Senators Arlen Specter, Alan Simpson, Orrin Hatch and Joseph Biden – showing at best blank incomprehension, and at worst a cavalier, humiliating disregard for women’s reality and testimony, was a revelation to the nation’s women of the barrenness of democracy without female representation, as well as being an unmasking of male authority.
During the McCarthy hearings, Joseph Welch, who represented the Army, stood up to the Senator and said, ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?’ The whole room stood still, and then everything was changed. The power of the witchhunts began to evaporate at that moment, even as the Senator was still speaking. In terms of the aura of patriarchy, the 1991 hearings served the same purpose.
The following two years were rocked by unprecedented struggles over gender issues, notably the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, the Mike Tyson rape trial, and the scandal of the Tailhook Convention, at which Navy men, after watching pornographic videos, sexually assaulted Navy women. The rage of insulted women ricocheted from the headlines to produce political repercussions, which came to be known as ‘the Anita Hill effect’.
Elections 1990s-style
In 1992 record numbers of women ran for office in the US elections, many of them because of anger at the hearings. Retaliation was an open, palpable theme. The Democratic Senator Brock Adams withdrew from his race after eight women went to the press with accusations of sexual harassment. He was succeeded by Patty Murray, who called herself ‘the mom in tennis shoes’, an ironic riposte to a putdown from a male legislator who had told her, ‘You can’t change anything, you’re just a mom in tennis shoes.’ Lynn Yeakel, a newcomer, fought for Arlen Specter’s seat in Pennsylvania, campaigning on an explicit platform of anger at Hill’s treatment; her opponent had been one of Hill’s most heavy-handed interrogators. Senator Alan Dixon of Illinois, who had turned away from his party to vote for Thomas, found himself beaten by a former county recorder of deeds, an African-American woman named Carol Moseley Braun. Californians Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein both used pro-Hill campaign literature to beat their male opponents, ‘who were reduced,’ as Phelps put it, ‘to arguing that they had better feminist credentials than the women candidates’.3 Women voters nationwide followed the campaigns of the newcomers with the intensity born of a mood of retribution.
The genderquake rattled and reoriented the presidential election. Throughout the campaign, the figure of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic front-runner’s lawyer/activist wife, became a central symbol of the convulsion, a symbol to be used both by her supporters and her detractors. The press, early on, was still unaware of how far-reaching the effects of the genderquake were to become. So the media tended to put the Governor of Arkansas’ wife in a harsh light, reiterating that ‘the country was not yet ready’ for a First Lady who was a prominent attorney. ‘For better or worse, an awful lot of Americans have taken a negative image away from their experiences with her. How do you explain that?’ Bryant Gumbel asked on the Today show, inadvertently providing the explanation4 himself. Barbara Bush, with her more traditional persona, was treated with relative warmth.
This media misjudgement of the intensifying anger among women led the Republicans into a grave tactical error: they took their own female supporters for granted. They interpreted Republican women’s political orientation from a male point of view, and failed to understand that conservative politics does not mean that a woman is willing to be treated with disrespect. From a woman’s point of view, the seriousness of sexual harassment cuts across party lines, as does the wish to be heard by one’s representatives. The Republicans’ failure to listen to Republican women may have cost them the White House; throughout the campaign, polls showed Bush scoring lower with women than with men.
The bungling of gender issues within the Republican camp moved into a critical phase with the summer campaign. By then, it was evident even to Republicans that the country was poised for a major Zeitgeist shift, and that the gender issue was the major faultline. But they chose the wrong side upon which to stand. They made their appeal to men – or rather to that group of men, the political ‘patriarchalists’, who were most threatened by the inroads being made into their domain. They cast the Houston Convention as a referendum on patriarchy, and lost.
Their strategists represented the Republican party as the last line of defence against the invading hordes of those who would level the traditional gender hierarchy. The tone had been set by Dan Quayle’s ‘family values’ speech, which attacked TV’s fictional single mother Murphy Brown. Misreading the press warmth towards Barbara Bush and hostility to Hillary Rodham Clinton as a reflection of the feelings of the electorate, rather than as a reflex of the male-dominated press, they cued their themes to that contrast, and did not understand that a significant proportion of Republican women – such as those who joined Ann Stone’s group, Republicans for Choice – saw their own lives reflected more fully in the lives of the Arkansas governor’s wife and of TV’s Murphy Brown, than in the lives of Barbara Bush and Marilyn Quayle.
Right-wing commentator Patrick Buchanan laid out the battle lines with his convention warning of a ‘cultural war’, spearheaded by ‘feminists’ (like Hillary Rodham Clinton). Reacting belatedly to the Democratic Convention’s well-received showcasing of women leaders, the Republicans condescendingly trotted out their wives. Marilyn Quayle, the Vice-President’s wife, a lawyer by training, made the disastrous misstep of appearing to attack mothers who held jobs, and stressed that women did not wish to be liberated from their ‘essential natures’ as women. Unfortunately for the Bush camp, no more sensitive nerve than the guilt experienced by working mothers – Republicans as well as Democrats – could have been found. Mrs Quayle could not have done more damage even if she had struck deliberately.
Clumsier still, Republican strategists depicted George Bush as the reassuring arch-patriarch, the promised redeemer of the Masculine Empire that was losing its stronghold. The President was actually blessed on television by a Greek Orthodox patriarch with a flowing beard, while Bush’s children, grandchildren and conspicuously supportive, non-professional wife were massed around him.
By playing these cards, the Republicans were addressing themselves to the patriarchalists’ deepest fears, while trusting the women of the party to remain docile.
Male blindness to the reality of women leads to faulty politics, and the Bush White House went down largely because it paid too little attention to its female constituents, and because it neglected to notice what was on daytime talk shows which women, including millions of traditional homemakers, were watching. Commentators pointed out that in 1992, in a departure from earlier years, voters were getting their political information directly from candidates who were bypassing the traditional news media by going to radio phone-in shows and on TV. But this thesis failed to account for the enormous socio-political influence on women viewers of shows like Oprah or Donahue. For years, while the male strategists were looking elsewhere, these shows had been providing a forum for the deconstruction of the patriarchal family. In spite of the opprobrium heaped upon them, despite their tendency to individualize social problems, these shows did more to bring the feminist issues of incest, and violence against women and children into the consciousness of the mainstream – and to frame them as intolerable wrongs rather than life as usual – than the entire feminist activist community could manage to do. The talk shows also raised the sense of political entitlement of the ordinary woman by doing something unique to our cultural institutions: they treated the opinions of women of all classes, races and educational levels as if they matter, and as if the dissent among women about ‘women’s issues’ matters too. That daily act of listening, whatever its shortcomings, made for a revolution in what women were willing to ask for; daily these shows conditioned otherwise unheard women to believe that they too were entitled to a voice.
By the time the Republicans made their pitch for the patriarchal family, the entire country of Oprah-watching women knew exactly what the injustices and dangers of that family structure looked like. As many Republican as Democrat women had experienced sexual harassment, domestic violence, paternal abdication, non-existent child support payments. They were unlikely to be led blindly by appeals to the glory of the patriarchal family and social structure. The Republicans, obviously, lost.
Bill Clinton, in contrast, understood the genderquake with more sophistication. He pitched to the ‘egalitarians’, male and female. He presented his wife as a respected partner: ‘You do not have to tear a woman down to build a man up.’ In his acceptance speech at the Convention he made history by using the image of a young girl as his central metaphor, and he thanked female mentors and teachers. He also, of course, championed abortion rights. Responding to his tactics, women voted to elect him, finally, by a slightly higher percentage than did men: 46 per cent to 41 per cent.5 In the presidential election, women were 54 per cent of the voting public.6 Many analysts now agree that abortion and social issues7 played a crucial role in the outcome, leading pro-choice Republicans to defect from their party.
This genderquake is not just a US phenomenon, although the US is the epicentre. It is ripping at the seams of power structures worldwide. In October 1991 John Major, the UK Prime Minister, launched Opportunity 2000 to increase the proportion of senior public appointments held by women; in the same year he launched a Citizen’s Charter for women; Neil Kinnock, then the leader of the opposition Labour party, promised to outdo him by creating a Ministry for Women; Labour MPs are now required to vote for at least three women in the annual Shadow Cabinet elections; and the party whips on both sides have been eagerly packing their women MPs8 on to the benches most visible to the TV cameras, as a way to woo women voters. Why the abrupt flurry of respect? The nervousness in the UK follows from the same shift that caused the quake in the US; as the Guardian put it, ‘The fact that male politicians have suddenly discovered feminism is, of course, related to the imminence of a general election at which women voters will outnumber men.’ The UK version of Emily’s List was immediately castigated by opposition politicians as ‘yet another example of designer socialism’.
In Australia Paul Keating won the 1993 election because he took women’s issues seriously. A year before the general election, in May 1992, a Morgan poll showed that Keating was unpopular with 59 per cent of women voters. At a time when 87 per cent of Australia’s one-parent families (a tenth of all families) are headed by a woman, when women make up 41 per cent of the Australian workforce, when 33 per cent of small businesses are owned by women, women in Australia were angry about his apparent lack of attention to the issues that directly concerned them: childcare, health insurance and equal pay. Several pre-election commentators warned that women might well cast their vote on childcare concerns alone.9 To rectify the situation, Keating immediately appointed as his adviser on women’s issues Dr Anne Summers, ex-editor of Ms. magazine (now editor of Good Weekend magazine) and the architect of the Hawke government’s pioneering sex discrimination and affirmative action legislation. He launched a women’s policy, a $630 million childcare package, a $30-a-week payment for women who stay at home to look after their children, a Medicare rebate for bone density tests to provide advance warning of osteoporosis, and an injection of cash for women’s organizations to lift their operational grants to a total of $1 million. He talked about equity, access and a fair deal. As feminist writer Dale Spender summed up: ‘Paul Keating went out for the women’s vote. He got it. He won.’10 In his victory speech, Keating gave ‘an extra special vote of thanks to the women of Australia’.11
In Ireland, three years earlier, Mary Robinson, a barrister, long involved with women’s rights campaigns and outspoken defender of abortion, divorce and the rights of single mothers, had become, in November 1990, the first woman President in Irish history. As she said in her acceptance speech, ‘I was elected . . . above all, by the women of Ireland . . . Instead of rocking the cradle, they have rocked the system.’12
While parties elsewhere courted women and won, in Britain the Labour party could not get its message across to women and lost the 1992 election. Its redistributive tax proposals and benefits, targeted at women voters, hardly entered public debate. As journalist and author Beatrix Campbell commented: ‘One of the more eccentric features of the general election was that while women were perceived to be precious, their issues and priorities were irrelevant.’13
In Canada, Defense Minister Kim Campbell became the first woman Prime Minister of that country in 1993, campaigning on a platform of ‘the politics of inclusion’. As in the United States, the stage had been set by a high-profile 1991 rape trial. After a controversial acquittal in a rape trial, Canadian women raised an outcry that Canadian rape laws did not adequately protect them. Campbell, then Minister of Justice, pushed to remove sex bias in criminal laws, and proposed changes in the criminal code that made it easier to convict rapists.14
In her 1993 campaign, her supporters were swept up in a wave of ‘Campbellmania’. An older stateswoman, Flora MacDonald, who had run for the leadership of the Tory party 17 years before only to find the voters unready for a woman leader, publicly supported the younger candidate. ‘Many Tories were worried,’ explained one report, ‘that if they rejected another woman, the party would be fatally branded.’15
Campbell’s opponents played the losing ‘patriarchalist’ card much as the US Republicans had tried to do. In the final days of the hotly contested campaign against male challenger Jean Charest, anti-Campbell partisans raised insinuations about Campbell’s ‘stability’ and drew attention to Charest’s attractive wife and children to show up Campbell’s status as a twice-divorced childless woman.16 In her victory speech, Campbell confronted the backfired allegations by Charest’s supporters that Canada might not be prepared for a female Prime Minister: to a mass of waving pink signs reading ‘Kim!’ in feminine cursive, she avowed that ‘Our choice as a party is clear: We can respond to the winds of change or we can be swept away.’ To laughter at a meeting of her female supporters, she remarked, ‘There’s a Chinese proverb that women hold up half the sky. Yeah, the heavier half.’
In Norway, with its female Prime Minster, Gro Brundtland, 7 of 17 ministers are female and 50 per cent of the police force is female. An Equal Status Act was passed to ensure that 40 per cent of all public boards are made up of women. In 1990 Dr Carmen Lawrence became the first state premier in Australia. In Canada, pressure from women led to the Pay Equity Act which ensures that women are paid comparable worth for the work they do. In Turkey,17 Tansu Ciller, whose husband took her last name, became leader of the governing coalition, and the country’s first female Prime Minister, on a platform that stressed her commitment to promote women’s rights.18 In Italy, there has been a revival of feminism following proposals to tighten abortion laws, the news of Bosnian women’s rapes and the suggestion that married women should accept social security payments in lieu of jobs.19 In Spain in 1992, the main opposition leader, Jose Maria Aznar of the People’s Party, brought his wife, Ana Botella, a lawyer and civil servant in her thirties often compared by the press to Hillary Rodham Clinton, into the limelight to try to catch the reflected glow of ‘the Hillary factor.’ In Sweden, the high-powered feminist networking group Stödstrumporna (Support Stockings), led by writer and campaigner Maria-Pia Böethius, has the ear of all the main political parties and their criticisms of government policy make front-page news.20 In Uganda, an unexpected spin-off from Uganda’s AIDS epidemic is that women are establishing a place for themselves in what has always been a male-dominated society: the Uganda Association of Women Lawyers (UAWL) has started a vociferous campaign for women’s rights, from inheritance to domestic violence.21
Worldwide we are challenging the media, the academy and the law. Australian women put male judges on trial, where they were found guilty of gender bias in rape cases;22 Irish women have begun to overturn centuries of Roman Catholic dogma to allow women in Ireland the right to have abortions;23 Danish women24 voted against the Maastricht treaty at the first referendum to ensure that their maternity rights and abortion facilities would be safeguarded; British women demanded and gained the right for divorced women to be included in their ex-husbands’ pension benefits.25
What made the genderquake years different from all the years, even the ‘years of the women’, that came before it? There have been outrages and scandals in the past as well. It was not the chain of scandals that was unusual – rape and sexual harassment are routine facts of life for women. What made them different was that, for the first time, the distribution of power into some women’s hands reached critical mass.
Chapter Two
The Decline of the Masculine Empire
WOMEN’S CLOUT REACHED that critical mass just as the empire that made men – and white men in particular – a ruling elite was sinking into deeper and deeper eclipse. In our commitment to women, feminists – Susan Faludi, Marilyn French and others – have been documenting a war, or ‘backlash’, against women.
But that analysis is incomplete without a corresponding understanding of the war against men. Women commentators have cast women’s incursions as small and the backlash as a disproportionately extreme reaction: ‘Women have not hurt1 or deprived the people who lead the backlash,’ wrote psychologist Jean Baker Miller in 1986; Faludi, too, sees the ‘backlash’ as out of proportion to women’s minute inroads.
In frustration at moving ahead so slowly and even sliding back, women tend to misunderstand how grave a threat to men’s real power are their claims. But men do not underestimate women’s power. The ‘backlash’ is an eminently rational, if intolerable, reaction to a massive and real threat. We are not simply experiencing a ‘war against women’ in which women are unthreatening victims. We are in the midst of a civil war over gender, in which there is not one side waging battle but two, unevenly matched though they may be. It is also a war against men.
The language of female progress often merges power-sharing in relationships with power-sharing at the highest level of politics, and presents the issue as a no-lose situation: ‘Why don’t they understand we just want to share? Equality makes the world better for men as well as women.’
But seizing legislative and economic power is not the same as getting help with the dishes. While equal partnership in heterosexual relationships is surely an advantage for both concerned, we are kidding ourselves if we refuse to recognize the gravity of what parity for women really means to men in political and economic terms. Newsweek commentator Eleanor Clift said that the situation ‘is as serious as South Africa: men are being asked to share power’. She is right to choose so serious an analogy, but she still understates the case; men are not being asked to ‘share’ power, the way, in a good marriage, they are being asked to ‘share’ the housework. They are being forcefully pressed to yield power. The recent recognition of women is being interpreted by women as ‘respect at last’ – a friendly offering. Unused to the weight of power, women are largely overlooking the base note of fear.
Evidence that female power has turned a corner, and that ‘the opposition’ is far more clear about the situation than women are themselves, is provided in David Brock’s 1993 account of the Thomas–Hill hearings, The Real Anita Hill, which used debatable evidence to try to demolish Hill’s reputation. Ironically, the book provides a sharper and more persuasive account of women’s new political power than a feminist writer could have achieved. Brock paints an ominous picture of a ‘Shadow Senate’ of feminists and their sympathizers. He offers a scenario in which Hill was ‘induced to file a complaint by Senate staffers and interest group partisans who wanted to defeat the nomination regardless of the charge’s truth or falsehood, and then “outed” Hill when the plan did not work’.2 He refers to feminists and to Hill’s supporters as ‘the opposition’; he describes the heads of the National Abortion Rights Action League and the various other groups that mobilized on Hill’s behalf as ‘deeply hidden operatives’;3 in his view, the dark forces of ‘the feminist groups that demanded a public inquiry on the basis of no evidence’4 were joined by ‘the media’ which ‘also helped to whip up the feminist frenzy’.5 Less than two years after backlash theorists were called paranoid, conspiracy-minded and delusional for describing a war against women’s rights, Brock has developed a detailed conspiracy theory in which feminists at the highest levels wage war against men’s rights. And he is not altogether far from the truth, for he is describing, though with the shadings of a patriarchal nightmare, the first time that women’s political power has worked with such efficiency.
Why would Brock go to the trouble of amassing enormous amounts of debatable evidence – allegations of sexual obsessiveness among others – to destroy Hill’s credibility? Why would conservative organizations like the Olin Foundation help underwrite the project? Because these men and organizations understand the conflict and all that is at stake. The book is not motivated merely by the desire to clear the name of a potentially wronged man. Brock himself provides the motivation. He details in consternation, much as I do in celebration, the broad advances made by women as a result of ‘the Anita Hill effect’. Those who believed Anita Hill, he writes, ‘took up the banner in a broader cultural conflict’. A mere two years before the right wing would not have had to go to this trouble to prevent women from taking up certain banners.
What is provoking this new level of defensiveness? What is there for those who endorse male power to be afraid of? A great deal. Right now, the continuing pro-male sex discrimination means that white men receive a mighty unearned power bonus: a fifth to a third more income6 than women across the board,7 four times the representation in state government8 in America, ten times the representation in the House of Commons in Britain and the House of Representatives in Australia, five times the representation in the European Parliament, almost total ownership of the US Senate and the House of Lords, odds of 93 to 7 in their favour for getting to the top9 of business and legal circles, and, as we shall see, an 76–24 advantage in the struggle for recognition in the press – not to mention the opportunity to cede home responsibilities to women. Truly equal opportunity for women slashes away at those advantages. Who would willingly embrace the loss of advantages such as men enjoy?
Feminists refer to sexist culture as ‘reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size’,10 in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, and women often see political parity as something that should be welcome to men, refocusing them on a friendly and realistic human scale, closer to that of women. But when women criticize men’s hoarding of power, we rarely concede that, given the same conditioning, any woman would also be convinced that twice her natural size is an appropriate reflection. Any tampering with that reflection would not feel like an adjustment for clarity, but an unjust diminution of scale.
Much female despair of men comes from seeing male sexism as men’s personal desire to ‘oppress’ women. While male dominance is undoubtedly oppressive, and while many men do take personal satisfaction in wielding power oppressively over women, the greater truth is that the majority of the ‘oppressors’ are simply protecting what they have. When we understand the nature of power, and when women acknowledge our own will to power, men’s resistance to women’s equality looks every bit as unjust, but less intimately infuriating. Misogyny is all too real; but a lot of sexism, seen in this light, is not the stubbornness of a pig or the oppressiveness of a born monster, so much as the basic logic of politics, a natural human response to a threatened and real loss of status. If the roles were reversed, women would certainly exhibit the same response.
The Crucial Percentage
Those men who are panicking are rightly apprehensive. Though almost all discussions of ‘women’s equality’ presume that the goal of the struggle is 50/50 representation, this assumption is not based on demographic reality. It is actually an arbitrary number in most Western democracies, for the true figures for parity11 are the terrifying 51 per cent to 49 per cent in the USA; 12 51.2 per cent to 48.8 per cent in the UK; 51.3 per cent to 48.7 per cent in Europe as a whole.
If voting trends continue, American women will have 10–12 million more votes than will men; according to the Bureau of the Census they now have 7 million more. Throughout the 1980s exit polls showed a gender gap13 in both statewide and national elections. In most elections, a 2 per cent advantage, a potential voting bloc of 7 million, means that that side wins.
Once we see the significance of the female balance of power, another14