Feminism

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t quite get the concept of an all-female round robin. I consider myself a hell of a lot more feminist than the average bear, but not in the academic sense—not unsurprisingly to the VCA, I have not immersed myself in the latest critical literature on the subject—and I have to wonder what exactly the situation is that such an event is bringing to light. Are there teams out there that exclude girls? Granted that the percentage of girls in the activity is smaller than that of boys, but they succeed in accordance with their percentage. So is what we’re talking about a general feminist critique of society in general insofar as it acculturates fewer females into the debate milieu? If so, it’s pretty oblique, and the idea that there is feminist training at the RR is, shall we say, if not exactly preaching to the choir than at least attempting to convert the faithful. But I can draw no other conclusion that this general feminist critique is exactly the point.

So I’m extrapolating quite a bit here, and there may be some other rationale for this altogether. But it looks like me that it’s simply a statement of feminism against a broad-based entrenched antifeminism in society, as compared to prejudice against females in debate. I would love for someone to straighten me out on this, if I’ve gotten it wrong.

From my perspective (the oldest living person in the universe), the subject of feminism is an interesting one. I’m not going to outline the literature of the subject, aside from pointing out to the newly hatched that good old J. S. Mill (the Digressives shiver in their timbers!) was among those who dipped an oar into the water early on. You’ve probably read more on the subject that I have. But I have lived through various stages of feminism that have kept me very interested, because of the vast changes from one short era to the next. There’s a whole big mix of events and thought that have colluded to get us where we are today, and I’ve been a part of a lot of them.

So, absent the literature on the subject, let’s look at the narrative as it unfolded in the last few generations. (As a post-contemporary philosopher, the narrative matters to me more than anything. Read Caveman if you don’t believe me.)

Whatever the roles of women had been up to World War II, there is no question that those roles changed on the homefront in the ‘40s. Many of the young men were off fighting, and many of the women who stayed behind took on their jobs. Numbers notwithstanding, simply the image of Rosie the Riveter is arresting in comparison with earlier images of women in the popular imagination, which are demur or matronly or floozyish flapper but seldom if ever competent characters doing “men’s” work. Women were not accepted as equals in the realms of men. Women as professionals were a rare breed. The remnants of hunting/gathering society aren’t all that far off in a modern societal concept of men working, women tending the home. The industrial revolution brought women into the workforce, but in a second, subsidiary tier, as machines in the manufacturing cog. It was an aspiration of women to move on from those jobs into rearing families full-time (although economics weren’t always so sunny as to allow it). It was an aspiration of men to support their full-time wives. How often that happened notwithstanding, that was the ideal, the cultural paradigm.

The working homefront WWII women demonstrated the ability of women to do the jobs just as well as men would do them. Some of these jobs, in war-related manufacturing, were such that women were responsible for manufacturing the tools that protected fighters’ lives. Not only were women now obviously as capable of men of doing any job, they were capable of doing the most important jobs on which the war relied! From this, one would expect a major paradigm shift in the feminist dynamic when the war ended, but this is not what happened. Other factors trumped this real-life demonstration of feminist potential.

The return of the soldiers from the homefront meant that a lot of young men, after years of war, were back and hungry for their perceived cultural normality. They wanted and needed jobs, and they wanted and needed women. And society had not changed as much as some people might have thought. On the one hand, the women were pushed out of the jobs to make room for the men, and on the other hand, the women hooked up with the men and together they began creating families. There was also pent-up energy in the post-war economy and the Fifties boomed with more than just babies. For middle class white American, this was mostly a great time. The men had jobs, the women had babies, everyone moved to the suburbs and watched television. A pretty good deal in many ways, at least relating to the creature comforts of life.

The baby boomers who lived through these Fifties, who you would have thought would have been raised for lives of ease, ended up in lives of protest. Not every teenager in the Sixties was a hippie by any means, but for whatever reasons there truly was a meaningful generational gap between this group and their parents. Much of it was caused by the Vietnam war. The older generation had fought their war, but the younger generation wasn’t going to repeat the process. The older generation had known what they were fighting for; the younger generation couldn’t figure it out. So the younger generation became politicized in new ways, many of which were only tangentially related to Vietnam. Feminism was one of these new politicizations.

The feminism of the Sixties was truly political, based mostly on an idea that men and women should be treated as equals. In fact, much feminist belief went beyond the political, claiming that men and women were identical not only in their claim to rights but in their physiology (with one or two essential differences). This claim was made for every disenfranchised group, and if it was certainly a given in race it was also something of a given in sex as well. The belief in the core identicalness, if you will, of men and women was based not merely on the politics of the time but the sociology and, to a great extent, the science. You learned this in college. Men and women were the same. Therefore, they should have the same entitlements. It informed almost all of feminist thought at the time.

The growing political power of women, fed by new writers and thinkers and leaders, was flamed by the sheer numbers of new women arising from the baby boom and coming into their majority in the Seventies. The stay-at-home mom, which was not simply a theory but a reality for a vast number of boomers, was no longer a relevant model. Women entering the marketplace of the Seventies hit the political ground running. Equal rights. Equal pay. Equal everything.

There was always, of course, a vocal anti-feminist movement claiming that women were meant to be mothers and not CEOs, and that feminists were denying their womanhood. The image of the mother-woman was conflated with images of saintliness, while the image of the business-woman was conflated with unnaturalness. It was hard to understand this anti-feminist movement, rooted as it was in values that seemed meaningless to a lot of young people on the move. Because women had babies they should have smaller salaries for the same work? It was hard to find the logic in that at any level, unless you believed that women shouldn’t have salaries in the first place. That much of the anti-feminist movement was led by powerful women was an irony not unmarked at the time.

Time, and society, do not stand still. Nor do they move in what we like to call progress. Dialectics ensue, false steps are taken, giant steps backwards are taken…

Contemporary feminism is quite different from the first bloom of modern mass feminism in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Science has demonstrated ineluctably that men and women are seriously different in ways beyond the simple reproductive. The python’s dinner of the baby boomers moved along the digestive system from newly graduated power-hungry twenty-somethings to parents balancing all the responsibilities of life and family. Radical young people turned into conservative old people. Today, feminism is way more complex than either the women-in-the-home model or the women-in-power model. Women almost have financial parity with men, but not quite: there are plenty of women in positions of fiscal power, but not in proportion to their numbers. They almost have political parity with men, but not quite: there are plenty of women in positions of political power, but not in proportion to their numbers. In general, though, we do not any longer believe that women can’t do “men’s” work. No one seriously says Hillary should not be elected because she’s female; it’s because she’s Hillary that some folks are agin’ her. For that matter, no one seriously says that Obama should not be elected because he’s not white. Oh, sure, there are racists and anti-feminists out there—I’m not that naïve—but when I was a kid governors blocked black students from attending white schools by standing in the doorway barring their entrance, and the President of the United States had to call out the National Guard! I could be wrong on this, though. Maybe the fact that people are seriously saying that Mitt should not be elected because he’s Mormon are nothing more than pent-up hatred that’s too embarrassed to express itself in sexual or racial arenas, but somehow feels comfortable in a religious arena. I remember serious discussion about Lieberman’s Jewishness in ’04; would he need some sort of shabbas goy to run the country on the Sabbath?

In today’s world little girls are not identical to little boys (which would have been the expected world of the empowered ‘70s feminist). They are not raised the same way, or play with the same toys. Girls do girl things and boys do boy things, and for me to even write that sentence gives me the willies. To what extent are these sexually dimorphic things inherent, and to what extent are they socially imposed? This, ultimately, becomes the question we must ask, and must always ask. I think that, maybe, the world today is not afraid of women, nor does the world think they are simply inferior men. And women do very well for themselves in the (American) world at large, for the most part, although there is still some room for improvement. Or at least women do as well as men, and can’t blame society as a whole too much for their lack of success (as they very clearly could at other moments in our history). But at the point where society does distinguish between male and female in any way aside from reproductive (and even there, of course, there are arguments), we have to be very, very careful that the distinction is a correct one. I was formed to make no distinctions at all, which may not be the best position to hold. But at least it’s not a horrible position, and I would suggest that any position that distinguishes between male and female ought to be held to a standard that the distinction cannot in any way lessen the personal, political or social power of the people involved.

Which is why, I guess, I don’t understand Round Robins for girls. In my mind, girls=boys in debate. I don’t mean to suggest that I feel that it’s wrong to have such an event, but I just don’t get it. As I said, I would love for someone to set me straight, especially in light of what I’ve said above.