Comments Elsewhere

Andrew,

So anyone who hasn’t read anything by a radical feminist doesn’t know what feminism is?

Well … … … yes.

It is no sin not to have read very much feminist theory. But it is totally irresponsible to go spouting off about the aims and theoretical claims of the feminist movement when you have made absolutely no effort to find out about what those are from sources available at your nearest bookstore or library. If you went around ranting about the evils of empiricism without ever having read anything by Locke or Hume, then you would be laughed out of the room; if you made confident pronouncements about the poetry of T. S. Eliot while refusing to read any of it, then your opinion would be dismissed out of hand. As well it should be: since you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about (how would you?) and your assertions have exactly as much evidential grounding as if you were just making them up as you go along.

(Note, incidentally, that I am intentionally ignoring your silly efforts to identify Valerie Solanas as a leading radical feminist, or to beg off on doing the reading when it’s “radical feminists.” Because it’s clear that you haven’t read anything by actual leading radical feminists, and it’s also clear that you haven’t done any serious reading of non-radical feminist theory, either.)

nik,

Thanks for your efforts at an answer. I’m afraid I wasn’t clear enough in my question, though. I know that the term comes from “Who Stole Feminism?” but I say that I don’t know what it means because I can’t find any coherent thread in Christina Hoff Sommers’ usage of the terms, or for that matter in the use by those who have adopted or adapted the distinction from her writing. It rather seems to me that it’s part of a long-standing tradition of Radical Menace politics in response to the feminist movement — that is, concocting a distinction between “reasonable” feminists and “hysterical” feminists, in order to try to divide the movement in order to make political headway. This has come from both within and without the movement, and the labels are always different — suffragists vs. feminists, “power feminists” vs. “victim feminists,” “moderates” vs. “extremists” (“man-haters,” “feminazis,” etc.), straight feminists vs. lesbian feminists, “First Wave” feminists vs. “Second Wave” feminists, “liberals” vs. “radicals” (there actually is a coherent distinction between first and second wave feminists, and also between liberals and radicals, but these terms have often also been abused in Radical Menace discussions), “sex-positive” or “pro-sex” vs. “anti-sex” (!) feminists, “Third Wave” vs. “Second Wave” feminists, “equality feminists” vs. “difference feminists,” “equity feminists” vs. “gender feminists,” etc. etc. etc. Of course, there are genuine factions within the feminist movement and I’ve no objection to identifying factions where factions exist, but it does seem to me that it’s important to make sure that these are distinctions based on the real distinctions in the thought and practice of the people involved, and not something that merely break down to “the feminists that I feel comfortable with” and “the feminists I don’t like”. When it does, the distinction serves only rhetorical purposes, not theoretical understanding.

Sorry for the lengthy prologue; this is one of my pet peeves. That said, let’s see how you set out the distinction:

• “Equity feminists” which — she says — is a doctrine of equal rights between the sexes (liberal feminism, first wave and beginings of the second).
• “Gender feminism” which — she says — views domination of women by men as a pervasive system, is opposed to liberalism, and is in favour of socialisation and state action (whenever people mention patriarchy, third wave).

This is probably consisent with what CHS gives as her “official” definition of equity feminism and gender feminism. But there are a number of problems. First, because they don’t divide the field cleanly, and they leave out some important factions. When she contrasts the “gender feminist” analysis of sexism as a pervasive social system with the “equity feminist” understanding of it in terms of individual violations of equal rights, it seems that she wants to line up her distinction with the liberal/radical distinction; but then why not just use the terms “liberal feminist” and “radical feminist” (which are widely known and originated from within the movement itself), instead of making up your own? I think part of the answer is that Hoff Sommers and many of those who cite her want to move the boundaries so as to move many high-profile liberal feminists from the “reasonable,” “liberal” side of the divide to the “hysterical,” “radical” side. In any case she doesn’t make the distinction cleanly. “Viewing domination of women by men as a pervasive system” and “a doctrine of equal rights between the sexes,” for example, are not mutually exclusive; the first claim has to do with the political question of how sexism operates, whereas the second claim has to do with the separate ethical question of what it is that’s wrong with sexism. You could believe in either, or you could believe in both; and in fact many feminists, historically, have believed in both — for example, First Wave feminists such as Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Abby Foster Kelly certainly considered the oppression of women to be systematic; they often compared their condition to that of Black slaves and their movement to the Abolition movement and to revolutionary uprisings such as the American Revolution. Many of them also suggested that the primary wrongs of this systemic domination were the violations of individual women’s equal rights that it enabled individual men to routinely commit. So does that make them “equity feminists” or “gender feminists” or both or neither? I don’t know.

Nor does viewing women’s oppression as systemic commit you one way or the other on the question of state action to remedy oppression; in fact many First and Second Wave feminists who were clearly liberal rather than radical in their orientation put a lot of effort into campaigns for state action or women’s ability to direct state action (e.g. the campaigns for the vote, antidiscrimination law, the ERA). On the other hand, many radical feminists have called for State action in various fields, but many others have been anarchists and/or advocated avoiding State channels. (This includes many lesbian separatists, who I imagine Christina Hoff Sommers would certainly want to include in her “gender feminist” category if she wants to include anybody.) So do pro-state-intervention liberals count as equity feminists, gender feminists, or neither? What about anti-state-intervention radicals? Again, I haven’t got the foggiest, and the problem is I don’t think CHS does either.

There’s another important criterion that you don’t mention — CHS suggests that “equity feminists” have “equality” (before the law, and possibly before some other prominent social institutions) as their main goal, whereas “gender feminists” reject claims of equality in favor of an political programme based on gender difference, which will either stop the suppression of women’s differences from men, or advantage women over men, or both. (This is part of the reason why Carol Gilligan is a particular object of her wrath.) Here it seems like she is trying to mimic not the liberal / radical distinction, but rather the “equality feminism” / “difference feminism” distinction. I have problems with the latter distinction too, but the chief problem with Hoff Sommers’ distinction is that she seems clearly to think this point is very important, but also seems very clearly to insist that people be lumped together on this point when they actually have nothing in common. For example, “gender feminism” is clearly used to pick out and criticize all of the following: (1) postmodern or poststructuralist feminists who regard gender as entirely performative, (2) radical feminists who regard gender as a socially constructed fiction that is violently enforced as a material political reality, and (3) feminists such as Elizabeth Gould Davis, and maybe Carol Gilligan, who are some sort of biological or spiritual essentialists about gender differences. But if you can be tagged as a “gender feminist” for believing that gender is a fiction that ought to be abolished, and tagged as a “gender feminist” for believing that gender differences are inherent and ineliminable, then again, I don’t have any idea what is being picked out by the term.