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Book Review |
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Women's Freedom Network Looks at Gender in America Edited by Rita J. Simon. New York: University Press of America, 1995.$45.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-7618-0058-1. $26.50 paper. ISBN: 0-7618-0057-3. Review by Ruth Rosen |
Contemporary Sociology, January 1997, Vol. 26, No.l, Pp.19-20
In the fall of 1993, The Women's Freedom Network (WFN), made up of women academics, critics, and journalists, held its founding conference in Washington, D.C. Positioning themselves somewhere between NOW's "radical feminism" and Phyllis Schafly's Eagle Forum, they pronounced themselves an alternative, responsible voice to whom journalists and pundits might turn for accurate reportage and data. Unlike NOW, they argued, the WFN refused to portray women as victims in need of special protection. Unlike Schlafly, they refused to argue that women belonged at home. In short, they hoped to inject themselves and some "sanity" into the debates that feminism has generated.
The essays and papers assembled for this collection are from that conference. But trying to figure out what the WFN really stands for is like trying to read tea leaves. According to the introduction and conclusion, the WFN finds radical feminists guilty of cooking their data, exaggerating the victimization of women, targeting men as enemies, and seeking special (governmental) privileges for women.
In contrast, the WFN regards "women not as a special group in need of special treatment, but rather, as nothing more than a subspecies of Humanus erectus: people who stand up for ourselves." According to the WFN, women who insist that gender discrimination is deeply institutionalized in society and culture are "gender feminists." In contrast, WFN members describe themselves as "equity feminists," who believe that most problems have been solved and that women should seek no more and no less than men. The WFN is also horrified by the pandemic political correctness they have witnessed in women's studies' programs. They agree with Christina Hoff Sommers (the author of Who Stole Feminism?) that "gender feminists" have largely hallucinated the many gender crimes they claim to be ubiquitous. Above all, the WFN embraces a strong antigovernment conviction. Women can take care of themselves, thank you very much.
These are the basic ideas that are supposed to frame this collection. One could disagree with these assertions and, for example, argue that they completely ignore the plight of poor and minority women. But the problem is that even their own research and data don't support their political agenda.
In fact some of the research-based essays only add more data to support "gender feminists"' contention that women are treated and represented as subordinates in American society. Virginia Postrel, for instance, examines how men and women relate to one another at the workplace. She concludes that both women and men learn "to perceive women as weak and men as strong." Anne Mitchelle investigates why mothers who do not have custody of their children suffer social stigma, while noncustodial fathers do not. In investigating women's and men's risk behavior, Margaret Brinig concludes that women are more altruistic than men. In one of the finest essays, Deborah Anker's research confirms that women refugees are routinely raped, and that their requests for asylum are routinely denied because they are regarded as victims of custom, rather than of state sanctioned violence. These essays hardly make a case for equity feminism.
In another fine essay, Jean Bethke Elshtain explores why women in other countries resist the deeply individualistic impulse in American liberal feminism. Her research is excellent, her analysis sharp. What she fails to note, however, is that although many women in foreign cultures have resisted the extreme individualism and careerism of liberal feminism, they have accepted the feminist premise that they have rights and entitlements, and have been redefining feminism according to their own exigencies and concrete needs. Some African women have now described water and fuel as feminist issues. Some women in Third World countries have targeted education as the path to population control and development. The point is, women all over the globe are identifying different problems, targeting different issues. The common denominator is that women are questioning the traditional assumption that they should not question anything. The essays in this collection are uneven. Some are puerile, some are paeans to the free market. But some of the writers' criticisms of feminism are right on target. Eishtain's critique of American feminism's excessive individualism (which directly contradicts other contributors' glorification of the free individual) is also a critique of the political culture from which American feminism emerged. Christina Hoff Sommers's (selective) anecdotal accounts of feminist dogrnatism, though hardly representative, cannot be denied by any honest feminist scholar.
Ultimately, It is not clear what the WFN stands for. Some members are ambitious women who would like to join Gloria Steinem and Phyllis Schlafly on talk shows. Others are shills for antigovernment conservatives who have supported many African American intellectuals, and now are paying for feminist writers as well.
Unlike the women of the far right, these women have careers and call themselves feminists. They clearly want to appropriate and incorporate feminism into a free market, conservative politics, Don't be surprised if you wake up one morning and wonder how conservatives, who so successfully seized the language of family values, also reinvented feminism as a necessary ingredient of a deregulated freemarket economy. Who stole feminism? I'd bet on the 'Women's Freedom Network.