The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  The core principle of women’s right to bodily dignity, free of coercion, undergirded reproductive rights discourse. It also generated other issues: activism against rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment. These newly accentuated wrongs of woman—newly accentuated, not newly discovered, because protests against male domestic and sexual violence went back to the eighteenth century—dramatized men’s power, formally and informally maintained by law, economics, and government, to use, abuse, exploit, and wreak havoc on women’s bodies. These particular expressions of body politics had the advantage of circumventing the polarities of the abortion debate. Images of abused and traumatized women tapped into a traditional moral scheme of female virtue and male vice. The very familiarity of the moral outrage these campaigns against male violence inspired gained them support from constituencies outside feminism and even opposed to feminism.

  Like abortion rights, body politics brought together women across generations—mothers and daughters—and across the color line. Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975), a feminist bestseller, touched off a furor by demonstrating how enmeshed rape was with normal male behavior. At every level, Brownmiller showed, rape victims were subject to hostility, shaming, and distrust from police, judges, neighbors, and even sometimes family and friends. Against Our Will presented a comprehensive view of male power in its most violent manifestations. The grievances had been circulating in the women’s movement for years, but Brownmiller’s book broke open the subject for a mainstream audience and galvanized the formation of groups dedicated to changing the abuse of rape victims by police and courts and ensuring that rapists were prosecuted. These rape crisis centers, while small and scattered, spurred research and revelations on the scandalously low number of convictions and the horrible assumptions that led judges and juries to assume victims were “asking for it.” In league with scholars, antirape activists challenged the stereotype of rape as a crime of black men against white women, a scenario that went back to the nineteenth-century South. They publicized the facts: Most rape was intraracial and the rapist was more likely to be an acquaintance than a stranger.

  Feminist lawyers worked for reform in standards of evidence and treatment of victims’ testimony—for one, arguing strenuously that the victim’s sexual history was irrelevant and should be inadmissible in court. Marital rape, which women’s rights advocates had long decried, came under pressure; and state laws for marital exemptions crumbled. The first trials of men for raping their wives occurred in 1978 and marked the beginning of the end of one of the last formal vestiges of coverture.67 While the idea was fodder for jokes (“If you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?” ran one old chestnut), the radical insight that a woman could deny sex to any man, including a husband or boyfriend, led to the new category of date rape, which became a mandatory topic for discussion in college freshman orientations across the country in the 1980s. Awareness of domestic violence spread at the same time and along the same pathways, spurred by similar convictions about how courts, police, and families looked away from violence against women.

  Body politics could be conducted locally, within cities, towns, and institutions. And like the abortion battle, body politics generated generational and sometimes cross-racial coalitions. Funding for shelters, counseling services, and crisis hotlines came from local, state, and federal government. During the administration of President Jimmy Carter, the Justice Department funded some 1,500 antirape projects; 400 of them were feminist rape crisis centers. Battered women’s shelters won backing from states and a few localities; President Carter introduced a bill to Congress that would have funded a national network of shelters, sponsored research, and established a federal agency. But conservatives blocked it, and after 1980 it was a dead issue.68 The results were striking, if always unsatisfying in the end. Over time, feminists succeeded in revamping police procedures and in rescuing some endangered girls and women.

  It was easier to invoke feminism when it meant protecting women than when it meant ensuring they could protect themselves from the adverse consequences of sex. In a time when antifeminism was on the rise, these forms of body politics, which stressed women’s vulnerability to male coercion and violence, were more palatable to local governments, donors, and supporters than was the defense of women’s sexual freedom and their right to make their own choices about pregnancy and childbearing. A view of sexual traits as inherently male or female, with male “sexuality” innately violent and predatory, crept into corners of body politics and from there into popular understanding. The views drew legitimacy from assumptions that went back to the temperance movement. Male sexuality was at the very least aggressive—as in sexual harassment—and at the worst murderous, as in rape and domestic violence.

  Nowhere were the historical sources clearer than in the antipornography movement, that form of body politics whose object—male titillation—was the most ephemeral and dubious. For a time, antipornography activism even garnered sympathy from conservatives, reviving old themes of social and sexual purity and the crusade against male vice. Centered in Los Angeles and New York City, Women Against Pornography, formed in 1979, drew initially favorable press coverage and the support of mainstream feminist venues such as Ms. magazine. The rallying point was the conviction that male consumption of pornography was a potent source of misogyny—indeed, the main source—a rationale for mundane sexual exploitation as well as an incentive to pathological violence. Zealots conflated pornography with violent pornography, and violent pornography (as in depictions of sexual sadomasochism) with actual rape, torture, and murder. The uses male hipster culture made of images of misogynistic violence to sell not only pornography but rock and roll provoked one of the first demonstrations, led by Women Against Violence Against Women in Los Angeles, to call for the removal of a billboard advertising the Rolling Stones’ new album Black and Blue. Floating high above Sunset Boulevard was a supersize woman, scantily clad, bound with ropes and bruised and captioned “I’m ‘Black and Blue’ from the Rolling Stones—and I love it!”

  “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice,” the legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon declared; MacKinnon lent antipornography politics the credibility of her first-rate intellect and sensationalist depictions of the viciousness of male power. Antipornography ideology drew its sensational appeal from a black-and-white moral allegory which equated the most savage masculine cruelty with normal male propensities. The view of men’s systematic erotic tyranny at times came close to suggesting that heterosexual intercourse, too, was something that men forced on women, who only pretended to like it. The moralistic politics attracted conservatives: In Indianapolis, antipornography campaigners allied with Republicans on the city council to ban the sale of pornography within city limits (a federal court struck down the ordinance on First Amendment grounds); a similar measure passed in Bellingham, Washington, but failed in Minneapolis and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  As the women’s movement splintered into the components of American identity politics—Latina, Asian-American, lesbian, and African-American “feminisms,” all counterposing themselves to the white heterosexual mainstream—these groups more or less existed amicably. But the division between antipornography crusaders and their opponents, the “pro-sex” radicals, was bitter and irreconciliable. Each side accused the other of advocating ideas that would destroy feminism. Pro-sex feminists decried the self-righteous morality of the antipornography forces and its animus to free speech; the latter accused their critics of being brainwashed by patriarchal sexuality and ignoring the deadly injuries pornography inflicted on millions of voiceless women. Antipornography zealots denounced First Amendment defenses. “A defense of pornography is a defense of the brute use of money to encourage violence against a class of persons who do not have—and have never had—the civil rights vouchsafed to men as a class,” preached Andrea Dworkin, the obsessed melodramatic polemicist of the movement.69 Women were pure and menaced; men were dirty and dangerous.

  Ellen
Willis, a sex radical whose clarity about feminist means and ends was unsurpassed, identified the neo-Victorian elements at work in the Women Against Pornography (WAP) chapter in New York. WAP was conducting tours of commercial sex spots in Times Square, then a red-light district, for all the world as if they were evangelical crusaders against brothels in the 1830s. “Self-righteousness has always been a feminine weapon, a permissible way to make men feel bad,” Willis wrote. “Ironically, it is socially acceptable for women to display fierce aggression in their crusades against male vice, which serve as an outlet for female anger without threatening male power.” Substitute pornography for demon alcohol, she observed, and you have the antipornography movement in a nutshell: a reenactment of nineteenth-century temperance ideology.70

  On the one hand, body politics could not have flourished without the popular front that supported abortion. On the other, initiatives against rape and domestic violence prospered because they circumvented the abortion movement’s most challenging assertions. Women as victims of violent men could be conceived as adamantine moral innocents; pregnant teenagers could not. Bad men, injured women and girls: The story was imprinted in cultural memory, a scenario that was the historic centerpiece of conservative feminism. Rights-bearing female citizens were never as assimilable to traditional scenarios. Thus the defense of rape and incest victims and battered women could draw support from across the political spectrum: It appealed to middle-of-the road, nonfeminist opinion in part because it was free of any tincture of interest in women’s autonomy. These were immensely worthy, important initiatives, but they were born of constrained political circumstances.

  In 1976, the abortion issue cropped up for the first time in presidential politics, in the race between Jimmy Carter and incumbent president Gerald Ford. Henry Hyde’s amendment to an appropriations bill to ban Medicaid funding for abortion, once Carter was in office, introduced the issue in Congress.71 As the controversy roiled on, the utility of right-to-life sentiment became unmistakable to the New Right, just getting its legs in national politics. In 1979, Paul Weyrich (who was Catholic) and Howard Phillips (who was Jewish) met with evangelical minister Jerry Falwell and others to form the Moral Majority, a united front to defend “family values.” Falwell had never spoken publicly about abortion until the previous year, but now the defense of the unborn and the restoration of traditional family roles became a rallying cry for the crusade against what New Right ideologues denounced as creeping “secular humanism.” Gearing up for the 1980 election, New Right operatives enlisted Phyllis Schlafly, who now jumped on the issue with a pamphlet, The Abortion Connection.72

  In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in a landslide. While the Democrats did not lose control of Congress until 1994, and liberals continued to hold a majority on the Supreme Court, Reagan’s skillful use of social conservatives brought far right domestic concerns into the mainstream. Despite touting conservative obeisance to pro-family policies, the right vehemently opposed federal funding for real family policies, like child care or health care. There was no major legislation that originated with the women’s movement until the Clinton administration, when Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) and the Violence Against Women Act (1994).73

  Yet paradoxically, feminism as sensibility, daily practice, and micro-politics reached into ever-larger areas of American culture. Cultural institutions became the province of left liberals barred from influence in politics. The revolution in the arts and popular culture that began in the 1960s continued unabated, despite conservative attacks on universities and federal funding for the arts and humanities as fronts for the pointy-headed liberal third column. Feminism was a chief target for the anti–“political correctness” vigilantes. Yet in the production of ideas and art, images, symbols, scholarship, and stories, the generation of the 1960s and their heirs excelled. The result was something of a standoff. The liberals got Lincoln Center, the joke went; the conservatives got the Defense Department; the liberals got rock and roll; the right got to bust unions. And feminists got women’s studies in colleges and universities, while antifeminists got to destroy sex education in public schools.

  Reflections upon feminism ran through spectacular work in these years in dance, theater, fiction, poetry, the visual arts, and intellectual work. Women artists and thinkers, whether or not self-consciously political, explored the imaginative world that feminism opened up: fascination with ties between women, a spirit of skeptical inquiry about motherhood and marriage, the rich secrets of female bodies and erotic desires, men’s subtle and overt manipulations of power, and the phenomenal discovery of a Lost Continent of women’s interior lives.

  True, stressing the momentum fails to take into account the undercurrents, the ways American culture distorted and attacked feminist ideas and the New Women who championed them even as it absorbed them. Hollywood, in particular, rounded on feminism as if by common consent among writers, directors, and producers to put independent women in their place. In films of the 1980s, heroines of unusual ideas and unconventional behavior were bound to end up alone, insane, murdered, or left in the dust by younger, perkier, more pliant rivals who snag the man while the heroines falter and flop (sassy Melanie Griffith in Working Girl [1988] stealing the man and the job out from under icy executive Sigourney Weaver). Worse, they could turn psychotic. The most notorious New Woman transformation was that of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987), in which she played a successful, beautiful, rich executive-turned-stalker who invades her married lover’s home and boils the pet bunny after he dumps her.74 Such were the wages of sin for a successful, seductive beauty, with the money to live alone in a gorgeous apartment—weath and autonomy being mortal sins for women.

  On balance, though, there is no question that feminism set in motion hopes, preoccupations, obsessions, dreams, and fantasies that streamed through art and intellect in the last two decades of the century. But to lay out these lists of artists, thinkers, and achievements against the comparable roster of accomplishments in politics, policy-making, economics, and diplomacy is to see a problem. A few women worked in the highest echelons of American politics, but except for Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under President Clinton, and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, they operated at a remove from feminism. Worldwide, the same could be said of the handful of female leaders—most notably Margaret Thatcher, Reagan’s Conservative partner in Britain. Even New Right women did not make it to the top. Phyllis Schlafly never got a diplomatic or cabinet post, and Republican women failed to keep up with their Democratic peers’ slow but steady gain of seats in Congress.

  The result was an American women’s movement whose cultural wing was populous, assured, and flashy and whose political wing was drab and sparse. American women could imagine themselves as the fount of modern feminism, with their rich body of investigations—aesthetic and scholarly—of women’s lives, their utopian proposals, their ever-bubbling artistic creations, and their brilliant analyses of sexism in every corner of the culture. They fanned out through the labor force and populated the professions. Many kinds of liberties survived and flourished. Yet power at the top eluded them.

  The weak feminist presence in Washington gave credence to the venerable conviction that politics were the province of men and that nothing short of revolution would change this. “There are many of us who know on a ‘gut level’ that elections are not ‘where it’s at,’ ” proclaimed Mary Morgan, a leader in Dayton, Ohio, voicing a sentiment that had long been commonplace.75 With women making no major inroads into upper-level government positions until the 1990s, women’s politics operated of necessity at the grassroots, and great significance was given to small-scale attempts, whether or not they were consequential.

  The social transformations feminism nourished were revolutionary. The sexual revolution rumbled on, with sex outside of wedlock no longer an open secret. Free love went mainstream, helped by the rising numbers of men and women who openly declared themselves gay. Legal contraception a
nd abortion (albeit highly constrained) provided a material basis for the possibility that girls and women could approach the erotic freedom that boys and men had long had. Other long-term trends continued: Growing numbers of married women with small children entered the workforce and increasing numbers raised children alone, without male partners. Even as the AIDS epidemic devastated the gay community, the vicissitudes faced by anguished lovers who lacked legal standing as spouses or family members fueled a drive that would lead to the first successes in securing marriage rights for same-sex couples in the early years of the twenty-first century. A baby boom among lesbian couples created a sense of urgency to legitimate household ties. The impress of gay households on family life, while still the imprint of a minority, moved households even further away from the gendered positions that family government and coverture had long dictated.

  Everywhere, among those who thought of themselves as feminists and those who didn’t, the insights and clamor of the women’s movement shaped expectations of themselves and others. The great change in the lives of girls and women that Alice Munro predicted had come to pass. No longer would girls be told their arms weren’t made to throw balls; women thought of themselves as capable of doing just about any man’s job, whether or not they applied for it and whether or not they got it. True, the reigning public discourse simply drove many kinds of prejudices underground. But the fact that prejudice and misogyny had to disguise themselves, creep about furtively rather than proudly and arrogantly, was itself a huge change, representing some space for women. Successive waves of young women who dubbed themselves “postfeminist” dashed past the older generation pell-mell, seeing themselves as leaving behind the mothers stumping along with their loads of ancient grievances.