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In 1970 Kate
Millett’s Sexual Politics became a feminist bestseller. Today
it reads like a template for the feminism which came after.
What inspired such
an influential book? It’s hard to miss, as part of the answer, the
role of orthodox liberal philosophy.
There’s even that
most primal liberal idea: that we are made human by our ability to
shape our own existence, in contrast to the animals who act from
biological instinct.
What’s odd about
this idea is that it means we can be more or less human, according
to how much we are subject to forces we don’t decide for ourselves,
such as traditions, or authorities, or behavioural codes or our own
inherited nature. Our very humanity is put on the line.
This is
particularly a problem for women, as traditional womanhood was
centred on the biological act of motherhood and the emotional life
associated with it, rather than an act of intellectual or wilful
“self-making” as might be claimed by men competing in the public
world of arts, sciences and politics.
This, at any rate,
is how Kate Millett saw things. She wrote,
“In terms of
activity, sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon
infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, and
ambition to the male. The limited role allotted the female tends to
arrest her at the level of biological experience. Therefore,
nearly all that can be described as distinctly human rather than
animal activity (in their own way animals also give birth and
care for their young) is largely reserved for the male.”
This is a
devastating way to understand the traditional female role. It means
that women are lower even than slaves – they are not even living as
humans.
Why would women be
assigned such a role? Millett argues at length, as she must, that
there is nothing natural about the female role. In fact, Millett
doesn’t even accept that our “core gender identity” is natural.
Instead, Millett
makes a distinction between our “sex”, which is biological, and our
“gender”, which is a product of culture. As she herself puts it:
“Important new
research not only suggests that the possibilities of innate
temperamental differences seem more remote than ever, but even
raises questions as to the validity and permanence of psycho-sexual
identity. In doing so it gives fairly concrete positive evidence of
the overwhelmingly cultural character of gender.”
So why then do
women have a role which robs them of their humanity? Millett
answers: as an act of power by men over women. For Millett all
politics is to be understood as a will to power by one group over
another:
“The term
‘politics’ shall refer to power-structured relationships,
arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another.”
Millett believes
that men are the dominant group who have subordinated women within a
patriarchy:
“the situation
between the sexes now, and throughout history, is a case of that
phenomenon Max Weber defined as herrschaft, a relationship of
dominance and subordinance.”
By this point
there is no saving the position of love, marriage and family. They
can only be understood as instruments of control by men over women:
“Patriarchy’s
chief institution is the family … the family effects control and
conformity where political and other authorities are insufficient ….
Traditionally, patriarchy granted the father nearly total ownership
over wife or wives and children, including the powers of physical
abuse and often even those of murder and sale …. The concept of
romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the
male is free to exploit ..."
How to respond?
This then is the
feminist path to bad faith, laid out so clearly for us by Kate
Millett.
It begins with the
idea that our humanity is contingent - that acting from a
biological nature imperils our distinct status as humans. From this
flows the claim that women’s traditional role, based around
motherhood, denies women their humanity. This makes it awkward to
view women’s role as natural; as an alternative the role is
explained as a product of cultural influences. The leading position
of men within public culture, the “human” sphere, similarly cannot
be accepted as natural, but is explained as a politically organised
dominance of men over women: a patriarchy. Love, marriage and the
family, central as they are to relations between men and women, are
then understood as “local” mechanisms of a male subordination of
women.
There is, in other
words, a chain of argument leading up to feminist expressions of bad
faith. When Kate Millett writes of women being treated as chattels
by men, or when she describes sexuality as an act of hostility by
men toward women, or when she denies the real possibilities of love
between men and women, denigrating love instead as a politically
calculated manipulation, she does so within an ideological framework
which appears to justify such claims.
However, in the
feminist chain of argument there is no strong link – each argument
can be easily pulled apart.
There is no
compelling reason, for instance, to accept the idea that our status
as humans is contingent. We certainly don’t feel this to be true. If
I act according to instinct, or in obedience to a traditional
authority, or from an inherited identity, I don’t feel my humanity
to be under threat. Most of us, I expect, have a sense that our
humanity is something that is with us as a matter of course and is
more the sum total of our existence, rather than something we must
self-consciously achieve as an act of “self-making”.
Once we view our
human status this way, then we are more free to accept the
significance of the traditional female role. Creating a new human
life can be seen as important, even if it is connected closely to
biology. Similarly, it becomes possible again to value the role
women traditionally played as the emotional centre of family life.
Nor are we under
the same pressure to deny that sex roles are natural. Millett wanted
us to believe that the distinction between masculine and feminine
was not natural: that it was an artificial product of culture and
not biology. She claimed that “important new research” supported
this view.
She has been
proved wrong. Science has, in fact, proved the conservative view to
be correct: that differences between men and women are hardwired
into our biology. It is now accepted, for instance, that there are
important differences between men and women in the structure of the
brain.
Couldn’t this mean
that the personalities of men have developed in a distinct way as
part of their natural role as protectors and providers? Thousands of
years ago, being a protector and provider might have meant
organising to hunt together and establishing basic leadership
councils to hold the tribe together. But as civilisation developed,
these same functions might have been expressed in more sophisticated
ways. The masculine personality might have been directed toward
industry and economic development, and toward higher level political
activity and interests.
The greater
involvement of men in careers and politics might, therefore, simply
be an expression of a positive and useful function played by men in
society, something they are fitted for in their personalities,
namely their traditional function of being providers and protectors.
It does not have to be explained as an organised attempt to
subordinate women. It might actually be something which has
generally benefited women.
A failed experiment
Which brings us
finally to love, marriage and the family.
Whereas a
conservative might see love between a man and a woman as a finer
part of human nature, leading ideally to marriage, an exclusive
union for life of a man and a woman, Kate Millett regarded love and
marriage as oppressive instruments of control over women.
And whereas a
conservative might see the family as securing for women both
emotional and material support, Millett took the more negative view
that the family was a mechanism for subordinating women.
So which outlook
has more validity? Millett herself decided to find out by living as
part of a “sisterhood” rather than as part of a family. She used the
money she made from the success of her book to buy a farm, which she
invited other women to stay at.
According to
Millett’s theory, by making this choice she ought to have escaped a
patriarchal oppression and found happiness, freedom and fulfilment.
What she actually did experience is recorded in
a description of her life she wrote in 1998. It is too long to
reproduce in full, but a few excerpts will do:
“Another season at
the farm … the tedium of a small community, shearing trees, so
exhausted afterward that I did nothing but read … Back to the Bowery
and another emptiness. I cannot spend the whole day reading, so I
write, or try to. A pure if pointless exercise …
“I cannot get
employment. I cannot earn money. Except by selling Christmas trees,
one by one, in the cold in Poughkeepsie. I cannot teach and have
nothing but farming now. And when physically I can no longer farm,
what then? Nothing I write now has any prospect of seeing print …
“Frightening, this
future. What poverty ahead, what mortification, what distant
bag-lady horrors, when my savings are gone? And why did I imagine it
would be any different, imagine my books would give me some slender
living …
“Much as I tire of
a life without purpose or the meaningful work that would make it
bearable, I can’t die because the moment I do, my sculpture,
drawings, negatives and silkscreens will be carted off to the dump…
“We [feminists]
haven’t helped each other much, haven’t been able to build solidly
enough to have created community or safety. Some women in this
generation disappeared to struggle alone in makeshift oblivion. Or
vanished into asylums and have yet to return to tell the tale, as
has Shula Firestone. There were despairs that could only end in
death: Maria del Drago chose suicide, so did Ellen Frankfurt, and
Elizabeth Fischer …
“Elizabeth and I
would eat an afternoon breakfast and chat, carefully disguising our
misery from each other. Feminists didn’t complain to one another
then; each imagined the loneliness and sense of failure was unique.”
The outcome of
Millett’s experiment was loneliness, insecurity and a loss of
purpose. I don’t think that this is accidental. If the family has
resilience it is partly because it offers the possibility of a
refuge from these things. This, though, is not something to be
admitted by those, like Kate Millett, who see the family primarily
in terms of “sexual politics”.
Related articles:
Scripting the new family
When the wheel turns
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