Wend Shalit: Putting Feminism Back in the Closet
Wendy Shalit made waves in conservative and feminist circles alike with the publication of 1999’s
A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue,
which asked women to voluntarily climb back into a closet of ankle-length skirts and early curfews. Shalit posits that modern female woes can all be blamed on the lack of modesty allowed to women, claiming that unisex bathrooms, sex education in elementary schools, and free condoms on college campuses are among the phenomena that force girls to give up the natural blushing ways that once protected them from harassment, rape, anorexia, depression, unpleasant dates, and pernicious ogling.
While Camille Paglia uses literary, celebrity, and pop culture figures to study the archetypes of the Western imagination, Shalit does her one better by actually holding up these fictionalized characters as models for the way that humanity (particularly the female half) should conduct itself. She seems peculiarly oblivious to the fact that Cary Grant movies and Jane Austen novels do not represent anybody’s reality, and—like Fox-Genovese—she appears to think that Cosmo is a realistic barometer of American women’s thoughts and opinions. She blows right past the fact that throughout the history of Western civilization, chivalrous courtship rules have only applied to wealthy (and usually white) women, since the sequestering of affluent females was facilitated by the economic contributions of slaves and working-class women. Shalit’s version of modesty is available only to the minority upper crust—not coincidentally, the same class that she brags about belonging to.
But Shalit’s most egregious move is to set up a startling new blame-thevictim … paradigm: Not only does a woman deserve individual blame if she’s attacked, but, by extension, all women are to blame due to a general lack of modesty that leads to wanton male behavior. Even if her dubious claim that modesty protects against sexual violence were true, she ignores how modesty’s complement, shame, has historically served to imprison sexual-assault victims in a mire of guilt and social condemnation. Furthermore, Shalit leaves no room for personal choice: A critical mass of women, she implies, must join the modesty club if men are to be browbeaten into civilized behavior (otherwise, modesty will simply be mocked by men who can still get free sex from loose women).
Shalit shares with Camille Paglia a view of masculinity as violent and ruthless, especially when it comes to sex. But here Shalit parts ways with both feminism and her fellow antifeminists by advocating an extreme version of the infantilizing behavioral prescriptions that both Paglia and Roiphe rail against; indeed, she specifically rejects both women as too dismissive of the campus date-rape crisis, but turns around to berate mainstream feminists for failing to recognize how women’s immodest behavior contributes to their eventual rape. Mostly, though, Shalit’s views fall narrowly in line with those of Fox-Genovese: Both see sexual liberation as a victory of men over women, and both call for women to move backward to reclaim lost ground—a plan that leaves many feminists cold. Shalit wants to be protected from the unseemly parts of life without giving up the rights and privileges that have accompanied women’s emergence from the confines of modesty—a have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too whine that few realistic feminists have the time or patience to indulge.
EACH OF THESE WOMEN ADDS A UNIQUE (IF WRONGHEADED, misinformed, or just plain grating) voice to the debate over women’s roles both past and future. If nothing else, these authors force feminists to take a serious look at how we identify ourselves and how we define participation in the feminist movement. They stretch the limits of whom we include under the rubric of feminism, and their criticisms expose areas where feminist work is incomplete, pointing the way to important questions that remain unanswered: What’s the best way to balance the reality of modern workplace interpersonal relations with an adequate sexual harassment policy? How can we ensure that girls and boys are treated equally in the classroom? Isn’t it more crucial to challenge ideas of “natural” male aggression than it is to teach females to restrict their lives in order to avoid it?
Unfortunately, their faux-feminist rhetoric makes it easy for readers to encounter “feminism” without ever encountering actual feminist views and activism. As such, their presence will serve only to take attention away from women whose goals transcend the endless disparagement of feminism itself and create a distraction from the real questions of equality.
The Perils of Feminist Fame
Rachel Fudge / WINTER 2003
ANY CASUAL READER OF THE POPULAR PRESS WILL HAVE NOTICED the recent avalanche of books boldly declaring that (are you ready for this?) women are not always nice to one another. In case you were laboring under a misconception, it isn’t all hearts and roses and sisterhood—women can be, like, rilly mean to each other. Not only that, what is rarely acknowledged is how badly allegedly liberated women can behave toward one another in the service of feminism. Feminists have long tried to keep their own bad behavior safely behind closed doors, relegating their infighting to the pages of movement-only journals or snarky comments made during group meetings. But the truth is, we feminists seem to have a particular taste for devouring our own. We have such high hopes for one another and for the mythical sisterhood that it’s especially distressing when a sister misbehaves or doesn’t live up to her potential.
Nowhere is this complicated dynamic as apparent as in the anointing, revering, and trashing of feminists who achieve a modicum of celebrity. Woe to the woman who becomes singled out by the media, portrayed as a star or spokesperson or symbol—for she has to answer not only to a public that is at best wary of (and often downright hostile to) feminism but also to the community of feminists who nurtured her. Second-wave feminists’ memoirs are rife with bitter tales of “star feminists” being told by their sisters not to shine, yet the pattern repeats itself with each new resurgence of
activism. Although they are by no means the only representations of these conflicts, the parallel careers of über—women’s libber Gloria Steinem and queen of the riot grrrls Kathleen Hanna demonstrate that one is not born but rather made a famous feminist.
Women have long been conditioned to shun the spotlight and instead seek gratification from motherhood or from nurturing menfolk. For a very long time, there were few places for women in the public sphere at all, let alone venues for women to seize the stage. A key tenet of feminism, from the nineteenth century onward, has been the simple but radical notion that women should have equal access to the public realm, to the world of work, money, power, politics, and influence. Yet at the same time, feminism has advocated for a kinder, gentler, less masculinist conception of that realm, in essence arguing that women are (or should be) less interested in success and power as they’ve traditionally been defined.
But by claiming that women should eschew success or power, we’ve done ourselves a disservice. Vilifying leadership and fame results only in our icons being chosen for us—not by us—and so we end up either with overtaxed activists like Steinem and Hanna as the lone voices of a movement or, as is more common these days, with pseudofeminists like Elizabeth Wurtzel or Katie Roiphe as our media-anointed leaders. It also ensures that the public representation of feminism will continue to be created by a scandal-hungry, nuance-rejecting media that has a hard time perceiving women as three-dimensional creatures.
Feminism Abhors a Leader
From its inception, second-wave feminism, aka the women’s liberation movement, or WLM, was painstakingly egalitarian in both theory and in attempted practice. Activist and consciousness-raising groups swore by the decision-by-consensus paradigm that’s now a caricature of feminist organizing. At its best, the “structureless” approach (so dubbed in 1972 by feminist author Joreen, otherwise known as Jo Freeman) prevented aggressive personalities from dominating groups and allowed everyone to be heard and, of course, validated. The movement’s lot system, which aimed to ensure that each woman would have a turn at each task, from running meetings to
making public appearances, was also a way for women to tap into undiscovered skills and talents.
This antistructure, antileader stance was a deliberate reaction against the charismatic leadership of the male-dominated civil rights and antiwar movements. It was also an earnest attempt to make literal a central feminist principle: that instances of sexism, whether institutionalized in laws and employment or embedded in interpersonal relationships, are not the complaints of individual women but rather injustices suffered by all women. Appointing one woman as a spokesperson would not only disrupt the committee approach but, more fundamentally, obscure the ingrained, systemic nature of sexism.
However, as it quickly became apparent to many in the movement, the problem with this utopian vision was that some women were better public speakers than others, had more contacts within the media, or quite simply were more ambitious. In the early days of the WLM, few women were bold enough to declare their own desire to be in command or in the public eye, yet the dreaded charismatic figures nonetheless emerged. Women like Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Susan Brownmiller, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Flo Kennedy, and Betty Friedan were smart, articulate, passionate feminists who were particularly adept at communicating both with the media and with other feminists. But other, equally hardworking women resented their “star power” and argued that these individual women were elitists who had no right to speak for the movement as a whole.
As Susan Brownmiller relates in
In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution,
“getting your name in the paper was ‘personal publicity’ that made you a ‘star,’ guilty of the sin of personal ambition.” Flo Kennedy dubbed it “horizontal hostility”—“misdirected anger that rightly should be focused on the external causes of oppression,” not on the few women who managed to work with the media. These supposed stars were swiftly ostracized by their sisters for breaking one of the cardinal unspoken rules of the WLM. The art of “trashing”—knocking down emerging stars—was widespread: Women in Brownmiller’s consciousness-raising group, for example, circulated a petition against her, claiming that she had sought personal fame by writing about the movement in the mainstream press. Others, like Shulamith Firestone, drifted away of their own accord, disenchanted with the so-called sisterhood
for quashing her personal ambitions. Alice Echols’s comprehensive history of second-wave radical feminism,
Daring to Be Bad,
is littered with stories of women who left the movement or were forced out because they were unwilling to subsume their career trajectories or drives for personal achievement into the collective good.
Further complicating the matter, most of the members of the WLM distrusted the mainstream media (even the ones who worked for it), and most groups had policies of not cooperating with the establishment press, or doing so only on their own very narrow terms. This stance of noncooperation, however principled, ultimately sabotaged the radical wing of second-wave feminism, as its silence allowed more palatable, media-friendly liberal feminists to become the face of feminism. Writing in 1972, Joreen pointed this out with great precision: “Because the movement did not put [the ‘stars’] in the role of spokesperson, the movement cannot remove them. The press put them there and only the press can choose not to listen. The press will continue to look to ‘stars’ as spokeswomen as long as it has no official alternatives. The movement has no control in the selection of its representatives to the public as long as it believes that it should have no representatives at all.”
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi:
The “Unlikely Guru of Women’s Lib”
The real turning point in the feminist fame game was a 1971
Newsweek
cover story that declared the long-legged, short-skirted writer/activist Gloria Steinem “the unlikely guru” of the women’s movement. Despite the fact that the article was a whole lot of hype—Betty Friedan had been the formal leader of NOW since cofounding it in 1966; Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and Robin Morgan had recently published extremely influential books; and hundreds of other women had started consciousness-raising groups and action collectives—it was self-fulfilling. After the piece was published, Steinem did become the public face of feminism—and the object of bitter jealousy and resentment. In
In Our Time
, Brownmiller describes how she and many of the other radicals were outraged by the hype and by seeing “hard-won, original insights developed by others in near total anonymity be turned by the media into Gloria Steinem pronouncements, Gloria Steinem ideas, and Gloria Steinem visions.”
But Steinem—and her glamorous U.K. counterpart, Germaine Greer—served a critical function, as Brownmiller also recognizes in hindsight: “While the radicals were insisting, ‘We don’t need a leader,’ mainstream women needed to have Gloria up there—a golden achiever who wore the armament of perfect beauty, was wildly attractive to men, and spoke uncompromising truths in calm, measured tones that seldom betrayed her anger. And Gloria, for all the complex reasons a person seeks heroism and stardom, needed to become what people wished her to be.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in her recent memoir of the ’60s and ’70s,
Outlaw Woman,
is less forgiving, painting Steinem’s ascension as a ploy to shift the movement away from radicalism: “Gloria Steinem was being promoted by the New York liberal media establishment as the model for the women’s liberation movement.”
Whether or not she sought out or desired her stardom, Steinem managed to parlay her fifteen minutes of fame into a lifelong career in public feminism. As she said in a 2000 interview in
Bust,
“I think the challenge is to figure out how to use public recognition to convey some message.” She also tried, in both concrete and abstract ways, to deflect the star label. In the early days, she took a cue from the radical feminist cadres and insisted upon speaking only with female reporters, or participating only in articles that would feature several women’s voices and not just hers. Current media outlets continue to ask for Steinem’s presence, and she always attempts to share the spotlight with other women—especially, of late, the younger generation of feminists.
Backstabbing, Grrrl-Style Now
Alas, the art of trashing was not isolated to the second wave. Sadly, the criticisms of selling out or seeking undue fame resurface with every rekindled interest in feminism. The rise and fall of the riot grrrl movement in the early ’90s, in particular, makes for a compelling parallel with the heady days of the second wave.
Even before Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi—arguably the two most prominent feminists of the early 1990s—rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists, a younger generation of activists had coalesced into a vital, messy new feminist force. Like the radical feminists of the second wave, these women were staunchly antiestablishment, operating outside the
mainstream and embracing indie- and punk-rock culture—and they too were inspired to action by the sexism of the men in their supposedly alternative communities. The term “riot grrrl,” first invoked as the name of a feminist zine and a gathering of hundreds of angry young women, was interpreted by the mainstream media as the name of the movement. Before this nascent movement had a chance to define itself, it seemed, it was plastered across the headlines of
Time, Newsweek,
and
Sassy
, leading girls across the country to start “chapters” and declare themselves “riot grrrls,” much to the bemusement of the originators of the term. In a tale that may be apocryphal, Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna purportedly convinced a “mainstream reporter” that there were riot grrrl chapters in cities across the country when there really weren’t; in response to the story, girls went looking for the chapters, and when they couldn’t find them, they decided to start their own.
In search of a public face for this new movement, reporters latched onto the outspoken Hanna, who was—not at all coincidentally, at least for the media’s purposes—a onetime neighbor of rock star Kurt Cobain. Hanna’s sudden high visibility soon affected her ability to participate in the very culture she was supposedly leading. In a 2001 interview in
index
magazine, Hanna said, “I went to a couple of Riot Grrrl meetings, but then I faded out of it, because I got sort of famous. I mean, at least famous in my own little scene, I got all this attention.” Like Brownmiller, Firestone, and Steinem, she was perceived by some as a traitor.
But from the start, Hanna was, she told
Bust,
“really embarrassed and humiliated by being singled out” and tried to resist being characterized as the leader of riot grrri—even going so far as to resist being called a riot grrrl at all. In the liner notes to a CD release of Bikini Kill’s first two records, the band insists it is not “the definitive ‘riot girl band’” and that its members are “not ‘leaders of’ or authorities on the ‘Riot Grrrl’ movement.” And furthermore, they write, “Tho we totally respect those who still feel that label is important and meaningful to them, we have never used that term to describe ourselves as a band.” These mixed feelings about being publicly allied with such a diffuse movement were shared by many of the original participants in riot grrrl, including zine authors and Bratmobile members Allison Wolfe and Molly Neuman and British band Huggy Bear, all of whom ended up declaring a sort of media blackout. Frustrated by their misrepresentation
in the press and anxious to maintain control over their images, riot grrrls refused to participate in interviews or be photographed for stories. As a result, as with the radical wing of second-wave feminism, their message was co-opted by the mainstream press and diluted into a slogan of anything-goes girl power.
In the meantime, Hanna struggled with her newfound celebrity, trying to balance her own integrity with the potential to reach a broader audience. Like Steinem before her, Hanna has developed a great awareness of fame’s potential, and its pitfalls. In a dialogue with Steinem in
Bust,
Hanna said, “I need to know how, as an FF—Famous Feminist—to deal with these things [backbiting, horizontal hostility disguised as valid criticism]. I need to see the graceful ways that other women have dealt with that.”