By Tatiana von Tauber and J. DeVoy
When Furman University recently hosted 85-year-old conservative activist and anti-feminist woman Phyllis Schlafly, controversy was sure to follow. Schlafly, calling feminists “bitter, unhappy and not successful women,” argued that there was no glass ceiling for women, and that women who embrace feminism die alone and bitter.
In light of our divergent views on the subject, we, Tatiana and Jay, will consider Schlafly’s speech in classic debate style.
Tatiana
Schlafly’s anti-feminist comments eliminate support of the primary factor feminism seeks: Choice. Unfortunately, the fine print of choice is consequence yet when determining the “right” choice one rarely understands the full load of backlashes or complications of its execution. The future rarely turns out as planned, and one never knows if she’s signed a contract for a lemon or not.
As a young feminist in the 1980s I didn’t question feminism’s promise of having it all, but no one informed me – or I just missed the speech – that the excitement of having career and family was sold with pep rally hype. At that time women didn’t realize just how difficult the combo might become. We rode the wave of promise just like with the Obama campaign. Now women are disappointed the promised results didn’t happen and the blame finger comes up.
Judith Warner in her book, “Motherhood Madness: the age of anxiety” discusses how women are opting for new solutions now that they’ve realized the combo method didn’t provide the kinds of rewards women sought in the idealized form on which they were sold. For me feminism isn’t about giving women a “better” lifestyle so much as giving women choice. The “better” is subjective. Those who cry that their choices led them to unhappy endings must find alternatives and because of the feminist movement alternatives exist. While both sides argue which is the better way, both fail to support that feminism’s new wave requires synthesis of old and new.
Conservative views such as Schlafly’s praise the commitment of traditional family, which I support; however, they fail in many cases to provide the comprehensive information necessary for women to understand the realties of motherhood versus career in its realism rather than theory and in the glorification to make the entire movement work, feminism is propaganda just like everything else.
I don’t even care for the term feminist anymore because it’s just another form of segregation. The problem with any “ism” is that it’s mostly all bullshitism. If the goal is to create equality between the sexes, propagate a healthy vision and experience of family, provide rightful choice and freedom to all and to create solid and non-dysfunctional communities which thrive not only on a small scale but a large one, then both sets of feminists can kiss my ass because both venture out to emphasize the victimization factors both sides create for the other. If even in feminism there cannot be an equal or neutral “sisterhood” – if there must exist subcategories within the umbrella term (feminist waves) then the intent isn’t true equality of sexes but power over the other one in an effort to find the balance and happiness sought.
Life is a constant battle of victimization and what others do with it either makes them winners or continual victims. Some feminists, such as anti-porn advocates do perpetuate the feeling that women are victims of their sex but that for me is a personal problem. I find my sex, my gender and human qualities to be anything but a stumbling block and each time one side presents a problem, I just look for other choices – because I can. That’s what feminism stands for and those choices are different for every woman on the plant. Feminism’s effort for equality will continue to be a gender struggle for power until all sides find a neutral point.
Jay
I’m unconvinced. If feminism has made so many strides forward, why are women more unhappy today than at any previously measured point? Some form of glass ceiling persists in society, but it’s far higher and more easily broken than before, as women graduate college at rates higher than men and have been less likely to be affected by the current recession.
Second, yes, motherhood is overhyped – and so is everything else. Careerism is hollow as is motherhood when either is heralded as an ultimate value and fulfillment in and of itself. These two modes of existence are identical to any other in that regard. Simply put, throwing yourself wholly into any one thing is unhealthy, whether it’s a job, a drug addiction, or alleged virtues (self-appointed evangelists are the worst).
Finally, it’s no surprise that Schlafly’s views are conservative. If anything, she’s one of the few conservatives who still believe in traditional gender roles: Both parties have abandoned their core principles to put women above men through legislation such as the Violence Against Women Act and the International Marriage Brokers Regulation Act. Recently, women from both sides of the aisle agreed that the legislative process would move faster if men refrained from participating.
When it comes to these issues, there are no Republicans or Democrats – only misandrists. Feminism as its defined now is a grab for power. That’s fine, and even rational, but call it that instead of masquerading it in the cheap tarp of equality. This dichotomy is often referred to as “lifeboats or votes.” If women want true egalitarianism in gender relations, they should cede their entitlement to protection above everything else and release the women-and-children-first mentality that still permeates society. Otherwise, it’s admitting that women have special status, something that would be unnecessary if there was true equality.
But the real problem is fantasy fulfillment, not feminism. Everyone is better off because of women’s equality, but now that banner is being waved to justify the living out of undesirable and even impossible fantasies. Women, inspired by Sex and the City and self-ruining books like The Rules, have lost touch with reality. Reality is that more than 85% – almost 90% – of their reproductive capacity is exhausted by age 30. Reality is that men care about a girl’s past and don’t want to devote resources to getting a woman to give him what she’s already given so many men for free. And reality is that the perfect person is waiting around the corner. No, that’s the sound of a half dozen cats, the next season of Dancing With The Stars, and the deafening static of time buzzing by until death finally comes.
Feminism isn’t what’s ruining women, but rather the actions being taken in its name, corrupting the legacy of women like Susan B. Anthony. Original feminists wanted women to be more involved with society, and nobody seriously thinks rescinding such rights is desirable. Simultaneously, Anthony and her peers still believed in traditional gender roles, to some extent, something that the second wave feminists rightly disavowed. It is the third wave who corrupt feminism by telling women they can have it all – motherhood, a great career, personal fulfillment, and every one of their hearts’ desires – and in so doing, tell the cruelest lie of all.
Tatiana
All of this shows me that society is evolving its concepts of love, marriage, family and, of course, feminism itself. The acceptance that there is always a shadow to the fairy tale will provide many positives wherein one is prepared to deal with the consequences of choice and be happy that further solutions exist at all, many of which wouldn’t even be possible without feminism.
Some women are bitter as Schlafly suggests, but are they bitter because of feminism or because they failed themselves and got caught up in the hype of attaining their goals? Did these women stop to consider what constitutes balance or blindly follow “the word” of the feminist bible?
The secret to minimizing self-victimization, finding balance and obtaining a steady level of happiness doesn’t sit inside the feminist or anti-feminist view. It sits inside the passion and desire one has to experience all that feminism and more rightly, humanism, offers with the quality of the cards they’ve been dealt. It takes maturity find strength from unexpected challenge. Suck it up, deal with it, grow up and move on. As long as one has choice and freedom to choose, one has all the tools for happiness.
Fantasy fulfillment, as Jay mentions, is created precisely though that patriarchal world Schlafly paints as better suited for women. It’s as much bullshit as “women can have it all.” Having it all means the entire enchilada, the good, the bad and the ugly, yet when the latter two are thrown into the mix, women cry foul. Individuals who aren’t lying to themselves are those who continue to seek a well rounded education on choices available to them and consciously realize that unhappiness, bitterness and victimization merely are reactions that need not be a state.
Perhaps America and feminism promised a fulfilling dream but when you get to be my age, you realize that the dream itself tweaks over time. What I wanted and believed in my early 20s is so far removed from who I am now that I can only say if a woman chooses family over career (or other personal development outside the home) exclusively, she misses finding herself and when a woman doesn’t know who she is from the inside out she’s not nearly as valuable as she could be to herself, children or community. In that sense she fails herself and the feminist movement as a whole.
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The Legal Satyricon 
How is a return to a social norm of “traditional” (which really another fantasy) gender roles “conservative” in any non-circular meaning of the word? Institutional sexism is a generation gone – the conservative path is to favor keeping it that way, particularly since it’s the path of greater freedom vis a vis the government.
This discussion reminds me of a famous quote from an Oscar winning movie. See if you can figure it out?
Receptionist: How do you write women so well?
Melvin Udall: I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.
I think you both have valid point, and they don’t necessarily contradict each other. I think you need to decide whether you are examining feminism on a macro or micro level. Women were once not considered competent adults; Sandra Day O’Connor’s first job out of Stanford was as a legal secretary. On a macro level, we have made vast improvements I think all reasonable people can agree on. But who promised happiness? Happiness has never been guaranteed and living with the consequences of bad choices or events out of one’s control is far older than feminism. And I don’t put much stock in those studies about generational happiness, either. Happiness can largely be defined by how closely your life tracks your expectations. When you expect nothing, you can be pleased by most anything.
On the micro level (me), feminism is about having the freedom to choose what I want. If you don’t like the consequences of your choices, tough shit. It can always be worse. I cringe when I think about how my life would be 100 years ago, unless I was fortunate enough to be married off to a man who considered more than a brood mare. It’s stupid to declare that traditional gender roles work for all women. Even during the Victorian era, there were women who were very discontent with their roles as mother, who were hemmed in and forced to live a life that did not suit them at all. Queen Victoria herself was an unwilling wife and mother, and she was the Queen of England.
Clearly my notion of feminism in college was different than it is today. In college, I was a child. Most of my choices didn’t extend beyond my person and I had the safety net of my parents to back me up. We must have the maturity and flexibility to allow our beliefs to mature and evolve with us. Life experience creates limitless nuance. I am not prepared to call feminism a failure because I would not want to live without it.
The ultimate promise and fulfillment of feminism — i.e. CHOICE — is and will be dependent on the male species “getting with it,” so to speak.
As a young mother in the 1980s it was no joy to work 50 hours a week, do all the shopping, bill paying, child discipline, laundry, house cleaning, and cooking. He did the dishes every night and put the kids to bed.
We got divorced and my load lessened…one less person to deal with (because sex with him had also become just another chore.)
When women of child-bearing age make their choices they need to also understand that the choice of HELPmate is critical. Don’t let all the magazines fool you…men LOVE to be married. Women (who have been), not.so.much. Feminism hasn’t failed. Men have.
-Nobody made you work that schedule but yourself. You could have downgraded your lifestyle and significantly reduced your obligations. Either you didn’t want to give up any QOL, or you too drank the grrl power Kool Aid and believed the lie of “having it all.”
-The fact that you got divorced verifies yet another one of my long-standing worldviews: Once her ‘gina tingles are gone, so are you. You didn’t think of the kids, only of the burden that marriage had placed on you. For further reading, I suggest Ferdinand Bardamu, “The Eternal Solipsism of the Female Mind,” http://www.inmalafide.com/2009/10/06/eternal-solipsism-of-the-female-mind/.
-Men don’t love to be married – they do it (and initiate fewer divorces, as 70% of them are initiated by women) because they understand it’s critical to lasting, functioning civilizations. But you’re right, men LOVE marriage, and the >50% odds that theirs will fail, leaving them to pay a significant portion of their income in alimony and child support. If we’re going to lay blame at the feet of either sex, it should be women. There is more to life than satisfying the need for constant, instant stimulation. Those who think otherwise should not have families.
The solopsism thing is just sophomoric. Emotion wrapped in the veil of intellectualism. And, frankly, ironic in that the post you linked to is itself a hearty example of solipsism.
It’s meta and has layer upon layer of possible meaning.
Eh. Not sure I’d agree. It’s mostly emotional drivel.
Good to hear that regular, disease-risk-free sex with a person whose company I enjoy (and who likes to cook, sorry Gloria) wasn’t the reason I got married.
I’m going to go kick a homeless person to keep from feeling too morally superior.
Men get married “because they understand it’s critical to lasting, functioning civilizations”? Man, I don’t even know if that was supposed to be funny or not, but thank you for the biggest laugh I’ve had all day. :) There’s clearly a whole ‘nother kind of man out there that I have yet to meet… Fabulous!
AJ,
It certainly is. Have you ever seen a society where heterosexual males are without the company of women? Prisons? Alaska? I’ve only spent time in the latter, but I can tell you (based on that experience) that men only wash, urinate behind bushes, and behave in any way that could be remotely deemed to be “civilized” when encouraged to do so by women. When they are not around, we return to our beastly roots.
Phyllis Schlafly gives a lot of lip service to traditional roles and is a political activist on behalf of those roles, but she didn’t walk the walk.
Her life is certainly not the life of a “traditional” woman, especially not a traditional woman of her time.
Oh yea, I don’t know what went on in her bedroom, maybe she really did let her husband have his way with her whenever he wanted, she may have walked the walk on that count. But career-wise? Author of 20+ books, crusader against the ERA, foundress of numerous political organizations…she certainly wasn’t barefoot and in the kitchen.
And speaking of the kitchen, she didn’t have the same concerns as traditional OR non-traditional working class women (like the 50-hour a week working spouse who commented here) when it came to division of labor in her home – I’m sure she & her husband had servants/household help. Makes it easy to “have it all” when others are doing the grunt work for you. Good on her for marrying up, though.
The problem of talking about feminism or anti-feminism is an entropic one. Once you’ve named it — “feminist” or “traditionalist” or what have you — it begins to unravel. The flaws in the definition become apparent, the holes in the theory grow and the exceptions threaten to swallow the purported rule. Throw in time, cultural and political shifts and differences, and a whole lotta complexity, and soon enough you’re not really talking about much at all.
The “super woman” is just as mythological a caricature as the “traditional family” is. Sure, we had the Cleavers to look at, and from the outside it seems complete. But, for every picture perfect middle american “normal” family, there’s an equal number of homes with self-loathing adults who can’t help but take their personal insecurities out on the their kids and one another. More to the point, talking about returning to “traditional families” or “traditional values” is a futile pipe-dream, premised on the juvenile notion that we can somehow reset the clock and not be irreparably different today than we were yesterday.
That there are people among us who strive to “have it all” is by no means exclusive to feminists (or women) either, and it has been going on since the dawn of time. From Cleopatra to Alexander. From the tough-as-nails-career-woman-come-super-mom, to the male titan of industry with home and hearth on one side of the street and hedonistically kept mistress on the other, there have always been those for whom the concepts of moderation or “having enough” has always been elusive.
Just as there have always been those who find more solace in being victims than in being accountable for their own actions and choices. And here again, this is not exclusive to women by any means. Whether its the my body is the private source of public law freshman feminist, or Dixie flag waving bubba who blames the “coloreds” for the fact that he’s got no sale-able skills to offer on the job market, or the Christians who see the rise of atheism as an attack on their faith, or the sad cry of the educated middle class white male who laments the “special status” of minorities, some human beings have always measured themselves by the half empty cup.
So, what does any of that say about the quest for “women’s rights”? No more than it says about the struggle of any group, anywhere in the world, subjugated under the heel of a more powerful sect–be it because of race, faith, gender, sexuality, tribal allegiance, family affiliation, political viewpoint, class or any of the other myriad of reasons that those in power use to segregate and dominate others. In this country, white men enjoyed for a time the privilege of disproportionate power, and some (perhaps most) of them abused that power. And, steps have been taken to stop that abuse. Effective steps. And, rational steps.
We, in this country and in this culture, are guided by the fairly unwavering belief that there are rights that should be available to all people. Whether its the right to vote or the right to seek a means of self support in employment or profession. And, we’ve enacted laws that herald our belief. We’ve come to some of them later than others, but the ideal works. Not all at once, and not always perfectly. But, overall, it works. Like with all change, some will take the extreme route, rejecting wholly what was before. While others will not. Today, some women are choosing career over other aspects of life, while others are returning to an embrace of family above all else. Most of us fall somewhere in between.
Which is exactly as it should be. Because diversity is healthy and good for the individual and the society.
Which is why Schlafly, like any other zealot, should trouble us little one way or the other. Ultimately, her rigidity and myopic view renders her of little consequence or value.
I’ve read this post like 2-3 times and I still grok very little of what’s going on in it, so I’ll happily put on a dunce cap and go sing Gilbert and Sullivan songs in the corner now. By the way, I’m glad my husband apparently married me because he dug me as a person and not my “reproductive capacity” because I’ll take work, six cats and the TV any day over some bozo whose primary interest is in that. I met a few in my twentyish days and cheerfully sent them packing with zero regrets.