Some people recognize that reality has changed, that something is up. Invariably this recognition leads to questions such as ‘What does it mean to be a feminist now?’ or ‘What can feminism tell us about this new reality?’ The publishing world is full of editors hunting for the young feminist who will galvanize new audiences with a contemporary version of the old theme of female oppression. In other words, there’s a search for a feminist ‘take’ on contemporary society. But feminism will never be relevant in that clear-sighted simple way again. Gender remains a crucial division in western society but in a much more fractured and inconsistent way. Sometimes when gender division is relevant, it is men who are disadvantaged not women.
These thoughts go into new and uncharted territory and there is not a huge amount of encouragement to undertake such a journey. Feminism is still a subject which provokes passion and, it has to be said, unreason. ‘Are you for it or against it?’ is the most common question. But such polarization is now unhelpful, obscuring an understanding of what feminism has achieved, what has changed, and what role gender now actually does play. It also prevents us asking an even more fundamental question: Is feminism relevant at all now?
It took me a long time before I allowed myself to ask this question. My intellectual and political formation were in feminism and it feels a bit like casting myself adrift and betraying friendships which have formed me, but for the past few years I have had a growing sense that, at some point, for my own benefit as much as anything else, I would have to look at feminism afresh, to settle my own accounts with it. I needed to understand why feminism had once been so important and why I now felt it had become a straitjacket.
This was no overnight revelation but a growing sense of unease. Over the years I have regularly had phone calls from newspapers or magazines, or received letters from research students, asking me one or all of the following questions: Do you think feminism has achieved its goals? Would you still call yourself a feminist? Is feminism dead? I used to answer these questions reasonably confidently. Women still have a very long way to go before they reach real equality so, yes, they still need a political perspective which attends to women’s specific needs. Yes, I’m still a feminist. No, feminism is not dead.
Over the last few years, though, my answers have become more and more convoluted and hesitant. I found it increasingly difficult to say I was a feminist. This was not because it was unfashionable to do so, although it was; rather it was because, almost without noticing, I had become disenchanted with the idea of being ‘a feminist’ in such times. I still identified with the feminist objectives of abolishing discrimination based on gender and the move towards a sexually equitable society. I still cared about many of the injustices feminism cared about. But somewhere along the line, my relationship with feminism had come unstuck.
Of course, few feminists, including myself, had ever really seen themselves as fully signed up, uncritical members of some united feminist movement. Feminism wasn’t like that anyway. It was more a loose alliance of women with different approaches to problems affecting women arid a number of different primary concerns. So there had always been a place for ideas to be discussed critically and I had always seen myself as being on a critical wing of this broad church. The religious imagery is not accidental, however; feminism was a broad church and ‘belief’ is an apposite term for its dynamism. When I first encountered feminism in the 1970s, it had the force and attraction of a profound explanatory system. As the old traditional family crumbled and women began to feel the effects of postwar education and consumerism, feminism was the ideology which galvanized women, putting them in the driving seat of these profound social changes.
Certainly feminism made sense of my own experience, emerging as I did, highly educated, from university in the 1970s, yet facing ancient prejudices and discrimination. And having espoused this doctrine, it was exhilarating to be involved in the astonishing changes it made to relationships between the sexes, transforming cultural prejudices against women, knocking on the doors of workplaces and educational institutions to transform women’s opportunities probably for ever.
Because of the importance which feminism had both personally and socially, it took me a long time to recognize just how uncomfortable I had become with that association. By the late 1980s, although publicly still very much associated with feminism, I was also beginning to feel compromised, drawn into interpretations of the world which no longer rang true. Throughout the 1990s I gradually realized I was travelling beyond some invisible boundary. One incident which brought this home to me was the reception given to Katie Roiphe’s book, The Morning After, published in Britain in 1993. In reviews and features it was explained that Katie Roiphe was a young American, the daughter of a woman who had been politically active as a feminist in the 1960s and ‘70s. Roiphe, it was explained, had written a naive book, the result of discovering as a student at Princeton University that the feminism which she had imbibed with her mother’s milk had turned into the sour doctrine of sexual repression dressed up as political correctness.
I heard many conversations about Roiphe’s book. Most were indignant in tone; what were we doing importing a book by a young American student about American sexual attitudes which were so different from our own? Why should we be worried about feminist political correctness in the USA when there were still so many steps towards equality for British women to take? Was the eagerness with which the British media had grasped this attack on feminism part of what many perceived as a growing backlash against feminism?
When I finally read the book it came as something of a surprise. It was naive, but it was also a valid set of observations about the dangers of applying rigid feminist views to intimate human relationships where power does not obligingly belong to one group only. What is more, although it was a vignette of life on an American campus, it was not altogether distant and unrecognizable. What she had to say about the victim culture of feminism, about the problems with a positive discrimination programme, and especially about how relationships between the sexes might be viewed in a new, more egalitarian context, were certainly recognizable to me in the UK.
The reception of that book made me realize that although British feminists always insist that there is no single uniform feminism, only a disparate set of voices addressing women’s issues, there are some no-go areas. Roiphe’s book touched in a naive way on precisely those areas, questioning the fundamental feminist convictions that women can never be powerful in relationship to men and, conversely, that men can never occupy a position of vulnerability. Roiphe argued that on the sexually egalitarian campus, sexual relationships are not always characterized by male oppressors and female victims. So, however broad the church of feminism, it clearly had its limits and, like most other systems of belief, it responded with indignation and accusations of treachery to such challenges.
Feminism’s self-image, as a beleaguered minority, does not help it to tolerate criticism. Women involved with feminism tend to feel they have never really had the chance to explain themselves or make a significant impact with their ideas, so what they really want is more support, not criticism. This is understandable. To call oneself a feminist has never been an easy choice and it has never made anyone popular. It is still hard for individual women to confront the injustices and plain bad behaviour that they meet in life, and to try to do something about them. More often than not, the result is marginalization, designation as a ‘trouble-maker’ and much ad feminam hostility.
Those women who fought the original battles suffer more than most. Hated and opposed when originally pushing down the barriers, they now often have to face contempt from a society which takes for granted their achievements. At a recent party I witnessed one such woman being challenged by a young man who had no sense of feminism’s history or her involvement in it. ‘Do you really call yourself a feminist?’ he asked belligerently. ‘Yes,’ she answered rather wistfully, ‘I’d still call myself that.’ ‘But what on earth does it mean?’ he continued. ‘I mean, is there really any need for it? Isn’t it just part of the way we are, part of our unconscious?’
It was a difficult and poignant moment for me, because it encapsulated both sides of my relationship with feminism. I greatly respected the woman for what she had achieved and deplored the man’s lack of respect for why she had placed herself as she did. In such circumstances, no wonder she dug her