Scholarship & Academic Achievements

(Reprinted from the Chronicle of Higher Education, June 21, 2002)

The Political Intolerance of Academic Feminism

By Mary Zeiss Stange

I met Rosemary several years ago, at a workshop in Texas on "Becoming an Outdoors Woman." Bunkmates, we stayed up late the first night, chatting. We had little in common. I was fortyish, no children, a feminist, a professor at a northeastern liberal-arts college, politically left of center. She was older, mother of four, a born-again Christian, had just completed an undergraduate psychology degree on her way to a master's degree in counseling, and politically conservative. But we did share a passion for hunting, which had brought us to this outdoor-skills-training workshop. "I don't know about being in these classes with all these women, though!" Rosemary confided. "I've always hunted with men. I am an equal in my husband's deer camp. I can tell stories and take a joke with the best of 'em." Maybe, I ventured, she'd never heard some women's hunting stories? She laughed. "I don't think women know any good ones."

Over the next two days, Rosemary learned otherwise. Sunday afternoon, as we were packing, she exclaimed, "This has been great! I feel so fulfilled. I mean, I feel empowered." (That, with a wink and a nudge, for my feminist benefit.) "Imagine," she continued. "With men, you have to compartmentalize. With other women, it's possible to talk about babies and bullets in the same conversation. I'd never have believed it."

The discipline of women's studies could learn a lot from that workshop. We were a hundred women working, exploring, and playing together, united by shared interests, desires, and curiosities. One couldn't say that our conversations were nonpolitical. But on some deeply important level, political differences didn't matter. What if academic feminism could capture some of that spirit? We need to find some new and powerful ways to put babies and bullets into the same conversation, to broaden and deepen the kinds of conversations we should be engaging in.

Academic feminists have yet to adequately address the issue implicitly raised by the millions of women like Rosemary: how to reach politically conservative yet "liberated" women, many of whom testify, "I'm not a feminist, but ..." Some of those women may be feminists without knowing it, although putting it that way implies a certain condescension. Others are openly hostile to feminism.

I care about those women. Over the past dozen years, doing research on female hunters and gun owners and enthusiasts, I have interacted with hundreds of them. They will never take a women's-studies course, or read a feminist book or magazine. If asked why, they will assure you it's because feminism has nothing to say to them. More often than not, they are right.

For all the time, energy, and ink we academic feminists have expended on categorizing oppressions and defining what a woman (or a feminist) is or isn't, exploring sex and gender, and delineating distinct cultural perspectives, we have an alarming tendency to evade one obvious fact. Feminists are a minority who speak for a majority of women who cannot or will not hear us. It is as if we lack a common language.

That struck home when I read Margaret Talbot's provocative argument last fall in the New York Times Magazine that multiculturalism, since the 1980s, unwittingly has tended both to reinforce a sense of "us" versus "others" and to celebrate a superficial sense of cultural diversity. She pinpointed linguistic ignorance as the main block to true inclusion: "The upbeat ethnic-festival approach ... allows you to leave out a lot of groups, like those that speak difficult languages or live in rough neighborhoods of the world or don't seem to treat women particularly well."

Feminist scholars have struggled to be inclusive when it comes to every conceivable form of "otherness" (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, age, appearance, education, ability). Every form of otherness, that is, except one: politics. How ironic, given that our movement began with the assertion that the personal is political.

It's in this regard that Talbot's indictment of multiculturalism translates to American academic feminism: By and large, we have not learned to communicate with those whose politics differ sharply from our own. Either we don't see them or we stereotype them. Such women include those, like Rosemary, who identify themselves as Bible-believing Christians or who are religious fundamentalists. Or who are political or social conservatives. Women's studies, to the extent that it has identified itself with a politically liberal or progressive perspective, has tended to discount or dismiss counter political perspectives as inauthentic, unenlightened, or antagonistic to feminist goals.

To invoke a religious analogy, we are happy to proselytize for the feminist cause, recognizing that that cause takes different forms in different ethnic or social contexts. But those whom we cannot convert, we criticize—or we feel sorry for them, because of their nonbelief. Religionist that I am, however, I am suspicious of such missionary activity, and recognize its practical limits.

Why are there no conservatives among us? Or, why is it that as soon as an erstwhile sister adopts a conservative perspective—Elizabeth Fox-Genovese comes to mind—she is summarily shunned? Consider the careers of Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi, whose feminist credentials periodically have been questioned over their apparent agreement with the "other side" on some issues. And then there's Camille Paglia—what exactly is she, politically, anyway?

I want to be clear that, in invoking those examples, I am not advocating those women's ideas. I agree with the critic who reviewed Fox-Genovese's Feminism Without Illusions under the title "Illusions Without Feminism." I question Wolf's take on presidential candidates as sartorially correct alpha males, and I am mystified by Faludi's thesis in Stiffed. I neither know nor especially care what Paglia is or wants to be.

My point is that academic feminism's predictably antagonistic response to feminists who appear to break liberal ranks has the unintended, and highly unfortunate, side effect of leaving us wide open to the criticisms of genuine anti-feminists—Christina Hoff Sommers, Katie Roiphe, Daphne Patai, Karen Lehrman, Rene Denfield—all of whom win ideological friends and influence people with their claims that feminism is exclusive and in disarray. Theirs are the voices that attract popular media attention. Theirs are the voices that women like Rosemary hear, and believe. And in our noncomprehension of her politics, our apparent disregard for her voice and her views, we reinforce that belief.

Second-wave feminists customarily have argued that it is imperative to present a united political front. Such adherence to the feminist party line is at best passé, and has in the long run done us more harm than good. It has allowed academic feminism, for all our talk of multiplicity and inclusiveness, to skate dangerously close to the edge of intolerance, particularly with regard to conservative-seeming arguments among ourselves about polarizing issues like abortion, pornography, or armed self-defense against abuse. Too often academic feminism has invited the stereotype of political correctness, and it has fit rather too snugly.

Can one be a conservative and a feminist? I honestly don't know. I know I used to argue—I admit, as a devil's advocate—that Maureen Reagan had a right to claim to be a feminist. I think Laura Bush is performing laudably these days, although how much of that is spin is anybody's guess. I know I was embarrassed several years ago when, at the last big reproductive-rights march in Washington, the crowd booed when the speaker from Republicans for Choice ascended the podium.

Can one be a conservative and a feminist? It shouldn't be so hard for me to pose, or to answer, that question, after more than a generation of thinking, writing, and teaching about feminism.

So why do I bother? Because I want to spend more time talking with women like Rosemary. Because I'd like to find a way to have in academe the kind of genuine interchange among women joined in a common pursuit bridging social and political differences that was possible at a 4-H camp in central Texas. The classroom can provide the ideal setting for that kind of interaction, and the discipline of women's studies offers the right methodological and conceptual tools. Indeed, it happens in small ways all the time. That's what keeps us going.

But to bring more women into the conversation, we professional feminists need to learn to speak, and to hear, another language: one that comprehends, without necessarily trying to change, certain political and cultural perspectives that most of us, as individuals, may not share. That means not imposing our structures of thought and belief on politically "other" women, hearing their take on feminism, learning from it, and allowing it to enrich our understanding of the many forms women's empowerment can take. There are models for that: The evolving literature on global feminism provides one; the current debate on black conservatism among African-Americans another.

The one thing we must avoid at all cost is reinforcing stereotypical ideas and values better relegated to the last century. I said at the outset that it's a matter of putting babies and bullets into the same conversation. Babies evoke the traditional view of woman as nurturer, and bullets suggest a liberated, powerful feminism. Or is it that bullets represent co-optation by traditional views of power over another, versus babies—the radical healing power of matriarchal mutuality? Must we choose metaphorical sides? I don't think it mattered to Rosemary; she knew what she was talking about. We need to learn to speak her language.

Mary Zeiss Stange is an associate professor of women's studies and religion at Skidmore College. She is the author of Woman the Hunter (Beacon Press, 1997) and co-author, with Carol K. Oyster, of Gun Women: Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America (New York University Press, 2000).

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