I’m interested in this passage from Susan Sontag’s posthumous collection of essays, because I think it touches on the difficulty — partially but not primarily self-inflicted — that feminists often have winning people over to the cause of feminism.
Sontag is writing about Anna Banti, a mid-century Italian novelist who hated the word “feminism” but who wrote about women in a way that was unmistakably feminist. Sontag writes:
To refuse, vehemently (even scornfully) refuse, a repuation as a feminist was, of course, a common move for the most brilliant and independent women of her generation—[Virginia] Woolf being the glorious exception. Think of Hannah Arendt. Or of Colette, who once declared that women who were so stupid as to want the vote deserved “the whip and the harem.” ? Feminism has meant many thing; many unnecessary things. It can be defined as a position—about justice and dignity and liberty—to which almost all independent women would adhere if they did not fear the retaliation that accompanies a word with such a sulfurous reputation. Or it can be defined as a position easier to disavow or quarrel with, as it was by Banti (and Arendt and Colette). That version of feminism suggests that there is a war against men, which was anathema to such women; that feminism suggests an avowal of strength—and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection); more, it proclaims pride in being a woman, it even affirms the superiority of women—all attitudes that felt alien to the many independent women who were proud of their accomplishments and who knew the sacrifices and the compromises they entailed.
What I take from this (and I’m not sure that I completely grok what Sontag is saying) is that one of the things that people find alienating about some manifestations of feminism is not so much its perceived negativity — the whole "man-hating" thing — as it is a perceived triumphalism or self-satisfaction. It’s a resentment of being criticized, yes, but it’s also envy — of women who seem not to have to contend with "the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong."
I don’t know. I’m still working this through in my mind, but it seems important. Not because I want to attack feminism but because one of the reasons I started this blog with Jamie was that I thought we could be an alternative, to quote from our original mani-festo, both to "misogynistic backslapping (not to mention butt-patting)" and to "a suffocating, supposedly enlightened perspective inside of which we censor ourselves for fear of being or being seen as sexist, misogynistic or objectifying."
Feminism is a good thing, and I take it as a given that much of the resistance to it is grounded in pretty nasty, indefensible, reactionary, atavistic emotions. But I also think that like all philosophies it can, sometimes, flatten into a kind of ideology that loses sympathy for human limits and frailties. I like the Sontag passage because it seems to point to this out without attacking the feminist project (there’s something gloriously casual about the feminist solidarity expressed in her line about Virginia Woolf "being the glorious exception").
