Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism

National Review, June 10, 1991 by Thomas Mallon

HOW PECULIAR it is for an author gathering up essays that first saw life in, among other places, Marxist Perspectives and Signs to declare herself "temperamentally and culturally conservative." How even more peculiar it is that one is tempted to believe her. Elizabeth Fox-genovese, well known in academic circles for a book on the antebellum plantation household, is not afraid to admit her doubts about the feminist-left wave that has crashed onto university lawns-is not even afraid to ascribe a certain cogency to a pronouncement made by Allan Bloom from "a position about which [she] admittedly [has] deep reservations." She says she still prefers history to self-satisfying myth, and professes acceptance of "some notion, however secularized, of original sin," which sounds a lot like human nature, the very thing the academic Left thinks it repealed long ago.

The author's self-proclaimed conservatism has, however, another peculiarity, an anti-capitalist one. It is "rampant capitalism," she says, that led to the coarsening primacy of "individualism," the all-purpose villain of her book, and the false premise of feminist causes she would still like to champion. By individualism she means "the systematic theory of politics, society, economics, and epistemology that emerged following the Renaissance, that was consolidated in the great English, American, French, and Haitian revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that has found its purest logical outcome in the laissez-faire doctrine of neoclassical economics and libertarian political theory." (Mustn't leave out Haiti.)

Many feminists, she argues, have gotten themselves into a logical bind (as if they cared) by calling for, say, legal abortion on the basis of individual rights, while demanding such things as "comparable worth" through "a repudiation of individualism." Mrs. Fox-Genovese does seem to care about logic, and throughout her book she is groping for a different basis for feminism and society as a whole-something other than the individualism she consistently deplores. But even in her defense of comparable worth, what that "collective" alternative might be never quite emerges. It's a "conception of collective good that transcends the aggregate interests of competing, atomized individuals." But what is it? Feudalism? Cooperative farms?

The author sometimes manages, in the course of these abstract gropings, to stimulate, even engage, the reader. But too often she falls into standard-issue academic pieties. On some matters, either incidentally or at length, she comes close to talking rubbish: "The proliferation of homelessness primarily testifies not, as some would believe, to individual failures-although doubtless they play some part-but to the collective failure of that greatest of all American dreams, the prospect of individual property ownership." One more than suspects that her exceptions are really the rule. Put aside the mentally ill and ask yourself, while looking at the rest of the homeless, if more of them turned to drugs because they lost their homes or lost their homes because they turned to drugs.

The author's chapter on pornography is ultimately useless, because she will not talk about or describe pornography itself. It's just a given that it expresses male violence-never mind those films of hobnailed girls with whips, in which males seem desperately eager not to assert power but to unburden themselves of it. If one is going to ponder the laws governing pornography, then one ought at least to attempt to, dare I say it, "deconstruct" a fair sampling of the subject.

When judging recent revisions of the academic canon, Mrs. Fox-genovese declares that it "assumes that the pool of potential heroes is restricted to white, elite males." Moreover, the men who wrote history, literary and otherwise, set out to create "a usable past for elite men." For a woman who claims to prefer history to myth, this is quite a fantasy to entertain. She seems actually to believe that when men look at history they take nothing but pride in it. According to the author, most defenders of the canon wish "to identify higher education, and our official culture, with a narrow elite." The "narrow elite" they so unreasonably have in mind has, in my long academic acquaintance with canon defenders, usually consisted of all students capable of reading on a 12th-grade level.

Long ago, literary study, like Lebanon and Cambodia, was a peaceful place, tended by teachers who were, despite what Mrs. Fox-genovese says, more than hospitable to reappraisals and fresh discoveries. They were happy to welcome to their syllabi writers such as the American novelist Kate Chopin-happy, that is, until they were asked to believe that the readable Mrs. Chopin was in fact a kind of genius. It soon became apparent what was happening-you'd give them an inch and they'd take a bard. Mrs. Fox-Genovese's conservative side will concede that the canon's defenders speak of "barbarians at the gates" with "enough reason to make the rest of us uncomfortable," but not, it would seem, enough force to inspire much resistance.