Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand - Review

Reason, August-Sept, 1999 by Cathy Young

Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, edited by Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 413 pages, $60.00, $19.95 (paper)

In Ayn Rand's lifetime, university professors regarded their students' interest in her writings with a mixture of scorn and dismay. Seventeen years after her death, the iconoclastic novelist-philosopher is becoming a respectable subject of scholarship. Most recently, a collection of essays on Rand has appeared in the "Re-Reading the Canon" series featuring feminist analyses of philosophers from Aristotle to Foucault.

That work, Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, edited by Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra (the authors, respectively, of The Ayn Rand Companion and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical), could not have pleased Rand, given her aversion to anything called "feminist." To some extent, this attitude reflected the anti-individualist, anti-capitalist slant of the modern women's movement. But it also had to do with Rand's peculiar views on sex and gender.

Was Rand a feminist? Some of the book's contributors - Gladstein, author Karen Michalson, psychologist and former Rand protege and lover Nathaniel Branden, and, with some reservations, biographer Barbara Branden - place her squarely within feminism's best tradition, pointing both to her own life of achievement and to her female characters: independent, strong women ahead of their time. As Nathaniel Branden puts it, "A feminism that sees woman at her best, as a heroic figure, will find support and validation in Rand's writings. A feminism that defines woman as victim and man as her evil oppressor will see Rand as the enemy."

Other contributors, such as libertarian feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor, philosopher Diana Mertz Brickell, and writer Thomas Gramstad, are more ambivalent. They argue that Rand's work has much to offer feminism but is marred by what Gramstad calls "flaws and in consistencies in her notions of gender." All agree that nothing in Rand's basic philosophy is incompatible with feminism and that, in fact, her antifeminism was in many ways at odds with her individualism.

One obvious stumbling block for would-be Randian feminists is the infamous "rape scene" between Howard Roark and Dominique Francon in Rand's novel The Fountainhead. Is it rape or, as Wendy McElroy insists, "rough sex between consenting adults"? McElroy rightly criticizes feminists who employ very broad definitions of sexual violence. Yet, given Dominique's ferocious resistance, the act would seem to qualify as rape even under the narrowest definition of the term (though her desire for degradation at Roark's hands does complicate the situation). While McElroy needlessly blurs the lines between this episode and other Randian encounters that can be described as consensual rough sex, in some sense Dominique's ravishment is an extreme expression of Rand's general view of sex as involving male dominance and female submission.

McElroy asserts that this emphasis on female surrender to the male "on the altar of sex" is the only thing that "mitigates an otherwise stable state of equality between the man and the woman" in Rand's novels. But it may be more complicated than that.

Rand believed, of course, that men and women should have equal rights. She had little sympathy for the traditional ideal of womanhood, in which the morality of self-sacrifice and service to others that she so detested was distilled and magnified. In a 1964 interview, she affirmed that women, like men, should build their lives around work: "What is proper for a man is proper for a woman. ... There is no particular work which is specifically feminine." Her novels reflect that: Kira Argounova in We the Living and Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged both choose "unfeminine" careers, engineering and railroad operations.

In "Who Is Dagny Taggart?" Michalson sees Dagny as a nearly unique female "epic hero" in Western literature. Particularly provocative is her analysis of the scene in which a teenage Dagny half-jokingly tells her future lover Francisco d'Anconia that perhaps she should play dumb in school to gain popularity. Francisco slaps her face, causing her "violent pleasure." Is Dagny "an oppressed woman reveling in her own abuse"? Michalson persuasively argues that the episode subverts the traditional paradigm in which men use violence "to keep women from excelling [or] being too uppity" (though I'm less inclined to agree that the subversion was intentional). Francisco slaps Dagny for threatening (even facetiously) to lower her standards, and her pleasure comes from realizing how intensely he values her achievement. Dagny, Michalson observes, is "the only important female hero in Western literature who is physically struck for refusing to excel at a nontraditional pursuit."

Michalson is undoubtedly right when she asserts that if most feminists wouldn't dream of embracing Dagny or her creator as role models, it's mainly because "some major strains of feminism posit themselves against individual achievement and traditional ideas of heroism, which are defined as 'male.'" Yet the case for Rand as crypto-feminist involves a good deal of wishful thinking and logical acrobatics.