Glorying in Womanhood

MEN ARE THE ENEMY. Never mind all those smooth-talking partisans of "men's liberation" joyously chanting "Oppressors, arise and recognize your own oppression!," fresh from their discovery that men as well as women suffer from rigid sexual stereotyping. No use trying to pin the blame on some anonymous entity called "the system" which makes both sexes squirm unhappily--not even if the system turns to be none other than that ogre capitalism. After all, Marxist theory may say one thing, but in practice socialist countries still uphold the nuclear family and discriminate against women. Every man--socialist or capitalist--is a sexist oppressor, a supporter of patriarchy, and even the most self-righteously "liberated" male is probably just using his so-called "raised consciousness" as a weapon for sexual conquest.

At any rate, so says The New Woman's Survival Sourcebook, a radical feminist guide to the ideas and institutional outlets of the woman's movement. In format, the Sourcebook resembles The Whole Earth Catalogue and its own predecessor, The New Woman's Survival Catalogue; it contains listings of resources by and for women in areas like health, education, work, literature, religion and politics, along with blurbs summarizing the latest feminist thinking on each topic. The blurbs are to read, the listings are for reference, and the whole constitutes an invaluable gauge of the progress feminists have made so far in redefining women's relationships towards one another and towards male-dominated society and culture.

A certain skepticism towards Marxists and men notwithstanding, the editors of the Sourcebook, Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie, claim to be proponents of what they call "militant pluralism". Consciously eschewing a rigid political stance, Grimstad and Rennie argue that the movement's very strength lies in its ott-bemoaned diversity (to some, incoherence), since "dogmatism and 'correct line' politics are usually the sign of weakness in a political movement." In keeping with this pluralistic approach, the Sourcebook has kind words for groups ranging from the reformist NOW, which seeks the best possible deal for women within the system, to the escapist Minerva Astrology Collective. The overwhelming emphasis, however, is clearly on women within a sexist society fashioning their own separate institutions embodying the feminist principles of egalitarianism and collectivism.

This stress on women doing for other women--women setting up their own restaurants, businesses, record companies and rape clinics, women creating their own distinctive art based on their unique experience as women--is what makes the Sourcebook valuable as a stimulus to the aspiring, or perhaps hitherto slumbering, feminist. There's a tremendous sense of power, of almost endless possibilities conveyed by this glimpse at what others have done and are trying to do.

The writers of the Sourcebook fairly glory in their womanhood, in their appreciation of feminism as a force "to enrich and diversify human life." Concomitant with this appreciation is a healthy distrust of those who would deny women their proper place in any scheme for societal and cultural revolution. And it is in this context that Marxist feminists and would-be "liberated" men come in for such a rough time. The problem with Marxists, says the Sourcebook, is that they fail to locate the problem of sexism where it belongs--in the oppression of women, as a class, by men. In seeking to liberate the working class from capitalism as a prelude to establishing the just society, Marxists have things backwards. Any radical feminist worth her salt will explain that a truly egalitarian, non-oppressive social order is possible only after male hegemony is overturned--a development that has yet to occur in any country which has been blessed with a socialist revolution.

THE SOURCEBOOK'S CRITICISM of men is even more to the point. In the first place, it is nonsense for men to say they have nothing to lose from a movement dedicated to eradicating male privilege. Men are the enemy, after all. Furthermore, males who proudly declaim their own "liberation"--meaning their rejection of sexual stereotypes--stumble noticeably between theory and practice, especially when practice involves concrete sacrifices. "Most women find out that a little bit of crying does not root out the deeply embedded patriarch," the Sourcebook comments dryly. This is not to say that men can never be legitimate feminists--a group of men who found a child care center in Tucson, Arizona, do earn the Sourcebook's grudging respect--but the way is certainly long and hard, and rightly so.

The Sourcebook is written in a style designed to jibe with its politics but, bound to offend the linguistic purist. For one thing, the language, when it's not merely rhetorical, is often distressingly colloquial, as in this comment on comic books: "The more drecky the material, the more blatant the sexism, the more overt the misogyny." Feminist expressions (language shapes consciousness and all that) abound, expressions like "Goddess knows" which ring a bit untrue, or the substitution of "MDeities" for doctors. The difficulties of constructing a graceful feminist language are certainly formidable, but fortunately the Sourcebook's analysis are sufficiently lucid to compensate for their lack of linguistic elegance.

Poet Susan Griffin, listed in the Sourcebook in the section on women and literature, writes there is always a time to make right what is wrong, there is always a time for retribution and that time is beginning.

The New Woman's Survival Sourcebook, though its editors call it only "the tip of the iceberg" of a movement that itself still has a long, long way to go, indicates just how far from that beginning women have come.