The Subtleties of Neo-Feminism

To the editors:

Re: “The Farce of Feminism” (Editorial, Oct. 16, 2001), I have no objection to people opposing feminism, or at least discussing it. Unfortunately, Rebecca E. Rubins’ Editor’s Notebook was riddled with factual errors and logical fallacies, which make her piece simple polemic rather than meaningful argument.

She asserts, for instance, that “women in this country are now on an entirely equal footing with men.” What does she mean by this? She can’t mean that they hold as many top jobs (at Harvard, for instance, 18 of 19 University Professors are men, along with three-fourths of the faculty in general), nor that they have equal salaries. So presumably Rubins means that women now have the potential to do as well as men, but are held back by the “feminists of today.”

But lacking a control group of women who are not exposed to feminism, she can’t say what might happen if feminism were not taught. So really, she’s just assuming that the genders are on an “equal footing.” Which, conveniently for her, means that the “feminists” are to blame for holding women back. But this is simply her conjecture, nothing more.

A broader factual and semantic problem in her article is that she doesn’t seem even to understand what the word feminism means. If she did the most elementary research, she would know that there are equalitarian feminists as well as so-called difference feminists, and that conflating the two is highly inaccurate. The fact of the matter is, many equalitarian feminists oppose “women-only” groups, arguing (as Rubins does) that they actually create negative gender-based distinctions. A difference feminist—who thinks men and women are different, but equally important in some respects—would probably support “women-only” groups, but might not support the equalitarian ideal that women and men have to be equally good at math and science. By conflating the two positions (and really, there are many shades between the basic poles), Rubins succeeds in making “feminism” look self-contradictory and stupid. Which it would be, if feminism were some centrally administered collective—but it isn’t. She’s arguing with several different people at once, and ascribing their arguments to one another. No wonder feminism looks bad in her analysis.

Ironically, though, Rubins’ opposition is almost all rhetorical: logically, she is a feminist. One of the most radical ideas of 1970’s feminism, which is still at the core of almost all feminism today, was that women’s position in society is socially, not biologically, determined. This was, and still is, a fundamental tenet of almost anything that calls itself feminism.

But though Rubins claims to be against “feminism,” that same assumption is at the core of her argument: “Girls are not born feeling inferior to boys.” They couldn’t have said it better in 1974. Twenty-five years ago, that sentence would have been considered a forward-thinking position; today it is still far from reactionary. And without it, without the assumption that women and men would be equal if only the “feminists” would leave us alone, her argument can’t exist. So in fact, what Rubins is unwittingly doing is throwing feminist analysis back at the feminists.

Instead of claiming (as most feminists do) that “the patriarchy” or the IMF or whatever oppressed women, Rubins is claiming that feminists oppress women. But her fundamental question—Who is oppressing women?—is a feminist one, and her analysis is as well. I think she should at least acknowledge her debt, if nothing else.

Nathan R. Perl-Rosenthal ’04

Oct. 16, 2001