Feminism: The Personal Struggle

MENTION "PARIS '68" to any French student and watch his face cloud with regret for a dream in defeat. The failed promise of Paris '68 has punctured his idealism, depressed his beliefs, and most likely by now put a permanent crease into his posture.

If 1968 was the big year for radical student revolt, 1969 was the heyday for militant Feminism. Mention "'69" to anyone who participated and watch the lines in her face tighten with nostalgia. She too looks as if the phrase were but an echo, or a ghost of an activism that passed away somewhere, she's not sure where.

The analogy is significant. Feminism can be as compelling a tool for her generation as Marxism has been for a century of radicals. But where the student revolt was geared by an ideology, programmed toward a solid goal, Feminism, at least for the time being, is more fluidly formed; it founds itself on faith more than anything else, faith in the possibility of an independent female identity. Feminist activism could fire away for all it was worth at external targets like job inequality and economic dependency. But it hasn't directly touched the deepest impulse of Feminism; it hasn't rescued the female sensibility. Activism is on its way to getting what it asked for, but, going only so far as the men's world, it hasn't given Feminism what it really needs.

It is difficult not to miss '69, however. For '69 meant bursting loose, breaking out of traditional sex roles, and finding a public voice. And that voice was yelling loud and brazen in raucous rebellion against all that 'femininity' had once connoted. The Feminist anger, for many, was the single most powerful emotion in their lives. It made them buoyant. Female strangers on the street went out of their way to give each other "everybody's a sister" smiles, and collective meetings warmed their faith with the feeling of an all female togetherness. Everybody's blood was running high in the temples, and the talk was feverish with urgency and purpose. Womanhood, nothing less, was to be salvaged from its historical oppression, and women burned like pioneer refugees out to rescue it.

They threw away their bras as a symbolic breaking loose, they foreswore make-up in revolt against the Look, and donned shapeless Indian prints that defied the Hollywood wasp-waisted ideal. They sat with legs widespread in mockery of Propriety and wore tattered jeans to taunt Ladylike Deportment. And they stopped shaving and stopped bathing to exult in the smells they trailed in the air. Rebellion against the Look was merely the easiest way to protest the Role, since the Look, be it slickfigured or heavy-breasted, was primed for seduction, for capitalizing on your assigned status as a sex object. It was this objecthood, having one's identity consigned to the status of an object, that Feminism reared up against. Because objecthood meant being a member of a psychologically subordinate class, it meant dependence on men for self-definition, and crippling your identity to fit the shape of the one already cut out for you.

THEN, A FEMINIST could scream out against what she knew was wrong. But that didn't make anything else right. And nobody knew for sure just what was right. Moreover, nobody really knew how to go about finding it out. Robbed of a relevant past and in rebellion against it a feminist lacked any model by which to structure her future. Activism was the only tool she had. But after four years, when that activism has aroused significant political change, the personal problem of self-definition, the question "What does it mean to be a woman?" remains.

That question triggers off reverberations that sound in the core of any feminist's personality. She has only her own experience to measure its extent. I became a feminist when I realized that I lacked the answer, and that I had grown up trained to believe the wrong one. My parents made a persuasive model for the idea that men were stronger than women, hence better. My father had power over my mother economically, intellectually, etc. He could demolish her verbally; their arguments ran like a Thurber parody of The Battle Between the Sexes. He could think more precisely and analytically than she could. His infallible logic made her look clumsy and irrational, and she failed ever to muster as clean a logic when pitted against him. He would retreat to a citadel of rationality and leave her flailing outside with futile goading and gadfly jabbing. Frustrated by her powerlessness, she could only shout. And I'd blame her as peacebreaker when it was his cool male aplomb that had subtly rendered her so.

Then my mother's economic dependence upon my father seemed pitiful to me. She lived for her family, he for work, for a life outside that would take care of the family. The priorities tell you that theirs was a relationship couched in power.

This naturally bred in me the sense of feminine powerlessness. Consciously my mother's dependence frightened me. I thought my father had the better life. So I emulated his independence. I became a tournament tennis player and traveled the national circuit for nine years. But the feeling of impotence and submission vis-a-vis the world breeds a guilt for any form of success achieved in that world. I would go to bed each night with a knot in my gut, sick with the pressure of having to sin the next day. Winning itself was rarely more than a breath-catcher en route to new pressures and more anxiety. I had wrought winning into an ultimatum whose fulfillment made me guilty not just because the life style put a premium on success, but because I had been educated to feel that independent success was meant for men. For women it had to be a by-product of a male-centered life, like a sideshow they could be proud of as long as it stayed in the wings. When my body began to get big and muscled and hard in a way I thought unfeminine I stopped playing altogether. My athlete's walk was making me feel like I had gone over to the other sex in betrayal of my own.

AFTER ALL, "femininity" was the only measure of success that really counted. Only boys founded an identity on extra-sexual criteria. The tests that would make or break them would come in their work or public life. For girls, life without male approval was practically no life at all. I remember sitting home on the night of a big high school dance thinking myself a failure as a person because no one had asked me. Most of the girls I knew were trained to serve the sexual code--in the expertise of how to win a man and keep him, how to flatter and flirt and sell their wiles. We disguised the jagged edges of our personalities to pander to the male appetite, and we sacrificed any principle for male applause. Trying to be siren seductresses was our assent to passivity and receptivity and all that men had laid down the definition of women to be. We gave up claim to doing what we were educated to need.

Now, figuring your self-esteem on little else than male-funded returns means that you are handicapped in loving yourself. You have to do it vicariously through men instead. It is a servile position and servility means degradation. Depressing your ego, your healthy selfishness, to fortify a man's takes shape as a self-hatred. It is being held in contempt and squeezing that role for every gambler's gold ounce it is worth.

I tried very hard to play by the rules of the sexual code, and hushed every self doubt under a louder male catcall or compliment. But a few years of shutting up to make men feel smart, acting timid to make them feel brave, and lying to make them feel stronger left me empty inside. Since the attention I got for my manipulative agility told me that I was a success by the standards of "femininity," I began to think that my problem was neurotic. So I went into psychoanalysis and discovered that I hated men.

Unconscious, my hatred was personal; made conscious, it had pervasive political extensions. A life spent placating men, preening for them and being petted by them in order to share their style, following them to places I didn't want to go and into things I didn't want to do made me hate them for it. I hated them for having the power I didn't, I despised them for not being 'man' enough when they weren't powerful, I hated myself for wanting that power. In short, I was paralyzed by my loyalty to the only feminine ideal I had ever known.

Generalized, my problem described a dilemma central to Feminism: success in a man's world is incompatible with female integrity, while 'femininity' stunts the female identity. Men justify themselves on pride for a world they have built and conquered, and the conquered includes women. Women are born and raised members of a subordinate class in a system of sexual power that admits no equality. When successful by masculine standards they threaten men, and feel guilty for doing so. When they exchange the male oriented language of femininity' for a man's vocabulary and a man's style they trade one form of identity denial for another. And this is why the Feminism that took shape in political action, that claimed for women the right to do everything that men could, didn't answer anybody's questions about what it meant to be a woman.

IN 1969 a feminist was often eaten up by a rage that hungered for nothing less than a total annihilation of the male dominated system. But nobody likes a woman who is angry. Her male friends would shy away from her with a "she'll get over it" condescension, and their condescension would fortify her outrage. You feel ugly fighting with a shrew's snarl, though. It is like using brass knuckles on a balloon for a punching bag. And you begin to wonder if you are worth liking after all.

So some slept around to prove that they could be women and liberated at the same time; and they choked back any cheap taste that filtered through their insides. Women tripped from bed to bed as if to proclaim to the world, "My sex is my freedom." But this sort of man-hopping denied any roots at all, and rootlessness loosens the grip on the self. These feverish sexual experiments were born out of a headlong rush into a new found feminism; sex was leaping out of the self to escape it.

For others, anti-'femininity' meant anti-sex. Sex gaged in the old market exchange, where you sold yourself to guarantee that you got from men the security you paid for, was intolerable. Revolt against traditional masculine expectations often went hand in hand with rejection of the men who couldn't see it happening any differently. Jeans and workshirts like the men's were like battle flags worn to advertise defiance, "Take me now, I just dare you to try." Here, revolt against one form of maladjustment carried women into another neurotic adjustment, neurotic simply because nobody wanted to deny her sexuality. She needed men, but the old language of male attention was poison to her feminism.

Four years later, I still don't feel that I have grown out of this dilemma. I have put a priority on my independence because I still believe that I am unable to fight a sexist system while I am tied to a man. His vocabulary has for too long structured the way I think, and his values are built into my head like enemy signposts. Feminism, for me, is a total sensibility. It is inside the head, and, for now, personal.

I think of this personalized feminism as a parlor form of guerilla warfare that uses an artillery of intuitive language--mime, gesture, silence--to sabotage the enemy. It is rather like a revolution of manners, something felt rather than articulated. You can't structure a sensibility, you can only recognize it. And you recognize it not in action but in the reverberations of an action, like watching drops of water distilled from the air, or learning to hear the unspoken associations in the grooves of a sentence. My feminism works rather like an inner eye that registers the other side of the surface caught by the retina. I watch it in the way I feel about getting ogled in the street. My body used to go taut with suppressed fury, and now I bristle ironically--"that puffy red-faced one there with the beery swollen jowls and lecherous look is a cracker, don't even try to meet his leer because his head is so far away that he's going to play any response you make by his rules." I watch its progression in the fact that I have stopped going back to first causes when I put on eyeliner in the morning, or in the way that I have stopped reading cop-outs into the way I dress.

FEMINISM HAS bred in me a hyper-self-consciousness, as if a sentry had been planted in my brain double-thinking me. It is most alert in conversation with men. I used to busy myself scenting out the most insignificant of sexisms and flying off the handle when I found them. And then I'd lapse into defensive raps to explain myself.

Today I would balk before having the conversation at all because I have begun to feel that the language of the man's world orbits inexorably in its neat Ptolemaic system. The guy says, "So you want respect?" and I shut up because as soon as I try to redefine the word I lose my case. The difference is that four years ago a feminist defined herself in opposition to the square sexist world. She was a naysayer to a tradition of role playing grown dyspeptic, practicing toughness instead of timidity, sloth instead of chic, either anti-sex or sexually liberated. Today the trap is complicity.

My contemporaries wonder where the collective anger that fed their faith in 1969 went. They think that the dream of '69 died with the action, and they miss the high feeling of Happening. One of their biggest depressants is a whole new crop of freshmen and sophomores who simply aren't having any of it.

These younger women have brought back a more tailored look, and they are cleaner. You can't categorize them by any group style, however, because there doesn't seem to be any. The Look has diffused and the Role along with it. They have largely abandoned collective political action for more individualized pursuits, study, pre-med, pre-law, etc. Neither can you stamp a personality according to political affiliation any more because so many cliques have spintered or meshed with each other. There are sexists in the Socialist camp and militants among the sexists; you find Feminists who won't vote, and more and more who won't stand on any ideology at all.

THIS DIVERSITY in style and the dearth of collectivism proclaims an "each woman out for herself" attitude. It is an individualism that shapes a generation different from the one that cut loose in 1969, and there is something like a generation gap in between. The older radical Feminists that I know are so jaded about this new generation that they read 'lowered consciousness' into trendy clothes, 'straightness' into studiousness, and all that looks vain as 'all was in vain.'

Perhaps, though, this pessimism is a bit fiercer than the situation deserves. If I could generalize about this new generation at all, I would call them the New Professionals. And I think it was precisely the changes brought by '69 that made this new professionalism possible. It is simply carrying on the personal business of Feminism that '69 outlined politically.

1969 sighted the enemy and legitimized Feminism for them. We were 19 or 20 when the only definition of womanhood that we knew was being smashed and the rigid lines of sexual demarcation eroded, and they were just coming out of adolescence. They could feel the protest of '69 tug at the roots of the system that wouldn't budge for us in our formative years. And they could watch sexism gruelled on a vast public witness stand. All this means is that this later generation could inherit Feminism as a personal guideline, because it was established for them publicly four years ago. They could internalize the political legacy of '69 as a given.

I don't see much of that old worshipful respect for masculine power in this new generation. I don't see younger women copping out with coy giggles in intellectual bouts because it is more attractive to be charming, and easier to let the man think he is smarter. I don't hear as much abrasive yelling of "Chauvinist pig! Male supremacist!" etc. But I do hear a lot of cool ironic hissing. Three years ago I felt practically traumatized before the picture of Dustin Hoffman in "Straw Dogs" wreaking bloody havoc on the men who had raped his wife when she asked for it. To me, Hoffman's pose epitomized the sort of sexual fascism that sanctifies itself by the territorial imperative. I saw the movie again this year with my younger sister, and her only reaction was a bemused "Where does he get off?" Where I found poignant contradiction in the film, my sister found mostly irrelevance. She is firmer footed than I could be, and more tough assed. Hers has always been a personalized form of Feminism.

Perhaps the biggest difference four years has made lies in the fact that nobody can venture to say with any authority what it means to be a woman. In 1969 we suffered from a footlose uncertainty about the goals of Women's Liberation, so we clutched at the movement for self-definition. And we used that political identity as a crutch for a queasy feeling personal identity to hang on to and steer by. We felt plagued by our inability to define 'woman,' frustrated by the fact that we could say only what 'woman' was not. But definition limits prematurely, and I think it was precisely the de-definition that prevented Women's Liberation from solidifying into a staple. It rendered the movement into a form with enough give and take that each could outfit her own style.

IT TAKES a long time for someone who was trained by a sexist system to digest the implications of '69 in the head. After four years I am weary of hard hitting, but I am still angry. And I live with that anger as the one unyielding signpost in my head. I still feel torn like an inbetween--I have my education in how to win a man and keep him built into me, and I often want to turn it on because it is less troublesome. But I feel sick when I do, as if caught in the act of lying for something you don't give a damn about. I still feel com- promised when I acknowledge my need for love of a man because I am not sure that I can protect my human independence from the sexual dependence I was trained to need.

They say in politics that purists never win. But for now Women's Liberation is inside the head, and compromising your head is a futile form of dishonesty. It hurts me to be hard, but I have to defend myself against the old needs so damaging to my feminist self-respect. The security the old needs brought is known and safe; the integrity I have to piece together as a feminist is 'out there' and not so safe. I waver between these two pulls trying to root out the sensibility that shaped me.

The political outbursts of Feminism in 1969 made possible the experiment in understanding the female consciousness. It has become a very personal experiment, and a difficult one. It means trying to separate your human needs from the needs of your sex role. It means trying to grapple with a sensibility, and a sensibility is a very slippery thing. It means picking yourself up by your gutstrings to inch yourself forward