The Sexual Devolution
Feminism is not the Story of My Life: How today’s Feminist Elite has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women.
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.
Doubleday. 275 pp. $23.95
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s feminist credentials are impeccable. She was an early organizer of women’s consciousness-raising groups; a scholar in the newly emerging field of women’s history; and the founder of the influential women’s-studies program at Emory University. In recent years, though, she has become an outspoken critic of feminism. Her latest book shows just how far she has moved: although she speaks as if she were reforming feminism from within, she has actually renounced almost all of its most pivotal ideas.
In her preface, Fox-Genovese explains that she wrote this book in order to answer a question that has troubled her: why have growing numbers of women, including many of her own students, become uneasy identifying themselves as feminists? Her answer is spelled out in the book’s title: feminism has lost touch with the concerns of ordinary women and is no longer relevant to their lives.
In some ways this thesis is a continuation of themes raised in Fox-Genovese’s 1991 book, Feminism Without Illusions. But where that book was dense and scholarly—as likely to invoke Hegel as Betty Friedan—this one is deliberately popular, and is peppered with material from personal interviews and poll data. These she employs to illustrate her central proposition that feminism has run aground in the sexual revolution it did so much to launch.
Feminists, in Fox-Genovese’s telling, sought to establish equality between the sexes by achieving sexual equality between the sexes. To that end, they preached against the shackles of morality that had restricted women’s sexual conduct. The preaching did not fall on deaf ears; feminism succeeded to a remarkable degree in creating a new moral universe in which sex has been entirely separated from morality.
This transformation has had wide-ranging effects. During the 60’s and 70’s, not only sex itself but everything having to do with sex—marriage and divorce, illegitimacy, abortion—became immune from moral judgment; and moral judgment itself was reduced to the status of purely personal choice and belief. About these sweeping changes Fox-Genovese has a decidedly glum view: “How a society—any society—can survive without at least a minimal moral standard remains obscure.”
In fact, as she points out, our society has not survived very well at all. While upper-middle-class feminists were celebrating sexual freedom, they turned a blind eye to the emotional and economic suffering that so many women experienced as a result of the change in mores. In particular, Fox-Genovese stresses the tragic consequences of the sexual revolution for poor women (and ultimately their children as well), for whom marriage and strong families have always been the sturdiest bulwarks against utter immiseration, and for whom sexual “liberation” has brought not freedom but dependency, abandonment, and abuse.
In tracing how this state of affairs came to pass, Fox-Genovese assigns a preeminent place to feminism’s battle for abortion on demand, an issue she describes as a “litmus test” for being a true feminist. More than anything else, the easy availability of abortion severs the link between sex and procreation. It was, therefore, central in the battle to achieve sexual parity with men, and, Fox-Genovese reports, the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion in Roe v. Wade was hailed by many feminists “as nothing less than women’s own Declaration of Independence.”
But once again Fox-Genovese demurs from the feminist position. She dismisses abortion-rights advocates who assert “with astonishing presumption, and no less astonishing absurdity, that no self-respecting baby would want to be born deformed or poor.” And she rejects the belief that a political solution to the abortion wars should be arrived at on the basis of “a woman’s right to choose.” “[W]e do not,” she writes, “normally regard the taking of a human life as a mere matter of personal preference.”
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All this amounts to a scathing and heretical critique. Yet, despite the power of its indictment, Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life is a work plagued by ambivalence. At one moment, Fox-Genovese seems on the verge of renouncing feminism altogether. In the next, she is intent on resurrecting it in what she calls a “family-friendly” form. Having meticulously established the link between feminism and the sexual revolution, having spelled out the pernicious social and economic consequences of that revolution, and having bewailed the moral chaos resulting from the abandonment of common moral standards, Fox-Genovese seems abruptly and repeatedly to recoil from the implications of her own words.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the hasty retreat she beats on abortion. “Our society must reconcile acceptance of early abortions,” she concludes, “with time-honored moral standards, most notably respect for human life.” Fox-Genovese offers no explanation for this (guardedly) pro-choice stance, but it seems utterly at odds with arguments she has already advanced and endorsed.
The inquiry that lies at the heart of this book—determining why so many women reject the feminist label—may itself be a reflection of intellectual confusion. Even from the evidence Fox-Genovese has collected—interviews with ordinary people who do not dwell in the cloister of the women’s-studies world—it appears that women can get by perfectly well without having to call themselves feminists, let alone immerse themselves in feminist ideology.
Fox-Genovese occasionally recognizes this fact. Recounting how two of her interviewees stood up to abusive husbands, she concludes: “they have not needed feminism to tell them that lines must be drawn.” More often than not, however, she clings to the belief that women do require an ideological framework to give them guidance and self-worth. Thus, she tells of a pregnant reporter who attended a conference of the National Organization for Women and was dismayed to find only one panel discussion that focused on child-rearing—and that was for lesbian mothers. “Here was a young woman of about thirty,” laments Fox-Genovese,
who was successfully pursuing a career and loving it and about to have a child she expected to love. Where did she turn for a story that would capture her life and help her to live it more easily?
If truth be told, most people are perfectly capable of defining their lives in their own terms—by the churches and synagogues they belong to, the people they keep company with, the schools they choose for their children, the books they read, the movies they see. It may be that only someone steeped in the rhetoric of the women’s-history discipline—with its insistence on the importance of telling “women’s story”—would expect an ordinary person to be searching for a “story” to offer an overarching account of her life. Fox-Genovese’s curious blindness to this point may say less about the current state of feminism than about her own attachment to an ideology—even one that may no longer tell the story of her life.
