To the Editor:

In the last paragraph of Thomas J. Main’s review of my book, The Sisterhood [Books in Review, October 1988], this sentence appears: “Missing altogether [from the feminist movement] are intellectuals who express their thoughts in the language developed by generations of political thinkers and actors, and whose frame of reference is the history of democratic institutions, their progress and their failings.”

Mr. Main writes this—his entire review, in fact—as if I argued otherwise. Or as if I were a feminist polemicist and The Sisterhood a feminist apologia. Neither is true. I am simply a journalist (“celebrity journalist” is unfair) who was intrigued by the enormous change in the status of women in the past few decades and wanted to know how it had happened. In the long process of research, I came to some of the same conclusions as Mr. Main, including the feeling that many of the ideas of the movement were less compelling than the emotions behind them and the remarkable process by which they were disseminated.

That the media were the magic carpet carrying the women’s rebellion throughout the world is the central theme of the book, which I arrived at by means of a reporter’s ordinary queries and a consistency in the replies that completely surprised me. Over and over, I asked women in other countries how they came to consider themselves “feminists,” and over and over the answer was: “The Americans. I read about it in the newspaper, saw it on television,” etc. . . .

Often I would ask these women if they didn’t find some of these displays a bit silly, and the gist of their replies was that it didn’t matter. What mattered was the notion that something was wrong, that somebody was calling attention to it, and that this is what had activated them.

It followed that those who were best able to attract the attention of the media became the spokeswomen for feminism (“celebrities,” if you choose) and that an examination of their media-magnetic characteristics—such as physical appearance or verbal flash and brass—was relevant. But though Mr. Main dwelled on these, he managed to ignore their purpose in the book—to convey the role of the media in creating a social revolution. . . . I am glad Mr. Main found The Sisterhood an “illuminating” work, but despite what I thought were sufficient illustrations of its theme, he seems to have missed it.

In addition, he comes dangerously close to the same trap that, for a while at least, captured the feminists: that is, too close an analogy to the black civil-rights movement (as in “woman as nigger”). . . . Obviously, the differences between men and women are far deeper and more complex than a superficial variation in skin color; the opportunity for “equality” is much higher for blacks, therefore, and the battlefield ideology much simpler. One would have to repeal the laws of biology to postulate women as, strictly speaking, “equal” to men, given, at the very least, the requirements of childbirth. Justice, on the other hand, a feasible goal for women, is also harder to define.

The fact is that formulating the role of “the other” sex (in Simone de Beauvoir’s terminology), extending as it does into love, marriage, childrearing, and, yes, eroticism, has occupied the minds and work of artists, great and small, since the beginning of time. (Norman Mailer was right in sensing his territory here.) The chances that the feminists would produce the final, definitive explication in what was, really, hardly more than one short, clamorous decade—from 1963 to 1973—were slim.

Justice, nonetheless, matters. If these insistent voices—through slogans, howls of outrage, or even Mr. Main’s much disdained “journalism”—brought that end closer for women, which they certainly appear to have done, why deny them that credit?

Marcia Cohen
New York City

_____________

Thomas J. Main writes:

It is clear from her letter that Marcia Cohen and I disagree on the meaning and importance of the feminist movement, especially as it developed during the 1960’s and 1970’s. But rather than respond point by point to her defense of the movement, I will note only that my evaluation of Miss Cohen’s book—as distinct from its subject—was broadly positive. It is true that I wrote that The Sisterhood is not scholarly but journalistic and even gossipy at times, and I stand by these characterizations. However, I also wrote that this approach is appropriate—at least up to a point—owing to the fact that the feminists themselves placed enormous emphasis on their personal lives during this period. Miss Cohen is of course entitled to disagree with my reservations regarding a movement which placed the most intimate details of its adherents’ lives on public display, and whose essence is therefore often better captured by gossip than by scholarship, but I doubt that we can resolve our differences in this forum.

_____________