After almost three decades of boil and bubble, the academic field of women’s studies has not only cooked down but has been served up and thoroughly ingested. In 700 or so undergraduate and graduate institutions around the country, women’s-studies programs boast their own tenured faculty and produce their own voluminous literature. This literature is readily divisible into two principal genres: the theoretical tract, and the first-person-singular sexual narrative.

For the most part, works in the former category are devoted to proving that all differences between men and women are “socially constructed” and, even more energetically, to disproving the opposite belief, labeled “biological determinism” or “essentialism”—the belief, that is, that biological differences exist or, worse still, matter. In the anti-essentialist world view, little boys and girls are not male and female; rather, they can be arranged along a continuum displaying, in the words of one professor of women’s studies, their relative “commitment to hegemonic femininity and masculinity.” The good news is that, if caught early enough, one’s hegemonic commitment to a sex—especially the male sex—can be reversed.

As for the second genre, sometimes called the “herstory” tradition, this sets itself in counterpoise to history, which records such things as wars, political successions, and similarly unedifying matters. The object of “herstory” is “the removal of male self-glorification from history” (Midge Lennert and Norma Willson, 1973). This it accomplishes by offering “accounts of the human past and human activity that consider women as being at the center of society, not at the margins” (Anne Forfreedom, 1983). Such accounts can range across the totality of human experience, but in practice they often consist of the author’s “celebrating” her own sexuality by writing about what she did and with whom. (Naming names is particularly revered as a “transgressive” act.)

Of the two types, the personal sexual narrative has become the more popular, lapping out of the academy and into better bookstores everywhere. And little wonder. It is not just that anti-essentialist theorizing is utterly false to reality, though it is certainly that. No lesser a problem is the prose in which anti-essentialist arguments are invariably couched. Here, for instance, is Judith Butler, a professor of humanities at Johns Hopkins and a veritable goddess in the anti-essentialist world for her 1990 work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, urging her readers to

consider not only that the ambiguities and incoherences with and among heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual practices are suppressed and redescribed within the reified framework of the disjunctive and asymmetrical binary of masculine/feminine, but that these cultural configurations of gender confusion operate as sites for intervention, exposure, and displacement of these reifications.

It does not help matters that Professor Butler has steadfastly bristled at attempts to make her explain what she means—or, rather, to “linguistify [her] positionality.” And so one can hardly blame readers for preferring the likes of Naomi Wolf, Kathryn Harrison, or Joyce Maynard. Each of them has been only too ready to linguistify her positionality, horizontal and otherwise.

Yet, truth to say, the tell-all genre has its limitations as well, having mainly accomplished a task one might once have thought impossible—rendering the obscene boring, and the salacious banal. Still, not to despair: as if to rescue a terminally devolving situation, we have lately been graced with what may seem like a new feminist genre but is really a hybrid, melding the best of antiessentialism with the best of “herstory.” Enter two new books, one by a novelist, the other by a professor.

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The novelist is Catherine Texier, and her offering is Breakup: The End of a Love Story¹ written after her husband of eighteen years left her for another woman. Although born in France, Texier seems not to have heard how sophisticated the French are about matters adulterous. She thinks her husband’s adultery is a very big deal—so big that she must write about it, lest “our life together . . . vanish without a trace. So that there will be a record.”

The “record” is a short, stream-of-consciousness affair cobbled into five chapters and shuttling back and forth from the breakup, to the first time Texier met the man who would become her husband and then her ex-husband, back to the breakup, then to the couple’s daughters (who have ended up in the clutches of their father’s new “friend”), and finally back again to the breakup. In this way the book not only tells the story of one woman’s emotional gyrations but faithfully, all too faithfully, mimics them.

What makes Breakup an example of the new form becomes clear early on. As a young couple, Catherine and her husband had been editors of a bohemian literary magazine, Between C & D. She had fallen in love with him, she writes, because he was “a flirt, a child-man, a free spirit, a pure artist who would never take a straight job.” Wanting him to be “wild, and irresponsible, and free,” she hoped they “could take turns being male and female” (emphasis added), thus breaking free of those old essentialist bogeypersons.

The result, alas, was disaster. Not that her husband failed at first to oblige. Rather, he obliged too well, by becoming a “wuss.” And then he decamped. Which was worse, Texier finds it difficult to say. Among his many faults, catalogued with painstaking precision, in his career as a “wuss,” we are told that he employed an expensive hatmaker and left his toe-fungus cream on the bedside table; also that his muscles deteriorated. But when he finally did the man thing and split, she was left “holding the home together, keeping the hearth going, so to speak. It’s a traditionally feminine task that I never thought I would take to.” Was ever anti-essentialism more confounded?

Unfortunately, Catherine Texier never answers this question or any question like it; her book is rather shorter on analysis than one might wish (not that one would wish it longer). But in any case, a more substantial treat awaits in An Unconventional Family by Sandra Lipsitz Bem,² a professor of psychology and women’s studies at Cornell. Bem often writes about her children, her husband, and herself, and since the early 70’s has held herself up as an expert practitioner of nonsexist child-rearing. “Like many feminist scholars,” she explains in An Unconventional Family, “I live my life with little separation between the personal, the professional, and the political. My theory and my practice are thus inextricably intertwined.”

The contents of An Unconventional Family certainly confirm this claim. Part One, “Coming Together,” tells the story of how Sandra met her husband Daryl (“Courtship”), followed by an analysis of their dating career (“Why Daryl?”). In Part Two, “Writing Our Own Script,” Bem gives us a tour of her anti-essentialist ideology, deconstructing each “phase” of its implementation in her own family; thus, we have a chapter on “Egalitarian Partnering,” another on “Feminist Child-Rearing,” and, as an extra added attraction, a blow-by-blow account of her personal battles in academia (“My Unorthodox Career”). Finally, in Part Three, “Evaluating Our Experiment,” Bem interviews her two grown children, Jeremy and Emily, prodding them to assess “what the consequences were for [them] of our so consciously trying to raise them in a gender-liberated, anti-homophobic, and sex-positive way.”

All parents have hopes for their children, but Sandra Bem had specific ones. She is, after all, the author of The Lenses of Gender (1993), a book which argues “that in order to interrupt the social reproduction of male power, we need to dismantle not only androcentrism and biological essentialism but also gender polarization and compulsory heterosexuality.” So it is not surprising to learn in An Unconventional Family that when young Sandra met young Daryl—she was then a senior psychology major at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh—what she “loved” most was this: “The fact that he was male and I was female had not seemed to be part of our chemistry.”

Soon after their wedding in 1965—in the great tradition of untraditional marriages, the pair performed the ceremony themselves—Sandra and Daryl Bem vowed to “function as truly egalitarian partners.” Not only did Sandra know “there was no way I would be willing to do what I presumed a good wife was supposed to do for her husband: namely, wash his floor, darn his socks, cook his meals, raise his children.” She even took pride in quashing Daryl’s job offers, and taught him to take pride in it as well: “This loss of total independence gave Daryl a moment’s pause . . . , but he quickly recovered, and we excitedly moved on to framing an egalitarian philosophy.” Before long, the two lovebirds were featured in Ms. magazine, where a confident Sandra declared that “I believe we are unlikely to get divorced.”

As for the children, those little “gender pioneers,” Sandra alternated with Daryl as the parent “on-duty.” A sign in the kitchen signified to little Jeremy and Emily whose turn it was to be responsible for them, with two pointy breast marks on a figure signifying “mommy’s turn,” a figure with one pointy crotch mark signifying “daddy’s turn.” To liberate them from the tyranny of “the culture’s sex-and-gender system,” Bem writes, “we never allowed there to be a time . . . when they didn’t know that some people had partners of their own sex and other people had partners of the other sex.” Sandra and Daryl “censored” (her word) certain books and television programs with inappropriate “gender” messages, and, when all else failed, used white correcting fluid to change pronouns in books from male to female.

At the Bems’, everyone often traipsed around in the buff. Sandra made a point of “putting tampons in and taking them out” in front of the children to demonstrate that women’s blood was not “yucky,” and the children were encouraged to “experiment sexually” in the privacy of their third-floor bedrooms. Experimenting intellectually, however, was another matter. When little Jeremy demanded that the pages of a book he was being read from be flipped over rapidly so that he could yell out the numbers, his mother became alarmed. Jeremy’s “mathematical giftedness,” as she puts it, had all the earmarks of a “nightmare. After all, mathematics is a field in which few American women have yet entered the highest levels, and that gender disparity could have easily made Jeremy even more disrespectful of women’s intelligence.” Luckily, by the time his parents were through with him, little Jeremy was so gender-liberated he had come to think the word “heorshe” was an English pronoun.

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Given their parents’ ideological weirdness, it is a relief to report that the Bem children, both now in their early twenties, have ended up surprisingly normal. True, they have tried to fulfill their parents’ expectations: Emily does not shave her body hair, and Jeremy still dons a skirt on occasion—just as he once wore barrettes to nursery school. But, as we learn in the final chapter, Emily mostly dates boys, wears makeup, and keeps a doll collection, while Jeremy admits that “I can’t really say I’ve transcended gender” (though it still “bothers” him that he is interested in “conventionally gendered” topics like “math and computer programming and physics”).

Jeremy, in fact, rebukes his mother for her child-rearing practices. “If you were doing it all over again,” she dutifully records him as saying, “I would advise you to make it clearer to me that it’s okay to have conventional desires as well as unconventional ones.” Emily, for her part, complains that her mother made her feel “unnatural to be a girl.” Does this give Sandra pause? Does it make her think there might be something to this “nature” business after all? Not for the merest moment. She and her husband, she (manfully?) concludes, must have been “much more gendered as parents than [we] had intended.”

Nor, it turns out, is this the only unexpected development to have tested the resilience of the Bem doctrine. Reader, it seems that Daryl and Sandra are no longer married. Nowhere near enough is made of this startling disclosure, which is mentioned only in passing; but perhaps the base facts are enough. “We did split up about four years ago,” Bem writes, “and both of us became involved in relationships with people of our own sex.”

A failure for the couple who once voted themselves most “unlikely to divorce”? Far from it: a crowning achievement. True, the Bems “are no longer close-coupled”—close-coupled?—but “Till death do us part is not the only—or even the best—criterion of whether and how we met our goals.” After all, they intended from the beginning to “provide at least one concrete example of an alternative to the traditional heterosexual family.” By running off with members of their own sex, they have carried their program to its triumphant conclusion.

Yes, anti-essentialism is a wonderful thing, as the doyennes of women’s studies have long maintained. Just ask Jeremy and Emily.

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¹ Doubleday, 159 pp., $19.95.

² Yale University Press, 209 pp., $20.00.

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