‘For girls who don’t want to wear the trousers’ runs the copy of a London underground ad for tights. Now strangely enough, when I was first allowed out of socks in the mid-sixties, tights were Freedom Fighters for Liberation, and featured prominently in images of women hopping in and out of aeroplanes, wielding guns, and otherwise engaged in demanding, up-to-the-minute activities. So how come panti-hose has become the prerogative of girls in flimsy dresses who look as if they couldn’t, but more importantly, wouldn’t do anything remotely less feminine than be bought a Babycham? And how come it is now seen as a defiant ‘choice’ to be feminine?
If being female was the same thing as being feminine the question wouldn’t arise. But femininity, like any representation, needs to be defined against something else; and as that something else shifts, so does our image of ‘femininity’. For example, another recent underground ad shows a woman’s white-stockinged legs standing out amongst a train seat of pin-striped male legs. Femininity is clearly marked in contrast to the masculinity of businessmen. But there’s something new here: it’s also marked in contrast to the ‘masculinity’ of being a businesswoman: for the image, in which everyone, including the woman, has an executive briefcase and ‘top’ newspaper, is also about professional equality. And the notion of this equality is a precondition for the ad’s way of showing sexual difference – it has to ‘kick off’ against something, the ‘unfemininity’ of the professional woman’s job.
‘Girls who don’t want to wear the trousers’ seems to be disarmingly simple in its appeal as though it meant ‘girls who don’t want to be men’. Of course what it really means is ‘girls who don’t want to be feminists’: the contrast isn’t with men, but with other, ‘liberated’ women. For the women’s movement has made possible a new form of definition for femininity: one that kicks off against feminism.
I am deliberately introducing Jeannette Kupfermann’s book, The MsTaken Body, in this context because it is so very much for girls who don’t want to wear the trousers, and so very dependent (even for publication) on precisely what she attacks – the efforts of people she refers to as ‘The Libbers’. Despite setting itself up as a cosmic opposition to the women’s movement, this book could only, historically, have come after it. It is also a symptom of something very real, best illustrated by a recent Guardian Women’s fashion page which without a hint of irony described the need for frills and flounces in times of economic hardship and distress. Obviously any book is part of a historical climate of feeling but it needs special emphasis here because Kupfermann herself leaps from century to century and from Africa to New Guinea, in describing Woman and Her Symbols – while I for my part read her book with an interest in women and our symbols here and now.
The main thesis of The MsTaken Body is that ‘symbolism can protect the body’ and that the kinds of symbols and rituals found in societies where women have well-defined roles, and where women’s and men’s activities are clearly demarcated, afford women greater protection and happiness than in our society. But this summary makes Kupfermann’s argument sound less confused than it actually is, because despite her anti-modern-rationality-technology stance she never seems to say what she really feels. Instead she quotes and cites a hodge-podge of writers and anthropologists, on the following lines;
‘Modern physics reveals that all life is based on a system of opposites and their dynamic interplay and exchange … to deny male and female is to preclude any possibility of interchange and to promote a breakdown of exchange at the level of the body itself … the increasing problems women experience with their bodies relate to the blurring of the lines between the sexes, the trend towards bisexuality, the loss of opposites’ … men’s presence at childbirth is indicative of male ‘identity crisis’ … women in rigid Hassidic societies suffer no ‘problems of meaning’ … there is ‘no such thing as rape’ in the Arapesh people of New Guinea, where women are excluded from ceremonies and perform clearly separate tasks from the men … in religious or community groups, ‘mental health is as much facilitated by the social structure, i.e. the rigid separation of men and women and their roles, and the accompanying ritual, as by the ideological imperatives …’ and so on and so on.
While her point about women’s segregation being a form of protection is fairly clear, what is not clear is what she suggests we do about it, since all her examples are from small, non-industrial, tribal societies, which could only correspond to this country in pre-capitalist times. The strongest note in all this is really one of nostalgia, not for a remembered, but an imagined past: a world where Women were Women and Men were Men, where a profusion of symbols and rituals spun a soft cocoon around women, wrapped us in a safe space, cushioned us from the world, from men, from pressures and decisions and violence and our own sexual demands and from writing books and dealing with publishers and filling in tax forms and writing articles for deadlines … I could go on for ever, which of us couldn’t? How often, crippled with period pains, I have wished someone would stand up and offer me a seat in the underground. Locked in a heavy industrial dispute, I want to look pretty, because I’m trying to be tough. How I wish there was some way of being a woman in the 1980s without endlessly battling and struggling to be as good as men while feeling threatened as a woman, uncertain of roles at work and at home, wanting security and trying to get taken seriously etc. etc. This is obviously very much what Jeannette Kupfermann feels too – but I wish she’d come right out and say it.
More important, this uncertainty and confusion and fear of being undermined are also felt by millions of other women; and the reason this book is so pernicious is that it actually blames the women’s movement for our problems – even, would you believe it, for period pains. ‘The dismal inventory of some of the leading feminists’ battles with their own bodies – the depressions, the abortions, the dysmenorrhoea, the painful labours, the weight problems, menopausal horrors – provide a sad statement of cosmic disconnection; they have lost, abandoned, thrown away their symbols, and the price they pay is their own body.’
Most of such surface arguments in The MsTaken Body aren’t worth refuting in detail, since I expect most readers of this article would disagree with them anyway. The idea of feminists ‘paying the price’ of dysmenorrhoea and suchlike is ridiculous, a punishment for being naughty girls. What really matters is why Ms. Kupfermann is so angry with ‘them’ (us); what is this sense of loss which is so profound and which is laid at the door of ‘the feminists’?
The problem, according to Ms. Kupfermann, is ‘symbol starvation’. Because of ‘The Libbers’, ‘women are being educated [does she think all women are passive?] only to understand the literal, physical meaning of their bodies, and to know nothing of their symbolic values.’ Or again, ‘An attempt has been made to destroy the symbol of women’s bodies, and we have been left with a physical husk.’ ‘The symbolic aspects of the body have been largely ignored or denied by the women’s movement – hardly surprising for the symbolic generally is disparaged and underestimated by all Marxist-inspired movements.’
Apart from all the errors – Marxist movements have not all disparaged the symbolic, and feminism is not a Marxist-inspired movement – there are two extraordinary assumptions here. The first is that women’s bodies just ‘have’ symbolic values – those values that feminists have ‘thrown away’ (we should be so lucky!) or taught women ‘to know nothing of’, the symbol that ‘an attempt has been made to destroy’. It’s as though our bodies had cosmic and eternal meanings that we have chosen, temporarily, to ignore, but in the right frame of mind we might win back again. This isn’t a parody, for Kupfermann quotes Jung and his ideas of ‘the male and female modes of our psyche’, as though these modes were quite separate from social life and imagery.
The second extraordinary assumption shows plain blind ignorance of all the current debates and work within the women’s movement and feminist writing. This is the assumption that feminists plan to ‘get rid of symbols’. It takes only the most elementary understanding of social communications to realize that you couldn’t ‘throw away’ symbols even if you wanted to, and the whole direction of recent feminist thought has been increasingly to intervene and try to change symbols, to engage in struggle within the symbolic, and precisely to understand how our bodies and our images are used as part of a network of social meanings. Women are also searching for new symbols of ourselves, our bodies – for symbols that mean something to us.
For the enormous aspect of meaning that Kupfermann leaves out, is who the symbols she is so keen on have meaning for. When Kupfermann says women have always been symbolic, she surely means that women have had meaning for men. We have had to interpret our own ‘meaning’ through their eyes. The ‘primitive’ societies which she cites as examples of harmony and happiness, and our own society with its films and bill-boards and TV, are alike in that women’s main symbolic value is to men – we are the language that is spoken on posters and screens, inasmuch as ‘Woman’ is an image.
The suggestion The MsTaken Body makes is that we claim that language as our own, and that we will be happier and have less body-problems if we do. Kupfermann says of glamour and beauty culture that ‘through communications it unites women in a way no other comparable culture can or does’. She also asserts that women in psychiatric institutions can be ‘cured’ by it: ‘One tested way of helping to bring them back is via the beauty culture. A new hairdo and lipstick has been known to do more for these women than a month’s chemotherapy, for by helping them to use symbols again – to regain myths – they are being helped back into the world.’
But whose world? Why is it that women whose roles are more clearly defined and separate from men’s, e.g. housewives with young children, suffer from worse psychological distress than any other group? Aren’t they using enough lipstick? The one thing missing from this whole book is any mention of real social conditions and the structure of power we live under. The kind of protection which Kupfermann refers to time and again is connected with suppression and with inferiority – with treating women like children, and excluding us from public life. And if women really occupied the kinds of roles she suggests, she would hardly be getting her book published and mass-produced for £1.95; she’d be completely fulfilled breastfeeding babies and looking glamorously symbolic. Because, when it comes down to it, anyone writing a book doesn’t want just to be symbolic. I sense something patronizing in that Kupfermann seems to advocate Myth as a panacea for Other Women, while writing about myth as a career for herself – just like Nietzsche. And the social implication of what she suggests is total stasis: not just reactionary, but also impossible, thank goodness.
All the same, underlying her invective is a very real feeling which can’t be dismissed without dishonesty. There is a valid reaction against some of the more ‘puritanical’ aspects of feminism, there is a deep-felt unease about social roles at a time of economic decline and rapid change: there is a recognition that women have formed ways of supporting, and communicating with, each other through traditional and ‘non-feminist’ channels – but the funny thing is, few feminists would dispute all this. Nor would many people dispute that lack of rituals of some sorts – mourning, for example – makes profound change or loss harder to deal with today, when we have few ‘rites of passage’. There are points like this which I agree with in her strange book; but it is her anger which is so revealing, and so misplaced, directed as it is against the women’s movement rather than the late capitalist society in which our personal and social crises are taking place.
Kupfermann ends her book with the claim that ‘the Eternal Feminine was the eternal outsider, and I for one, would never wish to relinquish that position.’ But that position, of ‘eternal outsider’, is precisely one embedded in society: that internal space for the ‘other’ which gives the sense of wholeness Kupfermann quotes so often. She doesn’t want to be outside, she wants to be snugly wrapped up inside, in a space marked ‘Eternal Feminine’. This safe enclosure of ‘mysticism, irrationality, gentleness, and Beauty’ (as she describes it) can be held up to compensate or justify the total lack of these qualities in any other part of society. How long can women go on bearing the values that society wants off its back? When are we going to kick those values into the office, the factory, the housing estate? Kupfermann’s fear of ‘losing’ her symbolic values can surely only be equal to the fear of those in power of having to act on those values, and to incorporate them into the social and symbolic life of women and men, no matter who wears the trousers.