The feminist movement is the only phenomenon of the age that has produced a bigger literature than Watergate. Of all the “movements” of the discontented which have flourished these past twenty years, it is by far the most devoted to the power of the word.
This may explain why the effort to enact the equal rights amendment is running out of steam. In the mass, American women may read more than men do, but in both sexes an excess of bookishness is apt to be looked upon in America as an elite characteristic. In difficult political fights the elite are usually kept locked in the attic, lest their inadvertent appearance stir the sour juices of public suspicion.
The feminists, violating political usage, have used literature as a heavy assault weapon. In addition to shelves of books, both argumentative and fictional, they have spawned a feminist magazine, Ms., and, at one time or another, feminist counterparts to Playboy and Penthouse.
Considerable energy has been spent on a campaign to revise the English language with self-conscious neologisms for traditional terms embodying the suffix “-man.” Around the country feminist sentinels scan newspapers for “sexist” grammatical constructions and fire off smoking letters calling offenders to order.
There is a certain political sense behind all this, but only to a point. Saul Alinsky states that in the launching stage of a political “movement” the first task is to persuade a group of people that they are aggrieved and abused. After being persuaded that they are victims of injustice and producing the energy that comes from anger, they must be shown an enemy against whom their rage can be directed.
Thereafter, the anger must be sustained until the movement becomes recognized as a legitimate political force reckoned in the weighing of public arrangements. At this stage, with the movement wielding political clout, the passions that gave birth to the movement become handicaps which interfere with the negotiating process that is politics and governance.
The feminists have entered the final stage of development, but the literature lingers on to afflict them. The enemy they identified in the early stages—the “sexism” of “male chauvinist pigs”—is, obviously, no longer the enemy blocking the equal rights amendment.
The real problem now surely comes from other women, women who feel alienated from a movement whose literature seems elite, disconnected from their daily lives and, often, contemptuous of their aspirations. Except for the indifference or hostility of these women, the equal rights amendment would have sailed through the state legislatures two years ago.
The feminist predicament probably results from the professional and intellectual origins of the movement. Its early leaders were justifiably outraged that they didn’t have as much opportunity as men to go to the office and become a success.
The idea that many women might not want to go to the office and become a success seems to have received little attention, although, having seen what happened to most men who were forced to do it, such women, one might have assumed, would number in the millions.
Instead of allowing for a sensible acuity of feminine observation, feminist philosophers took the line that there was something wrong with women who were content with traditional jobs associated with building families. In feminist jargon, their “consciousness” was low. They were trapped in degraded “roles” devised by male “sexists.”
It was an appealing argument to women discontented with their marriages, their families and sexual conventions in which they were miserable; but the woman satisfied in her marriage and family, the woman who preferred creating a family rather than going to the office and becoming a success, was made to feel inferior and guilty.
Making people feel guilty is a good way of getting political results in the short run. In the long run, it is a good way of making them despise you. Not surprisingly, the equal rights amendment is failing for want of enthusiasm among women.
In the meantime, feminism has won most of its important battles in Congress and the courts. It has become a political force of considerable weight. If the equal rights amendment fails, it will not be the loss of the war but an occasion to rebuild the army by enlisting the housewives.
Perhaps, to satisfy them, the old revolutionaries who made the movement will have to be purged. That is usually what happens in revolutions that succeed.