Mick Hartley

Phyllis Chesler, in Tablet, on The Progressive Erasure of Feminism:

As I write, the National Organization for Women and the Democrat Party both endorse the Equality Act, which will expand civil rights in American to transgender and LGBQIA people. This will dangerously privilege a minority over the majority by endangering women’s sex-based rights in terms of sports, and women-only safe spaces in prisons, DV and homeless shelters, and in the military. In addition, the highly de-centralized Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has issued individual statements in many American cities whose guiding principles are “trans affirming” and “queer affirming;” concerns for women, if they are mentioned, come later or last.

Did I only dream that we had embarked on a radical feminist revolution more than fifty, nearly sixty years ago? That the three rivers that made up the Second Wave once roared with a mighty joy? I am referring to the demand for legalized sex-based civil rights, left-style feminist activism, and the feminist transformation of formerly male-only professions. What happened to us?

The takeover by academics like Judith Butler is what happened, and the subordination of feminism to Queer Theory and the like.

In 1982, in Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, the great Australian scholar Dale Spender documented how pioneering feminist work has always been systematically disappeared, century after century. Guess what? By the mid-1980s, most of the radical feminist analyses by the best minds of my Second Wave generation were out of print and/or not being taught in college or graduate schools. By the mid-to-late 1980s, professors and their students were largely unfamiliar with most of our work.

For example, Harvard’s 2018-2019 Gender and Sexuality course offerings included: “‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean and the African Americas”; and “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism: Popular Music and Black Feminist Theory.” Stanford offered: “Intersectionality and Social Movements: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Collective Organizing.” Yale offered: “Transnational Approaches to Gender and Sexuality.” I could find no course which focused upon the writings of John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft, Matilda Joslyn Gage, or Simone de Beauvoir.

Women’s Studies was absorbed and neutered by the academy and our radical, woman-centered ideas never gained much institutional or ideological traction. By the 21st century, an obsessive preoccupation with both race and gender identity had trumped biological sex which was, in fact, increasingly derided and denied. Women’s Studies became ‘Gender and Sexuality Studies’ and ‘LGBTQIA Studies’. Race, class, and sexual preferences trumped incest, rape, domestic violence, pornography, sex slavery, commercial surrogacy, and trafficking, despite the fact that women of all races and classes endure such assaults.

The American academy prides itself on its global consciousness; however, an internet search yielded not one 2018-2019 Ivy League course that focused on honor-based violence, including honor killing, female genital mutilation, forced veiling, forced marriage, child marriage, polygamy, ‘Eve teasing’ (a south Asian euphemism for sexual harassment), or rape as a weapon, not merely a spoil of war.

Our Second Wave plain-spoken analyses have been jettisoned in favor of incomprehensible, jargon-clotted treatises manufactured for and by cloistered academic elites who rail against objective reality and white, western civilization. The authors of such work refuse to consider that other tribal, patriarchal cultures may actually be more misogynistic and colonial than our own.

Our vibrant and visionary radical feminism has been hijacked… Gender identity and sexual preference have preempted woman-centered concerns; identity has been balkanized in such ways as to render coherent female-centered activism and the intellectual and political alliances it requires impossible….