Feminism and Focus

Linda Hirschman had a somewhat puzzling op-ed calling on feminism to "focus" more and, I guess, abandon efforts by the movement to be open to more diverse people and concerns. Less intersectionality, more single-minded focus on middle-class white women trying to climb the corporate ladder. Mostly, I agree with Jill Filipovich's take on this but I thought I might also say that the alleged lack of progress to which Hirschman's recipe of "focus" is supposed to be the solution doesn't actually seem to me to have been happening.

If you think of the long trajectory of Western society, you have women being totally excluded from the main positions of economic and political power for hundreds of years. You also have a situation where since most people are women, you can't achieve equality by simply opening the doors of existing institutions to a new group of people. Institutions actually need to be rethought, reconfigured, and in some instances remade. That's, you know, hard to do. So I don't think anyone should consider it a shocking sign of things gone wrong that thirty or forty years hasn't proven to be enough time to eradicate every problem. Nor do I think the fact that many problems remain should make people think that progress isn't being made. On the elite issues dear to Hirschman's heart, we saw our first woman to anchor the nightly broadcast news starting in 2006. We saw the first woman to be Speaker of the House of Representatives sworn in in 2007. Things keep changing, which is as it should be. It's okay for people to be impatient with the pace of change, but not so impatient that they develop a false sense of crisis and decide that throwing people of color under the bus is the way to move forward.

Comments

Let me guess- secretly, she's thinking, "THIS will teach them to nominate Obama!"

*clicks the link*

Ok, apparently its not a secret.

Posted by Patrick | June 10, 2008 10:58 AM

Matt, you've spelled 'Hirshman' wrong in every instance in this post. I don't mind your constant typos, but please show enough respect to get names right.

Anyway, reading Hirshman's stuff, I'm always surprised at how much she seems to, you know, dislike women. She always paints an image of women as silly, superficial creatures ignorant to their own self-interest.

Not to mention her near-total dismissal of minority women from her vision of feminism. She has more in common with Maureen Dowd than she maybe would care to admit.

Posted by strannix | June 10, 2008 10:59 AM

Color me unsurprised. Her big piece (it was in *The American Prospect*, right?) a while back about the horrible, horrible crisis of some women who had attended elite institutions, *gasp*, wanting to spend a couple years at home with their kids, was racist to the core: it argued, almost nakedly, that women who attended elite institutions are honor-bound to work, and to hire women of color (or white hillbilly women, I suppose) to raise their kids. Read it again carefully if you don't believe me. This is *exactly* what I'd expect from her.

It's tragic that race and gender issues are *still* being pitted against one another. What a godsend for the reactionaries.

My two cents: at the level of elites, at least, we've gotten used to women in positions of relative power, but we are not *at all* used to the idea of men giving up some of those positions of power - yet. Yet we're still organisms, and we still reproduce. Rock, meet hard place. Either you pay poor women (usually women of color) to help raise your kids -- so much for progress on issues of race and gender! -- or somebody gives up the positions of power.

The solution isn't to rely indefinitely on exploiting women of color; it's to get men involved in child-rearing.

I saw this as a white male academic who tries hard, not always successfully (which is both a personal and cultural problem), to be an equal partner in domestic matters.

Posted by Harvey Lobster | June 10, 2008 11:02 AM

That was just very sad to read as a feminist of color. Fillipovich's rebuttal was excellent. But I feel that Hirshaman is speaking for a lot of angry woman out there who feel blindsided by Clinton's lost after her inevitablitiy.

The progress women have made is real and sustained. To move forward we need to strengthen progressive institutions and take back the legislative branch with feminists because we have a fairly conservative judiciary hostile I feel to women and civil rights.

Posted by Rhoda | June 10, 2008 11:05 AM

No one should have ever told them she was inevitable. It was never true.

Moreover, the failure of one very particular candidate carrying loads of psychic baggage weighing down both herself and us should not be interpreted to say as much as it has been about the state of women's opportunity in the U.S. God knows, we're not all the way there, lets not act shocked now, especially when the candidate in question is such a singular figure in the culture.

Posted by Mike | June 10, 2008 11:28 AM

Reading the various articles, I was surprised how much I agreed with Hirshman. I'm a liberal pro-feminist male who supported Obama. I think the Democratic party should generally operate as a cohesive unit outside these silos... but that's the Party. The same doesn't go for individual single issue groups.

Why should any single issue group have to address every issue ever? If you think both race and gender are important, then join both the NAACP and NOW. If you think racial problems are worse than gender problems, then give more to the NAACP than NOW. If you think they share perspective on some issues, then organize an alliance. But I don't see why NOW should address all racial or environmental issues. There are other people who can do that. And if you think all issues are so interrelated in a liberal patchwork that can't be separated, then just work for an umbrella liberal organization (one could be the Democratic party).

Of course focusing on the glass ceiling or issues that only affect the ruling class may be a bad idea, but NOW should only be weighing them against other feminist issues. If you weigh "glass ceiling" against "war", then war will always always win, and there's no point in having any single issue organizations.

Posted by Shock Mouse | June 10, 2008 11:33 AM

One of the feminist issues I care the most about is prison reform because in this country we have a problem in which female prisoners are dragged off to male prisons (often by their guards who get paid under the table for this) as sex slaves, raped and then sent back to their own prisons, bloody, possibly pregnant and possibly infected with an STD. Since the victims of such crimes are convicts, often poorly educated and often not white, their plight is ignored, but it is a much greater disgrace than day care being too expensive around Central Park West. The fact that Hirshaman dismisses such issues as non-feminist because they aren't about white women gaining power is insulting.

I mean, one of the greatest injustices brought about by slavery was legalized rape. Were abolitionists somehow anti-feminist by focusing more on ending slavery than on getting white women the vote?

Posted by Reality Man | June 10, 2008 11:34 AM

"Why should any single issue group have to address every issue ever? If you think both race and gender are important, then join both the NAACP and NOW. If you think racial problems are worse than gender problems, then give more to the NAACP than NOW. If you think they share perspective on some issues, then organize an alliance. But I don't see why NOW should address all racial or environmental issues. There are other people who can do that. And if you think all issues are so interrelated in a liberal patchwork that can't be separated, then just work for an umbrella liberal organization (one could be the Democratic party)."

However, if you are a black woman, where does the dividing line begin and end?

Posted by Reality Man | June 10, 2008 11:41 AM

By the way, I'm not saying "the NAACP doesn't help women, why should we help them". That would be whining. I'm saying "no other single issue organization tries to represent every issue". Human Rights Campaign, the Christian Coalition, the NRA, Sierra Club, the NEA. Single issue groups exist to serve singular interests, and while I hope they work as part of a cohesive network, they shouldn't abandon their identity.

Posted by Shock Mouse | June 10, 2008 11:43 AM

"Feminism" is essentially a facade American society has used to paper over the fact that since 1970 it has become impossible for a single income to sustain a middle class lifestyle.

Increasingly, since about 2000, even two incomes have been insufficient to sustain this facade.

Accordingly, we may predict ever more Baroque contortions in "feminist" posturing as it grows further and further out of sync with any semblance of reality.

Posted by Duncan Kinder | June 10, 2008 11:47 AM

"By the way, I'm not saying "the NAACP doesn't help women, why should we help them". That would be whining. I'm saying "no other single issue organization tries to represent every issue". Human Rights Campaign, the Christian Coalition, the NRA, Sierra Club, the NEA. Single issue groups exist to serve singular interests, and while I hope they work as part of a cohesive network, they shouldn't abandon their identity.

Posted by Shock Mouse | June 10, 2008 11:43 AM"

Just because all of these organizations have a focus doesn't mean they are all "single issue." The NRA, NARAL, etc. are single-issue groups in that they are focused on very specific causes like gun ownership or abortion. Ideas like civil rights (NAACP), feminism (NOW) or Christian cultural conservatism (Christian Coalition) are concerned with a more diverse number of issues that can easily intersect in meaningful ways than the way that an organization to clean up Lake Winnapasakee (sp?) isn't going to intersect meaningfully with an organization to reform prisons.

Posted by Reality Man | June 10, 2008 11:51 AM

Reality Man: "However, if you are a black woman, where does the dividing line begin and end?"

A) Join multiple organizations
B) Prioritize one or the other
C) Make a niche organization of both issues
D) Support an umbrella liberal organization
E) all of the above

I mean really, do people ask the same things of other single issue groups? Since wars destroy the environment, does the Sierra Club need to have an anti-war plank at the top of it's platform?

I am both anti-war and pro-vegetarian. I don't insist that all groups associated with those issues share platforms now.

Posted by Shock Mouse | June 10, 2008 11:51 AM

Shock, it's because Hirschman is explicitly defining the issues of plain-ol' feminism as those of concern to white woman, particularly professional white woman. It doesn't matter if racism disproportionately affects African-American and Hispanic women; Hirschman ruefully notes that NOW asserts that "since racism hurts black women, feminists must fight not only racist misogyny but racism in any form." What chumps!

As Reality Man notes just above me, there are a lot of issues that impact poorer women and women of color that seem to be valid issues. WIC and welfare and prison reform have impact on more women's lives than the kind of glass-ceiling-breaking that excites Hirschman, but if you demand a feminism that matters to the social circuit of Washington Post editorialists, you'll get to write Post editorials.

Posted by steve | June 10, 2008 11:52 AM

"WIC and welfare and prison reform have impact on more women's lives than the kind of glass-ceiling-breaking that excites Hirschman,"

If you think welfare and prison reform are the most important issues, then don't join NOW. I disagree with the priorities of the Christian Coalition too, but I respond by not supporting them. Not demanding they represent my issues.

As to your definition of Single Issue groups, shrug. Single constituency if that terms fits better. And yes, you can have ideals that intersect with other groups, and work together with them. But at the end of the day, you need to draw a line of what defines your identity... or become an umbrella liberal organization that deals with all issues. Nothing wrong with those umbrellas, I love them, but they really aren't the same thing.

Posted by Shock Mouse | June 10, 2008 11:58 AM

"A) Join multiple organizations
B) Prioritize one or the other
C) Make a niche organization of both issues
D) Support an umbrella liberal organization
E) all of the above

I mean really, do people ask the same things of other single issue groups? Since wars destroy the environment, does the Sierra Club need to have an anti-war plank at the top of it's platform?"

That doesn't really answer my question though. Who gets to set the agenda at, for instance, NOW? Are those issues going to be issues more important to white upper middle class women? If so, then what real benefit does a working class black women in the Bronx receive from NOW? If the NAACP, by focusing on problems in black communities, in effect more adequately addresses the feminist issues of black women, then doesn't that just turn NOW into a place where white women complain about not being able to join the old boys club golf courses? In effect, separating identity issues out this much just makes feminism an educated white women's political ghetto.

Issues relating to identity markers like race, gender, sexual orientation (and, to a lesser extent, class, which is more variable than these others) are fundamentally interrelated and can't really be separated the way that issues like environmentalism, abortion rights and wanting higher education spending can be easily separated. A working class half black/half Asian lesbian at a NOW meeting doesn't stop being black, Asian or a lesbian because she is at a NOW meeting and discrimination she receives on these three fronts reinforce the discrimination she receives from being a women.

Posted by Reality Man | June 10, 2008 12:07 PM

The first American women to anchor the nightly news was Barbara Walters in 1976 (she co-anchored with Harry Reasoner on ABC).

But Couric was the first to go solo.

Posted by AWC | June 10, 2008 12:12 PM

Hm, that is puzzling, Matt. Nothing seems more designed to kill feminism in its cradle than an approach that makes it less appealing and helpful to more people. What Hirschman wrote sounds like just the opposite of what I wrote here a while ago. A feminism that doesn't make sense for the whole socety doesn't make sense, and purposely trying to make feminism more myopic seems like it runs a dangerous risk of heading in just that direction.

I know a lot of people would be shy of using this to question Hirschman's motives, but that's not what I do, so I'll just say it: Hirschman's opinion seems like a very bad one-- too bad, in fact.

Posted by Swan | June 10, 2008 12:13 PM

Imagine if feminists really adopted this-- purposely ignoring people of color. It wold be a highway to dissillusioning minorities with liberalism and splitting the liberal coalition in America.

It's just such a bad idea, politically and practically.

Posted by Swan | June 10, 2008 12:16 PM

"A working class half black/half Asian lesbian at a NOW meeting doesn't stop being black, Asian or a lesbian because she is at a NOW meeting and discrimination she receives on these three fronts reinforce the discrimination she receives from being a women."

If that is the attitude a person feels, then don't join any single constituency groups. You're right, they are inherently exclusionary and myopic. But that's how you get stuff done. Have well defined goals and pursue them.

If you feel unable to pursue individual threads of your identity, then don't. But some people are very capable of it, and want to move issues with regards to those single constituencies. They don't disdain black women, they just see them as women first.

As far as second-wave feminism's tendency to focus on upper-class issues: yes. That is bad. There are plenty of purely feminist issues that affect poor and minority women that get less shrift (than say, Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations). But that is a very different discussion than this. There is a line between having to respond to the diverse needs within your constituency, and feeling you have to respond to every constituency ever.

Posted by Shock Mouse | June 10, 2008 12:16 PM

I agree with Reality Man on all points; here's another way to develop it.

The experience of women of color in feminist organizations is often that they are discriminated against on the basis of color (they are subordinated to white women); the experience of black women in, e.g., the NAACP, is often that they are discriminated against on the basis of gender (they are subordinated to black men). ++ those for people who are also gay.

In other words, black women aren't just "black" + "woman"; they have their own distinctive problems.

That isn't to say that hispanic lesbians can *only* be represented by an organization specifically for hispanic lesbians -- but it is to say that Hirschman's feminism is exclusive, not inclusive.

By asking that you deal with one group for "black" issues and one group for "female" issues, you guarantee that issues which are specifically the issues of black women get left off the table.

The categories that look all neat and tidy to a straight white man (who doesn't need to worry about them much) are at lot messier and problematic to, say, a gay black woman.

Posted by Harvey Lobster | June 10, 2008 12:25 PM

"If that is the attitude a person feels, then don't join any single constituency groups. You're right, they are inherently exclusionary and myopic. But that's how you get stuff done. Have well defined goals and pursue them.

If you feel unable to pursue individual threads of your identity, then don't. But some people are very capable of it, and want to move issues with regards to those single constituencies. They don't disdain black women, they just see them as women first."

That sounds ok in the abstract, but that doesn't answer the question of who gets to set the goals. If the goals of a group like NOW end up getting set by educated white women hoping to make the jump from CFO to CEO or whatever, then NOW stops in effect being a feminist organization and becomes an organization to help educated white women advance their career goals. Are African-American, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern and Native American women just supposed to tag along to make the white women happy? It's not like there is a default type of women in our population that has no ethnic, religious, sexual orientation or class identity and that all women who do in effect become "woman+lesbian" or "women+Arab" or whatever. The effect of overly separating such causes just makes the likes of NOW an organization for those who are defined as "women+white+rich+educated+straight."

Posted by Reality Man | June 10, 2008 12:32 PM

They look "neat and tidy" because that's how every other single issue organization deals with them.

Also, you could just join an umbrella organization that DOES deal with every liberal issue.

But as is, you have the farce where a march to support reproductive rights becomes a hodgepodge of every liberal cause.

Anyway, the internal heirarchies of single-issue orgnizations ("The experience of women of color in feminist organizations is often that they are discriminated against on the basis of color") is a different matter. If any of these orgs are racist or sexist internally, that's bad and should be exposed and fixed, no doubt about that. But that's different than saying the platform of NOW should address every liberal cause.

Lastly, I don't see why there shouldn't be an organization for hispanic lesbians. They can ally with other orgs when they feel like it, and provide the safe-haven they want for their members.

Posted by Shock Mouse | June 10, 2008 12:34 PM

"They look "neat and tidy" because that's how every other single issue organization deals with them."

How is a feminist organization a single issue organization? An organization dedicated to a single women's issue like abortion or increasing access to child care or helping more women attend college of EMILY's List are single-issue causes. Feminist organizations are meant to address the issues (explicitly in the plural) that impact women. They are two completely different types of organizations.

"Also, you could just join an umbrella organization that DOES deal with every liberal issue."

Feminist organizations are supposed to act like umbrellas to deal with the plethora of women's issues. This is what separates an organization that just happens to be associated with feminism, like NARAL, from an organization dedicated to women's issues in general, like NOW. As such, which issues are pursued by organizations like NOW cannot be easily separated from issues of race, sexual orientation, class and religion.

Posted by Reality Man | June 10, 2008 12:46 PM

"As such, which issues are pursued by organizations like NOW cannot be easily separated from issues of race, sexual orientation, class and religion."

You could say the same thing about the NEA. That all issues affect education and are affected by education, so therefore the NEA should deal with all issues directly.

Your semantics regarding the term "single issue" are frustrating, and I'm only using the term because we don't have common parlance regarding groups that focus on specific issues. Single Constituency? Special Interest Group? Who cares, you know what I mean.

The legislation a feminist organization would like to get passed is different than the legislation that an anti-racist organization would like to get passed. There is some overlap, and people could happily join both groups. But it's silly to try to ask the feminist organization to take all anti-racist causes under it's wing. It's especially silly because it seems that feminists are the only SIG who even contemplate hamstringing themselves this way.

Posted by Shock Mouse | June 10, 2008 12:58 PM

Re: I mean, one of the greatest injustices brought about by slavery was legalized rape.

To be precise, one of the greatest injustiuces brought about by _American_ slavery, under the aegis of wonderful Enlightenment values, was legalized rape. Medieval slavery, not so much. Under the laws of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, a man was prohibited from having intercourse with his slaves, and the penalty for it was castration. In this respect perhaps the men of the 12th century were more civilized than Thomas Jefferson and his associates.

Posted by Hector | June 10, 2008 1:12 PM

Shock Mouse seems to be holding down this side of the argument alone, but there is something of a reasonable tactical point being made by Hirschman.

Individuals, in general, should be interested in a variety of issues some self-intereted and some not. But effective advocacy often means focusing more on a single issue than that issue would deserve if you were suddenly grand emperor of the world and could address every problem unilaterally.

Hirschman's claim is that groups like NOW need to take that kind of monomania with regard to specifically women's issues, because other groups are doing it with regard to their own causes. And as a practical matter, if there is one group that is playing it down the center, while every other group is hyping their own purpose, the group playing it down the center will tend to lose.

I have this reaction when I see defenses of the Palestinians on blogs and newspapers, and they tend to be borderline (or worse) anti-semitic screeds. But then the normal discussion of Palestinian issues in this country is pro-Israeli with borderline ((or worse) anti-Palestinian screeds. Reasonable arguments on the issue leave the debate tilted in the pro-Israeli direction.

The problems of middle and upper class white women are never going to be the most pressing issues in a country which has issues of poverty and racism. But they are important issues nonetheless. And I can see why Hirschman would think that groups dedicated to these issues would be necessary to give them a fair hearing. (In op-eds one usually finds out what feminists are up to in the parody form that appears in columnists decrying the unnatural influence of feminists. Somehow htat influence doesn't extend to getting regular columns in the newspapers).

Posted by Lon | June 10, 2008 1:29 PM

Can we please retire the expression "throw X under the bus", or at least send it on sabbatical for a few years?

It's quickly becoming a tiresome cliché.

Posted by Brock | June 10, 2008 1:56 PM

It's okay for people to be impatient with the pace of change, but not so impatient that they develop a false sense of crisis and decide that throwing people of color under the bus is the way to move forward.

When did we invent transparent people? White is a color. Or else, as Steve Biko put it - "Why do you call yourself white, when you are actually pink?"

Posted by Arun | June 10, 2008 1:57 PM

Yes but the Nightly National Newcast Anchor is a fluffy bimbo....

Posted by MNPundit | June 10, 2008 4:27 PM

I agree with shock mouse. This isn't to say that NOW should avoid dealing with issues that affect poor or minority women. I do think Hirshmann is mainly concerned with elite women.

Posted by lemmy caution | June 10, 2008 4:48 PM

"You could say the same thing about the NEA. That all issues affect education and are affected by education, so therefore the NEA should deal with all issues directly.

Your semantics regarding the term "single issue" are frustrating, and I'm only using the term because we don't have common parlance regarding groups that focus on specific issues. Single Constituency? Special Interest Group? Who cares, you know what I mean."

Except that single issue (say, gun control) and single constituency (say, women) are apples and oranges. You're conflating them towards abstraction, which takes them out of the real world. Conservatives like to abstract everything like saying if you're for an internationalist foreign policy, you must agree with the neocons or your an isolationist. Abstracting something to this level removes it from reality.

The issues that affect the lives of working class black women are often simply different than the issues faced by upper-middle class white women. By calling the former group's issues "black issues" and the latter group's issues "feminist issues" is to privilege that group's concerns are feminist concerns simply because they are white and have more power. Cutting out the concerns of minority women and such because those are "minority issues" instead of somehow not "feminist issues" is simply a good way to kill feminism and make it a plaything of elite white women.

Posted by Reality Man | June 10, 2008 8:47 PM

So I'm wondering if Matt actually read the piece. If so, he might have noticed that there is no C in Hirshman. He might also have noticed two points: some black feminist broke away from nascent feminism as early as 1973, complaining that it did not represent their interests. Fine. I advocate not one but TWO inclusive strategies in response to this entirely legitimate move. ONE, Represent the interests of women, including the unique ways in which women suffering other oppressions need representation and keep the black women in the same organization. TWO something which just has a dirty name in feminism -- other liberal organizations use it all the time -- make coalitions!! But if you take on everybody's problems are your problems, you get nothing for your help. Getting nothing for your help, to paraphrase what Jill said, leaves the white men in the Democratic party (hi Matt) knowing you will support them no matter what they do, because the alternative is worse. WWMD? What Would Machiavelli Do?

Posted by Linda Hirshman | June 11, 2008 9:58 AM