Feminism’s failure is a tragedy. A movement that might have brought about fundamental social change and a reconfiguration of the relationship between men and women has achieved little, and nothing by way of meaningful change.
Women have asserted their right to fill many positions from which they were excluded and have sometimes gained those positions — though they have generally failed when it comes to occupying the highest positions in business and politics.
But, even here, they have had some success. It’s just that women’s individual success is sometimes a story of Feminism’s failure.
One “success” story, for example, is that in 2019 women were CEOs of four of America’s five biggest defence contractors — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing.
It’s a success because these women’s abilities were recognised and they took up positions that the glass ceiling might once have prevented them from attaining.
I’m sorry that I can’t feel very positive that women have taken up these positions. A better-run arms manufacturer is not an achievement in my mind.
Don’t get me wrong. I want equal representation of women and men in all significant social, economic and political positions. But mostly because it provides evidence that women in leading positions makes little to no difference and that their taking over leading positions in business and politics will not produce meaningful change in and of itself.
For so long we’ve been told that women would make an important difference when they achieved leading positions. It doesn’t. A difference? Probably. A meaningful difference? Definitely not.
Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defence arm of Boeing are still manufacturing arms to kill people in the most efficient ways possible. None of these women object to armed conflict and all will supply their company’s lobbyists with everything they need to create demand for their products. And war is always the best outcome for arms manufacturers. So, their lobbyists will push for war because it’s good for the company’s bottom line.
If this is a success story of Feminism, then Feminism is not what I’d hoped it was.
As a Marxist… well, technically, I was always an impure “post-Marxist” … Anyway, as some sort of Marxist I’d had to admit that Marx was wrong about the working class’s potential to bring about socialism. He saw workers in terms of factory production that forced them to live their lives in lock-step with others (think factory whistle) and reduced their sense of individuality while it increased their sense of connectedness to others. He thought this would make them socialists.
Even if factory production might have had this effect. Imperialism and changes in productive technology meant that fewer and fewer workers in Western societies participated in factory production.
Marx was right that the working-class had the power to bring about change. He was wrong about their social conditions turning them into socialists. If nothing else, the working class remained profoundly sexist and racist and unions proved generally conservative. The former was not a problem for Marx, who was equally sexist. He was also racist. But I assume an International communist movement would involve non-Europeans and overcoming racism would be necessary for such a movement.
(Marx might have understood capitalism better than anyone before him and seen its effect on people more clearly than others did. That’s why I am a Marxist. But he was not a good person.)
The important point is that the working-class did not become the agents of revolution Marx thought they would become.
Some worker organisations would be part of a project of social transformation. But feminism, which I see as the other major structural critique of (capitalist) society, was the other theory that offered meaningful change.
The debate between Marxists and Feminists of my time was about whether attacking the economic structures that held capitalist society in place was also, and at the same time, attaching patriarchy. Most Marxists argued that it was. Most feminists argued that it wasn’t.
The Feminists were right. The Marxists were wrong.
Feminism became my only source of hope. I couldn’t be a Feminist. I don’t have life experiences that allow me to understand the position of women. I could only hope that Feminism would bring an end to the capitalist society that was always killing us as individuals and destroying the environment, which is now going to make the planet uninhabitable.
I was wrong again… when will I listen to (Buddhist) Pema Chodron and live without hope? I wonder…
Anyway, foolishly I placed hope in Feminism.
My father died when I was young and I grew up with a mother and three sisters. I saw how badly men treated women and I developed an overly positive view of women. I thought women were better than men.
Wrong again.
I hope I wasn’t s victim of some physiological determinist position that meant I thought being born into a female body made the right sort of difference. It’s easy to think that women are wired to be better people because they give birth and nurture children.
I’m sure I ignored social structure and thought that women would be better people even though they were indoctrinated in a capitalist society. Maybe, like other Marxists, my only source of hope was a result of a “human nature” that could operate free of social determinants.
But there is no such thing as “human nature” (see Jesse Prinz’s Beyond Human Nature). Another false hope.
Women are indoctrinated within a capitalist society and are only different from men in being indoctrinated in a different way. Women are not better than men. Equally but differently pathological.
I’d seen this problem before. I’d known plenty of Marxists who refused to include themselves in their social analysis. They never stopped to think what awful bullies they were because they had the truth.
I should have learnt the difference between isms and ists. Isms are ideas and ideals. Ists are people with egos and motivations and a whole bunch of horrible socialization.
I suppose I had to believe that Feminists would be better than Marxists. Marxists failed because they could not direct their critique toward themselves and acknowledge that they were part of the problem (while they were trying to be part of the solution). They ended up intolerant thugs.
Many of them were in universities, though, having good careers and not actually doing anything to bring about change. So, they were mostly irrelevant. The same was and is true for many Feminists.
But I had to believe that it would be different with Feminism because they were women. I was fooling myself because I needed to do so. I had to ignore the fact that women were no more self-critical as Feminists than men and women were self-critical as Marxists. Their critiques were always directed toward others and there was no self-criticism. They could tell you everything about what was wrong with you and society but nothing about what was wrong with them.
I like to think that Mary Wollstonecraft and the speculum movement were expressions of Feminist’s willingness to undertake self-examination while also being Feminists. I thought crew-cut and boiler-suit Feminism offered something by way of a rejection of the femininity generated within capitalist society.
It was women challenging what women do. But Lipstick Feminism put an end to that.
A direct descendant of Lipstick Feminism, Grrl power, wasn’t about changing the system. It was about succeeding within it. It was about using (toxic) femininity to exert power and to succeed within a capitalist society.
While Baby was the worst of the Spice Girl constructs, none of them offered anything critical of or contradictory to capitalism. Rosie Spice would have been great, as it would honour Rosie the Riveter — an iconic figure of Second Wave feminism. Too much to expect, of course.
But where, we might ask, was Greeny Spice the environmentalist?
Capitalism co-opted Feminism. Sorry Pema, I choose to believe that capitalism can’t co-opt everything and that social change remains possible. (The fact that we have run out of time and the planet will be on a path to uninhabitability before we can change does not deny the possibility of social change.)
But maybe it is too much to expect that someone who wants to bring about social change will be fully able to embrace the fact that they are part of the problem and that they must change fundamentally as their society changes.
Perhaps there are women who believe that women and their particular form of femininity are as much the problem (are as toxic) as men and their form of masculinity. And perhaps it is hard for a woman to admit this to a man.
I don’t know.
I just know that I was wrong to hope that Feminism would be directed toward anything other than serving the interests of women in a capitalist society.
The fact that women are leading major companies within the military-industrial complex is good news for women and Feminism.
It’s just not good news for those of us who hoped that Feminism would make a difference.
