Here is what I think too many women who identify as feminist, including myself, too often overlook:When you tell someone "it's not just you; it's millions of women," do not be surprised when that person gets hung up on "it's not just you," and takes no comfort from "it's millions of women."
Because I think when feminists talk to other women who are, at best, on the fence about feminism, they forget this. I know I forgot it. I forgot that one of the losses I had to grieve when I threw my lot in with feminism was the idea that I was special and that, as someone special, I could beat the system all on my own. I was cute enough. I was funny enough. I was a "guy's girl" enough. I was laid-back enough. I was smart enough. I liked fucking enough. I could totally do this, and just as soon as I did, oh, how I was going to have a good long laugh at all the pathetic loser women down there who couldn't.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
And not just that! I wasn't just saying goodbye to everything I was going to do; I was also having to scale back the credit I had enjoyed giving myself for everything I had done.
Did I leave an abusive relationship?-Yes, and go me.
Was I able to leave that abusive relationship because of work other women had already done for me?-Uh, well, okay, kind of-but wait, why can't we talk about my awesome courage some more first?
Was I able to leave that abusive relationship because of certain privileges I held, privileges of which I was completely unaware?-I don't think you heard me! I LEFT AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP. IT WAS HARD. I DID A LOT OF WORK TO GET THERE. YOU CAN'T DENY MY ACHIEVEMENT LIKE THIS. I REJECT THIS JOY-KILLING NARRATIVE.
I also completely forgot how much importance this thing that you can call patriarchy or kyriarchy, I really don't give a shit which, places on individual women being special, standing out, being unique, being the exception, being the "atypical" girl, being a creature unlike any other.
So when you tell some woman, "You've got to get on board for the good of all of us," please do not forget that first, she's got to get okay about saying goodbye to a familiar pattern, that I'm-special pattern. Second, she's got to get okay with realizing that everything she has already accomplished to date may not be entirely the result of her innate and unique awesomeness. it may not even be entirely the result of her hard work and elbow grease. She may, in fact, have to share the good along wtih the bad.
If you don't hold out something for incentive here, if you don't suggest the possibility that smashing old patterns might even wind up benefiting her personally, odds are good that you can chalk another one up for the whatever-archy and subtract one for the cause. But at a minimum, if you're going to bother at all, then be prepared to sit there with her through a sort of mini-grief process, because hearing that it's not just you, when you've been taught to believe that it's all up to you, can be harder to accept than you might think. Obviously, this goes double for fans of Ayn Rand.
You lose something when you let go of an old pattern, and maybe you even needed to lose it, maybe that old pattern was hurting yourself and hurting others, too, but you still probably process breaking out of it as, initially, a loss, because that's what it is.
There's a temptation, when you embrace the idea of privilege, to go too far in the other direction--to write off everything as the product of forces beyond your control. This makes social conservatives and a lot of libertarians crazy, and I can see why. I think that conservatives tend to give themselves too much credit for doing things that were enabled by a solid middle-class upbringing. As I wrote a number of years ago, it's easy and true to point out that poor teenagers wouldn't stay poor if they finished school, didn't have babies out of wedlock, and eschewed criminal activity--but how many of us had the courage to defy our parents and peers, drop out of high school, and sell drugs? Every time I think about how much my parents did for me just by choosing a peer group that valued college, I close my eyes and thank my lucky stars.
The problem of poverty is not that it's impossible to get out of -- lots of people do. It isn't even that you need to be some sort of superhero. The problem is that poor kids have no margin for error. I got to be a screw up who nearly flunked out of college, and thanks to parents and schools that cared desperately about my fate, nonetheless turn it all around, pull a 4.0 in my major, and graduate on time. The first time a poor kid pulls that kind of crap, he's back at home looking for minimum wage work.
But if the right goes too far in congratulating people for pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, I think the left often goes too far in crediting nebulous social forces over individual agency. It's not only incorrect, but also, it seems dangerously passive. Women have been encouraged to be passive for centuries. It's good to recognize how much of what we achieve is possible because we stand, so to speak, on the shoulders of giants. It's very good for women who find the more radical, humorless brand of activist kind of annoying (and I am often among this group) to recognize that their willingness to be radical, humorless, and not very well liked was a necessary component of the massive advances we won a few short decades ago.
But it's not good to tell yourself that really, it wasn't you, just your environment. Luck plays a giant role in all of our lives, but we all know people who have grasped extraordinary luck with both hands and flung it away. Women of my generation are phenomenally lucky to be able to walk out of an abusive relationship, not because some protective male relative has arranged it, but because we don't deserve to be beat on, and we don't have to endure it to secure social approval or economic security. But we still have to walk the hell out, and lots don't. Society can't make them walk out, though it still may be able to do something for their daughters.
So it seems to me that celebrating your courage and hard work is a fundamentally feminist action. You don't need to deny the concept of privilege to recognize that we are not only products of society--that, in the words of Scout Finch, virtuous people are those who do the most, but those who do the best they can with what they have. When you say I did this, you send the most important feminist message at all--that women have the power, and the right, to improve their lives.
Without commenting on the feminist questions, you raise a good point: none of us are wholly self-made nor are we merely the product of our environment. We are agents, free to act within certain constraints. At the same time, we are acted upon and are never free to choose without others acting to influence our choice.
Since none of us can control our environment, the only thing we have anything resembling control over is our personal choices and actions. In this respect, it is proper to honor those who, more often than not, make the right choices. It's also proper to encourage people to take responsibility for their own lives. Does this approach sometimes come across as harsh and unfeeling? Yes, but it's the only way I know to truly help. If you want to change your circumstances, complaining about the raw deal you've received will seldom accomplish your goal -- no matter how valid your complaints.
While none of us can control our environment, that does not mean we should not be concerned with what's going on in society. I have three college age children. Sometimes I felt like Hollywood, the NEA, and the government were working overtime trying to undermine the values I was trying to teach my children. Being a parent of teenagers can be a very lonely experience.
I love this post. I think it's so true that we have to take both our history and upbringing into consideration when we think about where we are today, but that we must also acknowledge our own strength.
This post reminds me of a recent conversation with a friend. This friend just returned from a six week trip to India, so she was still letting the experience sink in. She told me about an ad in which a man walks by a woman who scoffs at him at first, but after he uses a product which makes his skin lighter that woman and a dozen others flock to him.
My friend struggles with her position of privilege (as a white Westerner) because she knows her luck is not a matter of deserving but of chance. She also constantly thinks about her attitude toward other cultures - that she wants to experience them but wonders if she's interested for the same elitist reasons the first anthropologists wanted to study African cultures, for example.
I think interest in other cultures is about attitude. My friend didn't want to go to India to see what she thought were primitive third worlders (I'm pretty sure this isn't the prevalent thinking nowadays...) - she's genuinely in awe of Indian culture and wanted to learn it.
Similarly, I don't think she should feel bad about the life she was born into. I think she should accept it and be thankful for it. Because once she has done that she will, first, not walk around feeling bad about something she can't help and, second, see what good she can do from where she stands.
> Yes, I google myself. It's perfectly natural
> and healthy, folks.)
So she says....but already she's wearing glasses...
Very valid point on the passivity, although I think that can also depend on which women we're talking about. Victorian women?--Certainly. Suburban housewives?--Hey, Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique for a reason. But branch out of the Western white middle- and upper-class demographic, and I'm not sure it holds up as well. The option to be passive is a luxury, however confining it may be.
I'm not sure even my own paternal grandmother had that luxury, come to think of it. By the time she reached retirement she had definitely acquired "a career," but it didn't start out that way; it started out being just what you did to put food on the table, and she would have found debates on whether women "belonged" in the workforce hysterical, because those debates weren't happening among the lower classes. No one's interested in a debate that boils down to, "Well?--Do you like eating?" And the "nebulous social force" driving a lot of that in her case was the Great Depression, which wasn't so nebulous for those who were in it, or so she's always telling (and telling, and telling) me.
I like a good deal of what you've said here, and I appreciate the response. Let me think more about it rather than babble on about grandma some more.
It's possible to be "passive" and still be a working woman. The question of passivity isn't so much what you literally do with your hands all day--stay at homes moms are busy and work hard--its about what role you play, and are expected to play, in deciding what you do with your hands all day.
I like the cover of the New Yorker showing Michelle and Barak Obama because it shows
1. Michelle wearing pants and an AK47 and Barak wearing a dress. Women's lib has arrived. In the First Family women wear the pants.
2. Liberals have finally seen the light on the Second amendment. You don't have to wear a uniform in order to wear an assault rifle.
The evidence is clear. Women have achieved equality. And if they accessorize with assault weapons, they will stay equal. As chairman Mao says, "Equality comes from the proper accessories".
I have always hated to be told that Americans were lucky. It isn't luck. It is the culmination of generations of hard work.
But some people don't stand on the shoulders of giants. They jump off, without bungee cord.
The point should be that we stand on the shoulders of giants, so don't waste it.
It's a balance: unless you're born Prince Charles or born with fetal alcohol syndrome, you generally have choices on how you live your life every step of the way. Thus the children on the rich can congratulate themselves on their successful efforts, and the children of the poor can blame society, and they'll both be partly right.
But they'll also be wrong. When I was at an Ivy League law school, a fellow law student who (like me) was from a less than professional background and I were speculating which of our classmates would wind up partner, and which of their kids would be druggie losers. We differed on who would make partner, but we didn't differ on whose kids would be druggie losers: those students who, at twenty-two, were sure that no-one else had contributed to their success. By ignoring the efforts of all those who had helped them, they were setting themselves up so that they never do the same for anyone else.
I think that conservatives tend to give themselves too much credit for doing things that were enabled by a solid middle-class upbringing. As I wrote a number of years ago, it's easy and true to point out that poor teenagers wouldn't stay poor if they finished school, didn't have babies out of wedlock, and eschewed criminal activity--but how many of us had the courage to defy our parents and peers, drop out of high school, and sell drugs? Every time I think about how much my parents did for me just by choosing a peer group that valued college, I close my eyes and thank my lucky stars.
About 27% of the current workforce have baccalaureate degrees. About 60% of the population lives in households where earnings are in the form of hourly wages, which is to say, working-class households. As recently as fifty years ago, not one child in thirty was born out of wedlock. The notion that having bourgeois employments and bourgeois priorities and bourgeois pastimes are necessary or sufficient for constructing an agreeable and orderly life cannot be taken seriously.
I'm trying to figure out what this means. As best as I can figure, Megan is drawing a comparison between people who come from peer groups where socially and personally destructive behavior is the norm and defy that to become personally and socially productive and responsible (eg. the poor kid who stays in school, doesn't do drugs, doesn't have a teen pregnancy, etc.) and people who come from peer groups that are personally and socially responsible but decided to engage in personally and socially destructive behavior (eg. the rich kid who drops out of high-school and sells drugs).
This seems kind of odd to me. We shouldn't criticize poor people for not going against the destructive norms they are raised with because, after all, most of us just went along with the personally and socially productive norms we were raised with? Is that the message? Because, it seems to me, that the middle-class and upper-class norms have been changing at an alarming rate to be more hyper-productive. This would be the rise of "helicopter" parenting, the rise of uber-competitive club sports for kids, the rise of the over-structured childhood. Say what you want about the rise of these trends, but they are clearly a change for the middle class, just not the change towards more drop-outs and more drug-selling that would seem to make Megan more sanguine about the hopes for poor kids abandoning the socially disastrous behaviors of their peer groups.
In other words, the productive classes have been "betraying" the laid-back norms they were raised with in an effort to chase greater heights, not greater depths. If the poor were experiencing similar change in norms to greater productivity, there would be no poor.
In reading this through before posting, it occurs to me that perhaps Megan is merely saying that the poor kid who drops out and starts selling drugs for a living is bravely defying his peers and parents in the search for a better life. If that's the case, I'd just say that a) I don't think the level of "defiance" is nearly as great as one might suppose and b) I don't think we need anybody else glorifying that behavior as "brave defiance" as it seems more than glorified enough in ghetto culture as is.
It's very good for women who find the more radical, humorless brand of activist kind of annoying (and I am often among this group) to recognize that their willingness to be radical, humorless, and not very well liked was a necessary component of the massive advances we won a few short decades ago.
Is their any indication from the biographical sketches heretofore published that the grandmother of the Democratic Presidential candidate, who was born in 1922 and was promoted to a senior management position at the Bank of Hawaii at a time (ca. 1970) when perhaps one corporation executive in fifteen was female, has made a habit in the course of her life of being radical, humorless, and not-very-well-liked?
Do you think the appellations 'radical', 'humorless', and 'not-very-well-liked' apply to Claire Booth Luce? How do you make sense of her career, which well antdated contemporary feminism? How about Erma Bombeck?
I read not too long ago a piece of biography which professed to be impressed with Bella Abzug's history as something of a political pioneer. Conceding that few people are elected to Congress and her primary victory in 1970 against the incumbent was something of a coup, one has to note that Mrs. Abzug had a very indifferent record subsequent to that as an electoral politician (on the Upper West Side!). A dozen years before Bella Abzug was elected to Congress, Jessica McCullough Weis was elected to represent a district around Rochester. She was the establishment candidate and, unlike Bella Abzug, she won her races handily.
I will offer a hypothesis: Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Gloria Steinem behaved obnoxiously because it was necessary for any sort of achievement, but because their personality and character are such that obnoxious behavior is their default mode.
but how many of us had the courage to defy our parents and peers, drop out of high school, and sell drugs?
Again, the slum population is perhaps a tenth of the total. Slum mothers may be crummy disciplinarians and indifferent to formal schooling, but I would wager very few encourage their children to involve themselves with criminal enterprises. Slum kids may have to defy their peers or neighborhood hoodlum, but not their mothers.
-- I think that conservatives tend to give themselves too much credit for doing things that were enabled by a solid middle-class upbringing...if the right goes too far in congratulating people for pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps"
Which conservatives are you referring to? Because most models of conservatism I see give an awful lot of credit to luck or the Grace of God--i.e. things totally out of their control. I don't think the "pulled myself up by my bootstraps" is all that conservative (nor liberal) a notion. And you've conflated being solidly middle class with liking to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps. Odd that--as the solidly middle class woudln't be doing that, as they'd be staying in the same place, not rising. Or are you suggesting that conservatives only value one change in tne "class" level, from poverty to middle?
Politically speaking, conservatism honors tradition, family, and a kind of risk aversion that says we should not stray very far from where we were. That seems to be profoundly supporting of the idea that one should acknowledge one's environment's effect on one's wealth, so to speak and credit it with giving one the wealth one has now. Ironically, it's the New Left of the 60s that advocated Me Me Me, it's all about Me, even as the New Left also claimed that individuals didn't matter and history was the story of social movements, etc.
Man, all us Asians, with our lives of privilege.
Those destitute, despotic, war-torn Asian shitholes we came from were actually bastions of privilege!
Since she seems to think you understand about "privilege" Megan, would you please explain to me? Here's what I don't understand: Say we have a theory of justice according to which each person is entitled to one free ice cream per day. If everyone receives their free ice cream (and only that), I take it that no-one is "privileged." If there's one guy who for some reason gets two ice creams per day, I take it that the extra one is a "privilege" he is enjoying. So I'm defining the term "privilege" as "a benefit to which there is no general entitlement." But it doesn't seem to me that this is how feminists and race theorists usually use the term. It seems to me that they, rather, point to the existence of a class of people who are being unjustly denied their free ice cream, and then define all the people who do receive it as "privileged." While it is obviously a good thing to point out and remedy the injustice, this strikes me as a conceptually confusing way to do so. If our norm is that people shouldn't assume you to be a thief and follow you around in stores, then white people aren't "privileged" because no one does that to them; rather the other groups so treated are suffering unjust discrimination. If I'm missing something here, please help me out. When you say "privilege exists and is unfortunately invisible to those who enjoy it" (paraphrase), is there any content to your statement that is not fully expressed by the statement "discrimination exists and is unfortunately invisible to those who do not suffer from it"? If so, what? If not, why call it "privilege"?