The New and Old of Radical Feminism
On the occasion of the publication of Vivian Gornick’s The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton
By Deborah Emin
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Photo by Brett C Vermilyea
Vivian Gornick in her Manhattan apartment.
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One day you wake up and all the details of an issue that has been troubling you for too long begin to emerge. Slowly, as if you had actually willed the tiger’s tail into your hands and that tiger, for some good reason, agreed to let you tame it, you sit holding the thing. What do you do next? Everything that has been causing you sleeplessness, a vexed and angry personality, an anxious and impatient response to life, now recedes. What becomes important and necessary is the revelation.
This is my way of describing the double impact on me of Vivian Gornick’s new book. In so many ways her analysis and interpretation of the work and life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton opens up a better way of talking about radical feminism. It is for many women of the 50-plus generation a memorable moment to recall that charge we felt when we thought fighting for equality was worth our entire attention. Even if fighting for equality was not of importance for all women of my generation, nor was it for Stanton’s generation either.
If however you will side with me and Gornick and Stanton on this issue for the purpose of this essay, we can think together about the real importance of Stanton’s work, how brilliantly Gornick reveals it, and where that leaves us now in 2005 with a changed and yet in so many ways similar world. A world where women still fight between themselves over what is most important – work or children, marriage or ambition – and where discussions still rampage through the media about the power of the Christian elements of American society to set the agenda, and for women on both sides of that divide who find themselves in conflict not only with each other but also within themselves.
How, indeed, to go about reconciling all of these various forces and to make our own peace with what many lament as a regressive anti-feminism of the younger generation? How to look at what in fact may be a new kind of feminism that is separate from the past and has had to make a break with the old Odd Women of the movement in order to find its own voice?
Let’s begin at the beginning. There is no one, to me, who is more eloquent than Gornick about Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Gornick is more than just an accomplished writer and critic. I have had correspondence with people on both coasts and down South, and the mention of Gornick’s name inspires universal recognition and praise. So when a woman of this stature turns her attention to the work of Stanton and tells not just how powerfully Stanton’s words affected women and men in her own time but reaches into how we should be thinking about the same issues of equality today, it behooves us to pay attention.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) was, like many other women of her time whom we would call radical feminists, a member of the Abolitionist Movement. This cause for the freedom of the slaves took her attention first and made an indelible impression on her. It was, according to Gornick, the Abolitionist movement that ignited a further cause – the women’s-suffrage movement. In a startling narrative, Gornick recounts how Stanton traveled with her husband, Henry, to London in 1840 to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention. What a shock it was to Elizabeth when these progressive men running the convention would not allow the women full participation. The women had to sit on the sidelines and observe without being allowed to speak.
This became one of the pivotal moments in Elizabeth’s life, what Gornick calls a conversion moment. The moment ignited within Elizabeth and then exploded into full force the “burning” desire to work for women’s equality. Her passion toward the vote – her recognition that women must have the vote in order to be recognized as full citizens in the republic – caused a number of things to happen in her life and within the life of the movement that she was so instrumental in helping to start.
First, as Gornick says: “She never got over that flash of plain sight. It was her moment of conversion – the moment when she realized that ‘in the eyes of the world I was not as I was in my own eyes. I was only a woman.’ ”
It is with great irony that we can look at Stanton’s fiery response to the fact that black men were going to be given the chance to vote before women. In her rage-filled reaction to the way she was treated, she used the word Sambo. What struck her as nothing else had was the rampant and illogical injustice of being a second-class citizen just by being a woman.
As Gornick says: “This was the cause that clarified her – the one that told her, not approximately but precisely, who she was – the one that, within ten years, would become the thing she could no longer do without.”
In the course of absorbing the Stanton story, we also read about Gornick’s conversion to radical feminism. I met with Gornick shortly before the book was published and had the opportunity to discuss with her what it was that made her so passionate in the telling of this story. It was a hot and humid middle-of-September day. Gornick appeared at the door and was all business from the moment I entered her lovely, orderly, well-lit apartment. We sat down and started talking as soon as the tape recorder began, and it was almost like walking into a place where someone has been thinking in these same throbbing and burning (to use the word Gornick uses often in her book) sentences for more than 30 years. There was still a freshness to it and not the stale recounting of a tale with which the narrator has grown bored. Gornick’s brilliantly blue eyes shine with how the deep emotional attachment she has to these ideas lives within her.
Two questions came up and were answered in a variety of ways. The first was why should people read this book. Her first answer was that it was in the book, and then that it was my job to make it clear to the readers of this magazine why. But with my being persistent and Gornick being polite, here is her further answer: “She [Stanton] lived in a world, and we still occupy it, that is profoundly resistant to this simple desire for equality. So what happens is we grow up inside a culture in which we are continued to be taught for men to use their brains and for women to stay home, to love. That world still exists; therefore women our age arose again in order to make one more stab at this, and we did as much as we could 30 years ago. The reason I wrote this book is to make clear the living history between that history and this history. . . People grow tired of it . . . For me, I can never hear it enough. I will go to my grave happy to hear it five thousand times.”
With that set of statements, which came rolling out of her mouth with wonderful urgency, Gornick finished the thought about the reason for this book by saying: “Susan B. Anthony has been given prominence. That was another reason I wanted to write this book. Stanton was our great intellectual visionary. Nobody knew about her. But it is true that her words are always astonishing, they always renew me.”
The other branch of my questioning had to do with the ways in which the parallels between Stanton’s work and the work of the radical feminists in our own time reflect each other. Of course, in many ways they don’t at all. It is nevertheless easy to seek out the conjunctions of ideas of radical feminists in both periods. In Gornick’s words:
The similarity between Elizabeth Stanton’s generation of rebels and mine remains striking. We, like them, were overtaken by the same flash of “original” insight: startled awake out of a less than grownup dream of life to realize that men did not consider us fellow creatures; then even more startled to find that, in the main, women themselves did not sufficiently object to their subordinate position in the worldly scheme of things.
And then as Gornick ties up this paragraph-long reprise of the ways in which the two different generations echoed each other:
Those of us who said – and kept on saying – that the inequality of women is intolerable were perceived as, well, odd: fanatics staring with a political gaze that could not be deflected into a vision of the future that could not be achieved. When was the last time anyone had known a woman with a political gaze that could not be deflected? She was not within living memory. And for good reason. The anxiety she spread, each and every time around, was most unwelcome.
I have quoted so extensively for a specific reason. I am not trying to be coy and withhold Gornick’s comments to me, but rather to show just how the writing itself burns with the message she has to offer. At one point she mentioned that change itself is not aesthetic; it is very unshapely. But here in Gornick’s writing you can see how aesthetically pleasing are the words she harnesses to tell her story, one sentence after another reflecting not only the interesting history of the women’s-suffrage movement and how it affected the radical feminists of the 1970s, but also the connection between these two women over the intervening years. “She [Stanton] made me very happy,” said Gornick. “She is a thrill . . . all you have are her words, and her words are endlessly renewing, endlessly thrilling. From the time 30 years ago when I first stumbled across her, I burn when I read her. I’m connected, deeply connected.”
The other strand of our discussion had to do with where things stand today. For this, I need to refer back to the earlier reference as to why Stanton was written out of the history books. If we think back to the 19th century and the ways in which religious idioms influenced the way everyone spoke and wrote, it is a little easier to appreciate the kind of “heresy” she committed. In brief, she re-wrote the Declaration of Independence as well as the Bible in order to take out all references to patriarchy. These abridged versions don’t begin to describe how radical an act that was and the impact it had. Gornick says it was for this reason that Stanton was written out of the history of the movement. Her Women’s Bible, Gornick goes on to say, “really did her in. It was true that for a good generation feminists were afraid to touch her. She was tarred and they were afraid they would be tarred if they allowed her to be spoken of even in memory.”
The way in which Gornick encapsulated her generation’s, our generation’s, discussion of feminism excited me. She began by issuing this statement: “You can’t be a lady and be a radical feminist.” She went on to say: “That was what was so shocking to come up against and so thrilling. When we started [as feminists] I was one of those who said: ‘Fuck motherhood and fuck wifehood.’ It took a lot to say this, because someone always asked, ‘What about the children?’ I said, ‘Fuck the children. I’m not here for the children. We are the children. We’re here to discuss one thing only, not to discuss how good or bad a woman is as a wife and a mother but the degree to which she can claim her right as a citizen.’”
That was her stand then and it remains that way now. The now, the present, is always a curious blend of the old and the new. For Gornick and for me, a different interpretation arises out of how the past has influenced the present. Her assessment of radical feminism’s place in today’s world revolves around this way of seeing historical progress: “We [her generation] had the thrill of standing up and saying what was said before. We said it, the world didn’t change, didn’t roll over. The ones who came after us are angry, resentful. It’s foolish to believe that the world could change in a generation, but they hold that against us. We did change the world in the fact that there are many more of us now in the world than there were before. That’s the best we can hope for, because things never go back to the way they were before. Until it’s over it ain’t over. It is a shocking thing to realize.”
For the most part, that is where we left off talking about Stanton and radical feminism. These discussions, though, never truly end. You listen to people talking on the subway. You watch the habits of friends. You pick up the papers, and there in the Sunday Times Magazine is an essay by Maureen Dowd about women and men and basically taking to task the conformity and truly oddness of taste in the feminist movement (seems she didn’t like their shoes). And then the mind considers all of this and begins to evaluate what it is and where it has taken us, and then finally, what it all means.
Here we are in 2005 discussing the possibility of Hillary Rodham Clinton running for President. Now there is a woman who has certainly benefited from the influence of feminism on American politics. On the other hand, we have Maureen Dowd, the only woman on the Op-Ed pages of the Times, who bemoans not being married at her age and probably not ever going to be. Despite her statuesque form, her position, and her humor, the poor woman seems unable to keep a man. Her role models seem to be characters from Sex and the City. Clinton and Dowd, two extreme examples of what feminism has produced and allowed to prosper. Hillary has benefited from the work of feminists, but probably needs them more to fuel her own ambitions than to help her re-think how to remake American society in a more equitable way. Dowd has had a different type of life and ambition, but we can assume she enjoys herself, gets to move in circles she might not have had the opportunity to before, and these are the benefit she has derived from feminism’s work. I like to imagine that she questions what it is she really wants.
Yet, that younger generation of women that Gornick bemoans, as do Dowd and others, to me is not as lost and unaware of what preceded them. It all depends on where you look. If you look to someone like Naomi Klein, you see a younger woman who works tirelessly to change the unequal ways in which the world’s resources are distributed. In the process she has become a rock star to other young women on the left who admire her efforts at exposing and reporting on the insatiable greed of those in power. There are others as well, from Amy Goodman of Democracy Now to Liza Featherstone who has written tirelessly about Wal-Mart’s treatment of its employees.
This was my revelation the other morning while thinking about what is wrong with the world: Why can’t there be some good news for a change? I’m tired of reading about these younger women who get too much attention for things of utterly no consequence. So now I focus on what seems to need the most attention. I thought about the mutation that has occurred among the women on the left, the beneficiaries of Stanton and Gornick and of the entire radical feminist movement. Theirs is a different world and their goals have changed. Now instead of wanting only to make sure that women are given their full citizenship, they have taken those lessons and expanded them onto a world stage. If the personal became political for the feminists of the 1970s, I think it is fair to say that the political became personal for this younger generation. It is their world and they want to make it better for as many people as possible. That seems to me to be a wonderful way to extend the legacy. More power to them.
