A Tip of the Hat to D. W. Winnicott
By Erik Tarloff
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2000, at 10:47 AM ETDear Katha,
I am, perhaps, a little less willing than you to separate quality of writing from quality --of thinking; I'm inclined to agree with Marjorie Garber, who maintained in the pages of this very magazine, some three months ago, that putting ideas together and putting words together ought to be considered related processes. However, I'm happy to accede to your implicit Basta! By now we've both, in our separate ways, issued our bad-prose consumer alerts. Caveat lector.
What might be interesting to consider in our final posts is whether the movement whose early stirrings are represented in this book should now, 30 years on, be judged a success. You mention several specific ways in which feminism has achieved its aims, and I agree with you about all of them. But I think the revolution has been even more far-reaching than that, bigger than the sum of its individual successes (and transcending such isolated failures as the ERA). With all the progress that unquestionably still remains to be made, the most fundamental change, in consciousness, has already taken place. Decisively.
Women occupy, increasingly, positions of power: in business, in politics, in most public arenas. And what's even more significant, it's no longer a surprise or a novelty to encounter them there. It no longer feels like an unusual situation requiring tolerance and tact. It's no longer an occasion for comment or comedy. It's part of the natural order of things. Here at Slate, our editor, yours and mine, is a woman; the editor of my two novels is a woman; the executive at Fox Studios at the time I was first working on the screenplay of Face-Time was a woman. In none of these situations did their sex seem noteworthy. That probably wouldn't have been true two or three decades ago.
I'm not suggesting we've reached the promised land, mind you. No doubt there's still decades of work ahead. No doubt there's still a glass ceiling, and a pronounced income disparity, and any number of other persistent injustices. But you won't find many people who defend them anymore. The challenge has moved from the strategic to the tactical, and that's a huge advance.
The only heterodox opinion I have to offer on the subject is this: I'm not convinced the sorts of writings contained in Dear Sisters were terribly helpful in securing these changes. Oh, the initial wave of agitation was no doubt useful, at least from a PR point of view, raising a ruckus, securing press attention, forcing everyone to think again about issues long regarded as settled. But so many of these pieces were so angry or extreme or even just plain goofy, they may have alienated as many potential supporters (both men and women) as they attracted; they may have made the serious ideas behind the women's movement easier to dismiss. Imagine the civil rights movement beginning with Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown rather than Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King; the justice of the cause might still have prevailed, but the slog would probably have been even tougher than it's proved to be.
I suspect we don't agree about that.
But I want to end with something I hope we do agree about. Unlike some revolutions, which turn out to be zero-sum games, this one has benefited almost everybody. Men and women needn't, after all, be viewed as natural antagonists. We may have our differences, but nevertheless, as the British psychotherapist D. W. Winnicott observes, we still "are more like each other than like anything else."
Best wishes,
Erik
A Tip of the Hat to D. W. Winnicott
By Erik Tarloff
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2000, at 10:47 AM ETReader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Try here for an interesting discussion of the format of the book, and here for "women get power through sex" (and follow the thread: "perhaps if men put less emphasis on sex...")]
If this feminist anthology is anything remotely like Tarloff says it is, it will conform completely to my impression of the most ardent feminists I have known since I was in high school a quarter-century ago--grim, dim, thoroughly intolerant, utterly predictable and generally unpleasant people with whom only the weather is a safe topic of conversation. Only with great difficulty can I remember more than one or two committed feminists whom I would not number among the dullest people I've ever met.
--Joseph Britt
(To reply, click here.)
To Joseph Britt:
Not surprised here either. I haven't known very many in-the-trenches civil rights activists, or revolutionary Catholic priests or lobbyists for ending the cycle of welfare-and-foster-care who were blessed with a sense of humor, a gift for joy and an easygoing attitude towards the ups-and-downs of social change. I will say that the ones who do have these qualities can melt hearts and change minds far more effectively than anyone else, but they are rare characters.
Why should these feminists be any different?
--Amy Bloom
(To reply, click
here.)
[Note: Amy Bloom, a Slate contributor, is the author, most recently, of A Blind Man Can Tell How Much I Love You.]
One of the most frequent complaints about feminists is that we "don't have a sense of humor." I suppose that's in the eye of the beholder--but really, feminism and women's struggle not only for equal rights but for equal respect isn't really a light-hearted topic, is it? Why would you expect a description of our fight to be couched in terms of bonhomie and coquetry? When was the last time you read an article on slavery or civil rights that made you laugh aloud and slap your knee? Color me naive, but I don't hear anyone taking digs at Tolstoy because his writings were like reading a constant dirge. Some people call it art.
--Madelaine
(To reply, click
here.)
Tarloff is right that words & ideas are linked--which is why the fact that no one comments on women's presence in the workplace is not a victory for feminism. Almost immediately (in the grand scheme of things) after women started making up half the workforce, it stopped being acceptable to discuss that fact. So what happened to all the opinions about sex roles that were previously expressed? They've become more tacit than ever. On the one hand, women get paid less than men--systemic, covert discrimination. On the other hand, many men resent and fear women for intruding on their perceived territory. By discouraging open discussion of their issues (distasteful as they are) we're reinforcing an environment of hidden hostility and ego trips. It's words and actions that need to be linked. Only when we've gotten to the point where no action needs to be taken to remedy our gender issues, will it be legitimate to say nothing about them.
--Toth
(To reply, click
here.)
This book is yet another tedious example of White American social dialogue. Self-absorbed, moralizing, ignorant and oblivious to other cultures except in a missionary, disapproving kind of way. It is utterly useless to the large mass of humanity for whom women's issues are immediate practical and need to be solved within the framework of extremely slender economic resources, while preserving delicately wrought social structures and modes of dialogue built up carefully over centuries.
What a bunch of reckless, idiotic, self-centered, harm causing people these American feminists have been. American White Women have been liberated: sure--from being rich housewives. Now they are richer and lonelier worker drones-as are their white brothers. And who speaks to the rights of the children thus affected?
--A.S.Germain
(To reply, click
here.)
The opposition to the idea of wages for housework has to have more intellectual content than that such wages would attract women to an ultimately unfulfilling career--as opposed to what, working as a salesman at Sears? Working as an entrepreneurial housecleaner for somebody else? I hope y'all address the class issue and its evanescence in "third wave" feminism, which seems, in dropping issues like housework pay, universal child care, and all references to medical issues outside of abortion, to have oriented itself entirely to those issues which resonate with its upper class members.
--Roger
(To reply, click
here.)
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Try here for an interesting discussion of the format of the book, and here for "women get power through sex" (and follow the thread: "perhaps if men put less emphasis on sex...")]
If this feminist anthology is anything remotely like Tarloff says it is, it will conform completely to my impression of the most ardent feminists I have known since I was in high school a quarter-century ago--grim, dim, thoroughly intolerant, utterly predictable and generally unpleasant people with whom only the weather is a safe topic of conversation. Only with great difficulty can I remember more than one or two committed feminists whom I would not number among the dullest people I've ever met.
--Joseph Britt
(To reply, click here.)
To Joseph Britt:
Not surprised here either. I haven't known very many in-the-trenches civil rights activists, or revolutionary Catholic priests or lobbyists for ending the cycle of welfare-and-foster-care who were blessed with a sense of humor, a gift for joy and an easygoing attitude towards the ups-and-downs of social change. I will say that the ones who do have these qualities can melt hearts and change minds far more effectively than anyone else, but they are rare characters.
Why should these feminists be any different?
--Amy Bloom
(To reply, click here.)
[Note: Amy Bloom, a Slate contributor, is the author, most recently, of A Blind Man Can Tell How Much I Love You.]
One of the most frequent complaints about feminists is that we "don't have a sense of humor." I suppose that's in the eye of the beholder--but really, feminism and women's struggle not only for equal rights but for equal respect isn't really a light-hearted topic, is it? Why would you expect a description of our fight to be couched in terms of bonhomie and coquetry? When was the last time you read an article on slavery or civil rights that made you laugh aloud and slap your knee? Color me naive, but I don't hear anyone taking digs at Tolstoy because his writings were like reading a constant dirge. Some people call it art.
--Madelaine
(To reply, click here.)
Tarloff is right that words & ideas are linked--which is why the fact that no one comments on women's presence in the workplace is not a victory for feminism. Almost immediately (in the grand scheme of things) after women started making up half the workforce, it stopped being acceptable to discuss that fact. So what happened to all the opinions about sex roles that were previously expressed? They've become more tacit than ever. On the one hand, women get paid less than men--systemic, covert discrimination. On the other hand, many men resent and fear women for intruding on their perceived territory. By discouraging open discussion of their issues (distasteful as they are) we're reinforcing an environment of hidden hostility and ego trips. It's words and actions that need to be linked. Only when we've gotten to the point where no action needs to be taken to remedy our gender issues, will it be legitimate to say nothing about them.
--Toth
(To reply, click here.)
This book is yet another tedious example of White American social dialogue. Self-absorbed, moralizing, ignorant and oblivious to other cultures except in a missionary, disapproving kind of way. It is utterly useless to the large mass of humanity for whom women's issues are immediate practical and need to be solved within the framework of extremely slender economic resources, while preserving delicately wrought social structures and modes of dialogue built up carefully over centuries.
What a bunch of reckless, idiotic, self-centered, harm causing people these American feminists have been. American White Women have been liberated: sure--from being rich housewives. Now they are richer and lonelier worker drones-as are their white brothers. And who speaks to the rights of the children thus affected?
--A.S.Germain
(To reply, click here.)
The opposition to the idea of wages for housework has to have more intellectual content than that such wages would attract women to an ultimately unfulfilling career--as opposed to what, working as a salesman at Sears? Working as an entrepreneurial housecleaner for somebody else? I hope y'all address the class issue and its evanescence in "third wave" feminism, which seems, in dropping issues like housework pay, universal child care, and all references to medical issues outside of abortion, to have oriented itself entirely to those issues which resonate with its upper class members.
--Roger
(To reply, click here.)