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Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

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Praxis and the "F" Word: Young Women, Feminism, Fear

Carmela Epright
Furman University

In this article I will ask more questions than I answer about our obligations, goals, and desires as feminist scholars. I focus here not upon research but upon the teaching of feminist philosophy across the generations. Specifically, I ask what we can, what we should, expect of our students not in terms of their academic work but with respect to their personal and political commitments.

Each term I begin my feminist philosophy course by explaining to my students the multiple goals that such a course must aim to achieve. These include: introducing critiques of the traditional conceptions of gender and sexuality; exploring the myriad and unconscious ways in which these conceptions color and inform our understanding of the world; outlining the systemic subordination of women and members of sexual minority groups; and examining the impact that this oppression has not merely upon the lives of individual women but upon our shared understandings—our language, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and conceptions of morality. Pursuing these educational goals is no small task, and I harbor no illusions that my course can or does achieve them all. When preparing to teach this course I also ask myself whether I ought to attempt to achieve another goal, one that cannot be explicitly shared with the students. I wonder whether it is (or should be) my responsibility to not only introduce my students to feminism’s alternative approach to thinking through philosophical problems but to encourage my students to become feminist activists and adopt feminist politics. Am I obliged to promote the notion that "genuine" feminism shows itself in action and thus that any study of it requires an understanding of its theoretical tenants as well as adoption of its social and political commitments?

Although I reflect on these questions each time I teach my feminist philosophy course, I must acknowledge (with tremendous embarrassment) that a recent mainstream film—a Julia Roberts’ vehicle no less—inspired me to consider these questions anew. Let me explain. I was in Italy with a dear friend, who also teaches applied ethics and feminist philosophy. After days of traveling we were desperate to watch a movie, any movie, as long as it was in English. "Mona Lisa Smile,"1 was our only option. I will spare you most of the details of the plot.
Suffice it to say that Julia Roberts plays Catherine Watson, an art history professor at Wellesley College in 1953. Her students are affluent, tenacious, and smart; they are also completely enmeshed in a culture that views one of the most prestigious colleges of its day as little more than a finishing school. According to the plot, it is openly acknowledged that most Wellesley students are seeking their so-called "Mrs. Degree"—few of them expect to pursue further education or a career outside of housewifery and child rearing. Professor Watson is stunned by this and views it as a tremendous waste of talent and potential.

In response, Watson pushes her young charges and introduces them to "radical ideas" (such as the apparently shocking view that there is artistic value in the paintings of Jackson Pollack), while attempting to convince her brightest students to recognize their own potential and to pursue something beyond marriage and motherhood. According to the film, Yale law school holds three slots open for "Wellesley Girls" each year. (Who knew that affirmative action existed for privileged white people in the 1950s?) In the movie’s climatic moment, Watson badgers a particularly gifted student to postpone marriage and pursue a law degree. She even shows up on the student’s doorstep in an effort to beg her to fill out the application.

The student blithely informs Professor Watson that choice takes many forms. I am, the student seems to be saying, choosing to remain subordinate to my husband (who is, by the way, less intelligent and industrious than am I). I am choosing to abandon my intellectual potential, and for you to even suggest that this choice is problematic is to abandon your own principles. Don’t you teach because you believe that young women should be free? Is not the point to give us choices? Well this is my choice. So there.

I am not quite sure what the rest of America made of this little speech about the purported internal inconsistency lurking in the soul of this feminist (and by extension, all feminists), but my friend was ready to chalk the movie up to "bad first wave feminism" and turn in for the night. Yet, as corny as the film was, I was a bit disturbed. Of course, I understand my friend’s dismissal—it is not clear whether academic feminists have ever held the stereotypical and flat-footed view that choice constitutes liberation and, thus, that the content of one’s choices is irrelevant. Indeed, such criticism—and from such a dubious source—should ring hollow. Moreover, feminist scholarship long ago moved beyond simplistic discussions of personal choice and on to multicultural, post-modern, and psychoanalytic approaches to feminist philosophy. As academics we view feminism as a scholarly, theoretical approach to asking and answering epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical questions—and these are, by necessity, farther removed from (although, most of us would argue, not irrelevant to) personal choices and political questions. Most feminists remain deeply committed to political questions—this is, after all, why most of us started asking philosophical questions in a uniquely feminist way in the first place. Yet feminists now have sessions at the American Philosophical Association meetings (the stodgy Eastern Division, no less). We address complex philosophical questions—and, for the most part, feel little compunction to explain ourselves to Hollywood screenwriters, much less to fictional movie characters portrayed by actresses. Certainly, there remains a disturbing number of fellow academics who do not take feminist scholarship seriously; nevertheless, departments routinely hire feminist theorists and, occasionally, top journals publish our articles.

My purpose here is not to challenge all of us to attend more rallies and do more activism—although I, for one, really should be doing more of this work. Rather, I want to ask how feminist philosophers ought to navigate the continuing dichotomy between theory and praxis—and how we ought to explain this tension to our students. To what end do we teach our discipline? Is my purpose to introduce students to feminism as a philosophical system, an alternative, often better approach to the asking and answering of philosophical questions? Am I to teach Luce Irigaray as I might teach, say, Descartes or Hume? Or am I allowed to hope that the questions raised in my feminist philosophy seminar actually have a profound effect on the lives and the life choices of my students?

Perhaps I should explain my own unique teaching situation. I live in a small southern city that often seems stuck in the 1950s. I teach at a small liberal arts university that The Princeton Review once cheerfully referred to as "the most conservative top-ranked liberal arts university in the U.S." My students are overwhelmingly white and wealthy. They are smart, well trained, and academically and politically well connected. Some of them are also fundamentalist Christians—which is to say that they interpret the Bible as the literal word of God, and as the last appeal on any subject be it personal, moral, political, or philosophical. A small minority is so committed to this system of belief that they will, for example, passionately defend slavery because they take it to be true that it is biblically ordained. So too is the subordination of women. Indeed, the inferior status of women and slaves is, these students point out, neatly delineated in a single passage of Ephesians, "Slaves obey your masters. Women obey your husbands. And this is how you obey God."2 Had I not heard multiple students refer to this passage as a means of defending one or another form of oppression, I never would have believed that nice, well-educated, suburbanite college students could possibly believe such things. Nor would I have imagined that I could ever refer to the holders of such beliefs as "smart." However, for reasons that I hope to make clear, I have decided that it is dangerous and naïve to suggest that they are anything less.

Perhaps others do not confront such issues in their classes, but I hardly need to point out that our country is going backward rather than forward with respect to such political commitments. I suspect that all of us will be addressing students with such beliefs in the years to come. From this perspective, my students ought to be viewed less as anomalies and more as the proverbial canaries in a coalmine defined by the rise of religious conservativism and reinforced by a second Bush administration.

In light of my students’ religious and political commitments, it is heartening to note that many of them find feminist philosophy intriguing and intellectually stimulating. I am not merely reporting that my course always fills and that it frequently runs a waiting list; I am saying that they are really interested in feminist philosophy. They are engaged and reflective; they write fascinating journal entries on the works of Friedrich Engels, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, and Mary Daly. They apply their theoretical knowledge to the standard introduction to feminism questions such as the media’s portrayal of women and the social construction of gender, but I have also been treated to papers concerning intersexuality, psychoanalytic approaches to rape trauma, and investigations concerning women’s complacency in their own oppression.

Moreover, my students are required to participate in service learning projects—they tutor the children of battered mothers, answer phones at a rape crisis center, do intake interviewing at Planned Parenthood. I make these opportunities available to students so they may see the connections between the theories that we study in class and the reality of sexism, subordination, and oppression that continues to impinge upon the lives and futures of many women.

Nevertheless, even this engaged scholarship seems to have little effect on these women’s life choices. In the end most report that they are personally affected only by a watered-down version of liberal feminism that carefully leaves open the possibility that they can choose the lives that they were planning to choose anyway—marriage right after college, children, and secondary status in their relationships with men—which includes deference to their husbands’ decisions and careers. I would not have predicted that after careful analysis of Marilyn Frye’s Politics of Reality students could walk away believing that commitment to the view that women, like men, are rational beings and thus that they ought to be entitled to autonomy is a radical view. Yet I have frequently had the Julia Roberts experience of standing on the doorstep as a student points out that it was my course that taught her that she is entitled to make choices, and thus that my questioning of such choices is condescending and even oppressive. I heard a polite version of this most recently from a former student who graduated with 3.9 GPA and then promptly got married—one week after graduation. She is currently expecting twins. Her most recent email reads in part: "My husband has a great new job, and I’m sure that my degree in psychology will make me a better mom."

In point of fact, I am sure that the academic training that these women receive will make them better mothers, partners, and housewives. Yet, am I wrong to hope for more for them—to wish that they could pursue a life that is not exclusively devoted to serving their families? Is it oppressive for me to believe that they should want what the men in their lives take for granted: a family as well as projects that have meaning, whether or not they served the needs and desires of their family members?

I have come to believe that these students are not afraid of feminist ideas per se; indeed, they seem more than willing to engage even the most radical of these ideas in the safety of the classroom, in the work that they share with other class participants and with their professor. Yet most remain unconvinced that these ideas can and should transcend the academic project, and many find it irritating—if not downright offensive—that our discipline insists upon problematizing what they take to be normal and natural gender roles that are not obviously and explicitly abusive or oppressive. Because feminist theory recognizes that there are contradictory and confusing questions to be asked about women’s experiences, embracing feminism as a way of being in the world, as opposed to merely viewing it as a way of reading and thinking through texts, would require them to accept more ambiguity and tolerate more complexity than their familial, religious, and cultural conceptions will permit. Embracing feminism as a life project means accepting that one’s relationships are likely to be less clearly defined and thus more complicated, and it requires one to expect and accept the resistance and discontent of family members and friends who wish to maintain the status quo. In short, embracing feminist practice means that one’s life is going to become more difficult. Such a life necessitates an expansion of one’s self past academic engagement and requires one to take a critical stance with respect to traditional—and often comfortable—gender norms, values, and behaviors. It also demands empathy for other women and requires that one take responsibility not just for one’s own life but, as Lisa Maria Hogeland pointed out in "Fear of Feminism: Why Young Women Get the Willies,"3 feminism requires one to develop the empathy to cross "differences, histories, cultures, ethnicities, sexual identities" and even "otherness itself." 4 Thus, accepting the system that feminist scholarship offers means embracing one’s own responsibility, vulnerability, and, perhaps most difficult of all, it means embracing an uncertain future. In Hogeland’s words:

The central tenet that the personal is the political is profoundly threatening to young women who do not want to be called to account. It is far easier to rest in silence, as if silence were neutrality and as if neutrality were safety. Neither wholly cynical nor wholly apathetic women who fear feminism fear living in consequences. Think harder, act more carefully; feminism requires that you enter a world supersaturated with meaning, with implications. And for privileged women in particular, the notion that one’s own privilege comes at someone else’s expense—that my privilege is your oppression—is profoundly threatening.5

Moreover, feminist praxis asks students to consider the ways in which they personally are vulnerable to oppression. As Hogeland points out, violence against women continues to permeate college campuses; nevertheless, most women still believe that women’s equality has been achieved. Surely colleges and universities have achieved a modicum of success over the last four decades in providing women students with more or less an equal education, and this means that young women are less likely to experience overt, first-hand discrimination. But in many cases this modest success contributes to a false sense of security and, more disturbingly, a tendency to attribute sexual discrimination, violence, or harassment to the actions and reactions of the individuals involved, rather than to systemic forces. "Sexism seems the exception, not the rule—and thus more attributable to individual sickness than systems of domination."6 For this reason, women may feel encouraged to study feminism as a historical concept, to think about it as a problem for women who are "not like us," or to pathologize individual victims or perpetrators than to accept the notion that they too are vulnerable and thus that there are powerful personal reasons to take the questions raised by feminism seriously in one’s own life.

More than a decade after Hogeland’s article appeared in Ms. Magazine, I am left wondering if this fear—not of feminist theory, but of feminist engagement—has become more, rather than less, profound. The feminist critique of traditional theory continues to be inspiring, but the commitments that emanate from feminist practice seem even more daunting and demanding—especially for women born under the Reagan regime and raised during the first Bush administration. With respect to my wealthy, conservative students it means not merely rethinking their privilege but perhaps even abandoning their religion, or at least considering the consequences of their religion’s tenants upon oppressed people.

My purpose with respect to this discussion is not merely to share my displeasure about the rise of new conservatism and its effect upon the life choices of young women. Surely I am perplexed and disappointed, but I also think that there is progress to be noted even in light of the dilemma to which I am pointing. For example, in the 1990s numerous scholars lamented young women’s fear of feminism and their tendency to believe that all feminists were lesbians—or, more to the point, that homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism were to be rejected out of hand, as were all critical inquiries concerning the nuclear family. It now seems almost quaint to read articles that worry about the perception that all feminists are man-haters rather than serious scholars interested in critiquing gender privilege in public and private spaces and in our theoretical and philosophical conceptions. More recently, progressive thinkers rejected feminism insofar as it was viewed as the exclusive domain of first-world, middle-class, white women and critiqued for failing to take seriously the privileges and punishments inherent in class, race, and geographic situation. While such objections continue to be relevant and essential, today they are at least somewhat less deserved, prevalent, and stinging. They are also less likely to prevent students from taking our classes.

All of this cheery news notwithstanding, with what are we feminist teachers left? Am I to be satisfied with students who will gladly investigate the complex, nuanced questions asked by feminist theory, but who will steadfastly refuse to recognize these questions as personal challenges? While their failure to embrace the praxis of feminism means that students are only getting half of what feminism offers, I may have no choice but to accept this partial answer from at least most of my students. As disappointing as this answer is, there are things that I am unwilling to do to change it. I will not suggest that feminist practice is safe, that taking it seriously as a life commitment demands no sacrifice, no rethinking of values. Nor will I suggest that choice alone—any choice—constitutes a feminist commitment. Indeed, more often then not, feminism requires one to stand opposed to their culture, to be critical of their culture’s benefits and its institutional support. Sometimes—often—it is not in one’s immediate interest to take such a position. But, as Hogeland points out,

We do our best work in "selling" feminism to the unconverted, when we make clear not only its necessity, but also its pleasures: the joys of intellectual and political work, the moral power of living in consequences, the surprises of coalition, the rewards of doing what is difficult. Feminism offers an arena for selfhood and personal relationships but not disconnected to them. It offers—and requires—courage, intelligence, boldness, sensitivity, relationality, complexity and as sense of purpose.7

Despite my disappointment, I have come to accept that being a teacher of feminism means that I will be required to continually plead my case about the responsibilities and pleasures associated with feminist praxis. I have also come to expect that, more often than not, the door will be slammed in my face—even after the woman closing me out has read the literature that I have to offer. The worth of this endeavor, as in all teaching, lies in the students who do come to accept the complexity and the joy inherent in the entire feminist project—the theory as well as the praxis—those who come to recognize their own vulnerability as well as their power to impact their own situation and the situations of other women.

Endnotes

1. 2003; Mike Newell, Director.

2. Editor’s Note: Ephesians 6:5 & Ephesians 5:22

3. Lisa Maria Hogeland. "Fear of Feminism: Why Young Women Get the Willies," Ms., November/December, 1994, pp. 18-21.

4. Ibid., 20.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 21.

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