Neglected or Misunderstood Page 6

  Is Beauvoir guilty then of abjecting the pregnant body? Is Firestone? The charge here is that both writers discursively construct this body as an object of fear and repulsion, when in reality it is no such thing. Are their perceptions being skewed by the values of a patriarchal culture that construes women’s differences from men – especially bodily ones – only in negative terms; even while they set themselves against patriarchy?

  Against Firestone and Beauvoir – feminists celebrate maternity

  Firestone’s views on maternity had never been shared by the majority of radical feminist activists, and from 1970 a different way of thinking about women’s reproductive role gained prominence. According to this, the pregnant body was beautiful, and women’s reproductive biology was to be celebrated as a source of distinctively feminine values and power. The activist Jane Alpert, for example, in 1974 published her manifesto Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory.37 In this she praises Firestone for her account of sex oppression as being foundational of all oppressions. But she writes that Firestone’s analysis of biology is ‘deficient,’ since it fails to recognize that ‘female biology is the basis of women’s powers.’ For Alpert, the capacity to bear children – the very consciousness that one’s body is capable of creating new life, even if a woman never becomes a biological mother – is the source of distinctively female psychological qualities, such as ‘empathy, intuitiveness, adaptability … protective feelings towards others and a capacity to respond emotionally as well as rationally.’ Biology, for Alpert, is ‘the source and not the enemy of feminist revolution.’

  In the 1980s, radical feminism developed into “cultural feminism,” which sought to celebrate the ways in which women differed psychologically from men. Many cultural feminists argued, as Alpert had done, that women’s biological differences played a determining role in producing these psychological differences, leading women to experience and make sense of the world differently. One claim was that women had a kind of natural affinity for progressive politics. For example, the menstrual cycle that Beauvoir considers a useless monthly trial was reconceptualized as keeping women in tune with the seasons of the natural world, therefore inclining women towards environmentalism. Where Beauvoir saw pregnancy as alienating and the fetus as an invader, many cultural feminists held that gestating life allowed women to understand the mutual dependencies that constitute all being, therefore disposing them to cooperative ways of living and to pacifism.

  In the meantime in France, a new kind of feminism (to which Beauvoir would object) had emerged that also celebrated sexual difference and “femininity,” drawing upon psychoanalytic theory and French poststructuralism. Hélène Cixous argued that for over 3000 years Western patriarchal culture had systematically denigrated femininity, associating it with negativity and death. She called for women to rescue their bodies from these associations, and to give them new significations through a practice of creative writing that she called ‘writing the body’ or écriture féminine. Cixous’s own densely allusive and poetic writing enacts this practice, and continually works through images that figure the female sexual and maternal body in terms of creativity and generosity. For Cixous, maternity permits women an experience of giving (milk, caresses, love) in which one gives freely and for the sake of the other: something normally disallowed in patriarchal capitalism, where one gives only in order to obtain a return. Of pregnancy and childbirth she urges: ‘Rather than depriving woman of a fascinating time in the life of her body just to guard against procreation’s being recuperated, let’s de-mater-paternalize.’38 Cixous suggests that in reclaiming their bodies from the patriarchal imaginary, women stand to recuperate a special relationship to literary creativity that has its origins in the capacity of a woman’s body to create new life: ‘How could the woman, who has experienced the not-me within me, not have a particular relationship to the written,’ she asks.

  Biological determinism and somatophobia

  To the extent that they all seek to affirm the ways in which women are thought to differ – emotionally, psychologically and physically – from men, all the above positions can be broadly classified as gynocentric feminisms.

  Some of them are also biologically determinist – in that they allege a simple correspondence between anatomy and psychology – and in ways that I think Firestone definitely is not. For Firestone, biological sex in itself does not have any immediate consequences for psychology. She is not someone for whom, for example, aggression is hard-wired into men through their higher levels of testosterone. She does not claim that the character of male genitalia makes men psychologically disposed to rape. It is actually sex class inequality that, for her, leads to the development of aggression in men, and to subservience in women, and she is very clear (as we shall see) that once sexual inequality has been eliminated, anatomical differences between the sexes will cease to be significant. She would have regarded the kind of position advanced by Alpert, I think, as what she was to call in Airless Spaces ‘matriarchalist theory … a glorification of women as they are in their oppressed state.’39

  These gynocentric positions are complex and varied, and are not all biologically determinist (some see women’s psychological differences as arising from their socialization). But they are linked by a call to reassess women’s embodiment outside of a framework established by patriarchal culture. From this perspective, both Firestone and Beauvoir can be criticized for failing to do this.

  Philosopher Elizabeth Spelman sees Firestone’s text as evincing what she calls somatophobia, or fear of or disdain for the body.40 For Spelman, somatophobia is a key element of the way that oppressive discourses such as misogyny and racism operate, where the supposed physical differences of the Other are singled out for particular disdain or repudiation. Faced with a long history of patriarchal thinking that negatively associates women with their bodies, placing men on the side of “culture” and women on the side of “nature,” feminists have a number of ways to respond, Spelman says. One way is to demand for women’s embodiment to be rethought and resignified outside of the incessantly negative terms of patriarchal ideology. This would be what the cultural feminists and Cixous are doing. For Spelman, both Firestone and Beauvoir take a different route, and it is a deeply dangerous one. It is to view ‘embodiment as a liability’ and to seek, therefore, to break the identification of women with their bodies. The problem is that while this sets itself in opposition to the patriarchal devaluing of women, it nonetheless accepts that tradition’s devaluing of the body itself. Beauvoir and Firestone are examples of feminists who ‘think and write as if we are not embodied, or as if we would be better off if we were not embodied.’ And in assuming and endorsing that somatophobia, she argues, they fail to challenge a key element of not just misogyny but also other, overlapping, oppressions including racism. ‘Flesh-loathing is part of the well-entrenched beliefs, habits, and practices epitomized in the treatment of pregnancy as a disease,’ Spelman writes. ‘But we need not experience our flesh, our body, as loathsome.’

  Reassessing Firestone

  I think that the question of whether Firestone is right in her characterization of pregnancy and childbirth as barbaric is logically separate from the question of whether her causal explanation of women’s oppression is correct. This is partly because Firestone’s causal account works (if it does work) at a different scale from that of personal experience; but it is also because the causal account makes a claim about function, where the normative account makes one about value. It is entirely possible for it to be true that at the level of the human species, women’s role in reproduction has been crucial, historically, in establishing societies based upon male domination; and that at the level of the individual, particular women have experienced their pregnancies not as barbaric but perhaps even as creative, fulfilling or empowering. Firestone’s argument does not require that every woman is made dependent through pregnancy and childbirth, or that every man respond to female dependence with the desire to reinforce domination. It only re
quires that in the past, female dependence through reproduction, and a consequent predominance of men over other social functions, has been sufficiently widespread to produce economic, legal and cultural arrangements that further entrench gender inequality – and that continue to do so even after the originating contribution of biology has been diminished in significance.

  Firestone would not, perhaps, have fully agreed with me here. She seems to think that there is an objective meaning to female reproductive biology and that it is negative. For me, however, the very fact that Cixous and others can just as persuasively describe the physical processes of maternity so differently shows that how these are thought (what significance and value they are made to bear) varies individually and culturally. There is perhaps no “right” answer – in the sense of objectively true – to the question of what value female reproductive biology has, or what the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth are like. But, to repeat: this is different from the question of what function that biology has had, historically, at the level of the species.

  And surely, feminist challenges to the authority of purely negative characterizations of women’s reproductive biology – that say, “there are other ways of thinking that biology” – ought to be welcomed?

  Does this mean, however, that Firestone’s characterization of pregnancy as barbaric is patriarchal? That she is guilty of somatophobia? Of flesh-loathing? I’m not sure there are simple answers to these questions. On the one hand, it is certainly true that Firestone sees women’s embodiment as a problem, perhaps the problem. But on the other, she may actually be less vulnerable to the problem of somatophobia than are others, such as Beauvoir. Although Beauvoir’s negative characterization of female embodiment extends to pretty much all aspects of a woman’s physical being, including muscular strength and lung size, Firestone’s comments are restricted to the processes involved in pregnancy and childbirth, and usually have to do with the suffering caused to women therein.

  That these processes do involve suffering is undeniable. A woman going through pregnancy and childbirth is likely to endure at least some of the following: morning sickness; exhaustion; hemorrhoids; agonizing labor pains; damage to pelvic muscles, nerves and ligaments; and perineal tears. She risks injuries that might lead to ongoing or even lifelong pain, fissures, bladder or bowel incontinence and diminished sexual enjoyment. Death in childbirth remains a substantial risk in many parts of the world, and even with the healthcare provision of technologically advanced Western societies it is far from zero (indeed, in the US it is actually increasing41). It is estimated that in 2015 alone, 30,300 women died as a result of pregnancy or childbirth worldwide.42 Firestone reminds us that this suffering and these risks are only the outcomes of a contingent natural process (that evolution has developed this way and not another). It has not been ordained according to some providential wisdom that women should so suffer in the course of reproducing the species (except in the view of a very few Christian fundamentalists). It is not a good thing.

  In offering this reminder, she opens up an important discursive space. It is a space that allows women honestly to discuss the physical aspects of maternity and the fears they may have in relation to them. All too often, such a space is closed down, and with it, the ability of women to make informed decisions about pregnancy and about pre- and antenatal options. In the UK and US, the medical professions seem strongly to favor vaginal over C-section births, and arguably to coerce women into the former. A “natural childbirth” ideology puts women in competition with one another to endure labor without pain relief. A wider culture of woman-blaming pervades discussion of maternity, operating to stigmatize or to shame any woman who thinks that she may be more than a baby incubator. Women who desire, or need, technological interventions, such as C-sections and pain relief, too often face censure, and are labeled trivial, vain, not brave enough, phobic, career-obsessed, privileged (“too posh to push”), unfeminine and unmaternal.

  We remain in the grip of a cultural mythology that, as it had been in Firestone’s day, shrouds maternity in romanticizing, sanitizing representations. Firestone’s discussion of pregnancy may be one-sided, intemperate, and even possibly offensive, but it at least punctures the sentimentalizing veil to say that childbearing is often difficult and sometimes even traumatic. And it says that this matters, because women matter, in themselves, and not just as baby carriers. Her unfashionably negative discussion of pregnancy and childbirth reminds us that “natural” does not equal “good,” that “technological” does not equal “bad”; and that the implications of this are that the threats to women’s health and well-being entailed by replenishing the species should not be complacently accepted but call instead for urgent consideration, action and resourcing.

  6

  Against the Nuclear Family

  This then is the oppressive climate in which the normal child grows up.

  (Firestone, p.44)

  Parental love misfires. This is one of the key themes of Firestone’s book. Damaged parents produce damaged offspring, who go on to replicate the harm when they become parents themselves. Firestone seeks to explore just how it is that, in her view, the institution of the family produces this intergenerational trauma, and to propose a radical alternative for the rearing of children. In so doing she was to be instrumental in developing an analysis that became widespread in radical feminist circles in the 1970s and beyond, and that identifies the family as one of the chief sites and sources of a woman’s – and child’s – oppression.

  Reading Firestone, reading Freud

  To understand Firestone’s critique of the family we must begin where she does – with the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. Firestone proposes that Freudianism is perhaps the ‘cultural current’ that has most influenced life in America in the twentieth century, and that nobody can remain unaffected by its language of “neurosis,” “penis envy” and “repression” (38). But she advances a feminist rereading of these Freudian categories. It is a rereading that purports to show that the processes of psychological development that Freud described are not to be understood as the immutable consequences of a timeless conflict between civilization and the individual psyche and its drives, but as the specific effects of a particular form of social arrangement – that of the patriarchal nuclear family.

  To bring Freud and feminism together at all was in 1970 a fairly unusual maneuver. For many feminists, Freud was the enemy. There are ample reasons for this. Freud famously claims that women unconsciously desire a penis and resent their felt anatomical inferiority; he theorizes that their establishment of a superego is weaker than is the case in men, and hence that their capacity for abstract ethical judgment is diminished; he proposes that the meaning of motherhood is that a woman desires a child as the unconscious substitute for her father’s penis. Generally in his theoretical apparatus, women feature as the weak link in humanity’s achievement of culture, always threatening to pull the male subject back into the realm of nature and incest. The male child is almost always the starting point of his descriptions of human psychological development, and when the mature Freud comes to realize that the girl’s trajectory cannot simply be the mirror image of her brother’s, he responds in seeming irritation, attributing to female sexuality an inscrutability that he does not pause to consider might be the result of the gendered bias of his own analytical framework.

  Why then does Firestone think there is something of value in Freudianism, and that feminism would be ill-advised simply to reject it as a patriarchal discourse? The answer is that she sees Freudianism and feminism as having a common origin in their recognition of the fundamental importance to human life of sex. ‘Freudianism is so charged,’ she writes, ‘so impossible to repudiate because Freud grasped the crucial problem of modern life: sexuality’ (40). ‘Freudianism and feminism grew from the same soil’ of oppressive Victorianism, ‘characterized by its family-centeredness, and thus its exaggerated sexual oppression and repression,’ and both are reactions agains
t this (41). Both are ‘made of the same stuff,’ (41) she writes, meaning that both grasp the experiences that befall the sexuate being as the material basis of human individual and cultural development. Indeed, the title of Firestone’s chapter describes Freudianism as ‘The Misguided Feminism.’ Freudianism starts with the same insight as does feminism into the terrible damage wrought upon human beings by a family structure predicated on the (sexual) domination of most of its members. But then it goes wrong, loses its way, since it fails to realize that the solution is not a therapy aimed at the adjustment of the individual to this structure, but the abandonment of the structure itself.

  It is the family that lies at the root of the problem, for Firestone, since this is fundamentally an organization of power and subservience that demands the channeling of sexual feeling into highly restricted paths. As we have seen from earlier chapters, for Firestone the family cannot help but have such a character because of the inequality that springs from the biological reality at its very basis. But since this biological reality can be changed, so too can the family that is causative of such widespread individual and cultural sickness be dismantled. In failing to recognize this, Firestone believes, Freud mistakenly sees the conflict between civilization and individual happiness as an eternal feature of human life, and thus his therapy seeks to reconcile the individual to this reality.

  In fact, argues Firestone, the very reason for the widespread popularity of Freudian psychoanalysis in the latter half of the twentieth century is thereby disclosed: Freudianism as a clinical practice is imported to the US in order ‘to stem the flow of feminism’ (61). The aborted revolution of first wave feminism produced a generation of women stuck halfway between their traditional feminine roles and an alternative that had not yet been realized: the resulting frustration and confusion of these women ‘often took hysterical forms’ and ‘sent them in droves to the psychoanalysts,’ who in turn sent them ‘scurrying back “adjusted” to their traditional roles as wives and mothers’ (62). The meaning of not just psychoanalytic practice, but of all psychological therapeutic intervention in this period is, according to Firestone, that of inducing individuals to accept their circumstances rather than continue railing against them. As such, psychology becomes a conservative, even counterrevolutionary, force, and not just for women but for men and children as well. Quoting radical theorist Herbert Marcuse, to whose own analysis she is greatly indebted, Firestone describes therapy as having become ‘“a course in resignation”’ (59).