CHEERS FOR RENE DENFELD AND

THE NEW VICTORIANS

“Rene Denfeld is one bold writer: twenty-eight years old, fueled by good sense and righteous anger… . Let’s hope she stays on the front lines.”

—New York Times Book Review

“A recording of the zeitgeist among younger women… . The gloves are off in the battle for the future of feminism… . Denfeld is obviously right that something is going awry.”

—Kate Muir, The Times (London)

“Delightful and thoroughly persuasive, Rene Denfeld’s feminism is individualistic, clear-headed, and irreverent… . She makes an overwhelming case, all the while pointing the way back to sanity and dignity.”

—Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism?

“Commendable work … her arguments are definitely valid.”

—Buffalo News

“Pardon the saying, but Rene Denfeld has balls. About 300 pages of them… . Denfeld does not only write well and define her theories clearly, she takes risks with description and humor that were previously lacking in most feminist writing.”

—The Review, University of Delaware

“A wonder.”

—Book Page

“Provocative … Denfeld goes Katie Roiphe one better.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Rene Denfeld has her boxing gloves on, both literally and figuratively. Literally in the sense that … she is one of a sprinkling of female amateur boxers in the United States. And figuratively, in that the twenty-eight-year-old Portland resident withholds no punches in her attack on the godheads of the feminist movement.”

—Journal Gazette (IN)

“She articulates her generation’s dilemma… . She also alerts readers to some highly questionable alliances, including that between anti-pornography feminists and the Religious Right.”

—Sunday Oregonian

“Since the late 1960s, millions of women have slowly discarded the personal and social girdles squeezing life options to a cramped few. Yet the National Organization for Women, in the forefront of most advances, has never achieved mainstream status… . Rene Denfeld tells why.”

—Milwaukee Sentinel

“Valuable … Denfeld doesn’t weave her argument from thin air… . It [will] certainly provoke discussion.”

—News & Record (NC)

“A rallying cry for women to take back feminism.”

—Sun-Bulletin (NJ)

“A scathing and clear-eyed depiction of the hijacking of a movement.”

—Swing

“Excellent points.”

—Charleston Post and Courier (SC)

“A sort of high-speed still photo of the terminating explosion of ‘Second Wave’ feminism, the variety that began in the late 1960s. Some of the fragments are still large and hot, but their point of origin has pretty clearly ceased to exist.”

—Culture Wars

Copyright

Warner Books Edition

Copyright © 1995 by Rene Denfeld

All rights reserved.

Hachette Book Group,

237 Park Avenue,

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

First eBook Edition: September 2009

ISBN: 978-0-446-56523-3

E3-20170302-JV-PC

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, let me give my heartfelt thanks to all the young women, too numerous to name here, who were willing to talk to me openly and honestly about their feelings regarding feminism. I would especially like to thank Caryn Brooks, Julie Shaw, Samantha Levine, Anne Greenwood, Jim Scoville, Lauren Gwin, and Jenn Stout for sharing their friends with me. Susan Stanley generously shared writing know-how, and Bill Donahue provided fine research assistance.

Richard Pine is the agent writers dream about. His assistant Lori Andiman offered strong advice and, on one memorable evening, strong drinks. My editor Jamie Raab was always available and immeasurably supportive.

Katherine Dunn helped me constantly along the way—from concept to proposal to finish. Without her this book wouldn’t have happened. She has been an invaluable friend.

My deep thanks to Bill Redden, who spent tireless hours reading proofs, debating points and making suggestions.

Finally, I want to thank my family for their support, and my mother, for teaching me what feminism means.

This book is dedicated to my sister, Nichole Appleton, in the hope that there will be a women’s movement for her in the future.

INTRODUCTION

I was born a year after the National Organization for Women was created in 1966, and I was a small child while many of the battles for women’s rights were being fought. Like most women of my generation, I can not remember the time when abortion was illegal. I can not remember a time—though my mother tells me it is true—when women were expected to go to college to snag a husband, not to earn a degree, when working women were confined to “pink-collar” jobs such as waitressing, when reliable birth control was unavailable, and when women were kept ignorant about their bodies and their sexuality. It was a time that translated into simple and devastating scenarios: a young woman denied birth control and dying from a back-alley abortion, a woman graduating from college, only to find the path of higher learning led directly to the typing pool, a ten-year-old schoolgirl wishing she could take shop class with the boys, only to be herded into home ec to make Jell-O and practice silverware arrangements. It was a time when, it is difficult to believe, sexism was not considered a problem or even recognized as a word in the public vocabulary.

We have it much better now than our mothers ever did. Abortion was legalized in 1973. There was the long fight to pass the ERA, which may have failed but which firmly planted the notion of equal rights in the public mind. There was the creation of NOW and the Women’s Equity Action League in the 1960s, and the battles they won against sex discrimination in the workplace and schools. There was the women’s health movement, the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the introduction of rape shield laws (which limit admissibility of a victim’s sexual history), the founding of battered women’s shelters, and the emergence of women in business, law, and politics. There were Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, and many others. It was the second wave of feminism, and its impact on women’s futures was profound.

For women of my generation, feminism is our birthright. While sexism may still permeate society, we know what it is to live without excessive confinement. We are the first generation to grow up expecting equal opportunity and equal education, as well as the freedom to express our sexuality. We are the first to assume what feminists had to force society to accept against its deeply ingrained prejudice: that we are the equals of any man. This belief may translate into the pursuit of a career or it may mean demanding respect for raising children—women of my generation believe in the right to choose.

Given, then, this huge debt we owe feminism, why do so many women my age refuse to join the women’s movement? Why do we adamantly reject the feminist label?

While numerous polls show that American women of all ages overwhelmingly support feminist ideals, these polls also show that they largely avoid calling themselves feminists and in many ways have abandoned the movement—even though most feel there is still work to be done. A 1989 Time/CNN survey reported that a majority of women believed feminism had advanced women’s rights but that only 33 percent considered themselves feminists. A whopping 76 percent polled said they paid little or no attention to the women’s movement. ¹ Another Time poll in 1992 found that while 57 percent of American women believed there was still a need for a strong women’s movement, only 39 percent believed the movement at that time reflected the views of most women—and only 29 percent considered themselves feminists. ² For younger women, even these numbers may be high. In View, a magazine for college students, conducted a survey in 1989 of over five hundred female undergraduates. While 90 percent agreed that sexism existed and 84 percent agreed women should have access to birth control, only 16 percent of women from my generation said they were feminists. ³

This trend has not gone unnoticed by the women’s movement or by the media. From the best-selling book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi, to columnist Linda Ellerbee, to newspaper and magazine articles, the alienation of otherwise-feminist-thinking women from the movement has sparked debate.

The most fashionable argument for women’s rejection of feminism is Susan Faludi’s “backlash” theory. The basic idea behind the backlash concept—that various forces in culture are working to undermine feminism—has floated around the women’s movement for nearly two decades (“Academia: Here Comes the Backlash,” announced a September 1975 review of three books in Ms. magazine), but Faludi’s modern rendition is the first time the idea has gained widespread credence. There is a likely explanation for its sudden currency. While numerous antifeminist articles and books appeared in the 1970s—many so Neanderthal that today’s criticisms sound like compliments—the women’s movement was healthy. Women were proud to call themselves feminists.

Today they are not.

“Seventy-two percent of young women say they don’t consider themselves feminists. Why not?” posed the March 1990 issue of Seventeen magazine. The answer was quick in coming “Linda Ellerbee says it’s because they don’t know what it means, or what’s at stake.” The article by Ellerbee, a nationally syndicated columnist, was titled “The Feminist Mistake.” In a patronizing and often vicious tone, Ellerbee tears into young women who would hesitate to call themselves feminists. “Feminism. There, I’ve said it. Try not to throw up. I know you don’t like the word, but believe me, that’s only because you’ve been misinformed about what it means. In fact, you’ve been misinformed about a lot of things.” Ellerbee doesn’t say where this misinformation is coming from. She says only that “somebody wants you to find feminism unattractive. And that somebody has been very busy.”

Susan Faludi, however, makes it clear just who that somebody is. “The backlash’s public agenda has been framed and promoted by men,” Faludi writes in Backlash, “… men at the helm in the media, business, and politics.” According to her book, such things as TV sitcoms (positive portrayals of nonworking mothers) and fashion (the revived popularity of lacy lingerie) are part of a devious male-orchestrated campaign to portray feminism as bad while extolling the virtues of hearth, home-cooked meals, and oppressive ideals of beauty.

The majority of women aren’t buying this—in a 1989 New York Times poll, for instance, only 28 percent of the women queried believed that men were “trying to take away the gains made by women over the past 20 years” ⁴ —but Faludi has an explanation. “The force and furor of the backlash churn beneath the surface, largely invisible to the public eye,” she writes. And though this conspiracy against feminism is so insidious that most women don’t even know it’s happening, its impact has been profound: “The backlash did manage to infiltrate the thoughts of women, broadcasting on these private channels its sound waves of shame and reproach.”

Young women, supposedly, have tuned into Channel Backlash, and for that reason we hesitate to call ourselves feminists.

For feminist commentators such as Ellerbee and Faludi, blaming an amorphous and all-powerful cultural conspiracy for women’s distaste for the feminist label is convenient as well as comforting. But it is wrong. For all the moronic depictions of women in popular culture, there are countless other role models—from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the rap group Salt n’ Pepa—who portray independent women in a positive light. Besides, women of my generation are not stupid enough to take detergent commercials literally or to be led like sheep by hidden meanings in underwear fashions. Nor are we the brain-dead dupes of a nameless and yet very busy “somebody.” If this was the case, then we would reject feminist beliefs as well as the feminist label—which we have not done.

As a 1986 survey of over ten thousand young adults by the U.S. Department of Education showed, both women and men of my generation wholeheartedly believe in women’s rights. Of women and men who were attending high school six years prior to the survey (and were at the time of the survey working, raising families, and going to college), 98 percent of each sex believed “a woman should have exactly the same educational opportunities as a man,” 90 percent of the men and 98 percent of the women agreed that “women should be paid the same money if they do the same work,” and 91 percent of the men and 96 percent of the women believed that “women should be considered as seriously as men for jobs as executives or politicians.” ⁵ And when it comes to staying home and raising the kids, both sexes say they would like the opportunity. A 1990 Time poll of young women and men eighteen to twenty-four found that 66 percent of the women and 48 percent of the men were interested in a full-time parenting job if given the option. ⁶ No one would have even thought to ask men this question in the early sixties.

That my generation has taken the women’s movement to heart is illustrated by these numbers. We don’t believe in sexual inequality, and we don’t believe in confining ourselves—or one another—to traditional sex roles. Simply put, we are feminists—in action, if not name.

Then why do we shirk the label? “Feminism is a movement where women get more radical as they get older,” was NOW president Patricia Ireland’s evasive answer in the December 4, 1989, issue of Time magazine. If that’s the case, then why do polls show that younger women hold stronger feminist beliefs than older generations? And why were more women of older generations involved in the movement during the 1970s, when they were young, instead of now, when they should be more radical?

The answer lies in the one pressing question that many commentators avoid examining: What exactly does today’s women’s movement stand for? Most appear to believe the movement hasn’t changed since the early seventies. Faludi, for example, doesn’t even mention the names of many of today’s feminist leaders in Backlash, and she spends no time exploring the causes they espouse. Ellerbee, in a statement that is either disingenuous or naive, simply writes, “Feminism means you believe in equality between men and women. Justice. Equal justice for all. And that’s all it means.”

If only it were true.

The fact is that feminism has changed—dramatically. While there are some feminists still in touch with most women’s concerns, the movement for the most part has taken a radical change in direction. It has become bogged down in an extremist moral and spiritual crusade that has little to do with women’s lives. It has climbed out on a limb of academic theory that is all but inaccessible to the uninitiated. It has lost contact with the ideas that sparked the second wave—individual empowerment and political activism—and has substituted a worldview that speaks to the very few, while alienating the many. For women of my generation, feminism has become as confining as what it pretends to combat.

There are, in essence, two different women’s movements alive today. One is a cultural movement, reflected in women’s magazines such as Glamour (“Your Ob-Gyn Checkup: Read This Before You Go” and “Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Talks About Women, Men and Work,” from the October 1993 issue) and expressed in the independent actions of thousands of feminist-thinking women who fight for equality in their lives—such as Shannon Faulkner, the courageous young woman who battled for her right to attend the Citadel, an all-male military school, and Dallas Malloy, the fierce young female amateur boxer who fought in court for the right of women to fight in the ring. But this movement lives primarily in the hearts and minds of women: It isn’t organized, and most of its members do not call themselves feminists. That’s because that word refers to the other women’s movement—the organized, ideological form of feminism represented by groups such as NOW, women’s studies courses, and feminist leaders. It is this organized women’s movement—which defines the feminist label—that is the focus of this book.

“Substitute the term ‘feminism’ for ‘women’s movement’ in public-opinion polls and support plummets,” writes Nina J. Easton in the February 2, 1992, Los Angeles Times Magazine article entitled “I’m Not a Feminist But …” “To many, the term feminist still evokes images of hairy-legged, humorless extremists who view men as the enemy. In an effort to combat those stereotypes, many feminist leaders have taken aim—at conservatives, at the media, at political leaders, at almost everyone but themselves. By lashing out, they have managed to underscore the militant image that alienated so many Middle American women in the first place.”

Easton is right. The term feminist does evoke images of extremists, but this may be less a holdover of “hairy-legged” antifeminist perceptions from the 1970s than a message that something is seriously amiss today. In 1986, for example, 56 percent of American women considered themselves feminists—a number that was to drop to 29 percent by 1992. ⁷

A young woman interested in joining the feminist movement is left in an odd position. Looking under “Feminism” in the phone book certainly won’t take her far. Major organizations such as NOW offer little outreach, even on college campuses. Young women are far more likely to encounter organized feminism by taking an introductory women’s studies course, attending rallies on campuses, picking up the latest issue of Ms. magazine, reading newspaper accounts, and browsing in the feminist literature section of bookstores.

The importance of women’s studies classes, feminist literature, and local activist groups in shaping women’s opinions of feminism cannot be overemphasized. They are not only intake mechanisms that define feminism for thousands of potential activists; they define it for the rest of the movement, as well. And this is where young women encounter a new feminist vanguard.

Widely recognized feminist leaders such as Betty Friedan, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s articulated the goals and the spirit of the movement, have been left by the roadside. Though Friedan is still active, her moderate stance, combined with her willingness to criticize certain aspects of current feminism, has caused her to be ostracized by the movement. When thousands marched in an April 1992 abortion rights rally in Washington, D.C., Friedan was conspicuously absent—because she hadn’t been invited. ⁸ This slight reflects the depth of anti-Friedan sentiments in the movement. In Backlash, Faludi terms Friedan’s 1981 book, The Second Stage, the “tantrums of a fallen leader” because the cofounder of NOW dared to criticize some leading feminist trends. Tellingly, Faludi neglects to name much of what Friedan found to criticize. These days, Friedan concentrates on issues facing older women. Her book on aging, The Fountain of Age, was published in 1993.

Other early feminist leaders also seem to be directing their energies toward older women. Germaine Greer’s 1992 book, The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause, examines cultural attitudes surrounding menopause, and Gloria Steinem’s 1992 book, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, concentrates on inner health and spirituality—issues that women my age tend to see as secondary to economic and political inequality. This was demonstrated at a 1993 reading given by Steinem to promote the paperback edition of her book. The crowd was overwhelmingly white, in their late thirties and older, and decidedly middle-class to affluent. Women who are in the midst of the struggle to balance work, families, and relationships while barely avoiding poverty find Steinem’s happy pursuit of her inner child disconcerting. Many women are more worried about caring for their actual children first.

While a few—particularly Steinem—have stayed in the media spotlight, feminist leaders of the seventies have passed the torch. Articulating the goals and spirit of the movement in their place are a new crop of feminist leaders. These feminists, to put it mildly, are of a much different school of thought from that of Friedan and others who are now considered too moderate.

There is Robin Morgan, a sixties activist who once called for a military-style training camp where women would learn how to use firearms, poisons, and bugging equipment (“I myself do not believe men as a class will cede their vast power for the mere asking,” she wrote then ⁹ ). Today she condemns sexual freedoms as antifeminist. Morgan, an author who carries great weight in the movement, retired as the editor of Ms. in 1993.

There is Catharine MacKinnon, a feminist lawyer and activist who questions whether consensual sex between women and men can even exist. “Compare victims’ reports of rape with women’s reports of sex. They look a lot alike,” she expounds in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Yet MacKinnon often appears in the media as a feminist spokesperson—including TV talk shows such as Today and Donahue—and is considered a leader in both feminist circles and law. As a flattering October 6, 1991, cover story in the New York Times Magazine put it, MacKinnon is “the law’s most prominent feminist legal theorist.”

There is Andrea Dworkin, the antipornography activist, who writes, “Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said, yes please, yes hurry, yes more. ¹⁰ Dworkin’s view that all sex is rape—and that all men are potential rapists—is considered gospel by many in the movement, cited reverently in many an article and book, and taught to women’s studies students as mainstream feminism. Even Gloria Steinem recommends Dworkin heartily in Revolution from Within.

There are Mary Daly and other feminist spiritualists, who assert that feminists should practice religions based on female deities. These spiritualists have gained high visibility and influence on campuses and in women’s organizations, and a trip through the feminist section of most bookstores will uncover dozens of books dedicated to their theology, from The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas to Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics by a woman who calls herself Starhawk.

There is Susan Faludi, who attacks everyone from “improper” female movie producers to dissenting feminists as part of her theory of an all-encompassing backlash against womankind, and there is Naomi Wolf. Wolf became a spokesperson for the movement with her best-selling 1991 book, The Beauty Myth. While that book echoed Faludi’s theme that women are the hapless victims of men, Wolf dramatically changed her stance with her 1993 book, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century, coming out strongly against what she terms “victim feminism” and preaching a more inclusive, empowering brand of equality-based feminism.

And there are a slew of other feminist leaders, from those who would have us believe heterosexuality is the root of all oppression (Adrienne Rich), to those who warn that meat-eating is a masculine evil (Carol Adams), to those who promote sexist stereotypes of women as the gentler sex (Carol Gilligan), to those who dismiss lobbying for legislation as virtually pointless (Patricia Ireland). All of these feminists, along with others who espouse equally, if not more, extremist positions, have gained powerful positions as theorists, spokespersons, and leaders in the movement.

Some women familiar with the feminism of the seventies might be under the impression that these activists and writers are simply the movement’s radical segment. For women who are no longer active in the movement but still associate feminism with Friedan and Greer, they are. But for women who were children—or not even born—when Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the early leaders of the second wave of feminism are often little more than footnotes. For us, the first encounter with feminist thought is likely to be the work of these so-called radicals—and no wonder. They have taken over the voice of feminism. “Only five years ago Dworkin and MacKinnon were leaders of a feminist fringe,” wrote feminist author Wendy Kaminer for the October 1993 Atlantic Monthly. Today, however, “they’re leaders in the feminist mainstream.”

Kaminer is right. In the mid-eighties, activists such as Dworkin, though influential, were still considered part of the feminist fringe. But today, owing in part to an exclusion by the feminist vanguard of more moderate leaders, their voices dominate the movement. From campuses to local chapters of NOW, a woman encountering organized feminism will find that these activists are held up and even revered as leaders.

This is clear in introductory-level women’s studies classes, one place that young women often go to learn about feminism. In collecting women’s studies syllabi for this book, I was dismayed, but not surprised, to see how frequently Dworkin, MacKinnon, Daly, and Adrienne Rich are taught—often with little or nothing else offered to counter their views—and how rarely the courses dealt with such basic concerns as economic equality. And over and over again, I heard the stories: One woman told of being required to attend a speech by Andrea Dworkin for her women’s studies class. Upset by that writer’s virulent attack on men and sex, she tentatively questioned Dworkin’s views in class, only to be bitterly condemned as antifeminist and accused of endorsing rape. Young women walk away from the organized women’s movement thinking that feminism means agreeing with the extremist ideas espoused by these leaders and that disagreeing with them—no matter how much one supports equality—means you can’t call yourself a feminist. They are told in no uncertain terms that only the organization’s version of feminism is valid.

In the name of feminism, these extremists have embarked on a moral and spiritual crusade that would take us back to a time worse than our mother’s day—back to the nineteenth-century values of sexual morality, spiritual purity, and political helplessness. Through a combination of influential voices and unquestioned causes, current feminism would create the very same morally pure yet helplessly martyred role that women suffered from a century ago.

From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, women were held in place by an odd mixture of societal mores. The very virtues that the Victorians praised in a woman—moral refinement, chastity, sexlessness, and spiritual purity—were her damnation. Women were seen as paragons of virtue, and a woman’s place was to offer spiritual guidance to men by providing a shining example. Contact with such sinful things as voting, free speech, sexual freedoms, and political power could only harm their delicate and lovingly pure nature. Instead, a woman’s place was in the home and her voice in society was limited to issues of morality, such as condemning the evils of prostitution or drink.

It is said that Victorians placed women on a pedestal. They did—in fiction. In reality, this pedestal was a prison for the many middle-to upper-class women taught to revel in it: a dainty life indoors, a worship of illness, and an utter lack of recourse when abused by men. And this pedestal was a crushing weight to the lower-class working women who were most harmed by moral crusades such as those against prostitution, which were consistently used to take legal rights away from poor women. As the moral saviors of humanity, women were held to a much higher standard than men—and punished when they could not achieve it.

In pushing their varied causes, today’s feminists promote a similar vision of womanhood. Discussing the dramatic redefinitions of rape by current feminists, journalist Stephanie Gutmann wrote for the July 1990 Reason magazine: “An almost Victorian denial of complicity—of woman’s emotional stake in the sexual relationship—is a big feature of the date rape oeuvre. Man is entirely predatory; woman is entirely passive, a hapless victim, there by accident.” Author Cathy Young, looking at similar sweeping definitions of sexual harassment, questioned this victim-centered view in the January 25, 1993, New York Forum: “This new, hypersensitive woman is remarkably similar to the Victorian lady fainting at any mention of sex… . Once upon a time, this view of women as dainty creatures with chaste ears was considered anti-feminist.”

Today it is not—at least not by feminist leaders. Today’s feminists are remarkably similar to Victorians in significant ways, and not only in their vision of sexuality. This is clear through an examination of several different causes and trends in today’s movement that, if anything, are a complete reversal of the movement’s progress during the seventies.

This is the New Victorianism. And this is why women of my generation are abandoning the women’s movement.

One of the most powerful trends in New Victorianism is what can be called the feminist antiphallic campaign. Today’s feminists have created an overarching theory that blames male sexuality for the world’s woes. In short, they believe that heterosexual intercourse—as an inherently invasive and oppressive act—is the root cause of all oppression. This theory is espoused by such influential feminist writers as Adrienne Rich and Cheryl Clarke, taught to women’s studies students, and promoted in organizations such as local chapters of NOW. It is behind much of the antimale sentiment in the movement, and at its logical end it calls for separatism—the cessation of all intercourse between women and men, whether social or sexual. By naming the “institution” of heterosexuality as oppressive, current feminists promote the Victorian view that relationships between the sexes are by nature unequal and will always remain so.

In light of the evils of heterosexual sex, a powerful school of feminist thought teaches that only lesbian relationships are acceptable for enlightened feminists. This topic is often shrouded in silence because feminist leaders consistently condemn as homophobic those who would discuss it. But it is true in groups such as NOW, and it is also true in women’s studies literature and magazines. The June/July 1991 San Francisco NOW Times summed up this cause succinctly: “Embracing lesbianism, or lesbian-feminist theory, is pivotal to the feminist movement, which works to change society through the elimination of gender-defined roles … heterosexism and male supremacy reinforce one another in maintaining our oppression. Both must be eliminated for any woman to be free.”

This antimale sentiment has led to what amounts to victim mythology, a set of beliefs that promote women as the helpless victims of masculine oppression. This bleak and uninviting—certainly not empowering—view of the sexes has crept into much feminist activism and theory. It is the basis of Faludi’s thesis, when she names nearly every aspect of culture as part of an ambiguous yet devastatingly orchestrated war against women—a war in which men have consistently won and, since they are so conniving, will probably always win. And it has reached its apex in today’s antirape movement.

Using a handful of extreme statistics from flawed surveys, today’s feminists are pushing the idea that men are constantly out to rape women—and that women will constantly be raped. Sexual assault has been redefined to include whistling, touching, and sexual humor. “Other forms of sexual assault include … unwanted sexual comments, jokes, and gestures,” declares just one among numerous college acquaintance rape pamphlets. ¹¹ Even consensual sex has come to be considered rape, as it was in the nineteenth century. “Perhaps the wrong of rape has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse,” students attending “A History of Feminist Thought” at Duke University learn from an essay by Catharine MacKinnon, “when for women it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance.” ¹²

Fitting hand in glove with this view is the feminist fight against pornography. Stamping out sexually oriented expression is considered a top priority for many of today’s feminists. This goal is enthusiastically supported by leaders such as Robin Morgan and given mainstream credibility by others such as Gloria Steinem. It has become an issue for organizations such as NOW, and the fight extends to other countries, including England and Germany. Young women, particularly on campuses, are told that to be a good feminist they must support the censorship of all varieties of sexual material—from Playboy to even lesbian erotic literature—because such material will inevitably cause violence against women. By blaming sexual material for sexual violence, current feminists invoke the Victorian-era belief that sexuality is inherently evil and any display of it must be squashed.

The antiphallic campaign’s attack on heterosexuality, victim mythology’s sweeping redefinitions of rape, and the effort to censor sexual material combine to create a repressive sexual morality that judges women’s personal lives according to strict Victorianesque standards. We are told what is proper for us to read, whom we can sleep with, and even when we are violated. While some aspects of current feminism have arisen out of a desire to apply a quick fix to complex problems—such as believing that banning sexual material will stop rape, though rape existed long before Playboy—at their heart these are simply recycled old morals that preach shame and repression. Introductory women’s studies students at the University of Utah, for example, are told that enjoying sex is shameful: “Internalizing the devaluation of self is fundamental in being the screwed one, the slut, the whore, celebrating it, not rebelling one bit, female complicity does not even have the dignity or the insight of world-class misogyny. …” ¹³ Yes, it is the twentieth century, and the writer is feminist leader Andrea Dworkin. And it would seem that, once again, women who would dare enjoy sex are no more than complicit whores and sluts.

The feminist sexual-purity crusades would have appalled our mothers as they fought for liberation in the sixties and seventies. It appalls their daughters, as well.

But these are not the only causes in feminism to ape the moral order of the nineteenth century. A new focus on spiritual and moral purity has pervaded the feminist movement. Major feminist schools of thought extoll an ideal of womanhood that rivals the best efforts of the Victorians to restrict our public role to nothing more than that of the shining example.

One of these is the growing feminist infatuation with goddess worship. Extrapolating freely from a few prehistoric artifacts, New Victorians have created a romanticized historical period where women not only ruled societies but were revered as deities. Ignoring all evidence that life at the time was not exactly Disneyland, feminists teach that these matriarchies were utopias. “Life was celebrated in all rituals, there were no blood sacrifices, or violence. Cultures were nurturing, non-violent, dependent upon each other and therefore respectful of each other’s needs,” asserts a NOW flyer entitled “Goddess cultural beliefs,” which was handed out to women at a 1993 International Women’s Day conference. “There were no weapons of violence, no fortifications surrounding goddess communities and no warfare.” Only by returning to the worship of the goddess, this school of thought contends, can women find a spiritual balance and truly become feminists.

Goddess worship focuses on modern interpretations of witchcraft and magic, resulting in the popularity of all-women “covens,” special magical ceremonies for different phases of the moon, casting spells, and chanting. Because it is often seen as just another form of New Age spirituality, many commentators offhandedly dismiss this religion. Yet young women encounter it constantly, from campuses, to feminist magazines, to major organizations. Young women attending women’s studies courses are often assigned material by leading feminist spiritualist Mary Daly, whose creative use of language leads to convoluted prose such this example from Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism: “This Spinster-Spooking is also re-calling/remembering/re-claiming our Witches’ power to cast spells, to charm, to overcome prestige with prestidigitation, to cast glamours, to employ occult grammar, to enthrall, to bewitch.” This is a required text for students attending “The Roots of Feminism” at Harvard.

The emphasis on promoting matriarchal religious beliefs has led to the increasing popularity of a related feminist trend: feminism as a utopian vision. This vision places blame for all problems in the world—from violence to the shrinking ozone layer—on the “patriarchy,” a sweeping view of culture that labels all male-created systems as evil. The key to women’s liberation is said to lie in overthrowing these systems and substituting an ill-defined, feminist-inspired matriarchy. Given that such things as free markets, capitalism, democracy, education, all forms of hierarchy, meat-eating, and objective thinking have all been termed by current feminists as corrupt aspects of the patriarchal culture, this vision is absurdly unattainable. Yet it is has become a litmus test for young feminists—anyone who would work within the patriarchal system need not apply.

The feminist utopian vision is based on the belief that women are morally, ethically, and spiritually different from men—and, by extension, superior to them. From leading authors such as Carol Gilligan, who makes sweeping claims that women have a different “moral” voice from men, one that makes us less violent and more caring, to feminist commentators in the 1992 elections who were often far more critical of female candidates than male (a situation that analysts believe contributed to Geraldine Ferraro’s defeat in New York’s Democratic U.S. Senate primaries), this view permeates feminist thought. In pushing this vision, feminists have abandoned the idea that women and men should be treated equally, endorsing the Victorian view of women as the guardians of morality, alone responsible for making the world a more decent place.

Another component of the feminist moral pedestal is what can be termed the “passive voice.” Following goddess worship and strictures against working within the “patriarchy,” today’s feminists have changed the focus from political reform to that of advocating an entirely passive means of enacting change. From NOW’s refusal to work within the system to Steinem’s claims that women should use meditation to gain equality, this ineffectiveness has infected feminist activism. Women joining feminist organizations often find more energy is directed toward sensitivity training, consciousness-raising, and group prayers than to pursing specific goals. The adoption of a cosmic feminist “transformative” philosophy has seen the movement diversified into many areas that have nothing to do with women’s rights, such as “ecofeminism.” And while widely accepted feminist literature easily identifies the enemy—from the backlash to the patriarchy—the all-powerful nature of the conspiracy we face leaves us no effective response. Instead, feminist writers offer us suggestions that tend to be vague, inner-directed, or just plain silly. “Transformation is necessary to save ourselves, sentient life on the planet, the biosphere itself,” Robin Morgan writes in her 1989 book, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism. “Transformation requires more than mere seeing; it requires all forms of perception, including remembering, imagining, intuiting, hallucinating, dreaming, and empathizing.” If Morgan thinks that hallucinating and dreaming are going to help women, she must be practicing what she preaches.

But for all their inane vagueness, these feminist spiritual beliefs are ingrained in the places young women encounter feminism. At Indiana University at Bloomington, for example, students curious about the movement might sign up for “Women in Culture: Introduction to Women’s Studies.” They are assigned the work of feminist spiritualists Starhawk and Merlin Stone. “Witchcraft as Goddess Religion” by Starhawk is popular in women’s studies departments. “My own covens are based on the Faery Tradition, which goes back to the Little People of Stone Age Britain, but we believe in creating our own rituals, which reflect our needs and insights of today,” she writes.

It’s easy to treat this focus on hocus-pocus lightly, but it doesn’t stop women of my generation from dismissing outright the feminist title. Together, Goddess worship with its ahistorical premise and New Age trappings; the feminist utopian vision, with its restriction of women to exacting moral roles; and the passive voice’s promotion of inertia trumpeted as transformation have changed the feminist agenda from a pursuit for social equality to the preaching of an orthodoxy that alienates most young women. The message they give us is that feminism is no longer concerned with women’s rights. Instead, feminism would have us accept a doctrine that dictates the most personal aspects of our lives—including religious, spiritual, and moral beliefs—while limiting our actions to ineffective romantic tripe.

From male bashing to goddess worship, each leading feminist cause today alienates women. Many heterosexual women—as well as gay—balk at the adoption of lesbianism as a purely political action, large numbers of liberal women are turned off by the campaign to censor sexual material, and many religious women find the conversation tactics of the feminist spiritualists appalling. All of these trends have distanced huge blocs of potential activists from the movement. Independently, each do enough damage to the movement.

Combined, they have almost killed feminism. It is their collective force that has redefined the meaning of feminism for women of all ages. And it is their sum total that has caused women of my generation to abandon the movement, leaving it without troops and without a future.

This is the danger of New Victorianism. This feminist promotion of repressive sexual morality and spiritual passivity promulgates the vision of an ideal woman, sexually pure and helpless yet somehow morally superior to men and all male-influenced institutions. The leading causes in feminism today are all morally driven. The influential voices are entirely passive, speaking always in the language of victim mythology or inner transformation.

And so the women’s movement has come to duplicate Victorianism in all its repressive glory: the woman revered on the pedestal, charged with keeping society’s moral order yet politically powerless—and perpetually martyred.

New Victorianism is not some sort of sinister conspiracy. Leading feminists didn’t sit down at a table and decide, cackling, to create a movement geared toward promoting new versions of nineteenth-century ideals. Each of these contributing causes—often born out of different segments of the movement—gained popularity in the 1980s due to several factors. The failure to pass the ERA left many feminists burned out with regard to political activism and eager to find new goals to take its place, something moral crusades against men, pornography, and sex promised to do. The defeat also saw many mainstream women abandon the movement, leaving extremists to speak on behalf of feminism. This ensured that even more women would reject the feminist label and the extremists would gain even more power, driving more women away—a deadly cycle.

And each of these causes fostered the popularity of the others because they work together so well. The effort to censor sexual material, for example, fits perfectly with the utopian vision’s claim of female moral superiority. And the fact that this effort to ban offensive pictures has yet to accomplish anything concrete is fully accepted under the concept of the passive voice. There is no contradiction between “all sex is rape” theories and matriarchal teachings, since both are based on the idea that men are inferior, morally demented predators. In fact, there is considerable crossover between feminist leaders in all of these causes, from Mary Daly redefining rape to lesbian separatists promoting goddess worship.

What women of all ages want out of organized women’s movement is simple: They want it to champion political reforms and social change that will address their needs and put them on an equal footing with men. In the 1989 Time poll, for example, 94 percent of the women surveyed felt equal pay was a crucial issue, followed closely by children’s day care at 90 percent. Other high-ranking issues were rape, maternity leave, job discrimination, abortion, and sexual freedom.

Asked to select the most important goal for the women’s movement, these women chose “helping women balance work and family” as number one. Second was “getting government funding for programs such as child care and maternity leave.” In Betty Friedan’s words—as scribbled on a napkin in 1966 in a now-famous account—women want feminism “to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of American society, now, full equality for women, in fully equal partnership with men.” It’s been nearly thirty years since these words became the NOW statement of purpose, and the issues feminists identified then as stumbling blocks to full equality—child care, job opportunities, and reproductive rights—remain women’s major concerns today.

For young women, these issues are crucial. We are much poorer than our mother’s generation. In the December 1992 Atlantic Monthly article entitled “The New Generation Gap,” authors Neil Howe and William Strauss report that over the past twenty years the poverty rate for young families has more than doubled and the median real income has fallen by one-third. In short, while older people have prospered, my generation has “fallen off a cliff.” And while women age twenty-four to thirty-five now earn eighty cents for every dollar earned by men (up from sixty-nine cents in 1980), that eighty cents is harder to find as society comes to depend on a low-paid service economy. ¹⁴

The result of this declining economic situation is that women of my generation are caught in a struggle to raise their children, complete college educations (if they are lucky), and find jobs while facing an often bleak and uncertain future. For us, a seemingly simple matter such as child care, health insurance, or access to birth control and abortion can decide that future.

There are feminist organizations that speak to women’s actual concerns. The National Abortion Rights Action League remains an effective advocate for reproductive rights. Emily’s List, a political fund-raising organization that finances women’s campaigns, has seen its contributor list grow to 63,000 since 1985—donating $6.2 million to Democratic women running for office in 1992 alone. These organizations, among a few others, continue to advance women’s rights and equality while remaining respectful of women’s personal lives and choices.

But for young women—and many older women, as well—these organizations are not what represent the concept of feminism. This should not be surprising. NARAL’s Campus Organizing Project—a national network for students organizing for abortion rights—did well in 1992, putting out a campus newsletter and forming coalitions among over four hundred pro-choice campus groups. But activism since Clinton’s election is flagging, and on many campuses, NARAL is simply not highly visible. While Emily’s List has gotten some media attention, its outreach is naturally aimed at those with the means to contribute.

And while NOW continues to devote some of its energy to political lobbying and funding campaigns for female politicians, the organization has been fragmented by New Victorianism. This is especially true on the local level, where young women are likely to encounter NOW in the form of chapter newspapers and community organizing. Reading a few issues of the Bend, Oregon, NOW newspaper, for example, could easily lead a woman to think that NOW stands for practicing modern witchcraft (“Halloween a holiday for witches other than traditional”), accepting goddess theories (“In Memory of Her: Honoring the goddess”), becoming a vegetarian (“What we eat will shape our environment”), and, of course, environmental causes (“Ancient Forest Adventures: Eco-feminism at its Best”).

In almost every place young women encounter feminism, New Victorianism reigns. A married student may sign up for a women’s studies class, only to be told that heterosexuality is oppressive. A politically liberal woman may attend an anti-sexual violence seminar, only to find the subject is really censoring free speech. A young Jewish woman may attend a local feminist organization meeting, only to find the night begins with a group prayer to invoke the goddess. A woman who couldn’t afford college may pick up a feminist magazine, only to open the pages to article after article of obscure academic theory on subjects such as the “patriarchy” and “phallocentric” language. And, as happens so often, a young woman may meet with friends over coffee to discuss what they know and what they’ve heard concerning male students attacked in women’s studies classes, organizations that promote strict ideologies, wacky theories that don’t apply to their lives, and feminist activists they’ve met who, well, seem to hate men.

These are experiences that define feminism in personal and striking ways for women. They have far more impact than distant-sounding newspaper accounts about NARAL or inaccurate portrayals of feminism by commentators who seem stuck in the seventies.

And yet these experiences have been shrouded in silence. Using the cry of “backlash” whenever current feminist trends are criticized, New Victorians have effectively muzzled discussion within the movement—and, it would seem, outside the movement. While articles may appear on “The Year of the Woman,” Hillary Rodham Clinton, or sexual harassment in the U.S. Senate, the mainstream press seldom looks critically at what is happening in the women’s movement itself. Scant attention is paid to examining prominent causes, from redefinitions of rape to goddess worship. This silence does little to mitigate their growing power and much to perpetuate the continuing alienation of women from the movement. The message that women receive from feminist leaders and, by default, the mainstream media is that feminism is an all-or-nothing proposition. Either one accepts New Victorianism without question or one eschews the feminist title.

Most women’s reaction—if one is to believe the polls—is clear. And if New Victorianism continues to flourish, the legacy it leaves behind will mirror the sad history of another women’s movement. In the late nineteenth century, the suffragist movement became entangled in a spiritual- and sexual-purity crusade, with feminist leaders of the day speaking out against sexual freedoms, birth control, promiscuity, sexual literature, and the evils of male sexuality. Birth control, for example, was condemned because feminist leaders thought it would turn women into “prostitutes.” The result was not only repressive social policies that served conservatives; by the late 1920s, the movement had alienated an entire generation of young women. The first wave of feminism soon died.

Unless we can reclaim feminism, this women’s movement will die, too.

The success of the women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was due largely to the recognition that political, economic, reproductive, and sexual inequalities all needed to be addressed. As long as women were subjected to more restrictions than men based on the belief that women needed “protection,” women’s efforts to enter the workforce and politics would be difficult. As long as women were excluded from male systems, efforts to dismantle confining ideals of femininity would be nearly impossible. The second wave of feminism took a powerful step on behalf of all women when it declared that without equal treatment in both the public and private spheres—from education to reproduction—women were simply never going to gain true equality and parity in society.

But this movement also appears to be coming to a premature end—because feminism today, especially to women of my generation, has little in common with what it stood for in the sixties and seventies. In fact, it looks more like the feminism of the 1800s.

We must toss New Victorianism in the rubbish can and return to a movement that addresses women’s concerns while respecting their personal lives and empowering their choices; a movement that prioritizes issues as women themselves prioritize them: child care, political parity, economic opportunity, abortion rights, and birth control; a movement that espouses the feminist ideal that our mothers taught us: that women can and should be equal and in full partnership with men, working together, both free from restraining sex roles—not tomorrow or the day after, but now.

We must return to a movement that, quite simply, represents the majority of women.

I was born in 1967, and I grew up believing fully in equality. I believe that I should earn equal pay. I believe I should have the same employment and educational opportunities as men. I believe in the right to abortion, and I believe that birth control should be accessible to all. I believe that all women and men should get paid family leave and that all families should have affordable child care and health insurance. I believe that women have a right to live free from discrimination, regardless of their sexual orientation. I believe that women have a right to bring rape charges without their personal histories being used against them. I believe that women have a right to work in environments free of sexual harassment and I believe that sex offenders should be severely punished. I believe in these rights, and many more.

And I believe all of these things are possible.

Throughout this book, you will hear voices from other women of my generation. These women come from a variety of backgrounds—from struggling young mothers, to students, to women in the workforce—but despite a tremendous diversity in their lives, all believe in women’s rights. Yet they almost all refuse to call themselves feminists. I sought these women out in a variety of places, and I make no claim that I conducted anything even remotely resembling a scientific survey. But I do think that these women speak for many.

All of these women, as well as hundreds of thousands of others, are feminists. Women’s rights are my generation’s heritage and we’ve taken their promise to heart.

And now we need to take back feminism.