The Feminist Promise by Christine Stansell

Author:Christine Stansell [Stansell, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-916-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

Discoveries were data for a burgeoning ethnography of the gendered self, a kind of top-to-bottom, inside-out, and outside-in account of femininity that developed at a breakneck pace. The Second Sex was a text of conversion. “Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex opened doors for me!” a self-described grandmother, an avowed convert, chirped to the women’s liberation monthly Off Our Backs in 1972.59 Almost certainly, more women knew about the book or owned the book than read the book. As A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had been in the nineteenth century, the volume was as much a flag that women planted to claim a position as it was a text absorbed chapter and verse. But its core insight, that women are made not born, was a reagent that worked its way through the tissue of women’s lives, dissolving norms and assumptions that had only a short time before seemed facts of nature.

The making of women seemed bound up with the business of men: that is, the labor and thought women devoted to attracting, pleasing, and mollifying men, bearing and raising their children, tending their domestic, sexual, and psychological needs. While the business of men clearly involved fathers and male authorities, the stress was on peers—lovers, husbands, workmates, roommates, political comrades. It was above all the fictive brother-friends whom consciousness-raising exposed as woefully inadequate. Whereas liberals made the inclusion of men a point of pride, radicals sought to jettison the desire for male companionship as foolish and self-destructive.

The phantom of the man-who-would-understand,

the lost brother, the twin—

for him did we leave our mothers,

deny our sisters, over and over?

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