The Seventies by Bruce J. Schulman

Author:Bruce J. Schulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Cultural Feminism and the Reassertion of Difference

“After years of trying to explain things to men and to change the outside world,” movement experiences at last “gave birth to sisterhood.” Exhausted “from dredging up facts and arguments for men whom we had previously thought advanced and intelligent,” Gloria Steinem explained, “we make another simple discovery. Women understand. We may share experiences, make jokes, paint pictures, and describe humiliations that mean nothing to men, but women understand. ” These “deep and personal connections of women,” Steinem reflected in the pages of Ms., “often ignore barriers of age, economics, worldly experience, race, culture—all the barriers that, in male or mixed society, seem so difficult to cross.” She no longer felt strange by herself or with a group of women in public. “I feel just fine. I am continually moved to discover I have sisters.” 43

By 1973, a wide network of feminist organizations and institutions had emerged: women’s clinics, credit unions, rape crisis centers, bookstores, newspapers, book publishers, and athletic leagues. Activists had established few of these institutions with cultural feminist objectives. They had just formed spontaneously, out of the immediate needs of the women’s movement. Few, if any, self-consciously sought to serve a specifically female culture or to construct an explicitly feminist set of separate, alternative institutions.

But by the mid-1970s, the sheer weight and influence of women’s institutions had prompted a rethinking of their origins and missions. In 1970, there were no battered women’s shelters in the United States, no rape crisis centers, no services for displaced homemakers. By the mid-1980s, literally thousands of institutions dedicated to women’s needs dotted the landscape. In 1970, American universities offered fewer than twenty courses about women; two decades later, there were more than 30,000 on the undergraduate level alone. 44

This explosion of feminist scholarship and female institutions reflected not just an expansion of the women’s movement but a reorientation of it. Early Seventies radical feminist publications had titles like “It Ain’t Me Babe,”“Tooth ’n Nail,” “off our backs,” “No More Fun and Games.” Late Seventies cultural feminist publications revealed a new emphasis with names like Amazon Quarterly, Womanspirit, and Chrysalis: A Magazine ofWomen’s Culture. 45

Cultural feminism accepted gender difference, but without a sense of hierarchy or inferiority. “Women have been socialized to be passive,” one publication explained.“But they also learned to be nurturing, affiliative, cooperative, in short endowed with more truly human qualities than men are currently socialized with.” Cultural feminism pointed not toward mere equality but toward a feminist reconstruction of American society based on gender differences. 46

Instead of radical egalitarianism, such as Shulamith Firestone’s insistence that women’s liberation required the abolition of pregnancy and motherhood, feminists increasingly stressed the positive virtues of female biology and women’s culture. Women’s health advocates campaigned for breastfeeding and natural childbirth; they redefined pregnancy as a gift rather than a burden. The findings of psychologists Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan proved particularly influential in this reassertion of difference. According to Chodorow, girls and boys followed vastly different paths of individuation and identity formation.

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