Reality Isn't What It Used to Be by Walter Truet Anderson

Author:Walter Truet Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

TO BE SOMEBODY FEMALE

The world’s largest course of constructivist therapy, the women’s movement, has been under way for some decades now and shows no signs of nearing termination. If it ever does finish its work, no civilization in the world will be the same.

The women’s movement—I think more than any political effort in our time—is an attempt to change not only laws and power structures, but social constructions of reality. And some of its activities, like consciousness-raising groups, were innovative mixtures of politics and psychotherapy, based on understanding the linkage between personal and political change.

It is hardly surprising, then, that women are deeply involved in every aspect of the postmodern dialogue. As psychologist Maureen O’Hara puts it: “When every ‘system of truth’ we’ve ever known, from the oldest myth to modern medical science, has concluded that women are biologically, intellectually and morally inferior, that we are at once dangerous and naturally nurturing, that we are unsuitable for public office and should be protected and subjugated—then you bet feminists have a stake in conversations about ‘truth’ and ‘reality.’”11

The questions feminists raise go to the very heart of our most commonplace assumptions about human life. Isn’t gender itself another one of our dreamed-up categories, built on doubtful assumptions and maintained by a fuzzy and culturally defined boundary that we try to persuade ourselves is a clear and “natural” one? Don’t different societies have entirely different ideas of what it means to be male or female? Doesn’t the language embody biased statements about the difference between the sexes, beginning with the words “man” and “woman,” with woman (from wifman) defined only as a sort of annex to the man? “Such is the dilemma of the woman speaker,” writes philosopher Andrea Nye: “That the categories of patriarchal language distort what she might like to say….”12

So women have produced their own works in the sociology of knowledge, in cognitive science, and in critical studies—and major figures in the postmodern intellectual world such as the French semiotician Julia Kristeva. They have challenged the gender assumptions and inequities built deeply into every social construction of reality, and they have proposed alternate realities.

Alternate realities, of course, because if old beliefs about womanhood and ways of being female are to be dispensed with, then new beliefs and new ways are called for. And some women recognize that the new beliefs and new ways are matters of choice. They see the task as not merely discovering the true femininity that lies beneath the false patriarchal construct, but creating something that has not existed before, not even in the never-never land of prehistory.

The women’s movement has its own versions of the objectivist-constructivist polarization—more than one version. One such polarization, the one that has been around the longest and gotten the most publicity, is between female traditionalists, such as Phyllis Schlafly, who defend the old female roles and “women’s lib” feminists who think it is time for some new ones. Another polarization is between women who want to discover a new “essential

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