Renee Randazzo April 26, 1999 Revised Paper Love Within Feminism
The second wave of feminism was ricxh with both activism and theory. While the women involved successfully advanced the study of women's oppression and the recognition of women's rights, they also discovered some areas of fundamental disagreement within the feminist movement itself. Radical feminists strove to illuminate the extent to which gendered behavior is socially acquired, as cultural feminists aspired to valorize femininity. As Alice Echols claims in Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, "radical feminists were typically social constructionists who wanted to render gender irrelevant, while cultural feminists were generally essentialists who sought to celebrate femaleness" (pg. 6). Echols goes on in her study to discuss the emergence of lesbianism within the radical feminist movement. Politicizing their personal lives, some radical feminists practiced lesbianism as a rejection of women's dependence on men. But also, as women gained strength in their untiy, they began to appreciate the beauty they saw in one another. This ability of radical feminsits to love one another, ironically, reflects the celebration of femaleness that Echols attributes only to cultural feminists. In this paper, I intend to investigate the implications of this love.
With theorists like Jane Alpert, cultural feminism sought to increase women's influence by valuing "femininity," failing to analyze the origin and function of this notion. For example, in Alpert's writing, she readily accepts the association of women with nature, stating that "women are beginning to rise in response to the Mother's call to save her planet" (pg. 251). Here, she neglects to contemplate the fact that the dicholtomies of man versus nature and man versus woman underlie the origin of all oppression. However, Alpert's passionate faith in the strength of womanhood is inspiring and worthy of consideration when put into perspective. Her notion of the empowerment of motherhood foreshadows the psychological hypothesis of Nancy Chodrow, as I'll explore later. The commemoration of womanhood, as advocated by cultural feminists, provides the current of determination that plays a large part in motivating feminism.
Radical feminists worked to deconstruct the components of "femininity," claiming that in the absence of social and cultural traditions, the qualities associated with men and women would actually be unrelated to gender. At the same time, lesbianism emerged as a crucial feminist issue, dividing feminsits within the radical movement. For many, sex with women was more than a political statement, it was a sincere expression of love. Judith Brown wrote:
Women who turn away from men for a time, to look to each other for political relationships, movement thinking, and an organizational milieu, are bound to see here and there someone they love. The slightest measure of female liberation will bring with it an ability to perceive again the precise qualities and degree of responsivity that inhere in other women. (pg. 212)
Lesbian feminists increasingly observed the intensity and authenticity of the lesbian experience, as described here. What was "sexuality" with men became "sensuality" with women, as theorists like Sue Katz claimed in her description of the freedom of lesbianism. "The sensuality I feel has transformed my politics, has solved the contradiction between my mind and my body because the energies of our feminist revolution are the same as the energies of our love for women." (pg. 218). In statements like this one, appreciation for femaleness, while usually assocaited with cultural feminsim, is clearly inherent in radical feminism.
The hesitance to acknowledge love for women as the basis for feminism reflects the fear of association with essentialism. To value the qualities of one gender seems to imply an ontological difference between them. Many radical feminists insisted that their goal was understanding social construction, and that their message would be weakened by the advocacy of true femininity, although, as I have shown, the underlying love manifested through lesbian experimentation. Nancy Chodrow, in "Psychology of the Family," presents a hypothesis that may explain women's tendency to esteem one onther. Women as mothers, she states, provide the primary intimate relationship for all human beings. It is this untiy that people seek to reacquire through romance. She explains,
…The return to the experience of primary love- the possibility of regressing to the infantile stage of a sense of oneness, no reality testing, and a tranquil sense of well being in which all needs are satisfied- is the main goal of adult sexual relationships… Women can fulfill this need better than men because a sexual relationship with a woman reproduces the early situation more completely and is more completely a return to the mother. (Chodrow, pg. 184) The argument that people seek to recreate the safety of infancy helps to explain the cultural feminist notion of motherhood as empowering, as cited earlier by Alpert. Additionally, this idea may explain the radical movement's metamorphosis toward lesbianism.
This becomes complicated, because the argument that women make better lovers, in the oedipal sense, that is, seems to imply an unalterable distinction between the genders. Women will remain the ones with whom the child is initially inseperable, as biology dictates. The significant point to consider, though, is one expressed by Gayle Rubin in "The Traffic in Women," namely that "cultural evolution provides us with the opportunity to seize control of the means of sexuality, reproduction, and socialization, and to make conscious decisions to liberate human sexual life from the archaic relationships which deform it" (pg. 52). In other words, psychology is not essentially determined by biology, but rather depends on the social ideology that shapes our fabrication of parenthood. Parenthood is socially constructed to be woman-centered. This, as radical feminists contend, can be culturally revised to include fatherhood as a primary relationship. Through widespread racognition of out power to change, the human species has the potential to supercede biology, but first we must recognize the implications in our own upbringing, even within the feminist movement.
To summarize, the capacity of women to love one another results from early psychological development, which was shaped by social ideology. The appreciation for femaleness is expressed by cultural feminists through written theory, and by radical feminists through meaningful physical experimentation. I believe the camraderie of women provides the passion and unity necessary to advance to feminist movement. It is quite an irony that parenthood, the same institution that has oppressed women throughout history, has also afforded us with the key to social modification, a fully developed sense of love.