Jocelyn Crawley on Shulamith Firestone’s “The Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.A.: New View”
As women continue to be raped and murdered all over the world, many individuals find themselves wondering why society has not progressed in a manner that is confluent with the erosion of patriarchal principles which make this sex-based violence prevalent. Yet many if not most of these individuals fail to subject patriarchy to the intense scrutiny that would be required to fully grasp why it remains such an operative, effective, acceptable modality. As such, they fail to understand the multifarious nature of patriarchy and how its constituent parts work conjointly for the purpose of precluding women from attaining real material power. If one were to view male supremacy this way, she might grasp the intersections of the personal and political such that awareness of the lack of political power women have precipitates consciousness of their lack of personal power. This abstract principle can be understood concretely, for example, in a real-world schema in which women typically don’t create and modify laws regarding domestic violence (political) such that the perpetuity of men hitting and raping their female intimate partners in homes and apartments remains a prevalent aspect of daily life (personal) for women. Unlike many, Shulamith Firestone does not commit the egregious error of maintaining an uncritical, amorphous understanding of patriarchy which culminates in befuddlement regarding why its ugly manifestations (including femicide) get to continue manifesting in a plethora of deleterious ways. Rather, Firestone devoted much of her intellectual life to analyzing and understanding patriarchal ideology and praxis in terms of its multiple nefarious parts and as an egregious whole. In “The Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.A.: New View,” for example, Firestone pays acute attention to patriarchy’s manifestations within the ideological and political realms. Here is an overview of the text:
Firestone begins her essay by explaining the dominant, normative attitudes towards feminism: ignorance and disdain. Specifically, Firestone notes that being called feminist is an “insult” and many young women who are otherwise radical in their politics are ashamed to identify with the early women’s movement. These attitudes are problematic and obscure the reality that feminist thought and praxis is continually, consistently suppressed for the purpose of perpetuating patriarchy. That feminist consciousness is indeed suppressed becomes evident when Firestone informs the reader that “Anyone who has ever researched the subject knows how little is available, and how superficial, slanted, or downright false is the existing information” (1). This assertion leads to the primary (and entirely accurate) argument that Firestone makes in the essay, which is that the liberation of women (oftentimes referred to as women’s rights) carries with it “dynamite revolutionary potential” (1) and thereby constitutes a substantive threat to the patriarchal order.
To defend her claim, Firestone asserts that the early women’s movement was radical. This is the case on the grounds that the Movement was ideologically opposed to the family, the church, and the law insomuch as these institutions (and the individuals embedded in them) upheld the patriarchy by positioning men in terms of hierarchical leadership in which they held power over women and children. Perhaps what is truly radical about the WRM becomes evident through Firestone’s assertion that “From the beginning the WRM identified itself with women in the working class” (2). As such, the movement was not geared towards amassing privilege (as was the pseudo-feminist “work” of liberal feminists who seek to share power with men and thereby identify with power rather than challenging the legitimacy of patriarchal conceptions of power insomuch as they are predicated on emotional infancy, self-alienation, and egocentric modalities). That the WRM indeed functioned as a radical movement in terms of its dissociation with power and identification with the oppressed becomes evident when Firestone informs the reader that “the meager funds that kept the WRM going were not from wealthy male donors, you can be sure, but were the nickels and dimes of housewives and laundresses” (1). Here, radicals can identify a common pattern that is important and operative in capitalist patriarchy: those in power seek to avoid financially supporting radical social movements that would truly challenge its power by asserting that its premises and structures (male domination) are oppressive, harmful, and–as many people are now coming to understand–illogical. People with power dissociating from people who lack it is oftentimes a sign that members of the latter group are not conforming to the principles of domination and submission that give shape and substance to the patriarchal hierarchical structure but are rather identifying themselves with a politics of resistance to this framework while aligning themselves with individuals (here, poor and working class women) who have been victimized by it. Thus the lack of support that the WRM received from wealthy males furthers the reader’s awareness of its radical import and identification.
As Firestone’s analysis of the WRM continues, she asks an important question regarding women’s history which helps us grasp why the patriarchal powers (wealthy men, especially white ones) keep women’s minds embedded in the fictive realms so that they cannot grapple with and process the reality of sex-based oppression that is unfolding in their daily lives. She asks: “Why are little girls familiar with Louisa May Alcott rather than Margaret Fuller, with Scarlett O’Hara and not Myrtilla Miner, with Florence Nightingale and not Fanny Wright?” (2). I have an answer and it pertains to a relatively normative assertion within truly radical feminist communities: the patriarchy wants to occupy female headspace with prototypical, heteronormative narratives so that their minds are continually concentrating on being deeply inundated in the slavery that is romantic and sexual attachment to men–but without processing the systems of relations as slavery. This way, women have little to no psychic space necessary to contemplate the reality that is unfolding all around them–whether that includes the sexual war against women that transpires in terms of rape and sexual assault or the other less significant yet still substantive forms of abuse and oppression such as the inability to vote and unequal pay for equal work. In saying this, I am also suggesting something else: men know that if women begin to seriously scrutinize and accurately comprehend their condition as slaves to men, a revolution might transpire. It is this–revolution–that men fear. Firestone draws awareness to this upon noting that women’s history is hushed up because “a real woman’s movement is dangerous” (2). The threat of the WRM was that it could “tear the country apart” (3), and that is the mark of a truly radical ideology and praxis–the refusal to acquiesce and assimilate to the patriarchal power structure and ongoing, adamant insistence on its obliteration/annihilation.
Firestone’s assessments regarding the truly radical nature of the WRM (also known as the first wave of American feminism) unfolds in context of her analysis of why the movement failed. Herein lies some ambiguity. What does a radical mean upon asserting that a revolutionary movement failed? Let’s disambiguate. I would suggest she means that its intended end objective–full and complete liberation from male tyranny–was not realized. Firestone’s contextualization of failure unfolds with this concept in mind when she asserts that “For what is the vote worth finally if the voter is manipulated? Every husband knows he’s not losing a vote, but gaining one” (5) such that women now have a “puppet political position” (5). To paraphrase, women gaining the right to vote did not liberate female people from male. Rather, it further inundated them in male supremacy by ensuring that men could vampirically appropriate female votes to represent male interests. Thus all of the effort and energy radical women put into the primary cause of the WRM (voting) failed to engender the desired outcome of ending the form of male supremacy that was evident and operative through the exclusion of women from the political realm. Rather than operating as a medium through which women came to operate in an autonomous, independent fashion, the vote simply became another mechanism through which men reified the patriarchal pattern of female people simply replicating and robotically repeating the things males choose to think and feel politically.
Additionally, Firestone argues that the WRM failed because the energy poured into granting women the right to vote precluded women from recognizing and responding to other forms of oppression they were experiencing in terms of capitalism, racism, government, the church and the family, and the law. Firestone notes that “the monster of the vote had swallowed everything else” (5) and–as mentioned earlier–this granting of the vote changed little to nothing as the heteropatriarchal unit remained intact and women (wives) voted in ideological continuity with their men (husbands).
Although Firestone makes many other important assertions regarding the suppression of radical feminist consciousness, I want to conclude with the one I find most significant–the mistake of radicals attempting to work with moderates and conservatives. I have personally felt that this is a substantive problem and that radicals need to stop working with individuals who think that subtle or salient forms of assimilation with the power structure is an acceptable or appropriate way to grapple with the oppressor. Firestone draws attention to this reality upon noting that “Stanton and Anthony made a mistake merging their radical feminist National Suffrage Association with the timid provincial American Suffrage Association” (8). The problem here was that the National Suffrage Association wanted the vote as a vehicle to broader ends and consciousness regarding other rights for women but the American Suffrage Association was a single issue organization that concentrated its energies on suffrage (thereby obscuring the reality of all of the other issues Firestone explicates and which real radical feminists are still grappling with a century later).
In conclusion, Firestone is a real radical and this fact becomes evident through her subjecting a particular period of patriarchy–the era when women gained the right to vote–to intense scrutiny. Recently, I have become increasingly attentive to what I now perceive as an intuitive truth: truly revolutionary individuals pay attention to (study, scrutinize carefully) patriarchy to attain a deeper understanding of how it works and why it keeps working. This sustained attention is the first step to liberation from male supremacy.
Works Cited
Firestone, Shulamith. “The Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.A.: New View.”