Contemporary Western European Feminism (RLE Feminist Theory)

Gisela Kaplan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136195037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary Western European Feminism is a ground-breaking history of feminism. Gisela Kaplan invites a critical analysis of current ideas, terms and assumptions about our modern world.

Written confidently and with compassion, this is the story of a long revolution that has set out to change predominant attitudes and transform value hierarchies and human lifestyles. By outlining the postwar histories of individual countries Kaplan contextualises women's movements and documents a significant chapter of European social history. She poses questions about the interrelationship between the new movements and the parliamentary democracies in which they occurred, while analysing the contradictions of living in modern capitalist countries.

Contemporary Western European Feminism also tackles important contradictions, such as those between the welfare state and the free market economy; industrialisation and religious value systems; social engineering and the production of wealth; and dissent and patrimonial systems of democracy.

For those wanting to know more about Europe without the intimidating barriers of language and for those already experts in its social history, Contemporary Western European Feminism is essential reading.

PART I

Western European women: an overview

1 The postwar movements

The meaning of the term ‘movement’ is not at all unequivocal or unambiguous. Broadly speaking, ‘movements’ are visible collective actions. But such a definition is patently insufficient because there have always been ‘collective actions’ throughout history: the peasant uprisings of earlier centuries or the collective workers' actions of 19th century Europe were movements of a particular structure, held together by class solidarity and class-specific experiences. What we need, then, is a characterisation of a specific cluster of movements in the post-World War II era in the western industrialised world to which the feminist movements belong. Melucci rightly argued that the classical model of collective action ‘has been exhausted under industrial capitalism’ and the ‘social and political dimensions of collective conflict have diverged’, being markedly slanted now in favour of distinct social conflicts (Melucci, 1988: 246).

At the very heart of feminist theory is a challenge to the dichotomous use of terms such as ‘public’ and ‘private’, ‘personal’ and ‘political’. Until the postwar movements, ‘social’ had generally been seen as being inferior to ‘political’. Thus it has been said of the French Revolution that its proponents forfeited important political opportunities and rights by emphasising social problems. By having concentrated on the issue of poverty, for instance, the chance of universal suffrage was lost (Arendt, 1973: 60–1). Indeed, it was one of the first tasks of the new movements to challenge the terms ‘political’ and ‘social’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘cultural’. In 1968 Kate Millet stated in her book Sexual Politics that the relationship of one group to another group, or of one individual to another individual, is political when one dominates or rules the other. In 1971 US feminists founded a political journal in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called The Second Wave, which the editors defined ‘as a tool with which we hammer at existing social and economic structures to open up new directions for a women's revolution’ (Tuttle, 1987: 288). Whether or not the term ‘revolution’ is justified in this context is not at issue, but the intention of attacking social structures in order to effect political change is telling. By contrast, critical observers of women's movements, such as Hannah Arendt, have lamented that those movements have in fact made a fatal mistake by largely remaining social and by not having become political enough (Young-Bruehl, 1982: 76–7; Markus, 1989). It has remained a hallmark of both western European and English-speaking women's movements to question, broaden, change and redefine the use of all of the three terms.

THEIR CHARACTER

The postwar movements are not class bound, at least not theoretically and by definition, and they are not necessarily definable in terms of the classical political ideological division of ‘left’ and ‘right’, although most movements come from specific political traditions. The ecological movement, for instance, has very little to do with traditional political alliances, although it has more often than not flirted with the left. The new movements have generally not arisen (and it is mostly not their stated aim) to take over the power of the state. Most arose to challenge the way in which that power is exercised. Yet many new movements of western Europe, such as the women's movements, the ecological and the peace movements, have in fact formed their own parties. The Greens and the ‘Women's lists’, in countries such as Norway, West Germany, Denmark and Iceland, were created with the intention of being voted into government or becoming the government. The demarkation lines between ‘social’ and ‘political’ are indeed blurred and the feminist viewpoint that the ‘social is political’ is an important conceptual amendment.

One of the salient features of the new movements, according to Touraine, is their link to biological status in post-industrial or rather ‘programmed society’ (see also Badham, 1984, on post-industrial and programmed society). Touraine argues:

The specificity of social conflict in a programmed society resides in the fact that the ruling class appears to hold sway over all of social life, a state of affairs that prevents the dominated from speaking and acting from the stronghold of a social and cultural autonomy. They are forced, then, to oppose social domination in the name of the only thing that may yet escape it, namely nature. This is what is important about the ecological movement, which appeals to life against a production ethic, pollution, and the dangers of nuclear contamination. It explains as well the importance of protest movements that rely upon a biological and not a social status: gender, youth, but also old age, membership in an ethnic group. (Touraine, 1988: 111)

The argument is persuasive indeed but raises a problem of a reductionist, socio-biological kind. It has been part of many of the new protest movements to challenge the view that biological status should assign social status, or, more radically, that social status is explained by biology. Simone de Beauvoir said over 40 years ago in her work The Second Sex: ‘One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine’ (Beauvoir, 1952: 249). Monique Wittig, one of the prolific French writers of the new wave, expressed the same sentiment that a substantial number of feminists of the new movement would have underwritten:

A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys the idea that women are a ‘natural group’… the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one and shows how we have been ideologically rebuilt into a ‘natural group’. In the case of women, ideology goes far since our bodies as well as our minds are the product of this manipulation. We have been compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us. Distorted to such an extent that our deformed body is what they call ‘natural’, what is supposed to exist as such before oppression. Distorted to such an extent that in the end oppression seems to be a consequence of this ‘nature’ within ourselves (a nature which is only an idea). (Wittig, 1981: 47)

The issue of biological and social status becomes even more ambivalent with respect to the gay liberation movement. Some would have said that their movement did not ‘rely on’ biological status, as Touraine suggests, but that the very premise on which such a biological assignment rested needed to be called into question.

One of the outstanding features of the postwar movements lies in their self-definition. By this I mean the new positive group identity. Leaders of today's movements, unlike movement leaders in the 19th century or earlier, are not just representatives but are an integral part of them. With rare exception, today's movements speak on behalf of themselves. There are no white leaders for black movements, no men speaking on behalf of women's movements. By their own definition, movements based on gender, ethnicity and sexuality tend to view with suspicion any attempts by outsiders to take an active role in their affairs, let alone have control as spokespeople. At best, the role of the outsider can be that of a sympathiser on the fringe of the movement.

There are at least two ways of assessing this phenomenon. One is to argue that a movement will be more effective politically if it musters support from disinterested parties (Arendt, 1973: 167). Such disinterestedness signals to the world that the actor has nothing to gain personally by speaking on behalf of others. There is no ‘selfish’ motive and no fear that the present (democratic) equilibrium, with its diffusion of power, is in any way usurped by the represented group (Lucas, 1976; Maddox, 1986: 2).

Disinterestedness in a more concrete sense also signals an objectivity of ar-gument which is usefully applied in bureaucratic structures. Bureaucracies, the administrative backbone of democracies, are meant to be value-free and objective. By contrast, the subjective leaders and spokespersons of movements today act as their own advocates and fight their own case for themselves and the group. Anne Summers, an Australian feminist, has rightly pointed out that feminists who have gone into bureaucracies with the aim of effecting change from within ‘the system’ on behalf of and for women, have played very ambivalent roles. Their position unavoidably defined them as ‘missionaries’ or as ‘mandarins': on the one hand arguing ideologically and, on the other, having special-interest claims in an environment which is not designed to foster expression of self-interest (Summers, 1986; see also Lynch, 1984).

Self-advocacy undoubtedly has very positive features. It is a healthy sign of modern democracies to allow dissent without the intervention of a disinterested (and possibly regarded as more respectable?) spokesperson. Yet some movements have ultimately failed to stake a claim in the world at large because they have not continued to argue their case with reference to that world, but turned inwards, thereby forfeiting the very public space that they had just claimed. Black liberationists have been read by blacks, feminists by women. One oppressed group may have read the literature of another; only rarely has the oppressing majority culture read the literatures of oppression. The exceptions are all the more noteworthy and conspicuous.

Ironically, oppression never means marginality. On the contrary, oppression indicates a firm place within the social construct. Whether as a slave or as a housewife, there is a niche assigned, and society relies on this niche being filled so that it can function in its own preset ways. Only the oppressed actor's recognition of oppression actually creates marginality in so far as the actor decides to leave the previously assigned role. Then, only then, is the actor without a firm place. Creating a new niche somewhere in that structure is either the aim or the cause for the resistance; creating merely another niche may be possible but it may also mean little if any change within the social structure as a whole. Asking for a thorough revision of that structure and its assumptions, before finding a niche, may be and has been the revolutionary content of many factions of the new women's movements.

By their very nature, movements are circumscribed: they have a beginning and an end; that is, are cyclical. It is rather easy to assume that their disappearance also implies a disappearance of the very force that consolidated them from the outset. This view fails to account for the forces that made the movement a visible collective activity in the first place. Melucci argues that movements would not be possible if it were not for another complementary face of movements, that of submerged networks. He writes that it would be hard, for instance, to ‘understand the massive peace mobilization if one does not take into account the vitality of the submerged networks’. ‘Mobilization’, he continues, is only possible by the daily production of ‘alternative frameworks which nourish mobilization potential’ (1988: 248). In the case of women's movements in western Europe, those submerged networks have existed for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. And even if they change their action potential in empirically measurable terms in the near future, they are likely to persist, probably long after the more dramatic outward signs of protest have disappeared.

Furthermore, women's movements are indebted to industrialisation and parliamentary democracies. Indeed, women's movements are part and parcel and a symptom of modern industrialised society. They have more in common with these economic developments than even with the ideals of the French Revolution. The system that has created the impetus for their very existence is also the soil for dissent; it has created the space and environment for its own discred-iting. Wittingly or unwittingly, women have become a true embodiment of the spirit of the modern phase of technocracy and are often agents in maintaining and developing the very system that has helped create oppression against which women needed to rally. Likewise, modern women's movements are dependent on the political system of parliamentary democracy. Not one 20th century European movement has survived and run its natural course in a system other than a parliamentary democracy. The Polish Solidarity Movement is perhaps the only example of a fully fledged new s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Half Title Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures, tables and maps
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I WESTERN EUROPEAN WOMEN: AN OVERVIEW
• Part II Characteristics of individual countries
• Part III Outlook
• Appendix Feminist research addresses
• References
• Index