i like my cape, it’s purple and sparkly
I’m reading this anthology my brother read in the course of his youth ministry studies, a volume called Stories of Emergence: Moving from Absolute to Authentic, edited by SCP favourite Mike Yaconelli. The back cover summary reads, “Follow the stories of people who were steeped in their beliefs… and walk with them on their journeys out of those beliefs.” I haven’t read them all — so far only Tony Jones (another SCP, um, favourite), and I liked his a lot. No beef with the Jonester for me. Today.
No, my beef is (however unsurprisingly) with the “former feminist.”
Frederica Mathewes-Green writes about her “Personal Journey through Feminism,” where she begins as a second-waver in the ’70s, becomes a feminist pro-lifer in the late ’80s and eventually abandons the feminist mantle altogether. She writes:
I even began to think that the whole theory was erroneous — that men and women rise and fall together, their situation affected by race or class, but not gender. A housemaid has more in common with her short-order cook husband and her bricklayer brother than with the wealthy female lawyer whose toilet she cleans. (143)
I totally agree. BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT FEMINIST THEORISTS ARE SAYING THESE DAYS. I think what gets me most about this essay is that it’s in a book that will be read in bible schools all across the continent and 19-year-old boys headed for ministry will be reading this and accepting Mathewes-Green’s portrait of feminism as the ultimate, correct one. That’s pretty damn terrifying.
There’s a reason women of my generation separate ourselves from from our mothers’ feminism. Because our ideology has changed and grown! Because we stand upon the foundations laid by women in the first and second waves of feminism and honour the efforts and progress and achievements of the women who established that females were persons under the law, able to own property, hold jobs, and run for political office. But we will also expand our ideas and conceptions.
The only third-wave feminist voice she cites is Naomi Wolf. Maybe Mathewes-Green should try reading feminist tomes that don’t appear on the New York Times bestseller list, and then she’d get a better picture of the shape of things feminist.
The feminisms of today are no longer so myopic that they ignore the plight of women who are not white, middle-class North Americans. Indeed, feminisms of today are hesitant to bind women together in a commonality of experience. “Of all the ways that genuine injustice can appear,” Mathewes-Green writes, “gender seemed increasingly the most spurious grid to use.” My feminist friends and I know that there is no common women’s experience any more than there is a common male experience. Not all women give birth, not all women are mothers, not all women menstruate, not all women work. I am a white Canadian woman, born to middle-class, educated parents, I have far more agency and opportunity and freedom than a large percentage of men in the world. Feminists of my generation and background are not blind to this fact, though Mathewes-Green seems to think that we are.
Has Mathewes-Green even heard of bell hooks, who, in the ’80s, pushed second-wave feminism beyond the paradigm of equating success with equality with the ruling white male class? Is she at all familiar with the feminisms that focus on eliminating sexism which operates as one of many oppressive structures in society?
Mathewes-Green creates a very interesting metaphor in this essay — the Superman cape. She writes:
Feminism is only one of its many expressions; the causes, as I said, are interchangeable. It’s an intoxicating costume. For one thing, the Superman cape works like an invisibility cloak in reverse: put it on and you cant’ see your own faults. Instead, you see everyone else’s…
Superman-Cape attitude has now natural enemies. If opposition arises — and self-made heroes secretly hope it will — it just proves that the hero threatens the powers-that-be…
…it blinds us to our own faults, so exhilarated are we by the faults of others. We develop contempt for others and describe them and their beliefs in the language of insult…
The Superman costume is like the shirt of Nessus, a wedding gift to Hercules that was supposedly charged with supernatural power. In reality, it was saturated with poison… I began to see that feminism was bad for me. It inculcated feelings of self-righteousness and judgmentalism. It filled me with self-perpetuating anger. It blinded me to the good that men do and the bad that women do. It made me think that men and women were enemies, when we actually have a mutual Enemy — who delights in any human discord. (142-143)
I actually like the Superman cape metaphor. As I read Mathewes-Green’s description of the phenomenon, I experience a certain level of conviction. In the throes of ideology I do often become blind to my own faults. I have, too often, stooped to a “language of insult,” as indeed I may have in this very post.
But these have nothing to do with my feminism and everything to do with the fact that I suck.
The Superman cape can be worn in the name of many causes, as Mathewes-Green writes. I have seen it worn in the name of feminism, anarchism, conservatism and, of course, Christianity. Does that fact by itself condemn any one of those causes?
Feminism can, should be, is subject to criticism. Without critical thought it could never expand and grow (like some other movements I can think of). But what Mathewes-Green seems to have missed is that feminism has responded to critics like she, and is changing. It’s too bad she jumped ship before she realized that, though. And too bad all the bible school students reading this anthology won’t be reading bell hooks, too.