Scott, Joan W. “Back to the Future.” History & Theory 47, no. 2 (2008): 279-284.

I think now that feminist ideas (in their various forms) have spread beyond the western world and morphed into many diverse responses to particular local conditions, we are really going to have to let go of the idea that there can be any single feminist political movement with a common set of ideals. The challenge, I guess, is to effectively empower women to challenge and change unjust and unequal conditions wherever they are in the world without having that unified political platform to drive activism (and without imposing any preconceived ideas, based on liberal, western, broadly Judeo-Christian values, about what constitutes ‘unequal’ and ‘unjust’).

Feminism is indeed an umbrella term for a very diverse set of ideas. It’s good (and even essential) to recognize this–but it does lead to internescene conflicts.

I wanted to pick up one comment raised a few times above, which is the allusion to the loss of unified feminist institutions (CR groups etc.) of the 1960s/1970s, and the implication that this may be limiting our ability to challenge structural sexism in a ‘post-feminist’ age. I guess the problem I have with this relates somewhat to Dr Crazy’s comments re: the authority of (parental) experience, in that it seems to assume we ‘all’ (as women and feminists) once had some unified subject position grounded in a common experience from which we could launch our critical analysis of and challenges to patriarchy.

I see (in Judith Bennett’s book and elsewhere) a sort of nostalgia for a time when all feminists supposedly recognised a shared experience that informed our politics, but I don’t think this is actually the case, nor do I think a sort of pining for this ‘lost’ past (if it ever really existed) is particularly productive. Like patriarchy, feminism is not a single monolithic entity or movement, but comprises many and dispersed relationships of power. Those relationships of power need themselves to be interrogated so we can understand how they work, and how they may be contributing to the perpetuation of some aspects of patriarchy that privilege (some) women, as well as men. There are, I think, elements of this in the way women often police other women over their career/child-bearing/partnering choices.

I write this from a position of having recently studied the on-going conflicts between secular French feminists whose feminism is grounded in a liberal, republican tradition and French Muslim feminists who argue from quite a different historical perspective. (The debate was sparked by the ban on Muslim girls wearing headscarves in French public schools.) I’m not really sure where I’m going with this (it’s late and I’m a bit rambly), but I think it’s important not to use terms like ‘patriarchy’ and ‘feminism’ as though they refer to self-evident homogeneous categories, and as Squadratomagico has pointed out, to resist the pressure to see them as a ‘natural’ dichotomy.

snowblack: I didn’t mean to imply that Calvinism demanded more “abject submission” than any other religion–just that that is the kind of religion that was dominant in 17th C New England, where my particular example came from.

I just wanted to say here that nothing has complicated my perception of myself as a woman or as a mother than being at home full time. I’ve done this twice in my life and there’s something unsettling about it. It’s like being when Neo found out about the Matrix. Sure, I’ve read books about motherhood and the ways in which society denigrates or elevates mothers, but the reality doesn’t sink in until faced with daily reminders. Much of it is subtle: the expectation that a parent is available at 3 to retrieve children, the look from a colleague when you explain that you’ll need the day off because school is out even though it’s not a holiday, the feeling you get when you get your Social Security statement and there’s a big fat zero for certain years. Some of it is blatant. Being accosted for breastfeeding or not. Being asked about why you couldn’t make it to the school play. Being told that it’s a really good thing that you don’t work cause that’s good for the kids. There are too many other roles where people feel free to tell you what they’re thinking about your personal choices. Choices, I might add, that don’t always feel like choices.

I feel guilty for being at home. When I worked, I felt guilty for being at work. When I think about working, I feel guilty. Where does all that guilt come from? Those expectations Tom mentions above. Feminists expect me to work–to have it all (I am a child of the 70s and then the 80s feminist movement). Traditionalists expect me to be at home. So many conflicted emotions. Someone upthread said that women at home can’t escape the system ever. That is so right. I feel it every day.