Lessing, FLDS, & Paglia

[zalena]

There's a brief interview with Doris Lessing in the Times, today. She's one of my heroes, even though I don't always like her books and certainly haven't read them all. (I'm currently in the middle of the second volume of her autobiography. The first volume Under My Skin is a major work.)

She's announced that Alfred & Emily---her most recent book imaging the life her parents might have had if WWI had never happened---will be her last book; which to me suggests she is anticipating her death. She's also claimed (though it isn't addressed in this interview) that she wishes she'd never won the Nobel Prize for literature, it has complicated her life.

There is also a photo essay about the women from the FLDS compound in Texas. An image of girls bouncing on a trampoline caught my eye. The FLDS fiasco and its resulting ripples have me thinking a lot about the following idea expressed in a recent essay from one of my other heroes (and protege of Bloom, also mentioned in the Lessing interview) Camille Paglia.

Paglia gave a lecture called Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform at The Legacy and Future of Feminism conference in which she addresses some of the inherent conflict in feminist ideology and practice. One of her most pressing concerns is the following question:

Feminism certainly has an obligation to protest and, if possible, to correct concrete abuses of women and children in Third World nations. But feminism might look very different in more traditional or religious societies, where motherhood and family are still valorized and where the independent career woman is less typical or admired.

I keep thinking about this issue both as exemplified by the FLDS fiasco (and I am absolutely not trying to defend pedophilia, here, but I feel the raid was a massive violation of their civil rights. The spectre of religious persecution as well as the questionable involvement of more mainstream evangelical Xtians is also disturbing.) and the way we think of women's issues around the world. One of the other things Paglia notes in her lecture is that Second Wave feminism was largely a response to post-War issues. She suggests:

...the ideology of Second Wave feminism was or should have been time- and place-specific. Postwar domesticity was a relatively local phenomenon. The problem was not just sexism; it was the postindustrial social evolution from the working-class extended family to the middle-class nuclear family, which left women painfully isolated in their comfortable homes.

I agree with this criticism of Second Wave feminism, upon which she expands at length in her essay; I also feel it has left us ill-equipped to deal with human rights issues, particularly those related to women, both in our communities and world wide. The questions she asks at the beginning of her lecture:

What precisely is feminism? Is it a theory, an ideology, or a praxis (that is, a program for action)? Is feminism perhaps so Western in its premises that it cannot be exported to other cultures without distorting them? When we find feminism in medieval or Renaissance writers, are we exporting modern ideas backwards? Who is or is not a feminist, and who defines it? Who confers legitimacy or authenticity? Must a feminist be a member of a group or conform to a dominant ideology or its subsets? Who declares, and on what authority, what is or is not permissible to think or say about gender issues? And is feminism intrinsically a movement of the left, or can there be a feminism based on conservative or religious principles?

are the questions we need to be asking with regard to scholarship and political policy across the board.

For a similar essay regarding race, please see Charles Johnson's essay The End of the Black American Narrative appearing in American Scholar this summer.

Comments

[borbor-chan.livejournal.com]

thanks for the paglia, thoughtful comments. I dig the criticism of 2nd wave but wonder what she makes of 3rd wave...?