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Juggling Contradictions:

Feminism, the Individual and What's Left

Joan Braderman

In this essay, | would like to suggest where
feminism can lead us and what myths must
finally be left behind to get there. The nature of
these myths —the myths of equality, individual-
ism and democratic liberalism—which under-
write our humanist heritage, account for the
weakest elements of feminist ideology. The
recognition that feminism is an ideology, like
Marx’s recognition that humanism is an ideolo-
gy (i.e., not a discourse whose “truth” was in-
separable from the world it described) is a nec-
essary step in re-examining what feminism is
and what it can do.

I will use as a conceit the form of “the contra-
diction”—that underlying, dynamic mechanism
of history—in a way that is sometimes more
metaphorical than concrete. | take the liberty of
using this model rhetorically at times to begin
to establish a series of interrelationships be-
tween ideologies and their culture. | use it to
suggest the many ways the several spheres of
interest to Heresies readers—art, feminism
and their political context—are subject to a set
of analogous and mutually reinforcing ideologi-
cal myths. Most feminists and artists alike are
still held captive by the power of these seduc-
tive belief systems, although they threaten the
coherence of our arguments, threaten our inter-
ests and threaten the very survival of the ideal
of freedom.

A confrontation between the facts and fic-
tions which surround us becomes inevitable
within an escalating spiral of contradictions.
The first group to experience directly the essen-
tial contradictions of the society we live in is, of
course, the lowest class: the unemployed, the
poorest, least skilled, most exploited working
people. Next, the marginal groups, in North
America: people of color, immigrants, the el-
derly, etc. Artists are marginal too. They feel
the economic squeeze in recessions, may even
become politicized as a result. And across all
these groups are women. As groups, then, wom-
en and artists have a low priority in the hier-
archy of capital.

To give up the humanist myths, those most
cherished ideals of our own class, the bourgeoi-
sie, which were forged when it was the revolu-
tionary class, is difficult indeed. But give them
up we must, for in the face of heightening con-
tradictions—economic, biological, ideological
—we have no choice.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

By 1976, the women’s movement seems to
have nearly as many political lines as there are
women in it. This partly healthy, partly disturb-
ing fact reflects with painful clarity both the
strengths and implicit weaknesses of the femi-
nist critique of society. What is feminist prac-
tice? What is it to be a feminist in 19762 Is it to
be an individual woman “making it” in a man’s
world? Is it to recognize woman’s historical
oppression and, released from individual frus-
tration and guilt, to take on collective responsi-
bility? What is the nature of such a responsibili-
ty? Is it restricted to oneself? To oneself and the
women one sees every week? Is this a responsi-
bility to oneself, to women, to men, to history?
In short, is feminism, as an ideology, funda-
mentally dangerous to the sexism it despises? If
so, how?

To many women, enmeshed in the growing
contradictions of late capitalist society, femi-
nism, by 1976, has proven as much a trap as a
liberation. What seemed to so many of us as
little as five years ago a potentially revolution-
ary force now appears to be virtually co-opted.
The great capitalist commodity machine has
produced a whole new catalogue of cultural
commodities: the feminist writer, artist, poet;
the feminist academic, professional, journal-
ist, TV persona; the feminist token with that
“feminist mystique.” She is for sale in the cul-
tural marketplace. She is tough, durable, tire-
less. She is “sexually liberated” (a great lay). She
works harder than a man. She has to. She is still
a woman in a world that calls people “man-
kind.” That is, “equality” for women still equals
inequality for women. This is a contradiction.

What kind of contradiction? It is a contradic-
tion between the ideology of bourgeois femi-
nism and economic and biological fact. The
economic facts of life for the great majority of
women remain the same: unpaid domestic
labor, ill-paid labor in the work force. Biological
fact (which is gender difference along with its
cultural baggage) proposes a contradiction,
even for those of us who are female tokens of
one sort or another, who are members of the
bourgeoisie.

Our psycho-sexual behavior, like our eco-
nomic roles, is wholly determined by an in-
herited system of power relations, not only in
the public sector, but at deeper levels, in the
formation—within the family—of the psyche
itself. Hence, as Juliet Mitchell so carefully