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Whining Wolf and the other passe feminists are wrong

May 6 2003
By Angela Shanahan

The latest visit to these shores of the glamorous face of whingeing feminism Naomi Wolf, while not exactly bringing the traffic to a halt in Collins Street, will doubtless spark at least a little flurry of life from the almost defunct sisterhood.

A few 40-somethings might pause from the dreadful grind of their walking machines in gyms around the country to glance at the glossy magazine interviews with another self-referential representative of that now passe movement of mid-20th century "radicalism" - The Feminist.

Despite the glamour, Naomi is deeply and unimaginatively reactionary, a feminist of the old "personal is political" school. She's discovered motherhood is tough, and she has turned her own caesarean section into meat (if you'll excuse the term) for entire treatises. One is left breathless that vast sums of money can be made from the stories women swap in labour wards!

The modern angry feminist has turned the very condition of being female into a whinge, and of course the biggest whinge of all is the laborious business of having and raising children. Now the same thing might be said of the new breed of post-feminists, who complain that no one told them they might be left on the shelf and barren at 40. Enter Virginia Haussegger, who on this page has attacked feminism's failure to address what women really want - namely husband, home, family and career - while maintaining sanity and slim hips.

But poor Virginia just doesn't get it! The only triumph of affluent Western feminism is its networking, to create jobs for the girls. No wonder TV newsreader Haussegger, an archetype of the successful feminist careerist, now finds herself reviled by her former sisters who badger her about how much she owes them.

Naomi on the other hand, despite husband, children and royalties, still manages to find things to whinge about. Naturally, the public are tiring of this. She and a lot of other feminists have recognised their use-by date, so they have hopped on to the "structural change in the workplace" bandwagon.

At least our own Anne Summers and Pru Goward know how that game is played - even if they're wrong. As Summers rages against the abandonment of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission she should realise that this body has become redundant. Most of the complaints directed to it are worked-related and would be properly referred to the Industrial Relations Commission.

Institutionalised feminism is being abandoned because it doesn't have the empirical answers. Hence the dominance of the ideas of Catherine Hakim, an empiricist with no particular ideology, who has proved fairly conclusively that most women do not prefer a work-centred life.

The problem is not with women in the workplace. In fact, women have had remarkable success in the workplace.

Professional women have entitlements my mother could only dream of, and most women who don't have careers have access to part-time work and much more flexibility in their lives. But feminism, which is all about individual women, has ignored the downside of this for families. Employers, under the gender-equity banner, can offer fewer and worse full-time jobs to males, who are still the breadwinners of most families, and governments can now rely on the 1.25-income family as the economic norm.

Gender-equity policies have been a mirage that confuses equity with equality. As Hakim points out, in countries such as Scandinavia where equity policies were implemented, not only were women forced into doing two jobs, one at home and one outside, but the prevailing pattern is one of inequality and occupational segregation.

No, the problem that many women have now is much more difficult and subtle than the workplace. Virginia is not a whinger in the same vein as Naomi, because she represents a genuinely disillusioned group of 40-somethings who have simply uncovered the truth about the old "personal is political" mantra: it is superficial bunk. Feminism has been complicit in a catastrophe, a crisis in sexual morality that has something to do with men too.

The contraceptive pill was first marketed 30 years ago as a glossy package of fertility control and sexual freedom. But, like a series of boxes one inside the other, women and not a few men have begun to find that at the end there is nothing but an empty box. Sexual license under the guise of freedom is no substitute for enduring marriage, which is also the best way to bring up children. But the feminist obsession with "career", not motherhood, as the central element of women's self-definition made fertility the enemy. Babies can really wreck your career. They consume your life and your heart. Feminism ignored all that.

If the sexual revolution is producing its 40-something casualties now, the effect on the young is devastating. Feminism, which girls regard as a joke, can't fill the gap left by abandonment of the old moral certainties. Some, such as the clever Wendy Shalit, author of A Return to Modesty, have rejected the promiscuity of their generation. But the vast, confused majority are more likely to take the advice proffered by Woman's Day's Dr Rosie, who holds up Liz Hurley as a role model: "She has money, success, fame and a child . . . one of an emerging breed of women who recognise that her happiness doesn't depend on finding a 'knight in shining armour'. These woman know how to play by men's rules."

Did you get that Virginia?

Angela Shanahan is a Canberra writer.



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