Feminism in American 1993 - 24 September 1993

I suppose this weekend; every commentator on earth is talking or writing about the new turmoil in Russia with its frightening memories of the 1991 August coup. My sources are no better than anyone else's and even the White House won't, can't say how it will all turn out, so I move on to something much smaller, very domestic but something I've wanted to talk about for sometime. Let us move up on the main theme gradually with an apparently frivolous overture.

Last Sunday night marked the performance of an annual ritual that has been for almost 60 years as dependable in the American calendar as the celebration of Thanksgiving or the 4th of July, it took place where it first happened in 1927 in Atlantic City, the Blackpool of the New Jersey Shore. The Miss America Pageant. For years and years we said quite fliply the Miss America Beauty Contest, it was first called a parade because that was more or less all that took place, a parade along a stretch of the boardwalk of what were called then "bathing beauties" one from each state in the Union. The girls in those days, there was no political requirement to call them women or love objects in popular songs with girls. The girls lined up in bathing suits each wearing a sash bearing the name of their State, which they'd come to Atlantic City to represent Miss Iowa, Miss Tennessee, Miss New York, Miss Idaho and so on. Those two features of the event, the bathing suits and the flaunted name of each State are just about all that's left of the original event. The Miss America Contest much more than any of its imitators has changed and will go on changing because, because why? Because I've come to think of a rather late but sure response to the pressure of women's lib.

In 1969, feminists staged a protest parade in Atlantic City affecting to be disgusted by the very sight of 50 American girls showing off their bodies and that the libbers maintained as they've maintained ever since that the pageant is dedicated to the degradation of women to reducing them, the fighting phrase of the day "to mere sex objects". Some of the girls of that 1969 vintage replied rudely, "you bet" or "what else" or "right on" or "what do you mean merely?" In the following years, the more dedicated or rampant libbers moved on, they went instead after pornography as a species of female debasement.

Now the Miss America Contest had started I think in the '50s at the latest to require the contestants to express themselves in several new ways to the bathing suit parade was added an evening gown parade and then pretty soon a talent contest. By now, we're not at all staggered by the sight of a handsome woman playing a movement of, say, the Beethoven violin concerto or reciting from Harold Pinter or proving to be a whiz on the trampoline.

Where I believe the feminists have had their small secret triumph is in the requirement, which has been standard for the last few years to make a little speech about their particular vision of America. Now this sounds fatuous put like that, but the sponsors came to see that at last physical beauty was not what the contest was about and they all now must say not only what profession they hope to follow, but what they expect of life or what they mean to do about the present state of American society. The early efforts in this style were fairly pathetic, because up to that point nobody running a beauty contest, including the girls, had ever expected the Miss America hopefuls to be anything but sleek, bosomy, have a fine figure and want to be an actress or a later ambition a real estate agent.

Today it's not enough of the 10 finalists we heard from; three or four of them had sensible things to say about the dark side of American society and expressed a hope at least of doing something about it. This year's winner was a black girl who means to spend her year's reign going around the country helping the homeless. That's an unbelievable leap, one giant step for womankind from the giggling bathing beauties of the 1920s.

Earlier this year, there was in feminist and literally circles a, I should say a well deserved, celebration of the 25th anniversary of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which certainly has turned out to be a pioneer work taking up the crusade of the suffragettes where it much too early left off. Up to her arrival on the scene, less combated feminists drummed away at the prevailing inequity of inferior wages for the same piece of work. Betty Friedan went far beyond that, she wanted to see a radical revision of the male view of women in society, she would not stop pointing out that there was only one or was it two women in the United States Senate that America along with most of the Western democracies did not exercise much democracy in giving equal rank to first-rate women doctors, lawyers, engineers whatever.

Betty Friedan stressed that all women did not choose to find their place only in the home and inspired by her came a flock of protesting women and then I'm afraid of whining women and then rallies of women who got drunk on the special thought of just being a woman and wanted now by next Monday morning a universal right to abortion, equal pay, equal appointments who wished damnation on all right to lifers on every lumberman to would intrude on a national forest and every male who clung to the abominable notion that a woman's place is in the home.

There was through the '70s and '80s such a multiplicity of aims, so many crusades for so many instant reforms that it all caused Florence King a sympathetic feminist to fear that, quote, "the all purpose feminist goal appears to be an abortion performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on an Indian reservation". Well, during that quarter century, life and liberty hearing themselves talked about so much as private possessions came out and asserted themselves and the feminist movement slowly and painfully began to learn that freedom from home, in the kitchen, might also mean neglected children or an unsolved problem, children shunted off into the very diffused affections of a day-care centre.

I think Betty Friedan was about the first to see and say that the aggressive feminist model was not for everybody and that some of her disciples had gone too far in failing to connect their battling ambitions with the reality of the time and place they lived in. The popularisation of feminine mystique did what all popularisations of original movements do, it vulgarised the doctrine. Chic popular magazines declared that the new woman could have a career and a home and a lover if she chose and a baby or two without the encumbrance of what was called at the time a piece of paper. The piece of paper was nothing less than a serious contract, which has been drawn up and sworn to by quite enlightened men and women for many centuries, it is called a marriage certificate. You can have it all, declared the smart magazines, well a lot of women who tried to have it have discovered that, of course, you can't.

Betty Friedan has been the first of the pioneers to deplore the naivety and the sheer asininity of the next generation of extreme feminists. Meanwhile, she's off writing about the blessings, bless her, of old age. The new generation of libbers has other targets, other goals and no feminine complaint is more popular just now than that embodied in the charge of sexual harassment. One event more than another prompted the idea of a successful lawsuit pursued under the banner of female equality and that event was the long two-day agony – and agony for both protagonists – of the Senate judiciary committees hearings in the matter of the fitness of Judge Clarence Thomas to become a justice of the Supreme Court.

When the young black law professor Anita Hill who'd worked for Mr Thomas accused him with graphic details of sexually harassing her in the long ago, in that moment, the country divided into opposing camps after Miss Hill's appalling story and Judge Thomas's furious denial of it, Miss Hill to some people became a puppet hired and manipulated by various liberal outfits or she was and immediately to the rampant feminists a Joan of Arc, a national heroine and still is.

After her, a deluge of similar confessions and lawsuits from women all over the country especially from ones who worked for a prominent public man. There's a United States senator who faces charges from several women who have detailed their helplessness before his alleged assaults going back I believe in some complaints to the 1970s. Now obviously it's a healthy thing and a proper advance to women that this sort of humiliation should be brought out and punished. A clause of sexual harassment of women is in the Civil Rights Act of the mid-60s, but I must say that there are legions of men who have found this charge of sexual harassment to be a blanket charge that covers everything from the touch of a hand to a joke to a passing gallantry.

The sad thing to me about the monotonous and widespread employment of this charge is its reducing to a legal generality and to a legal threat very much of the emotional detail, the subtlety of life between men and women, in fact, the rich raw material of literature all reduced to a magistrates rubber stamp. The wisest words I've heard on this whole topic, which I've not seen quoted anywhere, came from a judge in a federal court in New York, a woman judge who looked over a whimpering docket of complaints of sexual harassment and said, "Where has all the laughter gone?"

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