You've Lost Your Way, Baby

How organized feminism has made itself irrelevant

Catherine Seipp from the October 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

Left Out

Looking at dominant feminist concerns now, you might think that abortion is illegal, that Muslim women are being arrested in the U.S. for wearing head scarves, that girls are unfairly kept out of college, and that women?s fears about crime have more to do with right-wing nuts attacking lesbians than street rapists or garden-variety wife beaters. Woe to anyone who questions this received wisdom. Consider the case of Tammy Bruce, whose experiences with NOW highlight how feminism has been almost totally subsumed in the general morass of non-gender-related leftist concerns.

Conventional wisdom has it that feminists began losing credibility during the Clinton scandals. But I first noticed the slide into absurdity in 1995, during the O.J. Simpson trial. Bruce, then head of NOW?s Los Angeles chapter and a local talk radio host, had criticized Simpson on the air as a wife beater for months. After the not-guilty verdict, she organized a protest rally that attracted 5,000 people.

Surely using the Simpson case to focus on domestic abuse was exactly what an L.A. feminist should have been doing. But NOW?s national leadership, furious at Bruce for damaging feminist alliances with black leaders, called their L.A. renegade "racially insensitive" and "insidious" in multiple press releases.

"I was a thorn in the side of NOW from the beginning," says Bruce, who describes herself as a "gun-owning, openly gay, pro-choice, pro?death penalty, liberal feminist who voted for Ronald Reagan." Bruce?s recent book, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left?s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds, details her disillusionment with the women?s movement, which she describes as "socialism masquerading as feminism, group rights as opposed to the individual."

One cliché about women is that they put everyone?s needs above their own. NOW?s behavior during the Simpson trial, which put racial sensitivity before the women?s issue of domestic abuse, was an object lesson in how this cliché can be true. So are organized feminism?s stance on affirmative action and its multiculturalist worry about offending the Muslim world by criticizing its reactionary traditions regarding women.

The women?s movement remains deeply rooted in the soil of the orthodox left. As Bruce notes, Betty Friedan belonged to the Communist Party, Gloria Steinem is honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and immediate past president of NOW Patricia Ireland wrote about her support of the Communist Party in her 1999 autobiography, What Women Want. It causes problems "when you attach a social activism agenda like feminism to one side of the political spectrum," Bruce told me. "As I argued to NOW, if we had not attached women?s rights to one party, we would not be having these [relevancy] problems."

Race and multiculturalism aren?t the only issues that feminists have put before women?s interests. They have done the same with the gay agenda, specifically its push for hate crime laws. A woman may need hate crime legislation like a fish needs a bicycle, but feminists never seem to worry that demanding stronger punishment for "hate" crimes risks a return to the bad old days of men getting light sentences for "love" crimes of the old "Ruby, Don?t Take Your Love to Town" variety by making one?s emotional motive dispositive in criminal sentencing. (Historically, enraged, cuckolded men who committed crimes of passion against their wives or girlfriends often were viewed fairly sympathetically by judges and juries.) The sad fact is that far more women are killed by angry husbands or boyfriends -- 1,218 in 1999, according to the U.S. Department of Justice -- than gays are killed because they are gay. The FBI reported 17 "hate-motivated" murders of any type in 1999, the latest year for which data are available.

Bruce makes a strong case that an obsession with uncommon tragedies like Matthew Shepard?s killing by strangers obscures the far more common situation of women being killed by men they know. She points out that in 1998, the same year that Shepard was left to die on that fence outside of Laramie, Wyoming, another grisly murder happened there. But you?ve probably never heard of 15-year-old Daphne Sulk, who was stabbed to death by her 38-year-old boyfriend after he got her pregnant. Daphne ended up just as dead as Matthew, even if her death never made the national news. And while Matthew?s killers were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Daphne?s was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter. (See "The ?Hate State? Myth," May 1999.)

It?s rare to find a feminist group that ever mentions Daphne Sulk. Yet they regularly beat their drums about hate crimes legislation, even -- especially -- when it has little to do with women.

>The Red Herring of Abortion

One reason feminist groups didn?t turn Daphne Sulk into their new poster girl may be because she?d refused to have an abortion. As Bruce notes, this is "not exactly the kind of person the left wants to immortalize."

Three decades ago, feminist activist Flo Kennedy said that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. In the days of ineffective or unavailable birth control and back alley abortions, that statement packed a lot of punch. Not any more. Abortion has become a sacrament. I am not now, nor have I ever been, against abortion rights. It?s hard not to notice, though, how feminists continue to place abortion above issues with a bigger effect on women?s lives. Surely one reason the feminist movement has lost credibility is precisely because women are beginning to notice.

George W. Bush is not exactly a right-to-life crusader. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out during the 2000 presidential campaign, the 100-plus judges Bush appointed while governor of Texas actually extended abortion rights in that state. The Texas Right-to-Life Committee called the Texas Supreme Court?s 1999 ruling in favor of a 17-year-old?s right to an abortion without informing her parents "shocking." Laura Bush has stated that she thinks abortion should be legal; Attorney General John Ashcroft has said that he considers Roe v. Wade "settled law." But feminists still paint Bush as a pro-life zealot and ally themselves relentlessly and totally with the Democratic Party.

Anti-anti-abortion paranoia helped defeat former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan?s gubernatorial hopes last spring. Although the liberal Republican believes abortion should remain legal, his opponent, Gov. Gray Davis, brought up some old personal statements against abortion that Riordan, a Roman Catholic, made in the early ?90s. I remember feminists using similar scare tactics during Riordan?s mayoral campaign 10 years ago -- as if the mayor of Los Angeles, who can?t even control the city council, actually has the power to ban abortion.