Guest Post: Greer and Raymond: re-examined in different light by Maura Hennessey

http://radicalbitch.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/guest-post-greer-and-raymond-re-examined-in-different-light-by-maura-hennessey/
By catkisser
8/24/09

By way of introduction I will reveal that Maura Hennessey, Irish lesbian activist extraordinaire, has visited our home in the Catskills and along with a board member of HRC we shared an evening of spirited and delightful debate on feminism past and present. Her "friend of operative history" is a mutual one.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was an age of foolishness; it was an age of wisdom..."

In short, it was the 1970's. A brash, angry and outspoken woman named Greer was caught up in and in fact one of the public faces of the feminist movement in the British Commonwealth. In Boston, a young graduate student was working upon expanding the ideas of her doctoral supervisor and rumoured lover. Her work on gender and feminism would be perceived as largely theoretically sound to a point, making a sudden leap to come to a conclusion nearly inconsistent with the first few chapters of her work. Her name was Janice Raymond.

Excellent post. Some of the commenters though don't appear to have read it very closely, perhaps they didn't even read it at all, but heard their own voices instead.

Okay, when I actually read it closely it was pretty interesting, but I still don't know what point she is trying to make, if any. I guess she is condemning "Desparate [sic] Corrected Housewives," but she doesn't give an example of a single one. So I can understand why people might be reading their own fears or biases into the piece. There was a whole lot of color and not much lede. Elvira Brown of Dallas would be proud.

Oh get out the shovel, this thing is so deep in BS that to attempt to clean it out one would first have to call it the Augean stable. 

But, let's just take one or two things - like the real premise - and destroy them, the rest falls apart on its own.

Partly it was fueled by the availability of contraception, which meant that "good girls could...and did" and partly it was a reaction to the sociological experiment known as the Eisenhower years . The sexual revolution was on and with it a rapid and vertigo-inducing shift in ideas about women, women's roles, women's rights.

See.  Women's rights are all about pussy power.  Yup, its all about the politics of vaginas and the problem women have with their crotchfruit after they get down and make the beasts with two backs with the boys.

How droll.  How male a perspective.  How demeaning to the entire movement.  The writer here is nothing but a tool for the power structure, parroting stuff that is not true, and has never been true so they can paint the world as nothing more, and indeed something less than your external sex organs.

So, if they are right in using the quote they use: To understand what came after, it is important to know what came before - don't 'ch think they at least ought to have been bothered to find out what came before instead of doing the intellectually lazy gig and just assuming.

If one were to assume that it's all either a) contraception (sex) or a reaction to the sociological experiment known as the Eisenhower years (in fact, few things in the history of the world were less experimental then the Eisenhower years) then the early voices and writings would focus on that, and be contemporaneous with it?  Yet, the first American effort in Second Wave Feminism is usually cited as being Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique first published in 1963, and written in the period 1960-1962.

So, by '63 America is in a full on sexual revolution, and the pill is everywhere?  Not so fast there Bucko.  From Wiki (because I am lazy):
Although the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive in 1960, contraceptives were not available to married women in all states until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and were not available to unmarried women in all states until Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972.

So that the effect and widespread use of the pill, and the accompanying 'sexual revolution' is really a product of the late 60s and people like Herbert Marcuse & William Riech (both guys by the way) worked to find a synthesis of  Marxism and Psychoanalysis in a spirit of liberation and expression. The pill was not in widespread use much before 66/67, and really not till after 1970.

So, how did so many feminist authors get so far out ahead of the curve?  Oh perhaps its that sociological experiment known as the Eisenhower years.  Sure, blame Ike.  Except... the real origins of second wave feminism starts where?  With who?  When?  Oh, I'd put it - as would most scholars and academics (I'm the first, not the second) with the publication of the real manifesto, Simone de Beauvoir's, The Second Sex, in 1949.

A reaction to Ike, interesting considering how he hadn't been elected yet.  And hell, Simone is not even American - she is French. 

So, here are the critical theories both being put out long in advance of the two things/events that the authors cite as the reason for the movement.  How odd.

What is going on, and I don't expect an intellectual hack to get it, but... what the history, data and other factors points to is a complex situation (OK, I'm sure I lost the author right there) where several factors were colessing at roughly the same apex, and that is what caused the change in notions and attitudes.

First - it's not Ike.  Yeesh.  There was an event that really did change the world at Simone's time, and it wasn't the Eisenhower Administration, it was World War II.  WWII shattered forever the Ancient Regime, and the social landscape in several key ways. Simone writes this at the end of the war and immediately following, because she is in Europe and don't have the luxury (as American's would) of pleasantly ignoring it for a decade and a half. "The Sixties" as such were not a reaction to Ike, they were a delayed American reaction to WWII. The changes in the social status of women is not due to any of Ike's golf holidays, but to three unique attributes of the outcome of WWII, and one issue that had been ongoing since the 1890s.

WWII did three things to/for women that are relevant to our situation here.  One, often not even factored in, it moved people.  Literally.  Huge amounts of people were moved around the country.  Many were women following their servicemen husbands.  (and in that, there were lots of young married couples who absent the war, would not have been married so soon, but the looming specter of death changes things).  Women who up to that point in history most likely would have been born, lived and died within a hundred miles of their homes are packing up and moving (usually alone, as the hubby was in the service and didn't have the time, what with the war and all) cross country.  They find themselves in new places, with new notions, and new problems, one of which was how to support themselves absent the traditional family.

Enter my A-Number One girl of all time, Rosie the Riveter.  From the American perspective WWII was as much an industrial issue as it was a military one. The need for factory production in munitions, aircraft, uniforms and supplies and rest radically increased (this at the tail end of a depression when such production had reached an all time low) as the available work force of young men radically decreased. OK, got it, Production increased exactly as the pool of workers decreased.  So, you gots to gets yourself a new pool - and in this case, it was the young/middle age women.

So women in huge numbers went to work in places that never hired them before, the factories.  Also, and less noticed, a lot of women also took clearical/administration/management jobs during this period.  According to the Encyclopedia of American Economic History, the "Rosie the Riveter" movement increased the number of working American women to 20 million by 1944, a 57% increase from 1940.  (Total US population in 45 was around 132 million).  Were they good?  Is the pope catholic?  They were awesome.  Beyond awesome even.  Ever see those pictures of how damaged a B-17 could be and still keep flying?*  Girls built them that strong - and a lot of that came from knowing they were building them for their brothers, fathers, lovers and husbands.  CalShip and MarinShip both set production records in shipbuilding that still stand with more female workers than any other defense plant.**

After the war, many of these women lost these jobs, but not entirely.  The most successful program in American History (in my estimation) the GI Bill, also helped a lot of women gain access to a college education following the war. (About 350,000 women were in the military in WWII)  No doubt, the financial independence gained by many women who entered the workforce during and after World War II contributed greatly to second wave feminism.

Because that 'out of work' deal only lasted as long as our pleasant ignorance. By 1957 you have a rising need for highly trained (and low paid) workers in the emerging information economy, added to the huge swelling of the traditional 'pink collar' jobs of retail and general secretarial - all this, just as the baby boom was ending, and mom was looking for something to do.

It's exactly this - a rising need for highly trained (and low paid) workers in the emerging information economy, added to the huge swelling of the traditional 'pink collar' jobs of retail and general secretarial work - that creates second wave feminism.  Not the pill.  Femminism was far more about making a revolution of individual equality rather than biological independence.



* Photos of damaged B-17s.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.daveswarbirds.com/b-17/photos/body/b17allamerican.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.daveswarbirds.com/b-17/fuselag2.htm&h=336&w=445&sz=34&tbnid=f3o2zSSbMVxdcM:&tbnh=96&tbnw=127&prev=/images%3Fq%3Ddamaged%2Bb-17%2Bphotos&usg=__OHD1O0bVnzXtrUjqp5s6AA9rwvk=&ei=nemTSr3YOobQsQPPoJXcDw&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=1&ct=image

**By war's end, Calship had produced 467 vessels, among them the cargo vessels called Liberty ships, the speedier Victory ships, and tankers. In the fall of 1944, Calship was turning out 20 ships a month, operating three shifts a day, seven days a week, making it perhaps the most productive shipyard in history.

I'd answer you but it seems pointless when you start off "pussy power" and telling a non trans Irish lesbian activist her viewpoint is a "male perspective".......wow, just wow.

non trans Irish lesbian activist

Too many labels, most of them meaningless. 

And I'll stand by what I said.  To see modern feminism as some sort of social and/sexual issue is to miss the point, its an economic deal, largely by and for middle and upper middle class, college educated women. Equal pay for equal work never applied to maids, or matrons.

Men, wanted to see it as part of the sexual revolution, and it was not, and never was, at least in the US.  More repressive societies with a higher degree of religious cohesion might be different, but their brand of feminism is not what Raymond or Greer were speaking to. In fact, I don't think either of them was speaking to Europe at all, but to America and Australia.

um, err, eh..

wow.  Tekla just curious..

How much about feminism do you actually know?

Tekla,
You often rub me the wrong way, however, on this subject I am in agreement with you as were my college profs.

Feminist history would have been one of my three PhD fields in 20th Century American History, I had enough credits and I'm sure I could have passed the exam, but since no one was ever going to hire a male to teach it, I did history of Urban Planning instead, along with my other two. 

But, as my main teacher in the field always told me, it's 'not about the sex, its all about the checks.'  Meaning that it arose out of a technological imperative and financial necessity, and the real point was not 'control of the female body, or female sexual expression (all of which would come much later, not till the 70s really) but the grim economic realities that women faced where the best they could hope for as an honors student in a major university or college was to be the secretary for some male who got gentleman's 'Cs' at State. That was not exactly frosting their cake there, 'ya know.

The initial statement of the American Feminist Movement at its inception was "Equal Pay for Equal Work" (and the right to advance in that work) not, Our Bodies, Ourselves.  It was primarily about economics and access then any social revolution, or separatism, or In America They Call Us Dykes, or the fantastically inflated 'bra burnings' which always seem to get mentioned, but in fact rarely - like only a few times - actually happened, and when it did, it was part of political theater at the Miss America Pageant, not a political statement.  But that was sure a lot more fun - underwear and all - to focus on than the radical notion, and this is primarily about America at this time, that women and men not only should be paid the same for doing the same job, but the much more radical notion that they could and were doing the same job and they wanted their cut.

And it's that sex part, the Feminist Lesbianism, with its separatism, the bra burnings, the Pill (which is taken to 'sexually liberate' women. men being over liberated in that area as it were, and they just took it as a reason to take even less responsibility) that gets focused on whenever anyone links The Pill, to Feminism, and not the economic realities which conveniently get ignored, and glossed over with the sex issues.  Economic issues that are still to be solved, and still, I think, at the real heart of the movement.

Feminism was far more political than it was sexual or social, and it was far more economic than it was political. And, like it's forerunner, the Suffragette Movement, it was primarily middle/upper middle class educated women who articulated it, and who it mattered to. And they were women who had the unique historical example in people they actually knew, who as war workers made it happen and shattered the illusion that 'only men could do that kind of work.'

I wonder for all the people who cite The Feminine Mystique, which started all this - have actually read the book.  Its entire survey was women with College degrees, who apparently were tired of making beds and doing the shopping out there in suburbia and wanted to do something (there was an economic reason they wanted to also) that actually required a college degree and looked less like maid/nanny duty. The notion that the invention of The Pill allowed them to control their bodies and sexuality is nonsense.  They went to Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley, they were perfectly in control of both of those things.

And again, to the degree that Feminism is pushed and advocated as separatism, or a sexual relationship philosophy notion, or anything that is not the legal and economic equalization of society, then everyone moves further away from the real point, and, interestingly enough, the real things that can really be changed. 

You've never lived a woman's life have you.  You simply could not actually believe what you wrote if you had ever worked for years at a pink collar level job...experienced on a daily basis the casual mysogyny expressed even by men who profess to care for you....had any understanding of the offhand dismissal women experience routinely in medical matters.  Yah, the vote mattered....it was 79 years ago yesterday we got it.  Yup, equal pay for equal work is a great and worthy goal and we still haven't reached that yet either but if you think that is the be all and end all of feminism....well again I am at a loss as to how to respond to you.  American Feminism did, from the suffragettes to the second wave address the hierarchy issues and parity issues but it wasn't the only Feminist movement you know.....and parity was never the only issues even in American Feminism from the beginnings.....

At any rate, it is also quite apparent you did not read any of the follow up essays/blogs by either Maura or myself, most of which were also linked here.

I have the book 'larning' in sociology, anthropology and psychology myself....plus a lifetime of personal research on ancient history and lots and lots of theology.  Needless to say as a woman and one educated in all those things and as one who has lived everywhere you can think of on the socio-economic ladder........I find your observations totally off the mark.

You know, I'm sort of interested in this discussion, though mostly I wish it would go away -- the whole anti-trans strain in feminism, that is.

Heretic, at risk of sounding like an Unfrozen Cave-woman Lawyer, I'm not sure how anything you said has any bearing on any point that Tekla made. Now, fine, Tekla enjoys privilege. I'm pretty sure that Tekla acknowledges that. Everyone here enjoys privilege. Now, can we please refrain from ad hominem attacks? Dyssonance asked about Tekla's credentials in feminist scholarship, and Tekla answered.

Now, before anyone gets all upset, please not I'm not agreeing with Tekla, just saying that only reponse to Tekla's posts has been, in short, "Whatever, you're a man, what to you know?"  Not helpful. The problem with Tekla's argument is twofold and pretty obvious, I thought. First, sexual liberation as a basis for 1970's feminism was not really all that much of a basis for the whole essay; and second, Tekla take the post far too seriously. As far as I can tell, the blog post was intended not as a scholarly evaluation of Greer and Raymond, but more a personal recollection on the zeitgeist that produced them. What was important (to the angle taken by the article) was not the origins of second-wave feminism, but the feeling in the air once it got going and how Greer and Raymond fed into that.

Thanks, Tekla.