Feminist leader Gloria Steinem. Source: Ms. Foundation for Women
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In “Not Their Mother’s Candidate,” in last Sunday’s New York Times, Susan Faludi purports to situate the difference between women who support Clinton and women who support Sanders in terms of the history of American feminism. According to Faludi the conflict is one between “mothers” and “daughters,” which first appeared among feminists in the 1920s. The “mothers” of today (Madeleine Albright, Gloria Steinem) call for loyalty among women; the “daughters” (the flappers then; unnamed today) pursue personal liberation rather than group loyalty. One is almost finished with the article before one realizes that in fact it is another twisted pro-Clinton intervention, based on the assumption that Sanders is not electable.
I will not here explain why Sanders might prove more electable than Hillary Clinton. I will not discuss her potentially devastating weaknesses such as the underestimated, email problem or her enabling of her husband’s rapacious sexual career, which will certainly be at the center of the election, should she prove to be the candidate. Nor will I argue the case that a defeat of Sanders, if accompanied by a renewal of the left, might prove preferable to a continuation of today’s regime of lies and falsehoods, just as the defeat of Goldwater in 1964 led to the right’s successful insurgency from that time on. Rather, I want to take up Faludi’s misuse of the history of feminism.
Faludi’s discussion of “mothers” and “daughters,” especially in regard to the 1920s, is lifted without acknowledgement from Ann Douglas’s magisterial 1996 work, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. What Douglas showed was that the 1920s gave birth to what we know today as cultural radicalism– African-American nationalism, feminism, Jewish identity politics, sexual liberation, homosexual liberation, as well as artistic modernism, for example, the stream of consciousness novel, jazz and experimental theatre. Douglas’ argument is that it was the mixture, the interweaving of the different currents– which Manhattan made possible– that created what Lionel Trilling later called America’s “adversary culture” and that Christopher Lasch termed “the new radicalism in America.” Not accidentally Sigmund Freud was at the center of this radicalism– not the Freud who created modern psychotherapy but the sexual liberator and the crusader against hypocrisy. Douglas’ point is that radicals were able to create something new, based on a recognition of the new productive forces, such as the automobile and film, which no single group could create by itself. That is the point of the term “mongrel” in her title.
There was an argument between mothers and daughters, as Douglas shows, but this was not an argument inside feminism. The “mothers” were hypocrites, racists, anti-immigrant, supporters of prohibition, Bowdlerizers, nostalgic about the dual sphere society and the cult of true womanhood. The “daughters” were not only believers in sexual liberation; they were socialists, anarchists, communitarians, “wets,” creators and participants in the Harlem Renaissance, crusaders against lynching, and precursors of the Popular Front and the New Deal. As young women like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict exemplify, they were Freudians, and both of them were lesbians. The “mothers” banned such books as Joyce’s Ulysses, DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Radclyffe Halls’ classic 1928 lesbian novel, Well of Loneliness. The “daughters” read these works in pirated editions. Above all the daughters, in a crucial quote from the 1925 New York Times, which Faludi lifted from Douglas but without credit, could “take a man’s view as her mother never could.”
What Douglas shows is that the issue in the 1920s was not men vs. women; it was not even black vs. white; it was progress vs. reaction. It is the same today. Knowing which of the Democrats stands for progress is not always easy. But Faludi’s intervention– which is itself not forthright– helps clarify the issue. People made progress in the 1920s because they had a common cause. They did not make progress because each single group claimed a slice of the pie. In her early campaign Hillary Clinton tried to manipulate the issue of gender, but New Hampshire suggested that this wouldn’t work. In the last debate with Sanders she shifted ground, to race. If we recognize the extraordinary character of the American radical past, and note the “mongrel” contribution of the 1920s, that won’t work either.
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Eli Zaretsky is the author of Political Freud and Why America Needs a Left.
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