a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Last Spring, when Sarah Palin began to market herself nationally as a “conservative prolife feminist,” responding articles and op-eds by feminists waved like signs at a protest march. You cannot have our name! When she up-ed the ante during the summer, celebrating the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment by praising those “brave feminist foremothers” –the Suffragettes–who endured and suffered ridicule in order to “grant future generations of women a voice,” her critics knew what was coming next. Palin used her voice and the platform offered by The Susan B. Anthony List to call on feminists to fight actively against the right to abortion.  Coming up on the mid-term elections, a recent (10/18) issue of The Nation has a collection of articles– behind a cover story by Betsy Reed called “Sex and the GOP” –trying to sort it all out.  What is to be done?

This year’s campaigns have featured—among other amazements– a spectacular display of word expropriation.  The word “fascism” has become a firecracker among radio talk show hosts working over-time ad captandum vulgus (to win over the mob) as the Roman rhetoricians used to say. Glen Beck, a self-taught history buff, is particularly fond of cutting the word “fascism” loose from all its historical scholarship moorings and throwing it at anyone he is doing battle with at the moment. And now “feminism” is being claimed by the newly popular and very public women of the right who are running for office,  endorsed by Sarah Palin.

Actually, there is nothing new in “pro-life” groups calling themselves feminist and invoking the “brave feminist foremothers” as pro-life exponents. Palin’s hosts at  The Susan B. Anthony List (which endorsed Palin in her 2006 run for Governor of Alaska) have been active since 1997. Even older is Feminists for Life (FFL), founded in 1972  (Palin joined in 2006), which originated the technique of combing the suffragette foremothers’ writings for statements that could be construed –with a lot of redacting—as anti-abortion. Academic feminist scholars have tried to expose the reckless a-historical quoting and misquoting for the hit-and-run that it is, but they have not succeeded in getting a hearing for the fact –and it is a fact–that no words from a foremother have ever been found that advocate  for a law requiring a woman to carry a pregnancy to term.

What is new at the moment it seems to me is that we have candidates for office –not just lobbyists, fund-raisers, and FFL educationalists –performing a novel role for their men, who have hit on a novel way to exploit them. Presenting themselves to the crowds as anti-fascists, the new American male fascists are using their women as the propaganda models –the hood ornaments–for really twisted pop history lesson that is driving all over the land like a Victory Car.

The inter-war fascist movements and parties in Europe all had women’s auxiliaries. Some allowed women actual participation in their organizations, and encouraged newly enfranchised women to vote for fascist candidates, but most kept women in separate and not at all equal organizations that were dedicated to “family values.”  A woman’s role  was to preserve the sanctity and purity of homes, raise racially and ideologically correct children, serve masculine and masculinist interests.  The first detailed contemporary study of fascist women that I know of was focused on Italy: Victoria de Grazia’s How Fascism Ruled Women, which came out from the University of California Press in 1993, has a title that tells all.

At least since the first International Women’s Conference in Paris in 1892, the word “feminist” –from the French feministe—has been the standard noun and adjective in English for advocates and advocacy of women’s enfranchisement –the big goal at the time–and, more generally, of both equal rights for women (for example, to vote, to run for office) and specific rights addressing specifically female needs (for example, to safe and sanctioned abortions, or to peri-natal and post-natal care). It was very obvious to all progressive women of the inter-war period that the men and women of the fascist movements were the leading anti-feminists. Even if they favored enfranchisement (as did the British Fascisti, founded in 1923 and actually led by a woman), the fascists opposed equality in the fuller senses. The reasons for their anti-feminism were complex, but then, as now, the bottom line was that women should not be or have something men cannot be or have. Anti-feminism has always ultimately concerned women’s sexual characteristics and lives, which males do not have; their reproductive capacities, which males do not have; and their sensibilities, which have been variously construed by women and men as not male. It has been felt necessary to exploit, eliminate or erase –in the most diverse ways– the powers of these womanly capacities and traits. (Often the motive, as Murray Schwartz pointed out in commenting on my last post (#23), comes down to envy. For fascistic women, it often comes down to wanting to bond with men in fortress families.)

In Europe after the War, the term “feminism” expanded its meaning and both the political rights and specific needs of women were much more broadly conceived, as were society’s corresponding responsibilities.  The needs of women became a central focus of the European social democracies, where hundreds of thousands of women had been widowed and millions of girls and boys were half-orphaned, orphaned, or in other ways traumatized.  Immediately after the war, many women won positions in municipal, regional and national governments and made it their business to advocate not just for traditional women’s rights, but for children’s rights as well and for a wide new range of social, economic, and cultural rights. There were European conservatives who objected to the entry of women into political life, but they largely abstained from anti-feminism because they pragmatically shared much of the social democratic conviction that the reconstruction of Europe depended upon supporting women and children with services, healthcare, education. All through the post-war period, there has been a greater portion of women in government positions in European nations than in America. (The USA currently ranks 69th among countries around the world with respect to numbers of women in elected positions and cabinets). Europeans have consistently pioneered internationally, particularly in the United Nations declarations and conventions concerning women’s and children’s rights, which the USA has consistently refused to ratify. Gro Brundtland, the first woman Prime Minister of Norway, chaired the UN Commission that in its 1987 report linked devastation of the environment to social deterioration and specifically pointed to the plight of women and children.

America, not devastated by the War, lagged behind as a site of feminist political participation while Rosie the Riveter went back to homemaking and in the1950s suburbs the middle class malaise grew that later prompted Betty Friedan to write The Feminine Mystique.  The feminism that most contemporary American feminists reference is the “Second Wave” feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s, focused to a very large degree around sexual liberation and liberation from stifling nuclear family mores.  “Sexism” (a word coined in 1965) was the enemy.  This feminism was not the broad, society-wide call for political rights and rights to societal support that made feminism appealing across classes in post-war Europe and in most of the rest of the world. American “Third Wave” feminism has focused more on the inter-relationships of sexism and other types of prejudice –race prejudice, class prejudice, homophobia—and on finding ways to oppose these prejudices in their “inter-sectionality” (one of those academic words that will not, I am sure, suffer expropriation).

Each developmental “wave” in feminism, and each new organizing principle—by sub-groups of women, by types of sexist acts or policies, by types of relationships with other groups –has been targeted with an anti-feminism. There has been anti-Women’s Lib, anti-lesbian-feminism, anti anti-pornography feminism, and so forth. But it was not until the late 1980s that Americans who were marching toward national-purity fascistic ideas found a single word that could bind together all the stalks of their anti-feminism and, too boot, make feminism sound like a type of inter-war fascism. The wild and wildly successful radio personality Russ Limbaugh can be credited with popularizing the  portmanteau rallying cry, which was –startlingly enough— “feminazism.”  On the radio and in his 1992 book The Way Things Ought to Be, Limbaugh claimed that man-hating feminists were waging a war on men, and using fascist –particularly Nazi– propaganda techniques to show the group inferiority of men, emphasizing male woundednesss, inadequacy, and pain. (This from a man addicted to pain-killers, as Glen Beck is to pain-killing alcohol –so both have confessed, at maudlin length, on the radio.)

Since the 1990s, the great sin of the feminazis has been their promotion of abortion, which Limbaugh and others say is both a kind of fascist eugenics and a way of subverting family-based morals. The feminazis, so the charge goes, want women to get rid of any fetus deemed ill or damaged, conceived by rape or incest, or unwanted.  “Unborn child abusers” is a term, like “feminazi,” that attributes disgusting behavior and pathology to women who exercise their right, as guaranteed by Rose v. Wade in America and by the UN Convention on the Rights of Women internationally, to abort a pregnancy. And here, I think, you can see clearly the basic projective prejudice mechanism: you put on your enemies something you hate or fear in yourself.  THEY (the feminazis) do not want or will kill the damaged or vulnerable YOU.

It seems to me that it is on the front of the abortion debate that rightwing women have been the most useful propagandists for the fascists who call feminists fascists. Sarah Palin can be relied on to Grrrrrrrr back with a projective Twitter to the feminists who accuse her of hijacking the word “feminism”: “Who hijacked the word feminist”? A cackle of rads who want 2 crucify other women w/whom they disagree on a single issue.”  The pagan witches, so goes the subtext of this little text to mark the 19th Amendment anniversary, will ridicule and crucify (like Jesus) a woman (like Sarah) who disagrees with them. Feminists are trying to be the gate-keepers of “feminism,” Sarah complains, squeezing out “ordinary” non-elite woman.  It is another way of saying that feminazis are would-be killers –of her, as much as of poor Rush or poor Glen.

The wounded and the vulnerable among the rightist men find the Sarah Palins of the right reassuringly powerful, good-mama grizzly bears who can meet the threat from baby-killing bad-mamas head-on. As in a romance, the making of a Good Mother out of the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, now state Governor, began when she was sent out by the aging and stumbling John McCain as a lure and a trap. Youthful, pretty, more pro-life than he, she could get the far right men into his 2008 Republican presidential campaign. Maybe the women too. Immediately, her performance got very concrete and look-at-me exhibitionistic. She appeared on the national stage only months after giving birth to a Down Syndrome baby boy, pulling heartstrings with her guilt for even thinking about not bearing little Trig. (That none of her constituents or co-workers seemed to have known that she was pregnant added mystery to the plot; rumors flew that the baby was really her daughter’s.) Meanwhile, up stepped the daughter, 17-year-old Bristol, pregnant “out of wedlock,” but bravely ready to raise the baby by herself in the loving context of her family. (Later, she assuaged skeptics among the pro-family troops by announcing her engagement to the father –and then her disengagement—and then her re-engagement…on the soap opera went.)  They incarnated, mother and daughter, the “pro-life” position.  A photogenic person is worth a thousand words.

Sarah and Bristol are living proof that opposition to abortion is not a male specialty; they effectively disguise the fact that all the original “pro-life” organizations were and are ruled by men –like Randall Terry–who were and are ferociously condemnatory of women who chose to terminate a pregnancy—out of their envy of female reproductive capacity and fear of being harmed or terminated themselves, I have just suggested. But for a feminist, abortion is an achieved woman’s right –one of many.  You cannot be a feminist, defined as an advocate of women’s rights, and oppose the right to abortion or any other woman’s right, achieved or being fought for.  It is hard to hold this position without seeming to do exactly what Sarah Palin claims: “crucify” women (and men) who believe that abortion is immoral and that it should be prohibited by law.  But the feminist position is, in fact, not a crucifixion of the pro-life position: it says, rather, you are free to chose not to have an abortion, no law should ever prohibit you; but if your sister chooses to have an abortion and a law prohibits her, that is an abridgement of the woman’s right and all feminists should oppose it,

It will take a lot of careful psychological as well as political analysis for feminists to
defend feminism effectively and avoid the Babel our political life has become as words, which should be our means for dialogue and interpretation, loose their historically grounded  meanings  and become weapons. But at least we have to say clearly that the rights women –from the foremothers forward–have struggled to achieve are a unity, even if you cannot look them up in one achieved Bill of Rights. Each must be defended; there will never be a “post-feminist” era when defense is no longer necessary. If someone tries to rescind one right, she threatens them all –and cannot then with any honesty call herself a feminist. Feminists are for woman’s rights, not against them. It’s that simple.

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