SOURCE: Elshtain, Jean Bethke. “Sic Transit Gloria.” New Republic 211, no. 2 (11 July 1994): 32-6.

[In the following review, Elshtain discusses Sommers's Who Stole Feminism? and Gloria Steinem's Moving Beyond Words. Elshtain praises Sommers for identifying and exposing misinformation put forth by feminist scholars, but criticizes her for failing to place feminism in a broader cultural and historical context or offer a viable alternative to current trends in feminist thought.]

It seems that Simon & Schuster wishes to cover all the bases, producing more or less simultaneously a book whose thesis is that feminists have betrayed women and a book whose thesis is that women continue to be betrayed by patriarchy. My hunch is that the less familiar and predictable book, Christina Hoff Sommers's indictment of what “gender feminism” has wrought, may well carry the day. What Gloria Steinem has to say, and the way she has to say it, is utterly familiar. Moving Beyond Words has not exactly moved beyond words.

Steinem begins with a self-congratulatory warning to the reader: “Since there seems to be no genre for this, I've found myself explaining it in this way: If you added water to any of these parts, it would have become a book.” Despite the fact that her book is not exactly a book, Steinem proclaims herself “spent and happy” at its finish. For “writing a book is like trying to stop a river.” Enough already. If we don't have a book, what is it that we do have? The usual plaints, I fear. Thus we are told yet again that Freud was an “abnormal” creature and that his theory constitutes “the Watergate of the Western world.” (Whatever that means.) We are also told that Steinem is an “economics-impaired person” who took years to wise up to the ways of our profit-driven world, and that advertising compromises editorial freedom. (This is the wisdom that emerges from a piece on the perils of Ms. magazine's efforts to find advertising.)

The platitudes continue to proliferate. “Rich girls,” says Steinem, are terrifically unhappy and not well-off at all (which is in line with the view that all women, until they go on the “verge” and things start to “click,” lead blighted lives). They do not really control their own wealth, for one thing; but Steinem hints at yet darker possibilities: “We've read about rich girls who were victims of incestuous relationships. … Many observers believe that sexual abuse is more prevalent among families of inherited wealth and power than in the population at large—and I agree.” (There is no footnote for this, and no evidence is cited.) And finally we are treated to an “I'm all right, Jane” celebration of turning 60. Over the years, Steinem reports, she has learned that women are best thought of as “perennial flowers who re-pot ourselves and bloom in many times.”

But what is blooming here wilts quickly under scrutiny. In an essay praising women who go from soft bodies to hard bodies, for example, Steinem celebrates the career of “the strongest woman in the world,” a body-builder named Bev Francis. She details Francis's trials and tribulations, her stalwart training, her battles with sexism, her refusal to resort to breast implants. But she did have a teeny-weeny nose job: she didn't like her nose much, her husband told her that “if you don't like it change it,” and change it she did. Her nose “fits her face better now,” so all is well. Mind you, I think it's great for women to be fit; but turning fitness into a fetish doesn't seem like such a wonderful idea and, if the bitter truth be known, women who are out doing what Steinem wants them to do with jobs and careers, and who are also doing what she is a bit less keen on—marrying and having children—have little time for a regimen that sculpts a body.

This particular essay is fluff, and not worth belaboring. But one of Steinem's analogies is notable and troubling. She proclaims that going from Miss Soft Body to Ms. Hard Body is “so dramatic that the only male analogues I could find were Vietnam amputees whose confidence was bolstered when they entered marathons in wheelchairs or on artificial legs.” Do we really want to compare men who have lost limbs to women who work out? Why not compare overweight, overworked, flabby male careerists to their tougher, hard-bodied and healthier counterparts? The analogy, however, is revealing: for Steinem, women are crippled, besieged, beleaguered. Hence her rush to conflate grievous bodily loss with “normal” but undesirable femininity.

Or consider “Sex, Lies and Advertising,” a manifesto that can't quite make up its mind. On the one hand, advertising is awful and manipulative and akin to censorship. On the other hand, sexist and male-dominated corporations were egregiously slow to take up the offer to advertise in Ms., despite the fact that the promoters of Ms. had facts and figures on their side proving that, yes, women buy cars and drink liquor and consume all sorts of things. Steinem cannot decide if she wants a world without advertising or a world with what might be called “equal-opportunity manipulation.” She laments the compromise of “editorial freedom” entailed by the need to advertise—and I have no doubt that compromises of all sorts get made in glossy magazines—but she also condemns the efforts of a group who, offended at a Ms. article, tried to organize a consumer boycott against advertisers in Ms. This, too, is construed as an attack on “freedom of the press.”

I am old-fashioned and liberal enough to think that consumer boycotts are part and parcel of the American way of doing business. So why cry censorship? Because Steinem doesn't like the politics of these particular boycotters; and so their organizing efforts must be nothing less than an assault on freedom. We get another tasty, unwittingly revealing analogy here, too, as Steinem avers that “feminist seminars in shopping centers” (she cites Bloomingdale's) are “to the women's movement” what “churches were to the civil rights movement in the South—that is, where people are.” Am I alone in being confounded by the facility of this equivalence? Bloomingdale shoppers and Dr. King's congregations?

And then there is the matter of Freud—or “What If Freud Were Phyllis?” as Steinem calls her essay. Here she is spectacularly behind the curve. She seems completely unaware that dozens of contemporary scholars with impeccable feminist credentials are inventively bringing Freud to bear on their own work. It is clear, not least because she says so, that Steinem will permit only one reading of Freud's work, her own tendentious reading, and those who deviate from it are defenders of mischief, lies and patriarchy.

Steinem would like her reader to consider, as a thought experiment, the reversal of Freud's gender, to consider Freud “as a woman.” For Steinem, writing up a “biography” of “Phyllis Freud” is concocting a “lethal satire” on a par with Swift's “A Modest Proposal.” To this end she invents words and make-believe “scholarly” footnotes. The idea is to show that Freud's entire life and work were folly. Steinem claims she “gained a lot of faith in reversals—of all kinds.” This is the conceit of her essay. But it isn't necessarily the case that such reversals are a contribution to empathy or understanding, especially if the reversal is based on a caricatured version of what one is reversing. What turning the tables in this way does accomplish, though, is an incitement of spite and resentment. The Freud that emerges in Steinem's genuinely unpleasant pages is the Freud portrayed, and hated by, anti-Semitic Vienna, the filthy-minded psychic seducer of trusting and tormented women. He is pathetic (“there was no help for the poor guy himself”) as well as malicious and dangerous. Steinem alternately pities, trashes and scorns. (Freud is trashed for the rumor that he had an affair with his sister-in-law, but then Steinem pities by saying that this “might turn out to be the most normal thing about Freud.”)

I haven't the space or the patience to correct Steinem's essay point by point, but a few things do need to be said. She claims that Freud thought “cocaine was just fine,” which is completely false. She suggests that Freud may have been a murderer (more or less) for having “injected and killed” a friend and colleague. This is a slander against the truth about Freud's medical and personal solicitude for Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, a friend Freud tried to wean off morphine addiction with an oral solution containing cocaine—this at a time when cocaine was readily available at the local pharmacist. She claims that Freud embraced dream symbolism because symbols allowed psychoanalysts to interpret dreams without questioning the dreamer, when in fact Freud thought symbols had a very limited exegetical usefulness, and so based his interpretations on the dreamer's associations. And it is amusing, but not altogether surprising, to watch Steinem trot out Jeffrey Masson's widely discredited theories about Freud's treatment of sexual abuse in childhood and the psychic traces of it. Freud never denied that cases of seduction and abuse actually occurred, but he alerted us to the difficulties involved in sifting “inner” and “outer” realities—a difficulty that recent court cases in this country illustrate.

As if this weren't enough—and I am only skimming the surface of this hatchet job—she takes Freud to task for rejecting both “Marxist revolutionaries in Russia” and “Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations.” Freud, claims Steinem, was always “critical of those foolish enough to try to make social revolutions; especially feminists, who he thought were opposing biology itself.” But Freud is clear about what he fears—not “foolish” social revolutionaries, but cruel and dangerous ones. Perhaps Steinem believes that the Russian Revolution was a success. And his criticism of Wilson and the League was based on a premonition that the breakup of empire in Eastern and Central Europe would invite the eruption of the nationalistic “narcissism of minor differences,” a premonition that was amply confirmed in his time and in our own.

Nor is Freud's family spared. “Look up ‘Anna Freud’ in the index of the most pro-Freud biography,” writes Steinem, “and you'll probably find an entry for ‘low self-esteem.’” At this point I grow rather sickened. Anna Freud's intellectual independence was praised and encouraged by her father. She went on to become, in the words of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, her gifted biographer, “not only her father's successor and, in her own right, her generation's most scientifically exact and wide-ranging theoretical and clinical contributor,” but someone who lived a rich, full and productive life until she died at 86. This, “low self-esteem”? If so, let us have more of it.

Rounding things off with her celebration of re-potted women, Steinem's book flies out in all directions. Yet another weird analogy: women who try to “pass” as younger, says Steinem, are like “fair-skinned blacks” and “Jews escaping anti-Semitism.” The best bits in “Doing 60” may be found in Steinem's somewhat breathless account of a youthful trip to India, where she learns that “if you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.” But there is little evidence that she listens to other women—forget about men—unless they share her assumptions and her conclusions, including the conviction that “the personal is the political” tout court. Such a feminism is so old it is reactionary. Hasn't the experience of the last three decades taught that it is impossible to reduce the personal to the political? Are there no lessons to learn on this score?

The transformation of feminist politics into therapy is the dominant story told by Sommers [in Who Stole Feminism?], though she does not describe her story in quite this way. Sommers is, in her own words, a “feminist who does not like what feminism has become,” and she adds that “the new gender feminism is badly in need of scrutiny.” I agree, certainly, that no doctrine and no movement is exempt from scrutiny. How well does Sommers succeed? Though she was trained in philosophy, Sommers's analytical achievements here are owed to her journalistic stubbornness, to her energy in tracking down and exposing “factoids” that have gained the status of “fact.”

Interestingly, all these factoids are dismal. One would never know that, on all indices of achievement, women have steadily been gaining ground. That just isn't grist for the orthodox feminist mill. Consider two examples. “In Revolution from Within Steinem informs her readers that ‘in this country alone … about 150,000 females die of anorexia each year.’” This translates into 150,000 martyrs to the cause of feminism, or a horde of feminists dead aborning, for, in Steinem's view, anorexic women are women in political revolt. Sommers does some legwork and discovers from the president of the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association that “we were misquoted.” The organization's newsletter had written of 150,000 to 200,000 estimated sufferers from eating disorders. “The National Center for Health Statistics reported 101 deaths from anorexia in 1983 and sixty-seven deaths in 1988.”

What is going on here? Why, asks Sommers, do we want to believe the most awful stuff? Take another example, reported by Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, in a PBS interview: “Battery of pregnant women is the number one cause of birth defects in this country.” Sommers wondered how this could be, and set out in pursuit of this factoid. She called the March of Dimes, whose director of education said that they had seen no such research. Yet this “fact” was cited as such in The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Time and The Dallas Morning News, among others. Sommers called the March of Dimes again. Its director of media relations said the rumor was spinning out of control: even Senator Kennedy had requested a copy of a nonexistent report. When Sommers finally reached the reporter who had written the article in Time, the reporter said she had been in error; she had not checked her facts first. Time later printed a retraction. Meanwhile Sommers located the source of the story in a maternal nurse and child specialist in Raleigh, North Carolina, who said: “It blows my mind, it is not true.” What she had said was that less screening for battery than for birth defects was being done, but she had “said nothing at all about battery causing birth defects.”

But the mainstream media had leapt at the chance to paint yet another picture of American women assaulted, besieged, destroyed, manipulated, damaged. Sommers rightly asks:

Why was everybody so credulous? Battery responsible for more birth defects than all other causes combined? More than genetic disorders, Down's syndrome, Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia? More than congenital heart disorder? More than alcohol, crack or AIDS—more than all these things combined? Where were the fact-checkers, the editors, the skeptical journalists?

Her conclusion is that “gender feminists” have pretty much got the media in the palm of their hands. To be sure, it was an indefatigable reporter from The Washington Post who exposed the false story that Super Bowl Sunday was the No. 1 day for battering in the entire year. Sommers might have made more of this one. For encoded into the Super Bowl story were two stock genre types: the red-necked, beer-drinking, football-watching clod of a male and his counterpart, the ignored, long-suffering, abused wife. This latter image dominates television talk shows and evening docudramas. There is more than a little class nastiness and, yes, sexism lurking just beneath many of these allegedly progressive representations.

As the culture revels in bathos, so the academy, according to Sommers, sinks into a torpor brought on by fear. It is certainly the case that any senior woman in the academy who works on “women's issues” and is involved in feminist debates has stories to tell of being pressured to fall into line, for fear of being declared an apostate. Collecting such stories, however, is rather like shooting fish in a barrel. My hunch is that plenty of women—and feminists—who have been criticized from the standpoint of an ideological extreme have said the hell with it and gone on with their work.

Yes, there is a good deal that is obnoxious, especially the infantilization on display in group events in which women are required to give each other hugs, talk about something unpleasant as an “ouch experience” and about some new insight as a “click experience.” (Steinem has at least three “clicks,” by the way, in her book.) Yes, women's studies workshops showing films with such titles as Sex and the Sandinistas and We're Talking Vulva are probably beyond the reach of even the most clever parody. And, yes, it is terrible when political or intellectual dissent is redescribed as a psychological problem: “You make me uncomfortable.” When this happens in the classroom, it means that the teacher is evading her responsibility to help students grow up by encouraging them to make an argument and to listen to a disagreement without personalizing and psychologizing the encounter. If making someone feel uncomfortable is not permitted, then dissent and discussion are not permitted.

I can recall many pseudo-therapeutic events from my own years in the trenches, from 1973 until just last year, when a “facilitator” began an academic meeting by announcing that we were all going to be “supportive” of one another and show how exemplary women were by refusing to use language that others “couldn't understand,” by eschewing “intellectual elitism” and so on. Such an agenda promises terminal boredom, among other things, but it is also an unabashed play for power: in the name of “making nice,” people get shut up. I also know that there are young women faculty who are pressured by their “sisters” because they are doing “incorrect” things, such as the young (white) female historian studying (black) history who has been told repeatedly that she cannot legitimately do this because she is white and, moreover, because she is not “woman-identified.” My advice in such instances has been the same for twenty years: ignore the drivel, do your work and hope that good sense and fair play prevail.

More often than not—of this I am convinced—decency wins out over ardor. But it is awful to be hounded and haunted by other women because you are the “wrong” sort of woman. Which brings me to a major point—and a major weakness—in Sommers's book. She suggests that the heavy hand of “gender feminist” ideology has got people cowering and running for cover, and she contrasts this to a happy time when academics were not so craven. It is my general impression, by contrast, that academics have never been profiles in courage. Academics tend to swim in schools like fishes. That feminism rapidly became a school with its gatekeepers and its enforcers is no surprise.

This sort of thing has been going on for a long time. Did the majority of academics refuse to sign “loyalty oaths” at the height of cold war hysteria? Tenure, or its prospect, seems not to stiffen people's spines. Sommers overplays her hand when she claims that “the campus feminists have not made the American campuses a happier place, and not least because they have brow-beaten a once outspoken and free faculty.” Outspoken and free, in American higher education? Where? When?

To be sure, there's “trouble out there in River City,” no doubt about it, and some of it marches into town under the banner of “gender feminism.” But the academic excesses described by Sommers speak to a larger cluster of problems in contemporary American civic culture. The feminism that she deplores is not the cause of these larger problems, it is their expression. This sort of feminism is the consequence, for example, of a tawdry pop-therapeutic worldview that battens off confessional television and the “self-esteem” craze.

And it, too, is a reflection of the American gift for moral panics. Lacking any longer a clear-cut external enemy to concentrate our minds, we obsess fearfully about one thing, then another. I recall a dismal conversation with the “coordinator” of a women's studies program at a small liberal arts college who told me that she had a hard time breaking through the “defenses” of many of her students in her introductory core course in women's studies. What she wanted them to admit to was that many of them were “victims of incest.” And this, of course, is neither scholarship nor politics. It is only a trendy form of moral panic, and its “cure,” alas, is rather noxious: mandated re-education that aims to inoculate both the alleged victimizers and the alleged victims against dangerous thoughts, words and deeds. More often than not, however, it inspires only resentment—I have a lingering confidence in the ability of Americans to detect nonsense when it comes close—and a Manichaean worldview in which the source of all my discontents lies always outside myself, in which self-criticism is always preempted.

A quick glance at the “self-esteem” industry shows just how desperate we can get, and how shoddy our thoughts can be, when we are caught in the grip of a moral panic. Consider the following: The most vulnerable body in America today is that of the young black male. He is most likely to die violently, to kill or be killed. He is most likely to drop out of school. He is most likely to be unemployed. Males in general are at greater risk of dropping out, being diagnosed with learning disorders, committing suicide, dying in car crashes. Yet, according to a report issued by the American Association of University Women, what is “shocking” is that young white women have such low “self-esteem.” (Never mind the dubious measurements on which the calculation of self-esteem is based.) After weeks of effort Sommers actually laid her hands on the hard-to-find study, and she found that, on the evidence of the AAUW's own widely cited data, “African American boys score highest of all on the indexes of self-esteem.” By leaving out this critical piece of the puzzle, it was easier to make the pitch that girls were doomed.

In fact, what the study seems to suggest, and this, if it is true, is very sad, is that young black men are overtaken by a romantic self-imagination that far outstrips any reasonable chance of attainment, given their prospects and circumstances. It may be that self-esteem has little or nothing to do with actual achievement. If you look at the figures, young, middle-class white women are, as a group, the highest achieving in academic terms. And, with women outnumbering men in higher education, one wonders what the self-esteem industry is all about. The answer, of course, is that it is about itself. But this makes it the enemy of a viable politics, that is, a politics that might do something about actual and unpleasant facts. But that young black men are the most endangered of all our young people does not play as well in our victim-loving, responsibility-shirking culture as a quasi-therapeutic enterprise aimed at young, middle-class white women. (Sommers might have said more about the class and race biases in all of this.)

Sommers aims some of her most withering critical fire at feminist epistemology, at those who proclaim a “woman's way of knowing.” In its strongest form, in the claim that males and females inhabit separate epistemological universes, this is, of course, errant and dangerous nonsense. Still, is there no significant difference in, let us say, epistemological emphases? The nonsense notwithstanding, it is surely an exaggeration to dismiss our embodied and gendered experiences altogether. The maternal experience of women, for example, cannot be shared fully by men, and it certainly is an avenue of knowledge.

Sommers herself cites an illustration of “maternal thinking” from her own fine heroine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton described the efforts of several doctors to try to encourage her 4-day-old baby's “bent collarbone” to grow straight. Each time the doctors bandaged the child, his fingers turned blue; and so Stanton devised her own contraption that did the job without cutting off the child's circulation. She explained this to the doctors, who marveled at the ingenuity of a “mother's instinct.” “Thank you, gentlemen,” Stanton replied, “there was no instinct about it. I did some hard thinking before I saw how I could get pressure on the shoulder without impeding the circulation, as you did.” Sommers thinks that this is an example of gender-free or sex-free knowledge. But isn't it possible that the mother's intense attention to this, her child, helped her to think her way through to a solution? Isn't motherhood (and in its way, fatherhood) a sphere of what Aristotle called “practical reason,” sexed or gendered in important, if not exclusive, ways?

Finally, Sommers contrasts bad “gender feminism” with good “equity feminism.” She calls this latter “pure and wholesome,” and traces its origins to the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. But it was not considered so “pure and wholesome” at the time. In fact, the good women of Seneca Falls were a pure scandal. They fought not only for the vote, but also against clothes that maimed, demeaning social codes, rotten doctoring—against the “dead hand of custom” in its various and pervasive manifestations. Many early feminists were crusaders of the moral panic variety. Carrie Nation was no more the soul of sweet reason than John Brown. There were some among the “equity feminists” who thought equity extended to free love. Others thought that it required reorganizing familial and social life along the romantic lines of Fourier and other fanciful socialists.

Sommers fails, then, to develop convincingly her own preferred feminist model; and this failure is traceable partly to the fact that she is trapped in too sharp and severe a contrast between the bad new and the good old. Her “equity feminism” is pretty thin on the ground. We need to know more about what it requires. Has that feminist revolution already succeeded? What more, if anything, needs to be done? Sommers drops a tantalizing hint here and there: she notes, for example, that a woman's biological clock and an academic department's tenure clock may be clicking at the same time. (This is hardly the sort of cause with which to rally the population, though.) Perhaps we should take a critical look at the organization of work life and career patterns, which could scarcely be less “family friendly” than they are now. Does this require old-fashioned protectionism of the sort that women trade unionists fought for in the early decades of the century? But this would be an unhappy conclusion for Sommers, since it turns on precisely the gender differences that she wants to downplay.

Feminism is destined to remain what it has always been: an essentially contested concept, whose meaning admits of no final and definitive resolution. In the meantime, with all the Western welfare states in trouble, with nationalism promising to be the dominant political force in the next century, with social troubles here at home, especially among our children, there are more than enough “ouches” to keep us occupied for a long time. We are more than ever in need of an authentically political intelligence. We need to think not only humanely but also practically, to “think what we are doing,” in Hannah Arendt's words. It was she who proclaimed, in response to a critic who took her to task for the sharpness of her political judgments: “My God, this is not the nursery.” The United States seems headed down the road to a malicious and litigious Romper Room. This is not the fault of feminism; but, to the extent that institutionalized feminism, inside or outside the academy, has contributed to our spreading infantilization, it must be chastised.