My ongoing novel research—trying to get inside the head of a Catholic feminist liberationist grad student—has taken me to Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex, first published in 1968, then reissued in 1975 “with a new feminist postchristian introduction by the author.” Written in the fresh (but fading) aura of Postconciliar optimism, the book is infused with the assumption that many of its concerns will soon be answered (wouldn’t be the first time people in a Church waited for something that never showed up). But how could she have foreseen the election of Pope Benedict XVI? And how could she have foreseen the Vatican’s entrenched hostility to anything with the word “liberation” attached to it? Since her death in 2010, a new pope has been elected and he appears to act with a greater openness, but does anyone seriously expect the situation for women in the Catholic Church to improve anytime soon?
As a WASP male, it’s easy for me to treat these concerns in the abstract. They don’t personally affect me, do they? To the extent that any of my WASP male peers think about the Vatican (which is almost never), they tend to think of it the same way they think of supermarket tabloid headlines. News from the Vatican is a source of titillation and eye-rolling, then it’s forgotten along with news of the Kardashians and America’s Next Top Narcissist.
Yet the fact remains: I read the book. And I can’t help wondering: Catholic or otherwise, what the hell happened to feminism? Just look at the advertising that assaults our consciousness, the airheads on unreality TV, the Janet Jacksons and Miley Cyruses, the troll comments on just about any news outlet’s web site, the lip gloss, the Botox, the porn industry (now almost as important to our global economy as Hollywood), the giggling black-eyed anime twits. Wasn’t the call for equality supposed to include a call for equal dignity?
Even today, most of The Church and The Second Sex rings true, maybe because the concerns it addresses are as blatant today as they were 45 years ago. But one passage strikes an off note. Drawing on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (which marks its 50th anniversary this year), Daly details how the mythologizing of femininity, especially through a perverse idolatry of the Virgin Mary, produces a passive/aggressive strategy for subordinating women within the church while assuring them that they are being honoured. Daly points out that this practice hinders the ability of men and women alike to engage in mature relationships. Fair enough, but then …\r\n
Since it is chiefly as mother rather than as partner that the Eternal Woman is envisioned, the maternal role tends to be exaggerated into grotesque proportions which have pathological implications for sexual relationship. Devotees of the mystique often proclaim that the wife should be a mother not only to her children but also to her husband. This encourages infantile, obsessive men to ‘marry a mother’, in order to perpetuate the advantages of infantile dependence. Lussier points out that a psychological evolution sometimes takes place in such men, so that they eventually discover the true nature of their marriage. When this happens, the man begins to see his wife as dominating, much as an adolescent boy reacts against his mother. Often he will then try to prove his independence of her by seeking affairs with other women. It is clear that the total identification of the woman with the mother image is a source of sickness in both sexes.
This identification can also be harmful to the children. It would seem that the better educated and more energetic the woman is, the greater is the chance that she will suffocate her children, if she has no other outlet. Betty Friedan has pointed out that ‘the mother whose son becomes homosexual is usually not the “emancipated” woman who competes with men in the world, but the very paradigm of the feminine mystique—a woman who lives through her son, whose femininity is used in virtual seduction of her son, who attaches her son to her with such dependence that he can never mature to love a woman, nor can he, often, cope as an adult with life on his own.’
In other words: you men need to support us in our feminist vision because it will help keep your sons from turning gay.
This isn’t the only time Daly stumbles while trying to walk the feminist line. In “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” Audre Lorde delivers a politely scathing rebuke after reading Daly’s 1978 book, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism.[1] She chastises Daly for omitting Goddess images and mythologies from non-White non-Eurocentric cultures. She says: “What you excluded from Gyn/Ecology dismissed my heritage and the heritage of all other noneuropean women, and denied the real connections that exist between all of us.” And later: “To me, this feels like another instance of the knowledge, crone-ology and work of women of Color being ghettoized by a white woman dealing only out of a patriarchal western european frame of reference.”
That, in a nutshell, may account for what the hell happened to feminism, not just Daly’s liberation theology feminism, but all feminism(s). It has failed to escape the “patriarchal western european frame of reference” that was its original foil. If a liberationist account is to be truly liberating, then it must seek out and take account of all the axes of marginalization, not just those within view of the chaise longue by the swimming pool.
A vaguely white western feminism celebrates women who have made it (i.e. cracked through the proverbial glass ceiling), and so we see images of well-coiffed professionals in the board room directing their multinationals to record profits on the backs of sweatshop labour in Indonesian free-trade zones. And grey-suited politicians participating in the decisions that see troops deployed to countries in the two-thirds world as part of “aid” packages. And stern bespectacled economists advocating “structural adjustments” and neoliberal “reforms” that keep “developing” countries in eternal debt. This is what the hell happened to feminism.
And why would I, a middle-class white anglo-saxon Protestant Canadian, care about the internecine squabbles of two Catholic feminist thinkers? Wouldn’t it make more sense for me simply to let them cut each other’s heads off while I go on enjoying my position of privilege? The pragmatic reason, as I wrote at the outset, is that I’m doing research for a novel. But, to be honest, I would have read Daly and Lorde anyways. I look to Lorde’s poignant plea that Daly read her words. More than that, Lorde wants Daly to empathize, to leverage Lorde’s words so that, at least in some small measure, she might occupy Lorde’s experience as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” After all, what good is a voice if there are no ears to hear it? I think Lorde is genuinely frightened at the possibility that one of the white women best positioned to hear and empathize might simply ignore her. What hope, then, can she have for the rest of us? (In fact, Lorde published the letter precisely because Daly refused to respond.)
I take it as an article of faith—one of my few—that each of us lives along at least one axis of marginalization and, for that reason, is able to feel empathy. We can look to our own experience, then to the experience of others, and say: this is like that, a simple analogy. Call it identification. Call it solidarity. Except for sociopaths, each of us has the capacity for this. All it takes is the sense of an obligation, an ethic that calls us to feel something.
No one ever sees the first act of liberation because it begins inside us with the liberation of our own will.
I, too, need liberating. Among other things, I need liberating from the cultural blinkers that have been fastened to my head by people—mostly men—who are just like me. I have an intuition that there is more to the world than reveals itself in my narrow range of vision, but I barely have the imagination to speculate on what that more might be. In the mean time, I gaze out on the drab monotonous vista and hope that by reading the words of people who are not like me, I can nudge the blinkers back by degrees.
[1]Sister Outsider (Ten Speed Press, 1984)