Navarro's and Steinem's New Companion

by Christopher Pearson

Six years removed from the Year of the Woman, it’s tough going in the redoubts of radical feminism. Your favorite President since Daniel Ortega has been caught exploring a former Lewis and Clark College intern well beyond the Mississippi.

And as many of Clinton’s most prominent backers, usually eager to drive the big lug home, suddenly can’t find their car keys, it has been up to you to stand by your man. Though after all he’s given to the women of this country, you don’t mind so much. What’s worse is when even after you calmly explain that it’s only harassment when people you don’t like do it, some Scaife-funded gyno-phobes in the media are still whining about hypocrisy, still pointing their stubby patriarchal fingers at you.

For you, then, the recent arrival in bookstores of a weighty tome of feminist scholarship entitled the Readers’ Companion to US Women’s History is all the more welcome. As some Western male not Marx, Sartre, or Derrida once explained, controlling the past is the key to controlling the future.

And in its 650+ page majesty, the Companion does hold the promise of a major addition to the ever expansive feminist version of history.

Its pedigree is certainly exceptional. Two of the Companion’s five editors are, in fact, national feminist figures of some renown.
Wilma Mankiller (Yes, that is her name) is the former leader of the Cherokee Nation while Gloria Steinem is a former Playboy bunny, founder of Ms. magazine, and organizer of the Women’s Political Caucus.

Marysa Navarro is a professor of history at Dartmouth and a generous provider of grist for this newspaper’s Week in Review mill. Rounding out the quintet is Barbara Smith, a writer, and Gwendolyn Mink, a professor of politics at UC-Santa Cruz.

Mink has distinguished herself in recent weeks by taking to the New York Times editorial page to challenge her fellow editor Steinem’s stringent new definition of sexual harrassment, a definition that’s apparently only applicable to liberal Democrats.

The Companion is constructed in the manner of an encyclopedia, brief articles on a wide array of topics arranged alphabetically. Contributors include over 300 feminist scholars, primarily academics from colleges and universities, but others are affiliated with various think tank and advocacy groups.

For the editors, comprehensive seems to have been the watchword. In addition to five pages each dedicated to the entries for “Feminism” and “Feminisms,” respectively, there are two pages each devoted to “American Indian Feminism,” “Arab American Feminism,” “Asian American Feminism,” “Black Feminism,” “Chicana Feminism,” “Cultural Feminism,” “Ecofeminism,” “Electoral Feminism,” “International Feminism,” (curious for a guide to US women’s history), ”Jewish Feminism,” “Latina Feminism,” “Lesbian Feminism,” “Marxist Feminism,” “Puerto Rican Feminism,” “Radical Feminism,” “Socialist Feminism,” and “Working Class Feminism,” as well as entries for “Feminist Jurisprudence,” “Feminist Literary Criticism,” “Feminist Press, Publications, and Bookstores,” and “Feminist Theology.”

As befitting their academic authors, the entries in the Companion, for the most part, at least try for sober and measured tones, even when reporting on the bizarre. In her entry under “Radical Feminism,” Penn State’s Kathleen Barry somehow writes, “Groups like Redstockings; WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell); The Feminists; and Cell 16 which published ‘No more Fun and Games’ were identified particularly with women’s autonomy” without cracking a smile.

For her part, Nancy Smith of Ms. Magazine, also attempts to be objective but is just too impressed by her subject. She breathlessly identifies an activist troupe called the “Guerrilla Girls” as, and with no sense of irony, “an anonymous group of women who work to expose and challenge the racism and sexism in the art world, while wearing gorilla masks to hide their identities.”

Their tactics are not always welcome in that bastion of testosterone, the modern art community, but, fortunately there is reason for hope. “The Guerrilla Girls,” Smith notes, “received [in 1992] a NEA grant to produce four single-subject issues of a journal, Hotflashes.”

The Companion can perhaps be excused for indulging some of feminism’s stranger excesses but even the general history presented is also often skewed. In the entry under “The Fifties,” Wini Breines of Northeastern University writes, ”The 1950’s are best known as a time of prosperity and optimism; obsessive anti-communism, which led to the cold war; narrow gender expectations for women; and a glorification of the ‘normal’ nuclear family.”

Most serious scholars today, however, though generally opposed at the time to the US’s foreign policy towards Communism, grudingly admit that America’s anti-communistic stance was the decisive force that ultimately won the Cold War and brought democracy to the old Soviet empire.

No longer does anyone outside Bleecker Street suggest, as does Ms. Breines, that anti-communism was the cause of the Cold War.
In a similar attempt at revisionism, Susan Harding of UC-Santa Cruz, in her entry for “Fundamentalism” attempts to equate the Religious right and Iran’s genocidal theocracy: “Since 1979 (the Iranian Revolution and the founding of the Moral Majority), the term is commonly used by secular observers to include politically mobilized orthodox Muslims and Jews as well as Christians.” Yet Jerry Falwell, to date, has not guillotined, hanged, or otherwise executed anyone nor has he ever taken a US embassy and American citizens hostage. These are boasts the late Mr. Khomeini could not make.

The Companion’s most serious error, however, is the editors’ conflation of feminine with feminism.

“The Reader’s Companion is a unique reference work,” claims Dartmouth’s Marysa Navarro in the introduction, “because it represents much of what US women have written about themselves at the close of the twentieth century.” But the writings of 300+ feminist academics can only represent the writings of all women if all women are feminists. The Companion thus systematically excludes women who dissent from feminist orthodoxy.

While separate entries are devoted to “The National Black Feminists Organization,” “The National Center for Lesbian Rights,” and “The National Abortion Rights and Reproductive Rights Action League,” discussion of “Feminists for Life,” “The Independent Women’s Forum” and “The National Right to Life Committee” is omitted.

Each of these three latter groups is among the most powerful in Washington, is concerned with “women’s issues,” and chaired by a woman. Yet the Companion pays them no mind because they don’t toe the party line.

For modern feminists, the imperative is their own vison of women’s liberation. Those who don’t agree with such a radical prescription, it seems, are simply not invited to the ball.