Joan Didion on feminism
In the Joan Didion thread yesterday, commenter “Mac” wrote:
I believe it’s The White Album that includes a memorable and very sharp put down of feminist writing. I’m sure there was a lot of resentment about that.
To which commenter “AesopFan” replied:
I haven’t read that essay, but I suspect her complaints were along the lines of most feminist writing being of the type that allowed the Sokal Hoax Trilogy to sail through the leftist journals.
That made me curious. I’ve read The White Album, but so long ago that I remember virtually nothing of it. Fortunately, the essay appears online in its original form as it was published in 1972 in The New York Times, and you can read it and judge it for yourself.
It’s not just a criticism of feminist writing. It’s a criticism of feminism, and it’s a very sharp put-down indeed. A few excerpts:
To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone “oppressed” to break them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make 51 per cent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class. The creation of this revolutionary class was from the virtual beginning the “idea” of the women’s movement…
…[I]t depended entirely upon the popular view of the movement as some kind of collective inchoate yearning for “fulfillment” or “self expression,” a yearning absolutely devoid of ideas and therefore of any but the most pro forma benevolent interest. In fact there was an idea, and the idea was Marxist, and it was precisely to the extent that there was this Marxist idea that the curious historical anomaly known as the women’s movement would have seemed to have any interest at all.
Marxism in this country had ever been an eccentric and quixotic passion. One oppressed class after another had seemed finally to miss the point. The have?nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having. The minorities seemed to promise more, but finally disappointed: it developed that they actually cared about the issues, that they tended to see the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus as real goals, and only rarely as ploys, counters in a larger game. They resisted that essential inductive leap from the immediate reform to the social ideal, and, just as disappointingly, they failed to perceive their common cause with other minorities, continued to exhibit a self-interest disconcerting in the extreme to organizers steeped in the rhetoric of “brotherhood.”
And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women’s movement, and the invention of women as a “class.” One could not help admiring the radical simplicity of this instant transfiguration. The notion that, in the absence of a cooperative proletariat, a revolutionary class might simply be invented, made up, “named” and so brought into existence, seemed at once so pragmatic and so visionary, so precisely Emersonian, that it took the breath away, exactly confirmed one’s idea of where 19th?century transcendental instincts crossed with a late reading of Engels and Marx might lead. To read the theorists of the women’s movement was to think not of Mary Wollstonecraft but of Margaret Fuller at her most high-minded, of rushing position papers off to mimeo and drinking tea from paper cups in lieu of eating lunch; of thin raincoats on bitter nights. If the family was the last fortress of capitalism, then let us abolish the family. If the necessity for conventional reproduction of the species seemed unfair to women, then let us transcend, via technology, “the very organization of nature,” the oppression, as Shulamith Firestone saw it, “that goes back through recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.” I accept the universe, Margaret Fuller had finally allowed: Shulamith Firestone did not.
…Burn the literature, Ti-Grace Atkinson said in effect when it was suggested that, even come the revolution, there would still be left the whole body of “sexist” Western literature.
Much much much more at the link.
I wonder whether Didion ever met or commented on Camille Paglia, another biologically female critic of contemporary feminism. [Paglia identifies as transgender but is skeptical of the current obsession with transgender identity]
Last Nobel Prize time in early October, I read that Didion was under consideration.
I now grasp that this surfaced precisely because her health situation was faltering. (Not enough years since the Bob Dylan award? So methinks.)
Now it’s too late: Nobel awards are only made to the living.
I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by her. But the volume and variety of works by her that I have not yet been exposed to has been astonishing to me. (A lack reflecting the decline of magazines, perhaps?)
A singular voice and crystaline prose stylist — a true master of the American English language.
Thanks for reminding us slackers.
I specified feminist *writing* because there is one phrase from that essay that has stuck with me all these years (forty or so) since I last read it: “the clumsy torrent of words.” One thing that struck me over and over again back then, reading feminists, was that for the most part they were really, really bad writers.
Regarding Shulamith Firestone: she was truly a lunatic, at times even in the everyday sense. And her ideas are more or less commonplace now and very influential in some left-wing quarters. Here’s something I wrote about her when she died some years ago:
https://www.lightondarkwater.com/2013/06/shulamith-firestone-rip.html
She was literally preaching the defiance and eventual destruction (or “transcendence” as she would no doubt have said) of human physical reality. You can certain see that in the “trans” stuff now.
Amazingly prescient. Erudite, too.
PA+Cat:
That’s a good point. Paglia has some brilliant insights… I still think she’s mostly a performative head case, but at least she’s highly intelligent and can make the sparks fly… Not some joyless scold. And it’s sobering just how much she’s been unpersoned these last several years for not hewing to the Party Line. It used to be hard to go a month without reading something by or about her.
That’s an amazing post Neo, and I must read the whole essay soon.
I was watching some obscure movie last night and the main character (a failing actor) walked past a movie marquee featuring “Play It As It Lays.” So I found a streaming version of that and watched it.
It’s quite dark, though the last few lines in the film suggest a more tongue-in-cheek and whimsical viewpoint than I would have guessed without those lines.
Somewhat tangential, as a youthful woman Joan Didion was strikingly beautiful. I read: The Year of Magical Thinking when it was published. She weathered and suffered loss and rendered those painful losses with uncompromising detailed honesty.
In the ‘70’s I was the happy uncritical audience of much Feminist “literature”; especially Simone de Beauvoir. ~No regrets. But will get The White Album very soon.
Bari Weis on Didion gets this excerpt on Instapundit, citing her contrarian take on hippies and Joan Baez:
JOAN DIDION, THE GREAT CONTRARIAN:
Joan Didion, who inspired a generation of young writers including this one, died Thursday. She was a lot of things, but one of them: she was a brilliant contrarian. My favorite of her pieces skewered the trendy movements around her.
When hippies were cool, where was Joan Didion? She was writing the darkest portraits of the movement that were ever made. She was showing readers the preschool-aged child whose parents gave her LSD. She went to the beating heart of the utopian progressive movement of the era–in the heart of the city where I was born and raised–and she showed what the unmooring looks like up close.
In “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” Didion gives us a hilarious take-down of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, where well-meaning young hippies wander glassy-eyed across her pages. Here’s Didion on Baez’s right hand man:
“Ira Sandperl is a forty-two-year-old native of St. Louis who has, besides the beard, a shaved head, a large nuclear-disarmament emblem on his corduroy jacket, glittering and slightly messianic eyes, a high cracked laugh and the general look of a man who has, all his life, followed some imperceptible but fatally askew rainbow.”
Here on Baez: “To encourage Joan Baez to be ‘political’ is really only to encourage Joan Baez to continue ‘feeling’ things, for her politics are still, as she herself said, ‘all vague.’”
She ends the piece with Baez standing in front of the refrigerator eating potato salad with her fingers.
The Didion I read would quietly find the flabbiest bits of American culture. She was ruthless and funny. She was not on your side. She wasn’t on anyone’s side. If Didion had been working these past few years, I have no doubt who she’d be writing about.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/493254/
Indeed.
I was out this afternoon getting some last-minute gifts for people. Saw a couple of Didion selections in the fiction at the local indie bookstore. Was tempted, but was really hoping to find some Frost on that shelf. Took a pass for now and hurried on to find something more digestible by my intended recipient.
Regarding Shulamith Firestone: she was truly a lunatic, at times even in the everyday sense.
Hope you’re enjoying the holiday.
==
Shulamith Firestone withdrew from public life entirely around about 1971. She made one intervention in the ensuing four decades, and that was a collection published in 1998 on the subject of navigating the world of psychiatry and it’s affiliates.
Firestone was a schizophrenic. Her job, from 1971 until the end of her life, was to get through the day. (She may or may not have had regular employment in that time; every case is different).
“These broads are nuts.”
Cappy, 1978.
Outrage and grievance can be very seductive, sexy even.
I was that way a bit in college when I felt confused and directionless. I felt empowered by the feminist rhetoric.
It didn’t last long. I realized I was playing a role because I had not figured out my role.
It’s behind the trans mania, I think. Another look-at-me movement.
Thank you, AD, and likewise to you.
LOL, and that aligns perfectly with the BLM movement as well. They really reached their peak after the George Floyd incident, but in the intervening 18 months, they’ve literally achieved nothing, and its been shown that what many people believe – that their entire goal is $MONEY$ – is entirely true. Hard to be dedicated marxist when you’re really a capitalist dog in your heart.