When I was a girl, nobody thought women weren’t liberated. Heck, we had the vote. We could get as educated as we wanted to be. We could get hired for jobs formerly reserved for men.

Of course, we had to wear nylon stockings even in winter. And pointy bras that paradoxically accompanied the figure-concealing girdles holding up our nylons. Also, we needed to be married by age 23 or 24 latest. And to bring unsullied virginity to the bridal bed.

I fitted into this script less well than many of my women friends. My mother and her friends were European women whose semi-wordless messages led me to expect suitors who would say things like, “I kiss the hem of your robe.”

Since American boys were not in the habit of talking like that, even to girls they fancied, I would be pretty much hors de combat until I got to Paris on a Fulbright fellowship. (If you want to know how that went, read Confessions of a Young Philosopher.)

By now, January 2025, it’s possible that I have gotten to be older and wiser. Just in case that has happened, I’ve been thinking to write something on the subject of women, feminism and uh … real life. 

Since Judith Butler seems to stand at the headwaters of current discourse on these interesting topics, I’ve thought to start by getting an intuitive sense of that writer and her message. Though one of the titles that caught my eye appeared first in 2005, twenty years back, Giving an Account of Oneself looked promising for my getting-acquainted purposes.

That’s been the book I was reading this past week, while we were in southern California, getting my neuropathy treatments along with cancellations from friends whom we usually meet for lunch or dinner while we are there. They were cancelling because their homes had been – or might yet be – ablaze. One friend, a minister, returned from vacation to tend to parishioners with shattered lives… .

So what was the account of oneself promised by Butler’s title? Sorry folks. That’s precisely what we’ll never find out. “To tell the truth about oneself involves us in quarrels about the formation of the self and the social status of truth.” You can’t get to the fact of the matter about self-formation, she writes, because you can’t see the primal scene when your sense of self was produced. That primal scene is hidden either because it contained the infant’s reaction to intimations of adult sexuality or else possibly an infantile reaction to adult accusations. Whatever happened at this early stage (and here Butler canvasses an array of thinkers with their conjectures) – two outcomes follow: (1) an unconscious layer is formed, accompanied by (2) a frail, self-concealing subjectivity. 

Beyond that obscure primal scene, does anything else occur in the formation of one’s “I”? Yes, we are ringed about by social conditions, which set the terms for what we can say or even privately acknowledge, but these too are mainly occluded. Fractional breakthroughs are possible, but not much is said about how or why.

So can you or I give an adequate account of ourselves? Nah. It’ll be fictional at best.

Is there a windup? Do we have closure? Yeah, I guess but, when I read it, I am not sure what just happened. I think Butler concludes that I – who don’t know who I am or what just happened – ought to “take the risk” of … doing something, but what? It’s either the risk of one fractured person entering into an unbounded relationship with another fractured person – or else it’s the risk of me forgiving myself for all the blunders that my splintered subjectivity will be bound to commit now and in future. 

However, though a fair number of readers may regard Judith Butler as authoritative for contemporary feminism –

I have trouble believing any of this.

Butler as narrator must be – if we take her as implicated in her own analysis of “everyone’s” infancy – someone to whom something happened early that formed this hollow core of self-mistrust. Until and unless that self-mistrust can be 

lifted into the light of day,

where it might be seen and repaired,

I don’t see what further layers

can be laid down safely

on such a vanishing take-off point.

Related Content: Feminism without Contradictions– Column | Feminism without Contradictions– Article in The Monist | What Do Women Want?