Of late, I’ve begun to read certain well-regarded women writers. I started with Sylvia Plath and now it’s Joan Didion.

Earlier in my reading life, I had stayed away from these writers, fearing that they were whiners after all – whose complaints would be symptomatic rather than diagnostic. I suspected that they wouldn’t help me discover the root of the problem.

On the other hand, if we think of women on the model of dance partners, they’ve got a good chance of discovering by experience – direct and intimate – the awkward missteps of their lead partners. (Here “lead partner” would be my metaphor, either for the culture itself, or else for the men whom the culture might assess more impersonally and generically than the women do who know them best.) 

So what women discover about men – and the culture we share with men – is not the only reason to find women writers interesting. But it is one reason.

The collection of Joan Didion essays that I’ve just finished reading is titled The White Album. I have no idea why it bears that title. Didion herself may be seen on the back cover – a slender, pretty woman, standing in a fashionable slouch, right elbow crooked and cigarette poised between the fingers of her right hand. In her essays, whatever scene she’s reporting appears through the lens of a world-weary anomie that perfectly matches her photo. (Since I want to know what motivates people, I can make nothing of world-weary anomie.) 

There are, however, two essays in this Didion collection which do deliver a straight message, coming to you direct from the writer’s motivational system. “In Hollywood” (1973) tells about the process of producing a movie, a process to which Didion and John Gregory Dunn, her late husband, contributed as writers. She had a lot more interest and respect for the movie-making process – apparently always a gamble – and knew more about it than was known by the pretentiously high-brow movie reviewers. In that world, she was an expert.

The second essay that feels real to me is titled “The Women’s Movement.” It’s about the feminist movement as Didion encountered it in 1972. It was just going mainstream, with feminist pioneers of the time being invited to appear on TV talk shows.

 “Attention was finally being paid, and yet that attention was mired in the trivial. Even the brightest movement women found themselves engaged in sullen public colloquies about the inequities of dishwashing and the intolerable humiliations of being observed by construction workers on Sixth Avenue (p. 113).” 

And here is Didion’s scornfully sincere assessment of these women’ s complaints. “All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it – that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death – could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all (p. 116).”

Her essay brought back to my mind certain shocks and disappointments that I experienced back in the days when I was writing “Feminism Without Contradictions.” That article was published in The Monist, a well-regarded philosophical journal that broke precedent by devoting an entire issue to feminism.

What were the shocks and disappointments that I remember?

*. *. *

Item: a lovely woman I knew who worked on MS magazine during its inaugural year attributed her mastectomy to the infighting of the women on the editorial board of that trail-blazing magazine!

Item: a not-so-lovely woman, whom I knew from an Upper East Side consciousness-raising group, was writing a book about the year when her husband was dying – of cancer I think. She was writing it during that year! Whenever, during her sacrosanct working hours, the phone rang, her dying husband would pick up the phone, take the message for her and explain to the caller that his wife couldn’t come to the phone just then because she was busy – writing her book!

Item: when I tried to interest the feminists I knew in the case of Juanita Broaddrick – who, in a credible interview, had described being raped by Bill Clinton in the time before he ran for President – I was the only feminist I talked to who had actually listened to the interview! The feminists I called gave different reasons for their reluctance to sign the petition I proposed, demanding accountability from Clinton. I can’t sign because Clinton supports abortion rights. I’m sorry but my feminist book is just coming out and I need jacket endorsements.

My real list of these experiences is far longer, but I guess we can stop here. 

Despite their all-too-human inconsistencies, bad faith, cattiness and malice, Second Wave feminists did manage to change in some measure the legal and social culture for women. Some features improved, while other cultural features got discernibly worse. 

As Hegel has pointed out, those world-historical figures who drive the chariot whose purpose is to change the culture in world history, typically end up under the chariot wheels – either in the sense of personal suffering or (much more costly) moral distortion. And the public feminists I knew at the time turned out to offer no exception to the Hegelian generalization.

What about feminists and me? On the one hand, they have helped me and, on the other hand, they have hurt me.

And they have done that

for all women.

Related Content: Feminism Without Contradictions | Among the Feminists