The Feminist Revelation
The escalating academic industry of feminist/womanist studies is rife with declarations of a grand social revolution. Contemporary feminism, says Sommers, has more to do with revelation than with revolution.
She notes that Alison Jaggar identifies four dominant feminist “frameworks”: liberal, Marxist, radical, and socialist. The last three frequently overlap, and all are determined that feminism requires the overthrow of prevailing social arrangements, especially the “nuclear family,” and the wresting of power from men. As Andrea Dworkin puts it: “Men love death. In everything they make the hollow out a central place for death. . . . In male culture slow murder is the heart of Eros, fast murder is the heart of action, and systemized murder is the heart of history.”
Sommers simplify the typology by suggesting that there are essentially two feminisms: liberal feminism and gender feminism. She identifies herself as a liberal feminist. Liberal feminists respect what women want, also if that includes such “gendered” choices as marriage and motherhood. The goal of liberal feminism is straightforward: women have a right to fair treatment and equal opportunity in trying to realize their aspirations. Gender feminism is very different, indeed radically different. Gender feminism views all of social reality in terms of the “sex-gender system.” According to gender feminist Sandra Harding, this system is a “system of male-dominance made possible by men's control of women's productive and reproductive labor, where ‘reproduction' is broadly construed to include sexuality, family life, and kinship formations, as well as the birthing which biologically reproduces the species. . . . The sex/gender system appears to be a essential variable organizing social life throughout most recorded history and in every culture today.”
It is that system that must be