JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN
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transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller) and hoped to see a social transformation
that would free women's 'difference' and allow it to flourish, even to domi–
nate.
The diverse history of feminisms in the plural forms the basis of cur–
rent feminist discourse and debate. These debates secrete ethical imperatives
and trail in their wake moral implications whether or not the thinkers in–
volved articulate fully such imperatives or implications. Varieties of liberal,
socialist, Marxist, and utopian feminism abound. Sexuality and sexual identity
have become highly charged arenas of political redefinition. Some feminists
see women as universal victims; others as a transhistorical sex-class; others
as oppressed 'nature'. A minority urge women to separate entirely from
male-dominated society. Some want full integration into that society, hence its
transformation towards liberal equality. Others insist that the feminist project
will not be complete until 'women's values', correctly understood, triumph.
There are feminists who embrace a strong notion of women's difference,
ontologically grounded, and others who reject any such idea as itself sexist.
It's hard to wend one's way through the thicket of contemporary feminist
discourse without some sort of map. But even with various categorical
markers at hand, it is tricky at times to figure out what game is being played.
Is feminist scholarship primarily or exclusively the ideological arm of
'the feminist movement'? There are feminist analysts who make this argu–
ment and insist that unless a text helps feminist doctrine, as they understand
it, to triumph, it does not deserve the name 'feminism' and must, instead, be
condemned as suspect if not downright heretical. There are other feminists
who make a distinction between feminism as politics and feminism as the in–
spiration and occasion for scholarly endeavor. Anthropologist Judith Shapiro,
for example, insists that the time has come for scholars to loosen the tie be–
tween their endeavors and the political rhetoric and ideological claims of
feminism. "The danger," she wrote in an essay, "Anthropology and the
Study ofGender," "in too close an association between scholarship and social
reformism is not only in the limits it places on intellectual inquiry, but also in
the implication that our lives as social, moral, and political beings are depen–
dent on what we are able to discover in our scientific research. Loosening the
tie would have liberating consequences ... for anthropological investigation
and for feminism as a social movement." But the hard-liners counter that a
feminist text must exemplify and elaborate a "shared commitment to certain
political aims and objectives" (in Rosalind Cloward's words) and that books
are properly read and measured against a clear set of ideological criteria.
Awill to power and truth as anathematizing the heretical and embrac–
ing the politically correct is painfully evident
in
a number of the texts under
review. The
primary
aim of several of these works is to round up and to
isolate the usual suspects and to form the friends into one ofMilan Kundera's
circle dances. Thus Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, in
Nostalgia and Sex-
