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called 'equality' side of the current "difference versus equality" debate, as it
has been unfortunately cast. Epstein, however, does not consider the class
dimension to this debate historically. Middle-class women have been more
likely to push formal-legalistic equality and to challenge exclusion from public
life, by which they mean the positions of official power wielded by men.
Working-class women, on the other hand, have been less concerned with
abstract rights than with concrete socio-economic matters, many of them
lodged in recognition of biological difference, primarily the fact that it is
women who get pregnant and give birth. Using the findings of science (which
is, however, divided on this score, with recent scholarship, much of it carried
out by women, emphasizing differences), Epstein insists that in an ideal world
gender distinctions would
be
a matter ofcomplete indifference. Epstein makes
judgements about the works of a whole crew of feminist analysts based, not
upon their own work, but upon polemical secondary sources. Here are a few
examples. I get yet another walk-on role, this time as a "self-identified femi–
nist," in fact a "conservative" who "regards the family in universal terms."
As
proof, from my book,
Public Man, Private Woman,
she cites a few words
as quoted by
the author of "The New Conservative Feminism," the same
source Doane and Hodges accept as Holy Writ. In fact, my treatment of the
family in
Public Man, Private Woman
is framed with these words: "I rec–
ognize that there is no such thing as 'the family' but that there are multiple
variations on this theme." Similarly, three feminist writers on motherhood–
Alice Rossi, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and "June Flax," (whose name Epstein has
wrong as it is 'Jane', not 'June') - are excoriated based upon the blasts of
others rather than upon a direct engagement with their work. Alice Rossi's
"biosocial perspective" is debunked, but none of Rossi's own work appears in
the bibliography. Such lapses are disappointing coming, as they do, from a
serious sociologist.
Moving from Epstein's report to Claire Duchen's very helpful collection,
French Connections,
a slice of life from the recent past that introduces the
French MLF
(mouvement de liberation des femmes)
through "certain key de–
bates," is a dizzying experience. Duchen's selections detail the contentious–
ness, the internecine ideological warfare, and the remarkable fact that what
emerged as the most "telling questions" included: "Can you be feminist and
heterosexual? Can men be political allies or are all men always the enemy?"
Clearly there is real sectarian battiness at work if those are
the
questions.
There are a number of dissenting voices.
Fran~ois
Picq, for example,
characterizes what the MLF became as a "Parisian, intellectual, narcissistic
group." Annie Leclerc also distances herself from the most egregious exam–
ples of rhetorical overkill, but she goes on to issue a remarkable utopian
plaint: "We have to invent everything anew." This is a recipe for both ar–
rogance and defeat.
More troubling by far, however, are those radical separatists who label
