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heterosexual women "collabos," drawing upon the language of complicity
with German occupiers in World War II. Lesbians who believe they can
work with the "collabos" are smeared as "kapos," prisoners in Nazi concen–
tration camps who helped the guards. Thus: "A 'Feminist' who loves her
oppressor is a collaborator." Or: "Hetero-'Feminist'-kapos for patriarchy."
This is repugnant. Not only does it "turn feminism against the vast majority
of women," as one of Duchen's interlocutors notes, it banalizes the Shoah,
cheapening and trivializing its horrors and the mass slaughter ofWorld War
II in general by comparing it to ordinary, everyday heterosexual relations.
This is not political thinking, as Hannah Arendt has so brilliantly argued: it is
violence; it is a terroristic alternative to civic discourse. To respond to it by
pointing out that, after
all,
we are talking about just a few extremists will not
suffice. Those prepared to ravage the world in order to change it must be
exposed and criticized, no matter what stalking horse they are riding or how
few or many their numbers.
The contrast between the narrowly ideologizing and the more expan–
sive instances of feminist and women's studies scholarship grows more and
more apparent with each passing day. Even works under review here that
are neither particularly expansive nor gripping, for example, Demaris
Wehr's
Jung and Feminism
and Donald Meyer's
Sex and Power,
which is
less than the sum of its 721 pages, offer
something
to the reader beyond
categorical rigidities or rhetorical overkill. Wehr's effort is marred by over–
generalizations about androcentrism, sexism, and misogyny - they are not
one and the same - and underlaboring in her attempt to convince the reader
thatJung's psychology of types, with its essentializing categories, has some–
thing to offer modern feminism. I doubt it, and merely intoning the virtues of
"holism" doesn't do the trick. Jung's Manicheanism, which identifies "the
feminine principle" with matter and the "masculine principle" with spirit, has in
the past and will in the future work great mischief; moreover, Wehr's
definition of "internalized oppression" as something that "feels a certain way
inside a woman, it speaks with a certain voice, and it has a certain effect on
her" evaporates as soon as one focuses on it for more than a fleeting mo–
ment
Meyer'S troubles, on the other hand, are reminiscent of the story
Abraham Lincoln once told a group of interlocutors who were pushing a
particular author upon him, and he replied that no one had ever delved
deeper into the well of knowledge or come up drier. Meyer tells four stories
of the rise ofwomen in the United States, Russia, Sweden, and Italy from the
mid-nineteenth century to 1987. He makes the solid and welcome point that
women are not to be construed as history's victims but as active persons
confronting concrete dilemmas in particular times and places, and he notes
that many formidable early historians ofwomen, Mary Beard among them,
mocked "relapses into the pathos of victimonology, when their own data
