Engaging With Critique: Feminism and classism - Essay Example

?Engaging With Critique: Feminism and ism The critique most often leveled at second-wave American feminism, apart from specious and absurd linesabout bra-burning, is that it was essentially a movement for the liberation of middle-class white women. While this is an oversimplification, there is certainly a grain of truth to it, and both bell hooks and the Combahee River Collective were early critics of this unfortunate tendency. The issue of class and its relationship to feminism is one such intersection, and one deserving of specific examination as to its nature and history. Ultimately, that history shows that feminism responds to criticism from within, and as a movement has learned to engage with class issues more constructively than in the past. First- and second-wave feminism were movements born largely out of middle-class white culture, and as such concerned themselves with the problems that were visible from where they were sitting, if you will: employment, reproduction, self-actualization, and so on. These battles were, of course, worth fighting, but they tended to minimize or ignore the problems facing many women, and many men, who weren’t the kind of people to get invited to the drawing rooms of early feminists. This rank classism began to draw serious criticism during the second-wave period. The Combahee River Collective statement is a creation of the late 1970s, and speaks the political language of its time. It is generally thought of as a seminal document in the development of black feminism, but it can also be seen as a seminal document in the history of feminist self-critique. Truly resonant and enduring ideas and ideologies are not created fully-formed, do not spring like Athena full-grown from the brow of a god. Inevitably, the new will carry much of the baggage of the old, or have exciting ideas about implementation that prove untenable, or for whatever reason need a good second draft. The Combahee River Collective statement can be seen as feminism’s red pencil, going through the pages of feminist thought and writing in the margins, “We’re not all Mary Tyler Moore, you know.” The Combahee River Collective clearly took race and class to be intimately interlinked, so that addressing one must of necessity involve addressing the other. Thus, when they say “We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses” (Combahee River Collective) we see advocacy on behalf of the working class, which might at first blush seem like a separate priority for a group focused on racial and feminist issues, but in fact the authors saw the issues as intimately intertwined. In their view, a movement benefiting those who work hard for minimal pay would, by definition, benefit women and racial minorities. This is essentially putting into action the quote often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, “No one is free when others are oppressed.” The expression of this sentiment is very clear in the Collective statement when they say “The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people” (Combahee River Collective). In expanding their view beyond the narrow concerns of the feminists they “felt the necessity” of separating themselves from, they come to address all those whose work is devalued or whose life is reduced to an economic token. Women’s concerns become a part of a larger set of concerns, those of all the people marginalized by the white male economic power structure. The consideration of class in a feminist context is more than a statement of solidarity, however; it is a statement that systemic change is necessary for any true social justice to emerge. To simply alter one aspect of society without addressing the complex and interlocking structures of privilege and oppression that connect to that aspect is ultimately futile. Equal pay for middle-class jobs usually held by white women, for example, does not solve the problem of a pay gap in working-class jobs usually held by minorities, and helps perpetuate the view of feminism as narrow and exclusionary. bell hooks addresses this concept in some depth in her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, particularly in chapter two, “Feminism: a movement to end sexist oppression.” She calls any definition of feminism that fails to consider racial and class oppression “simplistic” and isn’t afraid to place the blame for avoiding these issues squarely on “bourgeois white women” (hooks 19). Part of hooks’ key point is that only seeing oppression on a single axis, male to female, necessarily requires ignoring a great deal of the oppression that exists in society along other axes. Feminists who ignore the oppression of men on racial and economic grounds fail to even understand what they’re trying to become equal to, she argues. In discussing how different radical feminists have approached interrelated forms of oppression, hooks speaks of “the interconnections among various systems of domination” (hooks 20) and how racism, sexism, and classism ultimately support and enable one another. The fundamental structure of oppression, of domination, of dehumanization, remains the same regardless of what specific justification is offered up for it. The interrelated nature of racist and sexist oppression is is seen when the Combahee River Collective quotes “a black nationalist pamphlet” as saying in no uncertain terms, “Equality of men and women is something that cannot happen even in the abstract world” (Combahee River Collective). In other words, these men intended to fight racism by strengthening sexism. Similarly, bell hooks spoke of how poor and minority women would often reject a simplistic goal of “equality with men” because, in her words, “knowing that men in their groups do not have social, political, and economic power, they would not deem it liberatory to share their social status” (hooks 19). In both cases, we see how attempting to defeat one form of oppression without defeating others is a flawed and futile plan, like trying to lift up a sofa or other large object by only hoisting one end of it. It is all too easy for people to focus only on problems that affect them directly, and ignore the related problems that affect others, and it was this simple human failing that led to second-wave feminism’s overfocus on middle-class white women, at the expense of larger concerns. The criticism of hooks and the Combahee River Collective was a necessary corrective to this short-sightedness, and helped strengthen feminism as a whole. Most modern feminists have a greater understanding of how different forms of oppression are all ultimately expressions of the same impulse to control and dominate, and learn to be aware of how their own problems are intimately tied up in others’ concerns. What was once named the patriarchy is increasingly being called the kyriarchy, a more inclusive term for all the densely interwoven forms of privilege and oppression that make up society and harm its members. The work of the early critics of feminism is paying off in better, stronger feminism. Today we are beginning to achieve what bell hooks advocated when she wrote “Focusing on feminism as political commitment, we resist the emphasis on individual identity and lifestyle” (hooks 30). We see beyond our own individual oppressions to see how the same system damages others who we might not have otherwise considered. Works Cited Combahee River Collective. "The Combahee River Collective Statement." 29 March 2010. The Combahee River Collective Statement. 20 August 2011 . hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin To Center. Cambridge: South End Press, n.d. Read More