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Originally Posted by bashfulbanshee
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I appreciated your tactful review despite your saying here that you found the book to be "one of the most ridiculous" you'd ever read -- an opinion I can respect in the sense that I can understand it.
What I liked was your choice not to impose your opinion as an ultimate judgment. You remained sensitive to the possibility that some readers might enjoy the book.
However, you did make a statement I find to be breathtakingly untrue:
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Being a product of second wave feminism (i.e. middle/upper class white woman’s feminism) makes it dated, but some of its points are still relevant. . . .
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You seem to be judging second-wave feminism anecdotally rather than historically, perhaps through the experience of encountering older feminists in the field. I don't know that that's fair to the history-changing work of feminists of that generation, who did more for the rights of women of color than (in my incredibly humble opinion) we've done since. Besides which, many feminist activists of that time were working-class.
The tendency to compartmentalize issues of gender in the context of one's own class goes far beyond the second wave. Second-wave feminists made the exact criticism of Virginia Woolf that you've made of Russ. Additionally, you can't look at any political movement in terms of the academics who survive to teach it -- academics who are usually the last ones in the pool. Many, many second-wave feminists were not Caucasian. Audre Lorde was a second-wave feminist.
For my money, Adrienne Rich is perhaps the most cogent second-wave essayist one can read. Beyond mere historical relevance, it's hard to justify reading someone who makes the classic arguments badly; Rich, however, makes them well and is also a crystalline stylist. And here's the thing: Most of her essays in
Lies, Secrets and Silence are about women of other cultures, races and classes. She addressed the rape of women in Kosovo and South Africa long before the journalists in the New York Times, and showed with copious footnotes and documentation how the soldiers in those areas had made rape a kind of military regimen when they entered an area in which the idea was to erase a given culture or ethnicity. She also championed the rights of Muslim women in America and still does.
My main criticism of that period of civil rights is that it often
separated various prejudice-targeted groups into smaller groups with special considerations, which frequently made larger coalitions impossible and consensus less visible to the public. To make a political difference in a large country, people have to unite, and the period of the 60s-70s seem to have been a time of progress-halting disharmony despite its many breakthroughs. That same disharmony impedes us even today.
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About Russ's flaws:
One thing to consider is that both political content and literary experimentation in SF were cresting when The Female Man was written, and that SF had acquired a kind of pestering look-at-this ostentatiousness. Overemphasizing points that now strike us as obvious was for them an act of negotiation.
You might also look at the unsympathetic depiction of men in the context of that generation's feminism. They felt they had to overemphasize gender issues, and exaggerate male behavior, to make their ideas recognizable and therefore credible. Freedoms we now take for granted weren't in place when that book was written.