Object Lessons | Feminists need to voice opinions on issues besides women’s affairs

Carolyn Bradley Columnist

By this point, it has become a party line to say that feminism is facing its death bed, that the movement is losing relevance from focusing on “women’s issues” to the exclusion of broader concerns. In other words, as LiP Magazine recently put it, “The biggest problem with American feminism today is its obsession with women.” Like a high school student who only makes good grades, feminism needs to be more well-rounded, it seems. It must tackle larger questions about, say, domestic poverty or global war. Otherwise, feminism will go the way of the flapper outfit and the bob, and the whole project of modern American womanhood will be toast.

I wonder, though, if the pundits who advocate this “broader feminism” (and they come from far and wide, from right and left) know just what they are asking for. Because the social changes it would take to produce this situation, where feminist pundits would speak on a range of social issues, would be so transformative that feminism would become irrelevant for an entirely different reason: sexism would cease to exist. What I mean to say is that there are concrete cultural reasons behind the fact that female pundits focus on “women’s issues,” and they are all rooted in our democracy’s failure to truly accommodate women.

Here’s the thing: Women have a difficult time just getting into the world of punditry, let alone picking their topics. In all of the nation’s forums of debate, from opinions columns to political journals to cable news networks to talk-radio, women are vastly underrepresented. According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), women make up only 24.4 percent of columnists at eight major syndicates, and even the women who are available are picked up by newspapers at only one-third of the rate of their male counterparts. The New York Times has only one female opinions columnist out of eight. Even The Miscellany News had only one out of four last year. Moreover, on any given night, the TV is populated with white men espousing their political views. When women are present (and often, they’re not), the night’s topic is usually one of those elusive “women’s issues,” like abortion or single motherhood.

But where are women the rest of the time? According to conventional wisdom, they avoid punditry, because they have (depending on who you talk to) innate or internalized inhibitions against confrontation. And maybe they do. But that doesn’t explain why women can generate so much passion when it comes to “women’s issues.” Because, for all the women who supposedly shy away from commenting on immigration or the Iraq War or the president’s wire-tapping program, there are scores of women who can talk and argue and rant for days about the nature of women’s position in this country. And this is not just true for liberal feminists; conservative women like Phyllis Schlafly, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Caitlin Flanagan have surprisingly much to say against the feminist beliefs that created their jobs.

There is no question about why people complain that women have an “obsession with women,” because a look into mainstream punditry suggests that by all accounts, they do. But is it possible that women simply respond to economic incentives? That maybe they just go where the jobs are? Think about it. A woman could waste a lot of time looking for a newspaper to print her international affairs column, but she is not likely to have much success. If she is smart, though, she will start a column about “women’s issues”—which is to say, a column a man cannot write. By representing the “female perspective,” women carve out a niche for themselves in a market economy that is otherwise not very interested in what they have to say. For all of conservatives’ dislike of identity politics, it is ironic that they are very much the by-products of capitalism.

Still, identity politics by their nature are limiting. The problem is not that women write about women—this would seem a natural state of affairs. It is the way the culture largely prohibits women from writing about anything else. And what’s more, by relegating women to “women’s issues,” the culture actually constricts the number of women who can speak. After all, how many columns on “women’s issues” can one paper carry?

A parallel can be drawn between female opinions writers and female musicians—names like Kathleen Hanna, Ani DiFranco, Lauryn Hill—who center their music on the “female perspective.” It is not that these women feign their commitments to feminism; it’s simply that the reason we hear of them and not of other women is that we do not ask to hear from anyone else. Female versions of Phish or Radiohead will not get played. But I would love to see a female Frank Rich someday—just to see it, to know what it would be like, because I have to think that a female Frank Rich wouldn’t be anything like Frank Rich. But more than that, I would love to see it because of where it would mean we’ve come as a country, to see the need for identity politics crushed beneath the weight of a true democracy.