Object Lessons | The media’s framing of “choice” obscures larger goals of feminism

Carolyn Bradley Carolyn Bradley

Will someone please explain to the right wing that when women speak out against sexism, they are not claiming victim status but rejecting it? How feminism, once maligned as the political movement of power-hungry, man-bashing castrators, came to be derided as an ideology of female helplessness and victimhood is a question not easily answered. I suspect it has something to do with the media’s perpetual presentation of women’s lives as a ceaseless stream of free “choices” and “options” and its simultaneous refusal to shed light on the complex social conditions in which these choices are made. Following the media’s reasoning, women are entirely free to choose how they want to live now—and so if women feel confined by sexism, well, that must be a choice too!

Now, I’d hate to suggest that the American media might not be telling the full story on an issue, but maybe it’s time we rethink the media’s framing of “choice.” At any rate, it seems worth asking whether women are really “free” now that they have legal rights to make “choices.” The implication is that feminism is simply a civil rights movement, whose progress can be evaluated by its ability to tear down legal barriers to women in the political and business world. (How convenient that, by this measure, feminism can be said to have been a huge success!). And yet, while every American feminist can be proud of the leaps and strides political feminism has made in the last 50 years in opening up previously-closed doors to women, these acts should not be misconstrued as the final projects of feminism.

I say this because, for any number of reasons, political rights and “choices” alone cannot bring equality between men and women—or even between just women, for that matter. That the chief accomplishments of feminism have been to open up well-paying jobs to educated women underscores the problematic nature of using “choices” as a barometer for the movement’s success. After all, one suspects that working-class women, who have always had to find poorly-paid jobs, have been less than thrilled to watch educated women find “liberation” from the tedium of being a housewife. If anything, they have been hurt by this development, insofar as it has widened the economic disparities between rich and poor families.

And yet, the misconception of feminism as a civil rights movement focused exclusively on “choices” and opportunities persists. Well, maybe it’s worth pointing out how much the American workplace benefits from this myth. As feminist thinker Katha Pollitt explains in her book Virginity or Death!, America needs feminism: at least, it needs a large skilled female labor force. Whatever the situation 50 years ago, the American workplace could simply not function today without it. At the same time, though, America needs gender inequality, since it would otherwise be required to provide publicly the large range of social services (particularly childcare and eldercare) which women now offer for free!

In other words, America needs feminism, but it also needs to silence discussion of its profoundly radical implications. Herein lies the genius of the media’s framing of “choice.” By presenting “choices” and opportunities as the final goal of feminism, the media can glide right over the deeper question (in truth, the only question) of what it would take to make these choices equally available to men and all women. In this way, women can be invited to take on full-time jobs, and yet still be expected to bear the same huge responsibilities that they have always faced in the home. Note the great way this allows men to soar right ahead of women in the workplace and tell themselves that their accomplishments are based on merit alone. (Or if they are in the math and sciences, they can tell themselves it is biology alone.) The male-centered workplace has rigid hours and inflexible career tracks and an expectation that people do their hardest work in their twenties and early-thirties. At these ages women are usually having children. The characteristics of the workplace are not questioned, since it’s presumed to be a woman’s “choice” to take a job in the first place.

Well! Maybe it’s worth asking how much more it would take than political rights to ensure that “choices” were equally available to women. We’d need to provide all women with childcare, healthcare, parental leaves and benefits. We’d need to provide all men with the same, so that a woman’s lot would not hinge on her ability to find the right man. We’d need to ensure that women had access to good, affordable housing and good schools for their kids. We’d need to change the very fabric of the American workplace to accommodate the living patterns of women, and we’d need to remodel the even more demanding career tracks of men, which are now premised on the presumption of a wife at home picking up the slack. The truth is, we’d need to take just a giant shopping-spree on the public dime. Which brings us perhaps to the heart of why political rights are so preferred to equality: They’re cheap.

Am I being too cynical? Look. There is only one way to destroy the existing barriers that to women’s “choices” because of gender inequality, and that is to destroy inequality itself. Leftward march!