Feminism and Identity

Feminism is a case study in the need to define identity through relationship, rather than by cutting the bonds of relationship. In a brief review of Dr. Laura’s new book for the Weekly Standard (March 22), Tammy Bruce suggests that Dr L has grasped something that feminists, with all their sophistication, have missed: “The freeing of women from the bonds of the family has delivered many of them into a kind of sexual slavery. If women are released from the deep structures o being mothers and daughters and wives and sisters, there isn’t any reason for men to think of them anymore as mothers and daughters and wives and sisters. And men, being men, have not surprisingly responded by considering women primarily as sex objects ?Ethe only male-female relationship left over.” What look like the suffocating demands of organic social and familial relations, it turns out, is the main bullwark against tyranny. It is only the stripped-down individual, the autonomous man and the liberated woman, who can be enslaved. Had feminists been listening, they could have learned as much from Edmund Burke and Tocqueville, though of course listening to such men is a form of fraternizing (damned gender-laden language) with the enemy.