Sexual Revolution at UnHerd

Mary Harrington at UnHerd had an essay two years ago The Sexual Revolution Killed Feminism. I was familiar with most of the arguments, but she assembles them clearly, puts in a few things I had not thought of, and makes connections I had at least not fully absorbed, if not overlooked altogether.

...what we think of today as ‘feminism’ is a story of economic transitions.

Specifically, it’s a story of how men and women re-negotiated life in common, in response first to the transition into the industrial era, then into twentieth-century market society. If everyone today seems to be arguing about men and women again, it’s because we’re in the throes of another economic transition.

And later

In its nineteenth and early twentieth-century incarnations, the women’s movement sought a positive negotiation of sex roles for prevailing material conditions, in the interests of life in common. But feminism in this sense ended in the 1960s. It was killed by the twin technology shocks of contraception and abortion.

Up to that point, the women’s movement encompassed both women who understood personhood in the context of family life – women as relational beings – and those who argued for women to be treated primarily as individuals, irrespective of the givens of sex or relational obligations. Medical control of fertility constituted a fundamental material change to this debate: it enabled the final victory of the individualist side.

A premise she puts a lot of weight on is that feminism is now so strongly with associated with bio-libertarianism (bodily autonomy) because of the issues of abortion and contraception that the two are often confused, both by feminists themselves, and the cultural conservatives who believe that "feminism" has ruined everything. She shows that they have in fact always been distinct, as the transgender conflicts with feminists are now illustrating. 

It reminds me of GK Chesterton's observation a hundred years ago that the success of women in the world of work (GKC was neither capitalist nor socialist) was not a victory but their final defeat. Throughout history men and women had competed in whether life should be organised around things (and thus individualism) or around people (and thus relationalism). Women in the marketplace was their capitulation: "All right, then, it's things." I think his reading of history is incomplete, oversimplified, and of prehistory only half-right, but the overall point has a great deal to it. And rather obviously, women succeeding in the world of things is even farther along now. Individualism has won decisively.

I do find some fault with the essay. In her solutions and hope-fors she veers into cliches about family attitudes being a liberation for men as well as women.  Not that she is wrong, but something seems wooden about it. Perhaps I am not entering into the spirit of this properly, but are we quite sure this is how it's going to work? And do we think renegotiation is necessarily going to work for everyone? Also, she is pretty rapidly dismissive of 20th C women putting so much stock in declaring their independence from fathers, brothers, and sons. I take her point that it has become downright silly (and hypocritical) in many cases, but it overlooks the fact that a lot of women had very good reason to declare themselves independent, especially of fathers. If the only other landing place was a rather radical individualism, they can hardly be blamed for embracing that.