Recently I time traveled to a place in the past I never wanted to revisit.
Washington University, in St. Louis, awarded anti-women’s-rights activist Phyllis Schlafly an honorary degree at its May 16 Commencement ceremony, amid protests. The next day Schlafly appeared on TV to react to the protests. What a sorry blast from the past. She was in her usual form; with mirth and glee she kicks people who are already down, and she displayed her usual gloating and taunting, offensive to any viewer with even a nominal sense of decency. Indeed, age has not endowed Schlafly with any decency. She is too lacking in that attribute to be ranked among public figures deserving of respect. With her remarks about marital rape in particular (that a woman consents carte blanche to sex on demand once she marries), she spoke volumes about herself. By contrast, the feminists who fought hard to outlaw marital rape merit the status of sheroes.
Undeserving as she was of the attention she drew, Schlafly revived a matter of anguish to feminists we need urgently to address, namely, that of women who reject the idea of women’s—-their own—-equality. Seeing her sorry behavior made me ponder the painful matter of women who tolerate, even demand, women’s subjugation.
I struggle to understand women’s resistance to equality, to explain its whys and wherefores, and to discern how to overcome it. The issue is fraught with painful conflict and complexity. This isn’t about a bald-faced opportunist like Schlafy, who has profited handsomely from grinding her heel into the necks of other women. It’s about patriarchy subjecting women to powerful pressure, manipulation, and coercion through the millennia. Not surprisingly, many women give in to the pressure to sit down and be quiet. Daunting forces are at work: raw fear and a lack of informed consent. We face not only male adversaries in overcoming these forces. We must also rise to the task of instilling in all women the resolve to defy our oppressors. The latter is the greater challenge.
The task of understanding and overcoming women’s resistance to equality is fraught with pitfalls. We must resist the impulse to lash out in anger at women who reject equality. Nothing justifies patronizing, condescending, demeaning treatment; nothing justifies name-calling. We need to fix our sights on our true adversary, namely, the patriarchy that has subjugated women through time immemorial by dividing us.
Fear—-sometimes conscious and palpable, sometimes unconscious, but always justified—-keeps women subjugated. This can be fear of retaliation from powerful men, which women have good reason to fear. Men do retaliate, sometimes savagely and lethally, when women defy them. Counselors at domestic violence centers and shelters can attest to this; a woman is at her greatest risk of being murdered by her abuser once she has escaped him, gone to the authorities, and obtained a court order requiring him to end all contact with her. And scholars attribute the global rise in fundamentalism—-and its oppression—- to a resistance to “modernization,” read, advances in women’s rights. Many women fear equality for fear of incurring the wrath of male supremacists. They feel it wisest to quietly settle with what men “allow” them because they see how harshly men brutalize women in other parts of the world.
Fear in other forms can also keep women down. For example, fear of the responsibility that comes with freedom can work against women. If you’re emancipated enough to act of your own volition, to earn and manage your own finances, to have finances to manage, to make your own life’s choices, then you’re also emancipated enough to bear the responsibility for bad judgment and unwise decisions. And none of us is perfect. No one goes through life without slipping up. And we are responsible for decisions we make out of informed consent. That’s as it should be. Fearfulness isn’t a problem as long as we’ve learned to overcome our fears. But many women grow up in families and communities that instill fearfulness in girls and women instead of teaching them the skills to overcome fear, instead of building confidence in them—-instead of teaching them that life’s inevitable mistakes are opportunities for learning and growing. Such girls and women are taught to believe in their own inferiority, weakness, and lack of intelligence. Once that goal is met, patriarchy has what it wants: fearful women who are easy to control. Patriarchy spares women the responsibility that comes with freedom—-the responsibility they fear—-and those women learn to prefer that, even at the expense of their freedom. I once spoke with a woman who said of her subjugation, “I feel safe this way.”
But that feeling is illusory and it comes at a staggering price. The false sense of security grows from a lack of informed consent. Oppressors know that the crucial part of keeping a people subjugated isn’t strong shackles or bars with heavy keys; it’s control of the psyche, and once oppressors have that they can hand the keys to their captives without fear of their fleeing. Fear goes a long way in gaining the upper hand, but controlling knowledge matters more. Scholars estimate that during the slavery era in America, about 100,000 slaves tried to escape. Escape attempts were suppressed in newspapers and not widely discussed, for fear of slaves in captivity taking courage from that knowledge and trying to escape themselves. Lacking informed consent, slaves stayed put.
The status quo uses the same tactic against women. Until recent decades, the writings of women and their courageous, solitary acts of defiance were suppressed. Only recently have they begun to reach contemporary women; only now can we read first- and second-hand accounts of their valor and endurance. Consider: The Diary of Lady Murasaki, which she recorded in Japan in the late 10th Century; As I Crossed A Bridge of Dreams, attributed to Lady Sarashina of the Heian period in Japan, born in a.d. 1008; Anne Askew, burned at the stake in 1546 for daring to challenge the roles of women and the dynamics between women and men; Anna Comnena, author of Alexiad , written in the 12th Century about the reign of her father, Byzantine Emperor Alexius I; Aphra Behn, the 17th Century English poet, playwright, novelist, and political satirist; and countless women who defied convention just by writing. We take courage from the defiance of these women, from their singular acts of escape. Indeed, many women tried to escape, more than we will ever know. Contemporary women who never hear of these women do not give informed consent to their subjugation. That doesn’t make it any less painless to witness, but it explains their hostility to equality.
The distant defiance of these brave women validates the feminist movement. Under the constant threat of violence, abandonment, even death, women still fought back. The fact that a feminist movement even exists today, given the legacy of terror used to keep us down, lends the movement unquestioned higher moral ground. No one can deny us that. Incredibly, despite this we face the formidable task of winning over women. But our anger, justified as it is, should not grow from the resistance of women affected by thousands of years of powerful conditioning. It should take the form of resolve to get past patriarchy’s guard dogs, vicious as they are. And we can expect to confront them anywhere—-even, sadly, in institutions of higher learning.
Becca
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