Dueling Feminists

Because I read Hilzoy's posts at Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog, I was aware of the back and forth between Hilzoy and Linda Hirshman on women and their abusers. Today, Hilzoy quoted Hirshman from that original argument. Here's the quote:

Individual stories eventually add up to evidence, true, but a personal, revelatory anecdote tends to abort what is supposed to be a political conversation. (originally appeared here, "Sheltering Women: Linda Hirshman Responds to Hilzoy")

How I hate that kind of condescension: "what is supposed to be political conversation." (Hey, I thought the personal WAS political.) Hirshman continues in that original post of April 14th: "If we are to discuss the politics of abuse, we need to resist this rhetorical move. It would be churlish of me to downplay the suffering of this well-known intellectual with many friends in the blogosphere." What's up with that: "this well-known intellectual with many friends in the blogosphere"? Would it be less churlish to "downplay the suffering" of someone who is NOT an intellectual, someone with few friends in the "blogosphere"? And also, what's wrong with explaining how one's political views arise naturally out of one's own experiences and observations? If one remains in the personal anecdote without trying to see the bigger picture or without acknowledging that one's personal experiences don't define the world, then perhaps there is a problem. However, this tendency to make argument bloodlessly intellectual, with little regard to empathy or the personal experiences of others, is what has gotten us in trouble over and over again in history. Oh, and if you think I'm exaggerating, just look at Hirshman's advice for feminist success: she essentially tells women to become men--or rather, what alpha men have historically been. (You can read that argument here: "Homeward Bound," Linda Hirshman, available on the web only at the American Prospect. I'm not totally unsympathetic to Hirshman's argument. But I do believe it is elitist in the worst sense, with little regard for the lives of ordinary, middle-class and working class women and with little regard to the multiplicity of human experience and the possibility of happiness and worth grounded in other things besides financial and familial independence.)

That very adjective "revelatory" gives the personal its power.

For more on this exchange, see Hilzoy's post today at Political Animal: "Two Sizes Too Small." I'm totally with her on those last two paragraphs of the post. See also, Linda Hirshman's post, "The Trouble with Jezebel," at DoubleX. There's a lot I agree with here, too. But Hilzoy certainly does bring out an important point in her response, too, and that point is that each of us has to make choices based on individual experiences, experiences grounded in a particular place, at a particular time, embedded in personal and political realities far beyond the Ivory Towers where professors of philosophy pontificate on power and feminism. It may be true that every woman who reports a rape is striking a blow for feminism, but that doesn't mean the reverse is true: that every woman who decides not to report a rape is cowardly capitulating to male domination. She may just be making the best choice for herself.