Feminism is inevitably a mixed form, requiring in its very nature . . . inconsistencies. In what follows, I try to show first, that a common divide keeps forming in both feminist thought and action betweeen the need to build the identity "woman" and give it solid political meaning and the need to tear down the very category "woman" and dismantle its all-too-solid history. Feminists often split along the lines of some version of this argument. (9)
On the one hand, many women moved by feminism . . . [want] to "reclaim an identity that they taught [us] to despise" (the line is Michelle Cliff's). . . . On the other hand, other feminists, often equally stirred by solidarity, rebel against having to be "women" at all. (10)
The divide so central as to be feminism's defining characteristic goes by many names. [It is often called the debate between "difference" and "equality"--between seeing women as different from or as equal to men.] Catharine Stimpson cleverly called it the feminist debate between the "minimizers" and the "maximizers."<1> Briefly, the minimizers are feminists who want to undermine the category "woman," to minimize the meaning of sex difference. . . . The maximizers want to keep the category (or feel they can't do otherwise), but they want to change its meaning, to reclaim and elaborate the social being "woman," and to empower her. (14)
In academic feminist discussion, the divide [has been] between the "essentialists" and the "social constructionists" . . . . Briefly, essentialists . . . see gender as rooted in biological sex differences. . . . [T]he term has become associated with a naive claim to an eternal female nature. . . . "Social construction"--the idea that the meaning of the body is changeable--is far harder to embrace with confidence. As Ellen Willis once put it, culture may shape the body, but we feel that the body has ways of pushing back.<2> To assert that the body has no enduring, natural language often seems like a rejection of common sense. Where can a woman stand--embodied or disembodied--in the flow of this argument? . . . In the essentialist-versus-social constructionist version of the divide, one can see that one term in the argument is far more stable than the other. Essentialism . . . assumes a relatively stable social identity in "male" and "female," while as Carole Vance argues,<3> social construction is at best a source of destabilizing questions. (16)
Equality and difference are broad ideas and have included a range of definitions and political expressions. Equality, for example, can mean anything from the mildest liberal reform (this is piece-of-the-pie feminism, in which women are merely to be included in the world as it is) to the most radical reduction of gender to insignificance. Difference can mean anything from Mary Daly's belief in the natural superiority of women to psychoanalytic theories of how women are inevitably cast as "the Other" because they lack penises. (26)
When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote one of the founding books of feminism in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, she said what was new then and remains fresh, shocking, and doubtful to many now: that sex hierarchy--like ranks in the church and the army . . .--was social, not natural. Though women before her had named injustices . . . , Wollstonecraft's generation experienced the divide in ways related to how feminists experience it now. . . . Wollstonecraft was often an equality-feminist in the narrowest sense, eager to speak of absolute rights [for everyone, regardless of gender], of an idealized male individualism [that she wanted women to imitate], and to ignore the body . . . . The body, she felt, could be counted on to assert its ever-present and dreary pull [i.e., many women died during childbirth at this time in history, and in fact Wollstonecraft did herself.] [T]he enlightenment promised her a mind that might escape. . . . When Wollstonecraft wrote, difference was the prevailing wind, equality the incipient revolutionary storm. (28-9)
<1> Catharine R. Stimpson, "The New Scholarship About Women: The State of the Art," Ann. Scholarship 1.2 (1980): 2-14).
<2> Ellen Willis, remarks at the NYU Symposium on the publication of Power of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, held on December 2, 1983.
<3> Carole S. Vance, "Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality," in Anja van Kooten Niekerk and Theo van der Meer, eds., Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? (Amsterdam: An Dekker, Imprint Schorer, 1989).