FEMINISM ON TRIAL
The Ginny Foat Case and the Future of the Women's Movement
Ellen Hawkes
New York: William Morrow & Company
420 pp., $18.95
A LESSER LIFE
The Myth of Women's Liberation In America
Sylvia Ann Hewlett
New York: William Morrow & Company
Illustrated, 461 pp., $17.95
WOMEN & CHILDREN LAST
The Plight of Poor Women in Affluent America
Ruth Sidel
New York: Viking
236 pp., $16.95
A new women's literature of the 1980s is emerging that challenges the entrenched ideology of feminism and seeks to redirect explicitly and implicitly feminist energies along different lines than those that culminated in the disastrous candidacy of Geraldine Ferraro. Mistakes of style and substance, as well as the clichés of the sexual revolution and women's liberation, are being put under the microscope by writers such as Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ellen Hawkes. Hewlitt and Hawkes, who describe themselves as feminists, are suggesting that a lot of nonsense was being promoted, while others such as Ruth Sidel now call for a social democratic transformation of American society so women can work and be wives and mothers at the same time.
As read in the sequence offered here, these three powerful books reject the histrionics and hypocrisy of the politics of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and the cult of personality of the women's movement that projected the image of women as victims (Feminism on Trial), assess what the actual situation is for most women in America who need to work but want families (A Lesser Life); and, finally, expound a sweeping advocacy of a total national family policy (Women and Children Last).
"He Done Her Wrong"
In Feminism on Trial, Ellen Hawkes, a feminist activist and journalist, gives a definitive account of the sensational 1983 trial of Ginny Foat, the president of the California chapter of NOW. Foat was charged with the tire iron murder of an Argentine businessman, a crime allegedly committed in 1965. The bizarre facts of the case and Foat’s rise in the hierarchy in the women’s movement causes Hawkes to reach the critical conclusion that the movement has enabled women to abdicate responsibility for what they are by blaming society. "To argue that women are not responsible for their actions undercuts their dignity as individuals," she asserts. Hawkes rejects both the famous "click of consciousness" that instantly bestowed a feminist consciousness on previously naïve women, and the key slogan of the feminism of the 1970s, "the personal is political," which made a public issue of all private feminine experience. Criticizing the defense tactics of proclaiming Foat to be a victim of her abusive husband and society, she insists that Foat, in fact, "had taken hold of her fate."
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