Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

THE GENDER WARDENS 259"ensure" that preferences are "authentic"? What additions to politicaldemocracy does Friedman have in mind? A constitutional amendment toprovide reeducation camps for men and women of false consciousness?Is she prepared to go the authoritarian route indicated by de Beauvoir?The feminist who thinks that democracy is insufficient believes thatseemingly free and enlightened American women have values and desiresthat, unbeknownst to them, are being manipulated by a system intent onkeeping women subjugated to men. Romance, a major cause of defectionfrom the gynocentric enclave, is ever a sticking point with gender feminists.Gloria Steinem, writing on the subject, engages in this kind ofdebunking "critique": "Romance itself serves a larger political purpose byoffering at least a temporary reward for gender roles and threateningrebels with loneliness and rejection. ... It privatizes our hopes and distractsus from making societal changes. The Roman 'bread and circuses'way of keeping the masses happy. . . . might now be updated." 11Jaggar,too, sees in romance a distraction from sexual politics: "The ideology ofromantic love has now become so pervasive that most women in contemporarycapitalism probably believe that they marry for love rather thanfor economic support." 12For her authoritarian disdain, de Beauvoir deserves our liberal censure.But the less authoritarian feminists also deserve it. No intelligent andliberal person—no one who has read and appreciated the limpid politicalprose of George Orwell or who has learned from the savage history oftwentieth-century totalitarianism—can accept the idea of a social agendato "overhaul" the desires of large numbers of people to make them more"authentic."In her defense, the gender feminist replies that effective teachers orpolitical leaders must always try to help others overcome benightedness.When women are caught in a system designed to perpetuate male domination,they must be enlightened. There is nothing intrinsically illiberalabout seeking to make them conscious of their subjugation. It is the veryessence of a liberal education to open minds and enlighten consciousness.If that entails "reeducating" them and overhauling their desires, so be it.This argument could easily be made in an earlier era when classicallyliberal principles were being applied to men but not to women. In thenineteenth century, the proposition that all men are created equal wastaken to mean "all males." Women did not have the rights that men had,and, what is more, they were being taught that their subordinate statuswas fitting and natural. Feminist philosophers like John Stuart Mill andHarriet Taylor rightly feared that such teaching was helping to perpetuateinequities. Under the circumstances, political democracy applied only