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

WOMEN UNDER SIEGE 25own feelings of embattlement and "siege." When they speak of theirpersonal plight they use words appropriate to the tragic plight of manyAmerican women of a bygone day and of millions of contemporary, trulyoppressed women in other countries. But their resentful rhetoric discreditsthe American women's movement today and seriously distorts itspriorities.Indeed, one of the main hallmarks of the New Feminism is its degreeof self-preoccupation. Feminists like Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthonywere keenly aware of themselves as privileged, middle-class, protectedwomen. They understood how inappropriate it would be to equatetheir struggles with those of less fortunate women, and it never occurredto them to air their personal grievances before the public.During the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, Catharine Mac­Kinnon, the influential feminist theorist and professor of law at the Universityof Michigan, seized the opportunity for a "national teach-in" onfeminist perspectives. Calling the Senate's treatment of Ms. Hill "a publichanging," she was quick to promote it as an example of how womensuffer when other women are mistreated. She was similarly affected byPatricia Bowman's ordeal in the trial of William Kennedy Smith:Watching the second public hanging of a woman who accused apowerful man of sexual violation reflects the way in which sexualassault in the United States today resembles lynching in times notlong past. One is lynched and raped as a member of a sociallysubordinated group. Each is an act of torture, a violent sexual humiliationritual in which victims are often killed. When it happens,the target population cringes, withdraws, identifies and disidentifiesin terror. 17That the ordeals of Ms. Hill and Ms. Bowman were comparable tolynchings is debatable. Although the dire effect they had on Ms. Mac­Kinnon and other New Feminists may not be debatable, the alleged ramifiedeffect on all women, the so-called "target population," is. In fact,there is no evidence that most women, including those who believed thatthe truth lay more with Ms. Hill or Ms. Bowman, felt terrorized or "targeted";or that they "cringed" or thought of themselves as members of a"socially subordinated group."Alice Jardine ("angry and struggling" at the Heilbrun conference) toldthe Harvard Crimson how she reacted to the report that a crazed misogyn-