THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 18, 1994 TAG: 9412140423
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
REASONABLE CREATURES
Essays on Women and Feminism
KATHA POLLITT
Alfred A. Knopf. 186 pp. $22.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, to general outrage.
Women, she wrote, are human beings before they are sexual beings; the rights of man and of woman are one and the same; women must be economically independent if they're ever to make moral choices. She proposed coeducational day schools and political representation for women. And she skewered the day's accepted view of women as delicate dependents by recording the sweaty, unhealthy, backbreaking conditions under which most women actually worked to support their families.
If Wollstonecraft could read Reasonable Creatures, Katha Pollitt's new collection of essays, she would first have a good laugh, then line up for Prozac. How depressing it would be to find that two centuries later, much of our progress toward equality is cosmetic.
In the 1790s Wollstonecraft wrote, ``I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes, but reasonable creatures.'' In the 1990s, Marilyn Quayle assures us that women don't want to be liberated from their ``essential nature'' as protected stay-at-homes; women's tax dollars go to schools where their daughters aren't welcome; and Marcia Clark can prosecute O.J. Simpson, as long as she curls her hair, wears something feminine and doesn't raise her voice.
Reasonable Creatures compiles 19 essays from The New York Times, The Nation and The New Yorker. Pollitt is angry - in fact, she's furious - and witty, logical and well. . . reasonable. She discusses why we need reproductive choice, why we don't have to be married to be happy, what's wrong with surrogate motherhood, what makes an anti-abortionist tick, why the Saturday cartoons relegate girls to being Smurfettes and why she hates ``sound-bite'' solutions and vacuous buzzwords like ``family values.''
``Why get upset about Murphy Brown's baby?. . . chances are excellent he won't sexually assault a retarded girl with a miniature baseball bat like those high school athletes in posh Glen Ridge, N.J.; or shoot his lover's spouse, like Amy Fisher; or find himself on trial for rape, like William Kennedy Smith - children of intact and prosperous families every one.''
In ``Who's Afraid of Hillary Clinton'' Pollitt calls first-lady-bashing of rightists like Rush Limbaugh and Suzanne Fields ``a lazy way to attack her husband''; then she blasts ``feminist scholars'' like Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia for careless research and misuse of statistics in ``Not Just Bad Sex.'' As for ``difference feminism'' - the notion that women belong in public life and private enterprise not because they have a right to be there but because they will raise the ``moral tone'' - she asks: Why should moral and social transformation be solely women's task? And how easy to exclude them again when they can't do the job alone: Sorry, girls, but obviously you just can't hack it.
Pollitt explodes the hot-air balloon of media sensationalism in ``Lorena's Army.'' She recalls how her own newspaper trumpeted the alarm: ``hordes of feminists'' were celebrating the docking of John Bobbitt's penis as a revolutionary act, Lorena Bobbitt as a heroine. Yikes! Scanning back issues of The New York Times, Pollitt found only one such letter; it called Lorena Bobbitt ``a symbol of innovative resistance against gender oppression everywhere'' and was sent by Stephanie Morris - of Sydney, Australia.
Meanwhile, relegated to obscurity inside the newspaper were the usual accounts of rape, domestic violence and spousal murder.
The editorial page also yielded a letter from ``Maynard Merwine, a history instructor at LeHigh Community College,'' defending female genital mutilation as ``an affirmation of the value of women in traditional society. . . a joyous occasion'' for the girls involved. ``Perhaps,'' wrote Pollitt, ``Stephanie Morris should drop by his office for a little chat.''
I noticed one or two undocumented statistics of Pollitt's own, a minor flaw in this thoughtful and provoking collection from a writer who'll critique a Kennedy as easily as a Dole. ``For me, to be a feminist,'' says Pollitt, ``is to answer the question `Are women human?' with a yes.''
Mary, meet Katha. Wollstonecraft would feel at home. MEMO: Lenore Hart, author of the novel ``Black River,'' lives on the Eastern
Shore. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
JOYCE RAVID
Katha Pollitt's ``Reasonable Creatures'' compiles 19 essays from The
New York Times, The Nation and The New Yorker.
by CNB