Hypatia

In the jargon of today's mainstream mass media, 'liberal' has become the L word and 'feminist' has become the F word. This co-opting of L and F trades on public squeamishness regarding the designations of earlier, and blunter, L and F words. 'Liberal' and 'feminist' are being shooed toward closets formerly inhabited by 'lesbian' and 'fuck'—words that liberals (in the case of 'fuck') and feminists (in the case of 'lesbian') worked so enthusiastically to bring out of the closet in the second half of the twentieth century. What an interesting reversal, this move to closet the outers! Revenge, perhaps? An aspect of the revenge: closeting them together? 'Liberal' and 'feminist' often sit uneasily in proximity to one another. Yet in the current reactionary political climate, uneasiness regarding 'liberal' should be problematic for feminists.

Readers of this journal need no prodding to resist the closeting of 'feminist.' About 'liberal,' the case is less clear. 'Liberal' receives a load of flack from the political left as well as from the right. Feminist philosophers have contributed substantial flack from the left. Closets are a foreseeable outcome of the creation of a derogatory, scornful aura around a concept, investing it with an emotive load that can easily embarrass any who might find the concept applicable to themselves. Some concepts deserve that aura. 'Rapist' is one of them. 'Liberal' is not. Yet 'liberal' in today's political climate is fast becoming a word that, like 'lesbian' in my high school of the 1950s, can be used to embarrass, dismiss, put down without discussion.

Do not be fooled by the fact that liberal feminisms receive more press than any other feminisms in the United States. This fact does not show that liberalism has made feminism respectable. It has helped make feminism visible to those who have come to speak of "the L word" and, now, "the F word," which suggest a certain embarrassment and squeamishness regarding what they have seen.

For years, I have been uneasy, if not ambivalent, regarding a widespread negative attitude—scornful, condescending, caricaturing—within feminism toward liberalism, especially within the radical feminisms that have been central to my emergence and development as a feminist philosopher. When I embraced radicalesbian feminism in the 1970s with an enthusiasm unparalleled in my [End Page 223] career, I found that 'liberal' in the mouths of feminists can drip with as much scorn as when it emerges from the mouths of right-wing politicians.

'Liberal' is what I come from—my atheist parents (whose liberalism defied their families' conservatism and the conservatism of most of the village in which I was raised), my favorite teachers, the texts that drew me to philosophy in the first place and nurtured my development through graduate school. Those are my roots as a thinker and rebel. Inevitable, perhaps, that I should rebel against liberalism itself. Also that I should do so on the basis of much that I learned from liberals and liberalism. But it is not inevitable that I should acquiesce in the closeting of those roots.

I like to think I have transformed the liberalism of my parents and teachers. Unlikely that I have left it behind. Or even that I would have been able to make whatever contributions I have been able to offer feminist thought without it. At this point in my life, and I think at this point in American culture, it seems more important to disown the scorn, condescension, and caricature than to worry about differentiating ourselves from anything liberal.

I do not think I have actually felt scornful of liberalism. But I have not previously voiced publicly my discomfort with that attitude. Perhaps I have become more sensitive as a result of finding that, as a so-called Second Wave feminist of the 1970s, I am included in the target of often not very subtle scorn, condescension, and caricature by self-identified Third Wave feminists who seem under the illusion that they were the first among feminists to take...