Hypatia

Naomi Zack's new book offers a kind of Humpty-Dumpty version of the recent career of feminist theory. The story begins about twenty years ago, when the feminist movement fell into conceptual and political disarray. Feminist theory imploded in response to charges that although it purported to be about all women it was in fact narrowly focused on white, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied women of the Western world. Feminism came to acknowledge the kinds of differences race, class, culture, and other variables make to women's identities and lives, but did so in such a way as to undermine the possibility of a unified women's movement. As Zack argues,

Intersectionality is believed to be democratic because women of color now have the authority, demanded by them and sanctioned by white feminists, to create their own feminisms. But, as a theory of women's identity, intersectionality is not inclusive insofar as members of specific intersections of race and class can create only their own feminisms.

(2)

And so, instead of a unified women's movement grounded in a theory of women's commonality, we ended up with the shards and splats of narrowly focused identity-based feminisms.

The good news, according to Zack, is that it is possible for feminists not simply to put Humpty back together again (why do that, if Humpty was myopically constructed to begin with?) but to craft a new and much better version. Indeed, with the right ingredients, Zack urges, feminists can build a movement that could create a world in which "the governments of all the major countries in the world will be controlled by women," their rule having as its "two universal objectives . . . the end of violence and the preservation of natural environments" (164). [End Page 201]

The heart of Zack's book is her account of such ingredients. They include an adequate conception of the category 'women,' an understanding of the nature of gender and its development in the context of different cultures and populations, and psychological and social theories that acknowledge the reach and force of oppression while pointing to agency in subjects and possibilities for change in the societies in which they live.

As Zack sees it, joint political activity among women requires an "inclusive foundation" (6), and such a foundation can only be provided by a definition of 'woman' from which no woman can be excluded. Such a definition must point to what women have in common even as it also makes room for crucial differences among us. Intersectionality accounted for differences, but at much too heavy a price: it appeared to deny the possibility that there is anything all women have in common. The solution, Zack thinks, lies in a definition of 'women' that posits that "what women have in common is a relation and not a thing" (2). She spells this claim out in the following way:

Women are those human beings who are related to the historical category of individuals who are designated female from birth or biological mothers or primary sexual choice of men. Call this category FMP. The relation of women to the disjunctive FMP category is that of being assigned to the whole category or identifying with the whole category. The relation of assignment to, or identification with, the FMP category is a necessary and sufficient condition for being a woman, and there is every reason to view it as an essence shared by all women.

(8)

What makes an individual count as a woman is not some substantive property but rather a relation to (assignment to or identification with) a category of individuals designated in a particular way. The point of articulating the grounds for commonality among women is not simply to prevent unwanted exclusion of the sort characteristic of second-wave feminism; it also serves as "a moral basis to end oppression by making liberatory efforts compelling to all women in their sameness. . . . Because they are all women, in this relation to the historical group...