The difference between men and women was established at the beginning of human history, at least according to Old Testament lore, as one of the ribs inside the first man was taken out and made into the first woman. Her dependence on and apparent obedience to him is suggested in her title: “helpmeet” (at least according to the King James Version). And so the tense and occasionally contradictory relationship between men and women began, and gender analysis likely began soon after. Consider the role of Helen of Troy – a woman of extraordinary beauty was able to lead a life of luxury and ease as the wife of the Greek king Menelaus. However, her provider was an older man who would go off to war for years at a time, sleeping with prostitutes and even taking maidens from the losing side as part of the spoils, while being expected to maintain a pure front on her end. All she did was fall for someone as attractive as her (the prince Paris from Troy) and run away to a different life of luxury – committing the same adultery that her husband had committed time after time, with impunity – and the result was a war that lasted a decade, ending in needless death after death and the burning of one of the time period’s great cities. She was beautiful, but her beauty was, to the men in her world, an object to be possessed. She was to be viewed, not to be understood. This ambivalent oppression – being plied with such opulence does not sound oppressive until one considers the cage involved – becomes even more confusing when combined with the element of race. When the male figures in one’s life look at a woman of a different gender, the politics of the interracial taboo, still alive and well here in the 2010’s, become infused with the affect of arousal, and the result is an environment that remains patently unfair to women, even to the most attractive of them. Both the idea of oppression and the element of race must be taken into consideration when performing gender analysis.
The ambivalent oppression that is specific to women starts at a young age. Particularly in homes that are religiously conservative, the development of a sexual identity is complicated and confusing. On the one hand, many religious authority figures preach the necessity of abstinence until marriage and brand women who start to have sex before they are married as promiscuous creatures. In an era when the average of first marriage is moving well past college and closer to 30, such an expectation is unrealistic and can only cause stress in the women who are expected to live up to it. In their encounters with potential sexual partners their own age, though, they feel pressure from the opposite direction: if they won’t go along with sex in high school, they are often treated as frigid, or potentially lesbian, or just not cool in some way. With pressure about sexuality coming from both directions, finding contentment as a woman can be difficult. As Marilyn Frye writes, “You can’t win. You are caught in a bind, caught between systematically related pressures” (3). She finds similar structures of oppression in the decision to work outside the home or stay home as a mother. While mothers who stay at home have the opportunity to build deeper relationships with their children, simply because of the time and proximity involved, on the one hand they can be criticized for “just” being a mother, as if attention to a career path is more important, or more of a suitable calling for someone with significant intellectual gifts. The function of mothering, then, itself becomes an ambivalent trap.
This trap becomes even more insidious and inescapable when it is combined with the complications of race. Because women as a whole feel the ambivalence associated with their sexual identity, one might expect there to be some solidarity among them, particularly in the fight to gain a measure of equality, or at least liberation from that ambivalence. However, the racism that is present in the white feminist movement has alienated black feminists historically, to the point that, in 1973, black feminists finally had enough and founded their own feminist organization, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO) (Combahee River Collective). This racism found its voice in the anger of white women who could not take out their rage at their own oppression against their husbands, or against the children, so they would turn it onto those who could not respond back – the black women in their midst. In the years of segregation, this often took the form of wealthy white women mistreating their black maids and nannies, as has been detailed in the recent novel The Help, among other sources. Even in the 1970’s and later, this has taken the form of condescension by white feminists toward their black counterparts, because even in their recognition of the oppression by males, the latent racism that so many white women feel, consciously or unconsciously, informs their interaction with them.
It is the unconscious form of this condescension that is the most difficult to overcome, as many white feminists feel, at least on a conscious level, that women of all ethnic backgrounds deserve equal standing with men. They tend to ignore what Peggy McIntosh refers to as the “invisible knapsack” of white privilege. Some of the items in this “knapsack” lie dormant in the white subconscious as facts without appearing to seem oppressive to them. After all, white children are raised to believe that their lives follow the expected norms in society and carry out social ideals. This upbringing is validated by a set of experiences in adulthood; for example, as McIntosh points out, white women can buy or rent housing wherever they would like, as long as they can afford it. Their neighbors will at least tolerate them, if they don’t get along. They can switch on the TV and find people who look like them on just about every channel. History lessons about their country show people who look like them as the heroes. They can go to a grocery store and find food that matches their cultural tastes. Perhaps most importantly, they are not asked individually to speak for all members of their ethnicity.
The list of items in this knapsack goes on. However, the theme is fairly consistent: white people can live their lives mostly free of inquiries, justification, and condescension. It is true that the more wealthy will tend to look down on the poor, even within the white community, but a white person’s skin color is not an immediate conferrer of value. If you add this instant judgment to the ambivalence of being and becoming a woman, it is easy to see that these two elements – race and ambivalence – stalk the lives of too many of us every day.
Works Cited
Frye, Marilyn. “Oppression.”
McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”
“The Combahee River Collective.” From Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American
Feminist Thought, Beverly Sheftal, ed. New York: The New Press, 1995.
