When I was a young woman, I was a lesbian-feminist. In retrospect, much of what I believed is embarrassing, mainly because I fell prey to a kind of essentialist and extreme feminism, in which men are simply bad and women simply good, and if women ran the world there would be no war, and lesbian relationships are natually equal and healthy.
It's not just my fault I thought that way; plenty of influential feminist writers were writing that way. It's just my fault I read them so uncritically.
I pulled Books & Life, Jan Clausen's collection of essays and reviews, off the shelf expecting to be appalled and embarrassed by it. Instead, I found myself wondering why more of her intelligent and critical feminism hadn't sunk into me earlier. Either I was dumber and more naive than I remember, to have been exposed to good thinking like Clausen's without learning anything from it, or I wasn't, and my dumbness and naivete is a nostalgic construct. I vote for the latter.
It is a jolt to remember, while reading about Clausen's peace work, that in the 80s many of us really did believe the world would end soon in a nuclear conflagration. What a burden to grow up under! I had friends who said they weren't going to college because there was no point in a world soon to end; another friend said she didn't bother trying to save money for the same reason. Even back then, I figured I'd rather get reduced to atoms on my way to commencement than while stoning out in some dingy hole. I was always asking these people, "And if the world doesn't end, what then? Don't expect me to support you!"
I've always been something of a pragmatist.
It is heartening to me that we sincerely believed we were living in end times, and we were wrong. I hold onto that thought when I start getting scared about environmental collapse or global warming. Not that I ignore the threat; I just remind myself that predictions about the future are almost always wrong, and things are rarely as bad as people say they are.
I doubt I'll read this book again, but she stays on the shelf for now, just for being a good book.
Posted by Su Penn at July 4, 2003 07:42 AM | TrackBack