‘It’s possible,’ said Ms Steinem doubtfully. ‘But they’d be living that way through choice.’
Up on stage in the Arts Theatre at the Community College, Ms Steinem suavely delivered her stump speech, ‘Equality: The Future of Humankind’. The audience, like the institution, was modest enough — a mere five or six hundred people, compared to the rock-concert-sized crowds she has attracted elsewhere. Once a painfully nervous speaker, she now performs with brisk panache. She marches up to the mike, returning the applause of the audience. ‘Friends,’ she begins. There are laughs (‘We now have words like sexual harassment and battered women. A few years ago they were just called life’), but no cheap jokes. Maximum clarity and suasion are what she is after. ‘Yes,’ you keep thinking, ‘that’s true. That’s right.’
After the speech, the applause, the questions (‘I’m a homemaker, or a uh “domestic engineer” …’),! drank a lot of coffee and smoked a lot of cigarettes with Eddie, our young, black chauffeur. I asked him if he worked for the Ms. Foundation, and he revealed, hesitantly (though it’s no great secret), that he worked for Ms Steinem’s ‘friend’, a high-level but low-profile company lawyer. Ms Steinem, like most eminent feminists, is unmarried and childless. The nature—nurture axis, one gathers, takes quite a wobble when you have kids of your own – but then Steinem’s Utopia is many generations away. ‘I’ve driven Gloria out to speak at places three or four times now,’ said Eddie. ‘It’s going to happen a lot more times, I can tell. I’m looking forward to it. I like to hear her speak.’
Eddie went on to say that it had taken only three months of Gloria’s example to convert him to the cause. ‘Me and my wife, we had a talk. Now I do my bit in the home. When she goes out — I used to make her take the kids with her. Now she can leave them with me. She can do what she likes. It’s better, for her, for me. I never knew my father, and it’s too late now. I don’t want to make the same mistake. I like to be with my children. Watching them grow.’
Well, by this stage I was on the verge of calling my friend in London — to tell her that it would all be different from now on. While Ms Steinem held court in the corner, I strolled round the common room among the dissolving crowd. A noticeboard advertised some forthcoming attractions: Frisbee Tournament, Human Potential Fra-Sority. The average age of the American college student is now twenty-seven, and I marvelled at their variety — not least the variety of the student body: some as thin and tightly-cocked as whippets, some like walking haystacks, with all the intervening shapes and sizes fully represented. As soon as you leave New York you see how monstrously various, how humanly balkanised, America really is. And yet in Steinemland — home of the Polymorphous Perverse — such diversity would not be remarkable, and would certainly not be amusing. A sense of humour is a risky thing to have out here, in the big mix, where mere oddity is no cause for laughter. Do all these people actually have a human potential? Don’t we need the norms? How much variety can a society contain? How much can it stand?
Feminism is a salutary challenge to one’s assumptions — including your assumptions about feminism. I wonder, though, how much it has to offer as an all-informing idea. And is the racial analogy, so often claimed, really fully earned? Busy systematisers, with a thing called ‘Women’s Studies’ to erect, the feminists have systematised an ideology, a history, an enemy. Yet surely there has been a good deal of collusion, and dumb human accident, on both sides. Adjustments in thought are necessary, but some of the reparations look alarmingly steep.
Ms Steinem has a literary gift — her prose is swift and sure — yet this is not quite the same thing as a gift for literature. Inevitably her artistic values are now ideologically determined, for the greater good, as is her view of language itself. She is against all idioms that are ‘divisive’ or ‘judgmental’, so it’s birth names for ‘maiden names’, back salary for ‘alimony’, preorgasmic for ‘frigid’. ‘Peace on Earth, Good Will to People’ is the sort of ‘rewrite’ she recommends. And at this point I have to ask myself: would I want to be a writer in the feminist Utopia? Would anybody? People might be happier or less anxious under such a tactful populism, but one wonders about the kinds of personality they would knock up for themselves. The result might simply strengthen the American how-to culture, the general thirst for ready-made or second-hand lives.