Jill Filipovic has written perhaps the most incisive—and, not unrelatedly, most personal—of many tributes to the recently deceased Gloria Steinem. Filipovic rightly credits Steinem as the founding mother of second-wave feminism. The driving ambition of that movement was to help every woman “do what she wants to do with her life,” not just in the sense of offering adult agency but also in the sense of militating against the interdependency of traditional family life. By any measure, this regnant iteration of feminism has accomplished its end.
This has been to the great and grave detriment of women and of society more broadly.
Not because it’s bad to offer women the legal and cultural respect due full persons and citizens. And not because it’s wrong to accord women the same personal agency and moral responsibility accorded to men. These objectives, common to both nineteenth-century proto-feminism and Steinem’s twentieth-century feminism, are good and right. Steinem’s critics are largely right about her troubled legacy more broadly, but that does not make their antifeminist worldview defensible or correct.
The problem is that Gloria Steinem’s iteration of feminism, and the popular women’s culture for which it was the catalyst, militates foundationally against the aim of women’s full and equal dignity.
Filipovic rightly argues that Steinem’s legacy is inextricable from her early life choices. Upon finding herself unexpectedly pregnant at 23, she left her engagement ring under her fiancé’s pillow, obtained an illegal abortion, and spent her life fighting for other women to be able to legally do the same. This fork-in-the-road moment, Filipovic contends, evinces Steinem’s extraordinary bravery. From her perspective, today’s women should be grateful to the late Steinem for leaving us a society in which women less brave than Steinem (Filipovic self-effacingly numbers herself among these) are nevertheless able to achieve self-determination through abortion access and broader norms that treat marriage and motherhood as morally neutral lifestyle choices.
Since we’re purportedly talking about women’s rights to legal and cultural equality with men, this question is worth asking: What do we think of a man who abandons his fiancée and child in service of his own fledgling ambitions? Words like selfish, shallow, and infantile come to mind. Indeed, the misogynistic manosphere, rightly deplored by progressive feminists like Filipovic, is filled with stories of faux-macho neo-bums celebrating exactly this kind of banal self-centeredness. When men evince solipsistic irresponsibility, we justly deem it immoral and unseemly. When women do the same, we’re supposed to consider it empowered, brave, and heroic.
Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Unfortunately, thanks in large part to Steinem’s exceptional wit and charm, a patronizing, sexist view of women and female heroism came to define our popular culture for generations of American girls. Moreover, we’ve made it seem falsely axiomatic that women (unlike men) should pay neither a personal nor a societal price for the moral relativism and ultimate nihilism of simply “doing what I want with my life.”
What a Girl Wants
When Disney released The Little Mermaid in 1989, I was two years old. It was my first favorite film, and I dressed up as Ariel for multiple preschool Halloweens. I was far too young, of course, to understand that Ariel, whose great ambition is to see the human world above the sea, is an appalling “heroine.” Steinem would no doubt acknowledge some of the reasons: She gives up her own life and even her literal voice to tag along after some random dude.
More importantly, though, in Disney’s version of The Little Mermaid, Ariel’s ambition itself is paltry and selfish. Facile defiance of convention (“stay in the ocean and marry a nice young merman”) is the sum total of Ariel’s character—and her appeal to Disney’s impressionable audience. She evinces no other regard, maturity, or responsibility. Thus, the lionization and ultimate triumph of her shallow goal accords entirely with Steinem’s worldview as elucidated by Filipovic: Women who do anything other than what “the patriarchy” expects are laudable for that reason alone, regardless of what it is that they do or why.
As I’ve rewatched the rest of the modern Disney classics with my children over the past decade, I have noticed that Ariel is far from alone. The Disney princesses I grew up on are a collection of knock-off Steinems: The thing that unites Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, and Pocahontas, for example, is an amorphous dream of escape—and the viewers’ presumptive admiration for them on those flimsy grounds alone. Some of these cartoon protagonists are, of course, more sympathetic than others: Yes, Gaston and Jafar are toxic males surely worth escaping, whereas Pocahontas’ father and prospective fiancé deserved a lot better than her insouciant defection to some dangerous invader. But, in every case, a vague yearning to “live the life I want” predates these specifics.
When no personal ambition or contribution is universally understood to be more important than any other (or, worse, when the low is considered high and vice versa), relativistic restlessness plants the seeds of mass discontent.
Revealingly, this is not how Disney portrays heroism for males. The Lion King’s Simba earns his heroism not by embracing the carefree “life I want,” his family and their expectations be damned, but by going through all the self-sacrificial trouble of returning to Pride Rock to fight for his place as king.
Indeed, the only modern Disney film in which women and men are truly accorded full and equal dignity might be The Princess and the Frog (2009). Play-boy Prince Naveen is living Gloria Steinem’s feminist dream: Doing whatever he wants without regard for anyone else. But because he’s male instead of female, he and his behavior are positioned as needing reform; only with and via self-discipline and self-sacrifice can Naveen live a life worthy of the name. Meanwhile, the waitress-turned-princess, Tiana, hailing from Black New Orleans, begins with a dream of owning a restaurant that is, unlike the selfish longings of her predecessors, infused with a sense of responsibility to her father’s legacy and her own upward mobility. Yet even Tiana, despite her comparatively worthy ambition, must learn that—per her mother’s admonitions—no amount of individual success can replace love, and its promise of responsibility to a broader family and community.
Apparently, the infantilizing faux-heroism of “doing what I want with my life,” for which we are supposed to admire Steinem, popularly applies only to pretty, feminine, white or white-coded women. For everyone else, a reality principle and some regard for others are considered inextricable from both morality and maturity.
As well as from real happiness.
What A Girl Needs
Emily Hancock has written about finding herself, like Steinem, unmarried and unexpectedly pregnant in her early 20s. Unlike Steinem, she carried, birthed, and supported her baby alone. She grew up fast. There probably wasn’t a lot of time left over to muse about self-actualization. Today, in her mid-30s, Hancock is raising that daughter of her youth (now a teen) alongside the three younger children born within her marriage.
There is something wrong at the heart of an ideology that views Hancock’s life of unforeseen family obligation as a fate best avoided via abortion access and Steinem’s perpetual freedom from domestic care as an aspirational achievement.
That partly explains why women (and especially liberal women), our plethora of choices notwithstanding, are less happy and more anxious than women in earlier generations. When no personal ambition or contribution is universally understood to be more important than any other (or, worse, when the low is considered high and vice versa), relativistic restlessness plants the seeds of mass discontent.
To be sure, no one should begrudge Filipovic her own outsized professional success and delayed motherhood, with which she credits Steinem. There are downsides, though, to a world where more women behave like Filipovic than like Hancock. Such a society is hollowed, not only in terms of population, but also in terms of values. For one thing, 40-something motherhood is not an option for everyone; a nontrivial percentage of women who intend to become mothers at that age are ultimately not able to do so. Moreover, many women celebrating their comparatively carefree lives as the fruit of Steinem’s legacy are neatly avoiding one omnipresent reality: For every “doing what I want with my life,” there is a counterfactual. Not just for the ostensibly repressed mothers of several like Hancock (and me), but also for Steinem’s allegedly empowered heirs.
In Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 literary classic Little Women, Civil War-era mother of four “Marmee” tells her second-born daughter, Jo: “You I leave to enjoy your liberty till you tire of it; for only then will you find that there is something sweeter.” But in the 1994 film, the line is “updated” to: “Go, and embrace your liberty. And see what wonderful things come of it.”
This is the lie that Steinem and her acolytes sold to women: There is nothing sweeter than the perfect freedom defined as a lack of responsibility to others.
The proto-feminist Alcott, of course, knew better. She wrote whole, complex, and nuanced female characters who were formed and chastened by self-sacrifice and responsibility precisely because she recognized that women and men are both worthiest and happiest (not in the hedonistic sense, but in the holistic one) when they willingly bear the burden of others’ needs. In updating John Bunyan’s 1678 male-centric Christian allegory, A Pilgrim’s Progress, to reflect the work of family life rather than the dangers of a literal pilgrimage, Alcott made a case for the seriousness of women’s character formation and moral agency.
Nor did she exempt men from that moral agency or its domestic manifestations. In Little Women, the main male character—just like the female ones—achieves maturity and respectability precisely by moving past “doing what I want” to embrace a life of responsibility to others.
This is the same point that Frank Capra makes, even more pointedly, in the 1946 Christmas classic, It’s A Wonderful Life. Protagonist George Bailey is discontented and miserable throughout most of the film because he never got to live the life of travel and wealth that he wanted. Instead, he took over his father’s business; got married; fathered four children; and lived with integrity and (resentful!) other-regard. The moral of the story, of course, is that George’s modest life of service to his family and community is far more wonderful—not just in its impact (though that is true), but also in his experience of it—than whatever he imagined for himself absent those burdens and responsibilities.
Someone needs to produce a modern remake of It’s A Wonderful Life, only with a female protagonist. Perhaps she could have a story like Hancock’s, but be paralyzed by resentment like George.
In some scene that portrays her misplaced regret—before she learns her lesson and embraces both the value and the joy of her own self-sacrifice—she would be reading something by Gloria Steinem.
