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Cutebaby printing pages8/12/2023 Today, one reads essays like Elizabeth Hardwick’s curiously scattered “Women Re Women” or Joan Didion’s startlingly shallow “The Women’s Movement” with a vague sense of unease-or, quite simply, bafflement at their authors’ lack of fellow-feeling, their lack of interest in the conditions that touched their lives as profoundly as the lives of the women whom they condescended to so freely. ![]() The years from 1968 to 1973 were the most publicly visible stretch of the women’s movement in the United States, years that appear to us now in an energetic sequence of film dissolves: women burning bras women marching in the streets and swaying at candlelight vigils women distributing mimeographed sheets with topics for consciousness-raising, including equal pay, domestic violence, housework, child care, and the right to an abortion women thumbing through copies of “ The Second Sex,” “ The Feminine Mystique,” and “ Sexual Politics.” Nearly every notable woman essayist opined on the movement, often by assuming a tone of cool, disdainful skepticism toward its goals and principles. The historical explanation is straightforward enough. (The other two were “China” and “freaks.”) And it was in the seventies that the subject moved to the heart of her writing. Yet, unless we consent to a moralizing litmus test of what it means to be a feminist, we should remain skeptical of the idea that, as Rich put it, Sontag’s writings on women were “an intellectual exercise” more than “the expression of a felt reality.” In a journal entry from 1972, Sontag noted that “women” was one of the three themes she had been studying all her life. In her journal, she questioned its “inherited political rhetoric (that of gauchisme)” and its dismissal of the intellect as “bourgeois, phallo-centric, repressive.” “Like all capital moral truths, feminism is a bit simple-minded,” she wrote in her response to Rich. It’s true that Sontag didn’t quite ally herself with the radical-feminist movement. The phenomena that Sontag was drawn to in her writing-the metamorphosis of people into objects, the obliteration of personality by style, the pursuit of perfection through domination and submission-were painted with the same broad brush of patriarchy, indicting the critic attracted to them. Consider the poet Adrienne Rich’s letter to The New York Review of Books, objecting to Sontag’s 1975 essay on Leni Riefenstahl, “ Fascinating Fascism.” Dismissing Sontag’s suggestion that feminists bore some responsibility for turning Riefenstahl’s films into cultural monuments, Rich noted the “running criticism by radical feminists of male-identified ‘successful’ women, whether they are artists, executives, psychiatrists, Marxists, politicians, or scholars.” It was no accident, Rich implied, that “male-identified” values were embodied not just by Riefenstahl but by Sontag. ![]() Suspicious of her celebrity, and convinced that her success had rendered her immune to the plights of ordinary women, her critics have characterized her relationship to the second sex as inconstant at best and faithless at worst. ![]() The singular glamour of Susan Sontag has done her some injustice, particularly where matters of sex and gender are concerned. They offer us only the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas, and the world. They contain no ready-made ideas, no borrowed rhetoric-nothing that risks hardening into dogma or cant. Though the pieces are around fifty years old, the effect of reading them today is to marvel at the untimeliness of their genius. But the essays and interviews in “ On Women,” a new collection of Susan Sontag’s work, are incapable of aging badly. ![]() A certain anxiety besieges the critic asked to introduce a volume of earlier writings on women, lest she find the ideas expressed in them relics of a distant, less enlightened past.
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