Women’s Issues: Beyond Hillary and Di

A not entirely harmonic convergence of magazine traditions occurs on newsstands this month: A Ms. magazine anniversary--its 20th--and Esquire’s “Women We Love” issue--its fifth.

But it says something (no, this column will not explain precisely what) that most other magazines in the current crop reserve their scrutiny for two women whose public personae are inextricably linked to men: Hillary and Di.

The July/August Ms. issue isn’t much of a departure from the standard fare in the resurrected, no-ads-accepted bimonthly.

The tear-out timeline provides an interesting history of the feminist movement from the launch of Ms. in 1972 through the Clarence Thomas confirmation and the subsequent rush of women for political office.

National Organization for Women President Patricia Ireland’s personal history, with update on the activism and snowballing NOW membership, is also informative. But--as with too much of the magazine--it reads as if editors are content in knowing their subscribers will consume it in sisterly duty, if not in readerly desire.

The exception, and this columnist’s gender bias may be a factor here, is Naomi Wolf’s essay: “Radical Heterosexuality--or How to Love a Man and Save Your Feminist Soul.”

Much has been made lately of feminism’s alleged indifference to issues that concern the so-called mainstream (and of efforts by thinkers like Susan Faludi to prove such criticisms are sexist poppycock).

That Wolf feels compelled to back into her discussion so delicately--”Is sleeping with a man ‘sleeping with the enemy’?” she wonders--lends credence to those criticisms.

But then she gets rolling and does what Ms. chooses not to do with its intramural cheerleading: She makes points that might change the unconverted.

“It’s not simple gender that pits Us against Them,” Wolf writes. “In the fight against sexism, it’s those who are for us versus those who are against us--of either gender.”

Is Esquire Us or Them from a feminist perspective? Wolf tsk-tsks that the magazine “runs infantile disquisitions on ‘Women We Love’ (suggesting, Lucky Girls!)”

Esquire, rather predictably, puts Candice Bergen on its cover and inserts this mock category: “Women to Whom We Apologize in Advance for this Entire Patronizing and Objectifying Exercise: Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolf, Thelma, Louise.”

For the record, a few of the women “we” love (and their male nominators) are Gloria Steinem (Jimmy Breslin), Dolly Parton (John Updike), Queen Latifah (Kurt Loder), Andrea Mitchell (Graydon Carter) and Annie Dillard (Garry Trudeau). And someone anonymously nominated “Pat?,” the androgynous “Saturday Night Live” character.

Analysis of the dynamics of male validation of women’s worth (to put it pedantically) seems relevant at the moment. In the August Working Woman, Patricia O’Brien profiles Hillary Clinton, “The First Lady With a Career.”

The article looks perceptively at the nuts and bolts political problems the female Clinton will face if the male Clinton becomes President. But more interesting to this discussion are the underlying problems of public perception she faces now.

When former President Richard Nixon said, “Hillary pounds the piano so hard that Bill can’t be heard,” he figured he echoed the thoughts of his fellow Americans.

Did he?

O’Brien seems to fear as much. Hillary, she says, “projects something that some men find unsettling. Call it a lack of need. She demonstrates an ease with power that some women find arrogant and off-putting. . . .”

Finally, O’Brien asks a question that Naomi Wolf touches in Ms.: “Can any woman truly be free and independent--and a wife?”

To that, Hillary says: “You are who you are, not who you’re married to. . . . And I know who I am.”

A much more timely question for most Americans, however, is: Does Di know who she is?

In the Aug. 3 issue of The New Republic, author Camille Paglia (whose name would almost certainly be “ ssssssss’ed’ ‘ at a Ms. editorial meeting) says it’s time to take Di seriously.

Since NOW boasts 280,000 members, and People magazine sold 4,001,100 copies with the first excerpt of “Diana: Her True Story,” she may have a point.

“Diana’s story,” Paglia writes, “taps into certain deep and powerful strains in our culture, strains that suggest that the ancient archetypes of conventional womanhood are not obsolete but stronger and deeper than ever.”

Among those archetypes, is Cinderella, of course, but also “the betrayed wife,” “the princess in the tower,” “the mater dolorosa, “ “the pagan goddess,” “the Hollywood queen” and “the beautiful boy.”

Not since deconstructionists discovered Madonna has an academic attached herself so earnestly to a pop figure.

There can only be one explanation for this insane devotion of space to Di in a magazine not owned by Time/Life publications. Clearly Camille Paglia has developed an irrational identification with Camilla Parker-Bowles, Prince Charles’ rumored mistress, and Camille’s fixation on the cult of Di reflects a sublimation of projected lust for royalty and class guilt about it. Or something like that.

REQUIRED READING

According to the August Working Woman, for the first time in years, complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about pregnancy discrimination rose--by 7%.

From 1985 to 1990, new mothers on leave were more than 10 times more likely to lose their jobs than other employees on leave, and the EEOC rarely ruled in favor of the mother when claims were filed.

Discrimination against pregnant women is usually triggered by employers’ fears about their performance and commitment to the job. But Working Woman cites a survey by the Families and Work Institute showing that 94% of employees who took maternity leave stayed out just three months and that the vast majority of managers reported no adverse impact on job performance or co-workers.

In the July/August issue of The Washington Monthly, Julie Rose views the workplace and pregnancy from a personal perspective.

Rose’s essay is at least in part a defense of Felice Schwartz, whose 1989 article in the Harvard Business Review sparked the heated “Mommy Track” debate.

Schwartz laments the unfairness with which working women are treated but blanches at the lock-step, “back-in-three-months-to-scale-the-corporate-ladder” party line.

“Ideological purity doesn’t count for much when it comes to dealing with the real world of juggling career and family,” she writes.

Rose prefers Schwartz’s idealistic “jungle gym” approach: Men or women who take time off to raise children could theoretically move off to one side temporarily, knowing they’ll be encouraged to start climbing the corporate structure again, at their own pace, whenever they’re ready.

That approach raises much more radical questions than were raised by those who attacked Schwartz for anti-feminism. For example, as Rose wonders: “Do we really want companies and other organizations to be run by only the most driven of the driven?”