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A Gender Diary" - This essay partly introduces and partly assumes knowledge of some key conflicts in recent feminist theory. Do not worry if
you do not fully understand it now. At the end of the semester you will be able to read it with full understanding.

The two theses Snitow develops in this essay are:

a. ". . . that a common divide keeps forming in both feminist thought and action between the need to build the identity of 'woman' and give it
solid political meaning and the need to tear down the very category 'woman' (p. 9)."

b. a compromise between the two sides of the divide is currently impossible and a constant choosing between sides is tactically necessary

Reading and Discussion Guide

1. What is the divide ? Summarize Snitow's perception of it in the peace movement and politics.

2. Below are various constructions of the divide. How does Snitow define of the camps?

a. Minimizers and Maximizers

b. Radical feminists and Cultural feminists

c. Social Constructionists and Essentialists

d. Poststructuralists and Cultural Feminists

e. American feminism and French feminism

f. Equality versus Difference

3. Why does Snitow believe there is no synthesis, no way beyond the divide? Granting the assumption of such a divide, evaluate her
argument.

4. How does Snitow define equality and difference (24-28)? How does practice affect the choice of an equality or difference stance according
to Snitow?

5. After emphasizing the recurring centrality of the divide, why does Snitow say the divide is not universal (28-30)? How can it serve positive
ends?

6. What was your reaction to the technique of alternating argument with italicized "diary" entries? Pick one italicized entry and be able to show
how the entry and related section of the 'regular' essay shed light on one another.

7. Be sure to be able to do the following in class: Define Snitow's "divide". Then, choose an issue such as women in the military,
family leave for birth and adoption, single sex education (such as schools for girls and women's colleges), using battered women's
syndrome as a defense in murder trials, or surrogate motherhood. Explain how different sides of the "divide" might approach that
issue.

A Gender Diary
by Ann Snitow
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from Conflicts in Feminism, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller
Feminism is inevitably a mixed form, requiring in its very nature . . . inconsistencies. In what follows, I try to show first, that a common
divide keeps forming in both feminist thought and action betweeen the need to build the identity "woman" and give it solid political meaning
and the need to tear down the very category "woman" and dismantle its all-too-solid history. Feminists often split along the lines of some
version of this argument. (9)
On the one hand, many women moved by feminism . . . [want] to "reclaim an identity that they taught [us] to despise" (the line is Michelle
Cliff's). . . . On the other hand, other feminists, often equally stirred by solidarity, rebel against having to be "women" at all. (10)
The divide so central as to be feminism's defining characteristic goes by many names. [It is often called the debate between "difference" and
"equality"--between seeing women as different from or as equal to men.] Catharine Stimpson cleverly called it the feminist debate between the
"minimizers" and the "maximizers."<1>Briefly, the minimizers are feminists who want to undermine the category "woman," to minimize the
meaning of sex difference. . . . The maximizers want to keep the category (or feel they can't do otherwise), but they want to change its
meaning, to reclaim and elaborate the social being "woman," and to empower her. (14)
In academic feminist discussion, the divide [has been] between the "essentialists" and the "social constructionists" . . . . Briefly, essentialists . .
. see gender as rooted in biological sex differences. . . . [T]he term has become associated with a naive claim to an eternal female nature. . . .
"Social construction"--the idea that the meaning of the body is changeable--is far harder to embrace with confidence. As Ellen Willis once put
it, culture may shape the body, but we feel that the body has ways of pushing back.<2> To assert that the body has no enduring, natural
language often seems like a rejection of common sense. Where can a woman stand--embodied or disembodied--in the flow of this
argument? . . . In the essentialist-versus-social constructionist version of the divide, one can see that one term in the argument is far more
stable than the other. Essentialism . . . assumes a relatively stable social identity in "male" and "female," while as Carole Vance
argues,<3> social construction is at best a source of destabilizing questions. (16)
Equality and difference are broad ideas and have included a range of definitions and political expressions. Equality, for example, can mean
anything from the mildest liberal reform (this is piece-of-the-pie feminism, in which women are merely to be included in the world as it is) to the
most radical reduction of gender to insignificance. Difference can mean anything from Mary Daly's belief in the natural superiority of women to
psychoanalytic theories of how women are inevitably cast as "the Other" because they lack penises. (26)
When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote one of the founding books of feminism in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, she said what was
new then and remains fresh, shocking, and doubtful to many now: that sex hierarchy--like ranks in the church and the army . . .--was social,
not natural. Though women before her had named injustices . . . , Wollstonecraft's generation experienced the divide in ways related to how
feminists experience it now. . . . Wollstonecraft was often an equality-feminist in the narrowest sense, eager to speak of absolute rights [for
everyone, regardless of gender], of an idealized male individualism [that she wanted women to imitate], and to ignore the body . . . . The body,
she felt, could be counted on to assert its ever-present and dreary pull [i.e., many women died during childbirth at this time in history, and in
fact Wollstonecraft did herself.] [T]he enlightenment promised her a mind that might escape. . . . When Wollstonecraft wrote, difference was
the prevailing wind, equality the incipient revolutionary storm. (28-9)