Comment on Karen Offen's "Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach"

Author(s): Nancy F. Cott

Source: Signs, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 203-205
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174720
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 Autumn 1989 / SIGNS

Comment on Karen Offen's "Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical

Approach"

NANCY F. COTT

All historians are in debt to Karen Offen for her sustained efforts to
define and conceptualize feminism with due regard for its historical
contents and meanings. Her contention that numbers of women in
the past have striven to combat male supremacy without necessarily
taking an individualistic stance or demanding the same rights and
privileges as men is important, and she has backed it up with
extensive research. Her essay (Signs 14, no. 1 [Autumn 1988]:
119-57) develops more fully than ever before Offen's point that
feminism as a tradition of protest against male domination has had
a relational as well as an individualistic variant. It also makes a
strong argument for seeing the relational as the larger and more
significant of the two strands, certainly the one with the longer
history, the one typical (so she argues) of feminists before the
twentieth century.
While I appreciate and welcome Offen's work, I feel that her
research and argumentation have taken a wrong turn, toward a
mistaken inclusiveness under the heading "feminism." Offen is
certainly aware, since she has done the original research herself,
that the term "feminism" (or the French feminisme) is a modern
term, a century old at most. She acknowledges (while objecting)
that most people (at least on this side of the Atlantic) link feminism
to a view of women's autonomy that is basically individualistic,
liberal, and rights-conscious. She concedes in her essay that around
the turn of the century a paradigm shift was required in relational
feminist views because of the increasing prevalence of such a more
individualistic approach, contemporaneous with increasing reli-
ance on the term "feminism." Yet she is reluctant to follow her
temporal and semantic evidence, and reserve "feminism" for the
more individualistic, more recent approach, while seeking another
and different rubric for the relational arguments. She wishes to
make feminism a transhistorical term and concept; therefore she
wants to expand our understanding of the boundaries of feminism,
by including within it the relational point of view.
There is much to be said in favor of finding a flexible, transhis-
torical definition for feminism. By focusing on the relational view-
point, however, it seems to me that Offen has gotten off the track.
She has described and explained the constellation of views on
[Signs: Journal of Womenl in Culture and Society 1989, vol. 15, no. 1]
? 1989 by Nancv F. Cott. All rights reserved.

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Cott / COMMENT

women's position in society that she calls "relational" better than

any other historian. What she has not acknowledged sufficiently is
how fully the underpinnings of this view of women's position-
with its acceptance of sexual dualism, belief in the complementa-
rity of the sexes, and reliance on the nuclear family as the basic unit
of social organization-composed the standard, conservative, status
quo view of women's position, rather than anything remotely
feminist. Offen has found numbers of articulate women (and some
men) who accepted this relational set-up but deplored and pro-
tested against arbitrary male domination-who believed, in other
words, that they might struggle toward true sexual parity and
complementarity within structures of traditional sexual differenti-
ation. These are the relational feminists, in her terms, and she
wants to argue that their position should be seen as a core (perhaps
the core) feminist tradition. However, Offen does not credit the fact
that these were dissident voices speaking within a much larger
universe of belief favoring the relational set-up for its continuation
of male domination. Far from being particularly characteristic of
protest against gender hierarchy, the constellation of relational
beliefs was characteristic of the existing gender hierarchy.
Toward the end of the essay Offen concedes that views of
relational feminists could be and were misused or co-opted-that
is, were adopted and used to the ends of continuing male domina-
tion. Surely this is putting the cart before the horse. Surely it was
relational feminists who did the misusing, as they very creatively
misused the prevailing views about gender complementarity and
sexual difference to try to combat male dominance. My point is that
relational feminists' views on gender shared everything with non-
feminists or traditionalists except the point that arbitrary male
domination should not be tolerated. Why, therefore, call their entire
approach "feminist"-even with the "relational" modifier? (Offen's
attempt to draw a parallel showing that individualist feminist
arguments were likewise used against women falls entirely flat, for
she can show only that such tenets were violently opposed by
antifeminists, not adopted by them [155].)
If Offen had rested her case with her finding of the widespread
relational viewpoint-had shown, for instance, how many women
contributed to it and shared it, examined why they found it
plausible and useful, acknowledged that a wide range of thinkers
(from different classes, with different politics) partook of this view,
even and including some who had aims to dismantle the male-
dominant gender hierarchy-then I would have no complaint but
only applause. Her intent to make the relational viewpoint the
matrix of feminism, however, not only tends to obfuscate what was

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 Autumn 1989/ SIGNS

especially characteristic of feminism (e.g., the critique of male

supremacy, the belief that gender order was socially constructed
and could be changed) but also does a disservice to our understand-
ing of the deeply embedded gender ideology of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. (An example of this double-barreled confu-
sion is Offen's startling leap to name even Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
usually seen as the archetypical American equal-rights individual-
ist, as someone in whose thought "relational arguments dominate"
[136]. If perchance Offen could persuade us of this claim, would
that be to explicate the specificities of Stanton's feminism, or of her
belonging to the mid-nineteenth century?)
Offen continues to ask the either/or question-was so-and-so a
feminist or not?-while she intends to bring a greater number of
women into the ranks by incorporating the relational vantage point.
Why not, instead, acknowledge a wide range in women's views,
including feminism, and be on the lookout for possibly shifting and
changing feminist aspects or effects in any of these? As feminist
historians today, we must be able to appreciate and credit women's
ideas in the past without having to name them feminists. Rather
than connecting large areas of women's thought adjectivally under
the rubric of feminism, we ought to multiply our vocabulary. We
ought to invent additional new terms in women's political and
intellectual history in order both to preserve feminism's distinc-
tiveness and to understand the full historical complexity and range
of women's views.

American Studies Program and Department of History

Yale University

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