The New Conservative Feminism

Abstract

rise of the New Right, an organized antifeminist social movement with legions of devoted female activists, forced feminists to the painful recognition that we could not speak for or to all the women we hoped to represent. Then the collapse of liberalism sealed a profound rightward shift in the social and political climate that made attacks on feminist ideology and politics attractive vocations, not only for neoconservatives, but, more disturbingly, for prominent leftists as well.1 Soon the media was welcoming the appearance of a postfeminist era whose arrival it celebrated with tales of the accomplished young women who had rejected feminist ideology.2 And now a feminist backlash has emerged. Mounted by notable, self-identified feminists, this backlash represents an attack on the core beliefs and politics of the women's liberation movement and gives chastening evidence that the New Right and the collapse of liberalism have taken their toll. Responding to a widespread crisis in personal life and to perceived inadequacies in the ways feminism has addressed this crisis, the backlash poses a serious challenge to the women's movement. Indeed, it initiates a new and conservative terrain of struggle over what feminism will mean in the next historical period. This internal backlash was foreshadowed in 1977 by Alice Rossi's A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting, a then startling rejection of feminist cultural analysis by an eminent feminist scholar.3 In recent literature by Betty Friedan and Jean Bethke Elshtain, the two most significant contemporary voices of what I tentatively am labeling the new conservative feminism, the backlash has become far more explicit and more strident.4 Recent writing by Friedan and Elshtain, however, commands feminist attention for nearly opposite reasons. On the one hand, Friedan's pivotal, highly public role in the founding of contemporary femi