I've been reading the collection of Sontag's 60s and 70s feminist works, On Women. In general the collected essays were not well received when the book came out in 2023. In terms of its topicality it's dated and it's very much seeped in the New Left Marxism of the time, some of which (especially) hasn't aged well. An example of a poor review is:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/05/on-women-by-susan-sontag-review-some-sister-she-was
And it's hard not to agree with some of Cooke's points.
But what I find fascinating about the essays is that they prefigure 'gender'. It's striking how much Butler's Gender Trouble tried to solve the problems Sontag posed. Sontag only uses the term 'gender' once, and when she does it's simple as a euphonic synonym for sex. She also doesn't use the word present - as in presenting as masculine or feminine - instead she talks about stereotypes, class (in the materialist sense), behaviour, and (interestingly) depolarisation of the sexes.
In general her position is that women must accept their sex (of course) but actively eliminate all stereotypes so that only the minimal, essential differences of sex are left and mitigate those so they don't disadvantage women. This contrasts with Butler who tries to salvage all stereo-typed behaviour of both sexes and allow them to be resorted between men and women - and insists that they all have equal value. Sontag by contrast, usually (but not always) sees the stereotypes of women as being inferior and to be eliminated. But in general her goal is levelling of differences.
2. In the process of liberating women, do you give equal importance to economic liberation and to sexual liberation?
The question seems to me to reveal the underlying weakness of the very concept of “liberation.” Unless made more specific, “women’s liberation” is an empty goal—and one which blurs the focus and dilutes the energy of women’s struggle. I am not sure that the economic and the sexual are two different kinds of liberation. But suppose that they are or, at least, that they can be considered separately. Without more clarity about what women are being liberated from and for, it is meaningless to ask whether both liberations are equally important.
The notion of “economic liberation” can be used to cover up the real issues. That women have access to a wide variety of jobs outside the home for which they are properly paid is certainly a primary, unnegotiable demand. The key to women’s psychological and cultural underdevelopment is the fact that most women do not support themselves—neither in the literal (economic) nor metaphoric (psychological, cultural) sense. But it is hardly enough for women to secure the possibility of earning money through the opening up of more jobs, through the creation of free facilities for the care of young children. Work must not be merely an option, an alternative to the still more common (and normative) “career” of housewife and mother. It must be expected that most women will work, that they will be economically independent (whether married or not) just as men are. Without work, women will never break the chains of dependence on men—the minimal prerequisite for their becoming fully adult. Unless they work, and their work is usually as valuable as their husbands’, married women have not even the chance of gaining real power over their own lives, which means the power to change their lives. The arts of psychological coercion and conciliation for which women are notorious—flattery, charm, wheedling, glamour, tears—are a servile substitute for real influence and autonomy.
Simply being able to work, however, hardly means that a woman is “liberated.” Large numbers of women already do work, and of these a minority already earns wages that guarantee economic independence; yet most women who work remain as dependent as ever on men. The reason is that employment itself is organized along sexist lines. The colonialized status of women is confirmed and indeed strengthened by the sexist division of labor. Women do not participate gainfully in modern work on the same footing as men. They play a supportive, backup role in the economy. What they do in “the world” tends to reproduce their image as “household” (serving and nurturing) creatures; they are considered unfit for large executive responsibilities. Thus, women cannot be said to be economically liberated until they perform all activities now performed by men, on the same terms (with respect to wages, standards of performance, exposure to risk) as men—thereby relinquishing the prerogatives of the fool, the child, and the servant. Their economic liberation is essential not merely to the psychological and moral well-being of individual women. Until they become important to the economy, not just as a reserve labor pool but because in large numbers they possess the major professional and executive skills, women have no means of exercising political power, which means gaining control of institutions and having an effective say in how society will change in the coming decades. Once again: liberation means power—or it hardly means anything at all.
The notion of “sexual liberation” seems to me even more suspect. The ancient double standard, which imputes to women less sexual energy and fewer sexual desires than men (and punishes them for behavior condoned in men), is clearly a way of keeping women in their place. But to demand for women the same privileges of sexual experimentation that men have is not enough, since the very conception of sexuality is an instrument of repression. Most sexual relationships act out the attitudes which oppress women and perpetuate male privilege. Merely to remove the onus placed on the sexual expressiveness of women is a hollow victory if the sexuality they become freer to enjoy remains the old one that converts women into objects. The mores of late, urban capitalist society have been for some time, as everyone has noticed, increasingly more “permissive,” penalizing women much less than before for behaving like sexual beings outside the context of monogamous marriage. But this already “freer” sexuality mostly reflects a spurious idea of freedom: the right of each person, briefly, to exploit and dehumanize someone else.
Without a change in the very norms of sexuality, the liberation of women is a meaningless goal. Sex as such is not liberating for women. Neither is more sex.
The question is: What sexuality are women to be liberated to enjoy? The only sexual ethic liberating for women is one which challenges the primacy of genital heterosexuality. A nonrepressive society, a society in which women are subjectively and objectively the genuine equals of men, will necessarily be an androgynous society. Why? Because the only other plausible terms on which the oppression of women could be ended are that men and women decide to live apart, and that is impossible. Separatism does remain plausible as a way of putting an end to the oppression of “colored” peoples by the white race. Conceivably, the different races originating in different parts of the planet could agree to live quite separately again (with the habits and mentalities of each strictly protected against all incursions of cultural as well as economic imperialism). But women and men will undoubtedly always cohabit. If, therefore, the answer to sexism—unlike racism—is not even conceivably separatism, then defending the distinct moral and aesthetic “traditions” of each sex (to preserve something equivalent to “cultural plurality”) and attacking the single standard of intellectual excellence or rationality as male “cultural imperialism” (to revalidate the unknown and despised “women’s culture”) are misleading tactics in the struggle to liberate women.
The aim of struggle should not be to protect the differences between the two sexes but to undermine them. To create a nonrepressive relation between women and men means to erase as far as possible the conventional demarcation lines that have been set up between the two sexes, to reduce the tension between women and men that arises from “otherness.” As everyone has noticed, there has been a lively tendency among young people in recent years to narrow and even confuse sex differences in clothes, hairstyles, gestures, taste. But this first step toward depolarizing the sexes, partly co-opted within capitalist forms of consumership as mere “style” (the commerce of unisex boutiques), will be denied its political implications unless the tendency takes root at a deeper level.
The more profound depolarization of the sexes must take place in the world of work and, increasingly, in sexual relations themselves. As “otherness” is reduced, some of the energy of sexual attraction between the sexes will decline. Women and men will certainly continue to make love and to pair off in couples. But women and men will no longer primarily define each other as potential sexual partners. In a nonrepressive nonsexist society, sexuality will in one sense have a more important role than it has today—because it will be more diffused. Homosexual choices will be as valid and respectable as heterosexual choices; both will grow out of a genuine bisexuality. (Exclusive homosexuality—which, like exclusive heterosexuality, is learned—would be much less common in a nonsexist society than it is at present.) But in such a society, sexuality will in another sense be less important than it is now—because sexual relations will no longer be hysterically craved as a substitute for genuine freedom and for so many other pleasures (intimacy, intensity, feeling of belonging, blasphemy) which this society frustrates.
7. And in this case, what will be the long-term and the short-term objectives?
The important difference is not between short-term and long-term objectives but, as I have already indicated, between objectives which are reformist (or liberal) and those which are radical. From suffrage onward, most of the objectives that women have sought have been reformist.
An example of the difference. To demand that women receive equal pay for equal work is reformist; to demand that women have access to all jobs and professions, without exception, is radical. The demand for equal wages does not attack the system of sexual stereotyping. Paying a woman the same wages a man gets if she holds the same job he does establishes a merely formal kind of equity. When roughly half the people doing every kind of job are women, when all forms of employment and public responsibility become fully coeducational, sexual stereotyping will end—not before.
In underlining this difference once again, I am not suggesting that the reformist gains are negligible. They are eminently worth struggling for—as evidenced by the fact that these demands are, for most people, too “radical.” Most of the reformist demands are far from being granted. In that slow procession toward fulfilling the reformist demands, the communist countries have taken a clear lead. Next, but well behind them in terms of the degree of “liberal” enlightenment of public policy, come the capitalist countries with a Protestant background, notably Sweden, Denmark, England, Holland, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Lagging far behind to the rear are those countries with a Catholic cultural base, like France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and the countries of Central and South America—where married women cannot buy and dispose of property without the signature of their husbands; and where the right to divorce, not to mention the legality of abortion, remains fiercely contested. And still further behind the Latin countries, almost out of sight, are the countries with a Muslim culture—where women are still subjected to ferociously strict forms of social segregation, economic exploitation, and sexual surveillance.…
Despite the cultural unevenness with which the situation of women is being ameliorated, I would predict that most of the reformist demands will be granted in most countries by the end of the century. My point is that then the struggle will have only begun. The granting of these demands can leave intact all the oppressive and patronizing attitudes that make women into second-class citizens. Women have to feel, and learn to express, their anger.
Women must start making concrete demands—first of all upon themselves and then upon men. For a start, women can note their acceptance of full adult status by symbolic acts, like not changing their last names when they marry. They can wean themselves from the enslaving concern with their personal appearance by which they consent to make themselves into objects. (By giving up makeup, and the reassuring ministrations of beauty parlors, they symbolically renounce the narcissism and vanity that are, insultingly, deemed normal in women.) They can refuse the rituals of male gallantry which dramatize their inferior position and convert it into a seduction. As often as not women should light men’s cigarettes for them, carry their suitcases, and fix their flat tires. Even the trivial acts by which women ignore preassigned “feminine” roles have weight, helping to educate both women and men. They are the necessary prologue to any serious consideration on the part of women of the institutional framework for their liberation. This thinking must coincide with the creation of experimental institutions run by women, for women—living collectives, work collectives, schools, day-care centers, medical centers—which will embody the solidarity of women, their increasingly politicized consciousness, and their practical strategies for outwitting the system of sexual stereotyping.
The liberation of women has both short-term and long-term political meaning. Changing the status of women is not only a political objective in itself but prepares for (as well as constitutes part of) that radical change in the structure of consciousness and society, which is what I understand by revolutionary socialism. It is not simply that the liberation of women need not wait for the advent of socialism, so defined. It cannot wait.
I do not think socialism can triumph unless big victories for feminism have been won beforehand. The liberation of women is a necessary preparation for building a just society—not the other way around, as Marxists always claim. For if it does happen the other way around, women are likely to find their liberation a fraud. Should the transformation of society according to revolutionary socialism be undertaken without a prior militant independent women’s movement, women will find that they have merely passed from the hegemony of one oppressive moral ethic to another.
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And in another section:
Thus, there are certain activities that only all-women’s groups can—or will want to—perform. Only groups composed entirely of women will be diversified enough in their tactics, and sufficiently “extreme.” Women should lobby, demonstrate, march. They should take karate lessons. They should whistle at men in the streets, raid beauty parlors, picket toy manufacturers who produce sexist toys, convert in sizeable numbers to militant lesbianism, operate their own free psychiatric and abortion clinics, provide feminist divorce counseling, establish makeup withdrawal centers, adopt their mothers’ family names as their last names, deface billboard advertising that insults women, disrupt public events by singing in honor of the docile wives of male celebrities and politicians, collect pledges to renounce alimony and giggling, bring lawsuits for defamation against the mass-circulation “women’s magazines,” conduct telephone harassment campaigns against male psychiatrists who have sexual relations with their women patients, organize beauty contests for men, put up feminist candidates for all public offices. Though no single action is necessary, the “extremist” acts are valuable in themselves, because they help women to raise their own consciousness. And, however much people claim to be shocked or put off by such acts, their rhetoric does have a positive effect upon the silent majority. Performed by even a small minority, this guerrilla theater forces millions to become defensive about hitherto barely conscious sexist attitudes, accustoming them to the idea that these attitudes are at least not self-evident. (I do not exclude the utility of real guerrilla violence as well.)
Undeterred by the fear of confirming sexist clichés (e.g., women as creatures of emotion, incapable of being detached, objective), militant groups must commit themselves to behavior that does violate the stereotypes of femininity. A common way of reinforcing the political passivity of women has been to say they will be more effective and influential if they act with “dignity,” if they don’t violate decorum, if they remain charming. Women should show their contempt for this form of intimidation disguised as friendly advice. Women will be much more effective politically if they are rude, shrill, and—by sexist standards—“unattractive.” They will be met with ridicule, which they should do more than bear stoically. They should, indeed, welcome it. Only when their acts are described as “ridiculous” and their demands are dismissed as “exaggerated” and “unreasonable” can militant women be sure they are on the right track.