Feminism and Personal Freedom
Third Quarter 1998
Initially, feminist struggles for women's full status as individuals coexisted with more traditional views of women's distinct nature and social roles. Acquisition of the right to vote, for example, did not necessarily lead women to repudiate their roles and responsibilities as wife and mother. Nor did a married woman's right to hold property in her own name, divorce an abusive husband, gain custody of her children in the wake of divorce, establish credit in her own name, or earn equal pay for equal work. Each step towards women's independence did subtly transform women's relations with others, including the members of their immediate families, primarily by giving women the legal and economic independence to defend their conception of those relations or, at the extreme, to leave. But it was neither necessary nor inevitable that the growing equality of spouses result in the undermining of marriage as a binding covenant or as a foundational social institution. Reigning understandings of freedom and individualism nonetheless resulted in a growing proclivity to view marriage as a (temporary) contract between sovereign individuals rather than as a (sacred) covenant that imposed distinct responsibilities upon both parties while it transcended individual claims and recognized the obligation of both parties to society.
The emphasis on self-sovereignty further led the women's movement to insist upon abortion as a woman's fundamental right, namely a woman's right to be free from the unintended consequences of the individual pursuit of sexual pleasure. And the defense of abortion, perhaps more sharply than any other feminist position, exposes the impoverishment of individualism as a substitute for the person or as a conception of the self. For the defense of a woman's right to abortion carries the vision of the masterless individual to its logical nihilistic extreme: not merely must the individual be free from the domination of the strong, she must also be free from the claims of the weak. Seen at this extreme, the individual may be recognized as the ideological abstraction it always has been—as a unit of sovereignty or of consciousness rather than a person enmeshed in variegated and shifting relations with others. The suggestion that the defense of abortion embodies the ultimate selfishness enrages pro-choice advocates, who insist that women should have a choice of when to bear a child in order that each child may be loved. Unfortunately, this logic, which many find comfortably seductive, makes mockery of the understanding that it is not our subjective choice or convenience that enjoins love but the existence of the other. The reduction of love, which should represent the essence of mutual recognition and engagement, to personal choice amounts to the virtual sanctification of narcissism, for it effectively erases the consciousness—and, in the case of abortion, the very being—of the other.
Unleashed sexuality, promoted and justified by important tendencies within postmodernism, led to the canonization of desire as the irreducible essence of the individual and to the reinterpretation of freedom as the license of desire. In postmodern thought, desire figures simultaneously as infinitely mobile and plastic and as the authentic determinant of individual action. The freedom of sexuality had been brewing in Western culture at least since Freud, but only during the waning decades of the twentieth century did it secure its claims to define the meaning of human life and, hence, the nature of true freedom. It does not require much imagination to grasp that this canonization of desire necessarily signaled the demise of conventional restraints upon desire's pursuit of its objects.
The triumph of desire thus confirms the proliferation of the disturbing sociopathy, which, in other circumstances characterizes the children who shoot other children to secure one or another commodity or to exact "respect." The examples could be multiplied, but for present purposes these should suffice to introduce the related arguments: 1) that the sanctification of desire represents the ultimate disembedding of the individual from all social and moral restraints; 2) that the triumph of this narcissistic and sociopathic individualism exposes the underlying contradiction between the construct of the individual and the substance of the person; and 3) that the celebration of unqualified freedom as an individual right must inevitably result in the denial of the existence of others.
