How (Not) to Think About Anti-Feminist Women

[…] The woman hangs on, not with the delicacy of a clinging vine, but with a tenacity incredible in its intensity, to the very persons, institutions, and values that demean her, degrade her, glorify her powerlessness, insist upon constraining and paralyzing the most honest expressions of her will and being.

Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women(1978)

Though liberal feminists might hope for a world where Dworkin’s book can be forgotten, it finds a new life now in 2020. The phenomenon of anti-feminist, right-wing women is neither new nor novel. However, the urgency of its central themes has increased. We are now more than ever in need of understanding the apparent contradiction of women opposing the ideals that ensure their liberation and political agency: namely, feminism. 

Anti-feminism among women is clearly identified in figures like Phyllis Schlafly, whose opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment is renowned. More recently, the faux feminism of Sarah Palin’s ‘mama bear’ narrative toes a similar line. In spite of anti-feminism’s long history and often powerful political clout, we tend to think of anti-feminists as extraordinary or ‘fringe’. Or, more likely, we tend not to think of them at all. However, the renewed public visibility of right-wing and anti-feminist women prompts us once more to ask how should we think about anti-feminist women? One answer is to think about anti-feminist women as bewildering outliers or, alternatively, as ‘unintentional feminists.’ Another way to think of them would be as simply misguided or confused. But this would be a mistake. A better way is to think about the social and material conditions that produce anti-feminist thought among women, for in many ways their existence is entirely predictable.

In the post-2016 political climate, the problem of anti-feminism is more momentous, more ‘radical,’ and more fundamentalist than its anti-ERA predecessors (e.g., Lana Lokteff, Candace Owens). The visibility of anti-feminist, conservative, and right-wing women has sharply increased in popular media.

The 2019 release of Bombshell foregrounds the role of highly relevant feminist issues—sexual assault and harassment and workplace inequality—among conservative anchors at Fox News.’ In 2020, the Hulu series Mrs. America has given Schlafly and the anti-ERA movement a new and highly stylized, if complicated, life. As one New York Times review puts it, “‘Mrs. America’ Depicts a Different Kind of Feminist: The Anti- Kind”. Even Margaret Thatcher has received a cinematic treatment that depicts her as an icon for strong women, in spite of her politics and explicit denial of the term ‘feminist.’  

Although some commentators have gone as far as calling this ‘The Other Women’s Movement’, these optimistic representations are framed in only superficially feminist terms. Films like Bombshell and series like Mrs. America showcase the presence of ‘strong women’ on the Right, seemingly independent of their politics. In Bombshell, anti-feminists do not believe their experiences are the result of structural or systemic sexism or gender oppression, even after personal experience of trauma or injustice. Paradoxically, popular depictions of anti-feminist women have tried to demonstrate their feminist values, without addressing the substance of their politics. They depict a shared experience between leftist and right-wing women, but ignore the fact that only actual feminists would acknowledge the systemic nature and political significance of their experience. As seen in the nomination of allegedly ‘conservative feminist’ Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, the tendency to conflate de facto feminism with women in power is widespread. 

Still, in the history of feminist theory—Dworkin is a notable exception—the phenomena of anti-feminist women rarely registers as a problem, as a challenge to be addressed by feminist thought and action. Attempts to recuperate anti-feminist women as somehow feminist is a sign that the liberal feminist framework is inadequate. Part of the problem is that, at least in feminist theory, we assume that women already seek to liberate themselves and that they acknowledge the need for feminist liberation. We think oppressed groups are ready-made for liberation, rather than requiring cultivation and collective work.  We have failed to think about how women become anti-feminist. How do they come to embrace fundamentally self-undermining and contradictory social and political positions? These questions have high stakes: women who gravitate to the alt-right often begin as anti-feminists, the #tradwife movement continues to grow, and many of its advocates are increasingly associated with the alt-right and white supremacy. 

Feminists need theoretical resources to address the processes of internalized misogyny that draw women to the cause of anti-feminism. The Frankfurt School and Marxism can be helpful on this score: the identification of false or ideological consciousness—though not explicitly about gender or sexuality—has long been pivotal in these traditions. The most crucial founding question the Frankfurt School asks is, why do workers embrace forms of social and political organization which are detrimental to their own interests? Drawing on thinkers such as György Lukács (who has been influential to feminist standpoint theory and feminist epistemology), Adorno and Horkheimer are widely known for asking their readers to consider how those living in consumer societies not only passively accept but actively embrace conditions of exploitation and alienation. This tradition draws on Marx’s and Engels’ account of how thought is mediated by the material conditions of the reproduction of life and by society’s dominant assumptions and contradictions. 

The concept of ideology remains controversial in the philosophical community, but recently it has experienced a revival in the work of Rahel Jaeggi, Deborah Cook, and Karen Ng. Analytic philosophers have taken up the concept of ideology and the practice of ideology critique, though with a markedly different conception from those developed in the Marxist and critical theory traditions (e.g., Sally Haslanger, Jason Stanley). Charles Mills has also resuscitated the discussion of ideology in his work on epistemologies of ignorance.

This revival is important because ideology critique is principally a matter of critically assessing the form and content of socially produced, materially grounded, and false and contradictory ideas. Rather than write off problematic ways of thinking among oppressed groups—including not only women in general but women of color—as mere aberrations or inexplicably paradoxical, ideology asks us to seek out structural, societal explanations for these contradictions in thought and social behavior. Anti-feminist women, from the standpoint of ideology critique, are not mere accidents or anomalies, but expressions of underlying social and material contradictions which must be addressed before we can expect internalized misogyny—much less misogyny writ large—to disappear. 

Doing feminist philosophy requires us to identify, analyze, and transform the assumptions that our training relies on. And interrogating the conditions under which anti-feminism takes hold among women is not only a critique of right-wing thinking and organizing but also an avenue for self-criticism within the feminist philosophical community and of our own communities more broadly. In my own hometown of Hialeah, FL, anti-feminism among women and women of color is not at all uncommon. Although my community’s demographics are overwhelmingly Latinx and Latin American, support for Trump during 2016 was widespread, including grassroots organizations like Latinas For Trump. Their support for Trump simply does not match their actual interests as a community, especially in the case of Latinx women who are targets of Trump’s own anti-feminism. The theory of ideology and the practice of ideology critique is especially adaptable to this task. 

Ideology critique requires not only analyzing and critiquing the tactics of the Right, but at the same time, undertaking a critical inventory of feminist philosophy’s role in world where ‘coming out’ is being co-opted by conservatives and women are cheerfully pledging to ‘submit to their husbands like its 1959’. The fact that ‘strong’ right-wing women are being celebrated tells us something important about feminism in the mainstream i.e., that being ‘strong’ under conditions of male-dominance has been misunderstood as a personal quality, and is not the same as being a feminist who seeks to change the conditions of society itself. The politics of unqualified ‘personal choice’ are insufficient; we must turn our attention to the objective social contradictions that make anti-feminism and the alt-right seem like a colorized episode of I Love Lucy. 

Feminist theory must address the material conditions of women’s oppression. What makes women desire the ‘simplicity’ of domesticity, passivity, and submission? What motivates women to embrace subservience and valorize personal attributes which are a result of domination? What would make women enthusiastically embrace a gendered division of labor? Most likely, the answers to these questions are material – it is incredibly difficult to balance exploitative, waged work and unpaid work at home. It is also difficult to manage conflicting cultural messages in both public and private about what women can, should, and must do. These questions (and their answers) are not so distant from those posed by Marx and the early Frankfurt School. 

The most helpful tool for understanding these phenomena is a conception of ideology which Adorno called “socially necessary false consciousness”—the production of false, contradictory ideas by underlying social, material conditions which are themselves contradictory and antagonistic. Adorno’s phrase diagnoses thought which hides social contradictions, but is also a tool for self-criticism that acknowledges the complex terrain in which feminist and other forms of critical theory must operate.

Adapted to feminist ends, it enables us be mindful of the ways that critical thought can be co-opted and transformed to support the status quo. It asks us to recognize the relative but real and material advantages of adopting self-undermining ideas if they coincide with society’s dominant ideology. It explains not only how women become anti-feminist, but why this particular form of consciousness is diametrically opposed to fact and appears unresponsive to rational argumentation. In short, women identify with anti-feminism and the Right for reasons that appear to them as ‘practical’ as well as moral, given the options laid out by liberal society. The concept of ideology clearly explains false ideas’ stubbornness in terms of their practical and material necessity.

The message that feminists should insist on is that femicide, sexual violence, intimate partner violence, cisheterosexism, and gendered/sexualized forms of labor exploitation both at work and at home will not disappear with increased numbers of women CEOs and politicians. It is not enough for women to try to ‘persevere’ under conditions of male-dominance – rather, feminist values and strategies will be exploited under those conditions.  The ideal of sexual freedom during the famous ‘sex wars’ was quickly transformed into commercialized sexual objectification and subordination; the ‘freedom’ to work outside the home became a new means through which women’s labor could be exploited (in addition to unpaid labor in the home); the moniker of ‘identity politics’ which was once a part of debates on how to make feminism and the Left more diverse and inclusive has become a rallying point for the Right and the politics of representation has proven inadequate to redress the material conditions of women’s oppression. 

Anti-feminism was forged in a male-dominated, capitalist world. Of course anti-feminist women experience social and economic anxieties, interpersonal stressors, and social pressures just as leftist women do. Only they quite wrongly see the failures of liberal reform as sufficient to make feminism the blameworthy party for continued uncertainty, instability, and social strain. Women still find themselves in positions of economic inequality, relations of dependency, and as the objects of immense social pressures, things which mainstream feminism has not successfully addressed because it has focused primarily on inclusion and reform. The desire to return to ‘1959’ (or June Cleaver’s version of 1959 anyway) stems from a desire for the apparent certainty of gender roles, the ‘prosperity’ of the post-war boom, and escape from the strain of women’s self-determination in a contradictory and unequal society.

These inverted desires emerge from a distortion which is not merely personal or idiosyncratic, but from the social contradictions that it should be the ongoing work of feminist thought and action to transform. It should not surprise us that anti-feminist women exist and are actively growing, considering that the conditions that give anti-feminism its appeal (however false and misguided) have not been resolved. Until these social conditions are transformed, anti-feminism and the dominant ideology it reflects will remain. 

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.