[Socialism Today, No 3, November 1995, p. 8]
‘New wave’ US feminist Naomi Wolf has defected to the anti-abortionists’ camp. Although she says that abortion should be legal and is sometimes necessary, she has launched a vitriolic attack on pro-choice supporters. In an article in the US magazine New Republic she condemns those campaigning for abortion rights as callous and amoral.
Naomi Wolf first shot to fame with the publication in 1990 of The Beauty Myth, which graphically reveals how the beauty industry exploits women in the name of profit. It has been widely read by a new generation of young women. With her reputation secured Wolf was feted by the media both in the US and Britain and held up as a feminist authority for the 1990s. : Now she attributes her volte-face on abortion to becoming pregnant and giving birth to her first child. But whatever her personal feelings, by attacking those struggling for a woman’s right to choose, she is strengthening the hand of the right-wing pro-life lobby – most of whom would like to see abortion made completely illegal.
“Naomi Wolf strengthens the hand of the right-wing pro-life lobby”.
The pro-lifers are on the offensive in the USA. They were already boosted by the decision this summer of Norma McCorvey to join their ranks. McCorvey was ‘Jane Roe’ – her legal pseudonym – in the famous ‘Roe Vs Wade’ lawsuit which led to the Supreme Court legalising abortion in 1973. And in August the House of Representatives voted to give state authorities the option to refuse to pay for abortions with government money unless the woman’s life is in danger.
One and a half million women seek abortions in the US every year. Unlike Naomi Wolf most are not wealthy enough to face anything but a life of unemployment, bad housing and poverty in today’s society. But anyone who has read Wolf’s second book, Fire with Fire, published in 1993, will not be surprised at her apparent indifference to the effect her comments could have on the lives of these working-class women.
Fire with Fire extolled the virtues of ‘power feminism’. For too long, she argued, women have been seen as victims. It is time to rise up and use the capitalist system for the next stage of women’s empowerment. “The main question”, she wrote, “is to get power into women’s hands, whoever these women may be, whatever they may do with it”. How working-class women were supposed to achieve this power under capitalism she didn’t say. Women in low-paid jobs, women struggling to combine work with looking after a family against a background of cuts in services – these women are the victims of the profit system and they want solutions. One thing is sure. They won’t find them from Naomi Wolf. Her perspective is conditioned by her own personal experiences as a Yale-educated, wealthy woman who has done very nicely in today’s unequal society. Without a coherent ideology which roots women’s oppression in the class nature of capitalist society, ‘feminists’ like Wolf will chop and change their views, becoming susceptible to ideas that undermine and harm the struggle of the majority of women to defend and extend their rights.
But, regardless of Wolf’s attitudes on pro-choice, the struggle for women’s rights will continue. In 1992, 600,000 women marched on Washington in one of the biggest demonstrations in US history. After several years of decline some US trade unions have begun to increase their membership, mainly due to an influx of low-paid women workers who see the need to get organised to fight for their rights as women and as workers.
Socialists will participate in all of these struggles, linking them to the need to challenge the capitalist system as a whole, to enable all women and not just a wealthy and privileged minority to gain control over their lives and reach their full potential.
Christine Thomas
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