A woman can and must judge other women. A woman can and must face the judgment of other women…. A woman's judgment on her fellow woman always impresses her and can have an enormous importance for better or for worse, whether it is acknowledged or not. We do not propose to submit to it but, on the contrary, to acknowledge its weight, and therefore to think through and actualize a regime of social relations where female freedom is guaranteed by women themselves.
The Milan Women's Bookstore CollectiveFootnote 1Linda Hirshman coined the phrase “choice feminism” to name the widespread belief in the US that the women's movement has liberated women to make whatever choices they want. While Hirshman focuses on the choices women make about wage work and unpaid labor in the home, choice feminism is a much broader phenomenon. The view that today all choices are feminist can be invoked to support decisions to wear lipstick and high heels, to participate in Girls Gone Wild!, to sleep with men, to enjoy pornography, to not have children, to hire a maid, or to adopt a gendered division of labor. It's the creed of third-wave feminists like Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, whose capacious understanding of feminism includes every life choice, so long as it is accompanied by “a political consciousness.”Footnote 2 It is the implicit feminism of the Bush Presidency,Footnote 3 whose foreign policy emphasized giving women abroad “access to more opportunities.”Footnote 4 As my colleagues confirm, it is in our classrooms, where students profess strong views on controversial feminist issues, yet refuse to apply them to others, saying, “but that's just my personal opinion.”
What unites those I call “choice feminists” on the left and the right, in the academy, the workplace, and the home, is not so much an ideology or a specific political platform. After all, one could be a choice feminist who endorses women's varied choices about working and mothering, and yet insist that certain sexual choices are demeaning to all women. Or one could be quite the opposite: endorsing sexual freedoms of all kinds, while insisting that women should occupy particular kinds of roles outside of the bedroom. Hirshman, then, addresses only one variant of choice feminism. What I analyze in this essay is the way of thinking about feminist politics that underlies all of these different variants. We might call it an orientation to feminist politics.
Understood as an orientation, choice feminism has three important features. First, it understands freedom as the capacity to make individual choices, and oppression as the inability to choose. Consequently, as long as a woman can say that she has chosen to do something, it is considered by choice feminists to be an expression of her liberation. Second, since the only criterion for evaluating women's freedom is individual choice, we should abstain from judging the content of the choices women make. It is definitionally impossible for a woman to choose her own oppression; all choices she makes are equally expressions of her freedom, and therefore equally to be supported. Finally, this view of freedom is supported by a particular historical narrative: it is the women's movement in the past that has made it possible for women to make free choices in the present. In some cases, this is a way of celebrating the successes of an ongoing women's movement. In other cases, however, this narrative supports the view that we are now post-feminist, the women's movement achieved all that was necessary some time ago, and women today are fully liberated.Footnote 5
Here, I critically examine choice feminism, understood as a particular orientation to politics. In the following section, I argue that it arises as a response to the structure of feminist politics. In particular, I suggest that as a response to criticisms that feminism is too radical, exclusionary, and judgmental, choice feminism evinces a fear of politics. It aims to avoid having to make judgments, to avoid taking controversial stands that might offend and exclude, and to de-radicalize feminist claims. The political concerns and dilemmas to which choice feminism responds are very real. Consequently, I conclude by suggesting that we take seriously the political motivations behind choice feminism without withdrawing from politics. Instead, I argue that as feminists we need to complement an acknowledgment of the political dilemmas facing feminists with a celebration of the pleasures of engaging in politics with those who differ from and disagree with us.
The Allure of Choice Feminism
I propose that choice feminism is a response to three interrelated and common criticisms of feminism that disaffect potential allies. Choice feminism hopes to defuse these criticisms by representing feminism as a nonthreatening, capacious movement that welcomes all supporters—however discordant their views—while demanding only the thinnest of political commitments. In other words, choice feminism's political function is to try to make feminism seem appealing to the broadest constituency possible.
Criticism #1: Feminism is too radical. Feminists are frequently charged with demanding political and personal changes that go too far—that undermine institutions like marriage and the family, or restrict individual freedoms to dress, love, and have sex as we please. Choice feminists respond to this criticism by reassuring us that feminism's demands are minimal. As Baumgardner and Richards put it: “You're sexy, a wallflower, you shop at Calvin Klein, you are a stay-at-home mom, a big Hollywood producer, a beautiful bride all in white, an ex-wife raising three kids, or you shave, pluck, and wax. In reality, feminism wants you to be whoever you are—but with a political consciousness.”Footnote 6 Being a feminist does not mean that you have to have a career, give up wearing a bra, be anti-sex, or be critical of the fashion industry. In fact, you can keep doing whatever you have been doing—all they ask is that you do these things “with a political consciousness”—whatever that is. Consequently, choice feminists can market feminism to a broad audience as compatible with virtually any life choices, and seemingly at odds with none.
Criticism #2: Feminists are exclusionary. The classic (and often well-placed) form of this criticism is that American feminists are only concerned about the rights and needs of white, middle-class, Western, straight women. American feminism since the 1970s has come under repeated attack for excluding or disparaging the needs and viewpoints of women of color, lesbians, working-class women, non-Western women, and intersexed persons. For many feminists, faced with a long history of scathing criticism, it sometimes seems that the worst sin a feminist could commit would be to leave someone out.
Choice feminism is a reaction to this fear of excluding some of those whom we would wish to have as political allies. Hirshman identifies Gloria Steinem as the source of choice feminism's drive to be as inclusive as possible: “Under her uncritically accepting eye, feminism expanded to embrace every oppressed group.”Footnote 7 Baumgardner and Richards aim to include by stepping back from the notion that feminists are united by a common identity or political platform: for them, feminists are merely “a loose collection of individuals.”Footnote 8 If feminists only loosely form a collectivity, then we can more readily comprehend diverse identities and perspectives, and avoid the problems of essentialism and exclusion that plagued the second wave.
Criticism #3: Feminists are judgmental. Feminists have often been criticized for being judgmental—that is, for making moralizing judgments where such judgment is inappropriate and therefore unwelcome. These criticisms have come from the right—e.g., the criticisms that feminism is anti-homemaker, anti-men, anti-heterosexual, and anti-family. They have also come from the left, from those concerned that feminists are critical of women who choose motherhood—especially stay at home moms (SAHMs)—whose family lives follow a gendered division of labor, who have and enjoy heterosexual sex (or any sex), who choose to be married, and who wear makeup and enjoy femininity. Judgmental feminists, according to these critics, think they have the right to tell the rest of us what to do and how to live our lives, to tell us who counts as a feminist, and who has betrayed feminism by failing to live up to their standards. Such feminists unnecessarily intrude into personal matters, when they should be more tolerant and open-minded. They denigrate and devalue other people's personal choices, which has the negative political consequence of turning many people off of feminism who should be drawn towards it.
In response to these concerns, choice feminists try to avoid making judgments about other people's personal lives. Naomi Wolf, for example, castigates what she calls “victim feminism” for being “judgmental of other women's sexuality and appearance.”Footnote 9 In its place, she advocates “power feminism,” which is pro-sex, pro-money, and whose core tenets include that “women have the right to determine their lives.”Footnote 10 Another third-wave feminist, Rebecca Walker, urges feminists to “avoid making judgments about people based on generalizations and stereotypes. While you're at it, avoid making judgments about people at all.”Footnote 11 Anxious to not appear judgmental, choice feminism accepts all choices as valid and sidesteps the difficulty of judging between them.
Feminism will continue to provoke these three criticisms so long as it is deeply critical of existing institutions, or aims in any way to speak for or about a collectivity (such as women), or claims that the personal is political. As long as feminism provokes these criticisms, some feminists will be tempted to adopt some kind of a choice feminist orientation in response.Footnote 12
The Politics of the Personal
So far, I have explained the allure of choice feminism by arguing that it is a reaction to a number of criticisms produced by the structure of feminist politics. In this section, I contend that perhaps the most intractable source of its appeal is in the personal dilemmas faced by those of us who would be feminists.
Feminists live in relationship with people who (whether consciously or unconsciously) are sexist and anti-feminist. We live with people whose lives have gone seemingly untouched by the women's movement, or who lack an awareness of the political character of their personal decisions. Our world is one that has only been partially and imperfectly transformed by feminism; all of us who would be feminists live at odds with the world around us.
The disjuncture between our political principles and our personal lives produces dilemmas for feminists. Consider that many of us have mothers, sisters, friends, and colleagues who have—whether by choice or not—been homemakers and SAHMs. Adopting a political position like Hirshman's—that homemaking and childrearing do not make full use of women's capacities—places feminists in an impossible bind: they have to disrupt and potentially undermine relationships with people whose choices they condemn, or they have to bite their tongues and support the problematic choices of those they love. From this dilemma, a choice feminist position is born and sustained. To do anything less than to celebrate all women's choices equally is to ask of us that we judge those who are closest to us and risk severing or damaging our relationships with them. As some students of mine have put it, to condemn homemaking as a valid choice for women is to condemn their own mothers—which they cannot do. And so they refuse to make judgments and instead adopt a choice feminist position.
This dilemma—that feminist political consciousness requires of us that we understand those we love and care about as having made nonfeminist or even anti-feminist choices, which understanding puts in jeopardy those same relationships—is pervasive for feminists living in a world only partially transformed by feminism. Our political views and consciousness necessitate judgments about those we love: about the gendered division of labor within a friend's marriage, about the choice a sister makes to leave the workforce to stay at home with her children, about the way a teenage daughter wants to dress and act, about the sexist and homophobic jokes a friend likes to tell, about how one's partner places his career goals above one's own, about a colleague's desire to have another child before tenure when her case is already shaky. Yet, if we articulate these judgments, or allow them to affect our relationships, we risk triggering passionate conflict—which makes relationship unpleasant if not impossible. However, if we suspend judgment in the context of our personal relationships, we seem to be failing in courage as feminists—for feminism is precisely about reimagining and reworking the personal.
Our political views also exact a demanding standard for ourselves: we, too, must strive for an egalitarian distribution of labor in the home, for nonsexist relations with others, to not fall back into traditionalist gender roles. If I do the dishes tonight, have I given in? If I wear lipstick and show some cleavage, am I selling out the women's movement? How much time should a feminist take off from her career to spend with a newborn? It can be exhausting to subject our every thought, our every decision to feminist analysis. And if our most personal relationships are with people who are not equally committed to feminism, we may find ourselves unsupported in making changes in our personal lives.
It is possible to imagine living as a feminist with this dilemma: accepting that being a feminist means loving nonfeminists, and accepting one's own inability to fully embody one's own feminist principles. This is the kind of feminism that Lori Marso urges us towards: a feminism involving humility and self-forgiveness, an awareness that we are all constrained by the demands of femininity.Footnote 13 Yet this is a position that is difficult to occupy, and perhaps even more difficult to sustain.
By comparison, choice feminism offers us an easy way to opt out of the dilemma altogether. It releases us from the burden of judging those close to us: our older friends and relatives can be excused because they did not have the choices available to us now; our peers can be excused from judgment because in making choices, they cannot be sexist or regressive—they are just making free choices in a world in which we all have options. Choice feminism also relieves us of the burden of being consistently feminist ourselves: we do not have to struggle to bring our own personal lives into line with a demanding set of principles, because the only relevant principle is that our personal arrangements be freely chosen—and it is dangerously easy to convince ourselves that what we do is a simple matter of free choice.
Choice feminism will continue to have broad appeal to feminists because it gives us an easy way out of the dilemmas of politicizing the personal. If we wish to counteract the influence of choice feminism, then we need to do a better job as feminists of acknowledging the difficulty of living a feminist life. We need to give voice to these dilemmas, and we need to provide guidance to one another on how to live with them.
The Fear of Political Freedom
The main criticisms that have so far been levied against choice feminism attack its focus on individual choice. This focus divorces choice from the broader institutional, political, historical, and social contexts in which choices take place. This means that choice feminism obscures how our choices are shaped for us.Footnote 14 Hirshman argues that the “choice” for women to quit their jobs and become SAHMs is shaped by the current US tax code that penalizes two career married couples;Footnote 15 Warner argues that the “choice” to become a super-mom is framed by a historically contingent cult of motherhood with roots in child psychology, an underfunded and under-regulated child care industry, and a conservative backlash against feminism;Footnote 16 Ariel Levy argues that the “choices” to express one's sexuality through public exhibition for men, to have cosmetic surgery to meet a porn star ideal of beauty, and to learn to striptease are produced by the commodification of a narrow range of sexuality sold to women as sexual liberation.Footnote 17
Furthermore, choice feminism fails to differentiate between those who can choose and those who cannot; analysis of how class, race, sexuality, and power affect women's choices is often missing.Footnote 18 Since it represents choices as a matter of individual responsibility alone, choice feminism can be deployed to punish women who have “made” the wrong choices.Footnote 19 It also misleadingly suggests that since choices are individual, they have no social consequences; women are therefore relieved of responsibility for considering the broader implications of their decisions.Footnote 20 Indeed, individual choices are figured as private matters of no one else's concern.Footnote 21 This means that it is inappropriate to politicize women's choices. Consequently, choice feminism is radically depoliticizing: it discourages us from forming judgments about the value of different choices, it discourages us from giving a public account for the choices we make, it shuts down critical discussion about which choices should be valued and which choices are mere illusions,Footnote 22 it uncritically embraces consumerism,Footnote 23 and most problematically for the future of feminism, it deters women from being active in politics to improve childcare, public schools, and working conditions—all of which are deemed private matters.Footnote 24 As Hirshman depressingly puts it, “the invitation to leave one another alone is really an invitation to leave the current unjust arrangement in place.”Footnote 25
Some choice feminists—following in the footsteps of Baumgardner and Richards—might respond to these criticisms by suggesting that we can avoid these problems of choice as long as we complement a celebration of the diversity of women's choices with a political consciousness. A modified choice feminism, like the one offered here by Claire Snyder-Hall, would not celebrate all women's choices equally—but only those made by women who are conscious of the politics of their choices. For example, a woman might choose to end her career and stay at home to raise children; her choice would be feminist not as such, but only insofar as she “reflect[s] on her own desires and seriously consider[s] how her choices might play a role in propping up or calling into question the sex/gender system.”Footnote 26 This modification might go a long way towards satisfying some of choice feminism's critics. However, it does not go far enough.
My concern is that this move does not address the political drives behind choice feminism: the drive to make feminism appeal to as many people as possible and the drive to escape the dilemmas of feminism in our personal lives. Ultimately, the problem with choice feminism is not that it celebrates women's choices without having a political consciousness. The problem is that—even complemented by a political consciousness—the turn to choice feminism is motivated by a fear of politics. It aims to sidestep the need to make judgments, it aims to avoid making exclusions, and it aims to downplay the radicalism of feminism's challenges to the status quo. Yet judgment, exclusion, and calls for change are unavoidable parts of politics. What is ultimately being expressed in a choice feminist position is a fantasy of a world without politics: a world in which we are never called upon to defend our views to those who disagree, in which we never offend anyone because we tolerate everyone, and in which we do not attempt as a collectivity to bring about structural changes. This is a vision of a world in which we all get along not because we agree, but because we studiously avoid conflict. What good is a political consciousness if we are afraid to use it?
The conception of freedom at the heart of choice feminism is the classic freedom of modern liberalism: individual license to do as one pleases free from political interference. However, there is a countervailing tradition of feminist political thought that expresses a very different understanding of freedom—one which is inseparable from political engagement.Footnote 27 On this account, women have been oppressed not so much because they have been denied the freedom to determine their own life paths,Footnote 28 as because they have been denied participation in public life. Feminists in this tradition have decried the historical absence of women in positions of power not as the symptom of a lack of choices, but as the systematic exclusion of women from involvement in shaping the world in which they live. The remedy for this form of oppression is not mere opportunity to get involved, but the active exercise of political freedom—what Linda Zerilli describes as “the capacity to found new forms of political association.”Footnote 29 Women are free only to the extent that they are engaged in the political practice of creating, reimagining, and transforming the shared world in which they live.
The exercise of political freedom is difficult and demanding because it requires that we make judgments—hard, messy judgments. Claims about the relative value of different choices, claims about the justice or injustice of particular courses of action, are exercises in judgment. Without making judgments, politics becomes vacuous relativism: we have no reason to prefer one course of action over another. Yet making judgments is always potentially terrifying and demands a certain amount of courage because, when it comes to political matters, we have no objective set of standards for judging that could serve as a set of guidelines for us to follow. Political freedom requires that we make the best judgments that we can, without knowing for certain that the judgments we make are correct.
Moreover, politics involves making our uncertain judgments public, submitting them to the scrutiny of others, and trying to persuade these others to share our views. However, there is no guarantee that when we share our judgments, other people will agree with them. Simply because I believe my judgment is the best does not mean that others will, too. As Zerilli argues, “political claims have a fundamentally anticipatory structure.”Footnote 30 That is, when we express judgments and claim them as valid for others, we anticipate, we hope that others will agree with us; but we cannot know in advance whether they will. Making judgments therefore always involves taking risks: a risk that my justifications will not be persuasive to others, and a risk that after subjecting my views to public scrutiny, I may find that my judgments are no longer persuasive to me. Most importantly for our discussion, Zerilli notes that political judgment always risks exclusion: I may claim to speak for a group (say “women”) and find in response that not all women agree with what I say, or agree that I have the authority to speak for them.Footnote 31 The choice feminist orientation misunderstands this disagreement and exclusion as evidence of the failure of politics; yet it is an expected part of the public exchange of uncertain judgments. When we make judgments, we take the risk that others will not agree with us, that we are going to offend some people we would like to persuade, and that we are going to turn off some people from feminism who we would prefer to have as allies. That's politics.
Exercising judgment is not the same as being judgmental (although choice feminists often equate the two). Judging is coming to a decision where there is no objectively right or wrong choice to be made. Rather than inappropriately imposing personal standards on other people from without, the practice of judgment involves becoming aware that we make political claims within a world of others who are differently situated and who need to be persuaded of the validity of our claims. Zerilli argues that political judgments require “learning to make claims that take others into account and to elicit criteria in an effort to persuade them of one's own view.”Footnote 32 To say that feminists should make judgments is not to say that we will all from the start be capable of making good judgments—judgments that fully acknowledge others and are persuasive to them. Feminists who fail to make “claims that take others into account” are not thereby being judgmental. Instead, they are practicing judgment—that is, judging without having become masters of judgment. Judging is a political skill we learn to do better by practicing it in the company of others.
The criticism that feminists are judgmental, therefore, may sometimes be a misplaced criticism. What is meant may be something like: your judgment is narrow-minded and does not take my perspective into account, and I think we can do better. The disagreement, in other words, may be a political one about how we should judge. Choice feminists disavow their own position when they reject judgment as such; after all, they are passing judgment on their fellow feminists even as they claim to want to avoid judging!
Nonetheless, some people do mean to suggest that feminists are judgmental, and not merely making poor judgments. In such cases, what is meant is that feminists are making judgments about personal matters that do not concern them. In other words, the charge of judgmentalness is grounded in a liberal worldview: it suggests that there is an appropriate sphere for the exercise of judgment beyond which judging others is unacceptable. We need to see this accusation for what it is—an attempt to reassert the boundary between public and private that many feminists have long contested. If we are to take seriously the premise that “the personal is political,” then we have to resist the notion that to critically analyze the politics of the personal is necessarily to be judgmental. Feminists need to publicly make judgments about personal matters—sex, career decisions, dress and makeup, power in intimate relationships—because reimagining our personal lives is an essential component of a feminist reimagining of the world we share.
Political freedom is very demanding: engaging in politics requires time, energy, commitment, courage, and a willingness to take risks. It is understandable that choice feminists would be afraid of politics because of what it demands of us. But we should not run from a fightFootnote 33 simply because the fight is hard and its outcome is uncertain. What we need is to remind ourselves of the pleasures of politics, the parts of political action that make being courageous in the face of risk enjoyable and worthwhile.
Towards Taking Feminist Pleasure in Politics
When I suggest that feminists need to take pleasure in politics, I do not mean that political action is always and only pleasurable. On the contrary, I believe it is extremely important for us to acknowledge how very difficult and demanding it is to be a politically engaged feminist. This is especially so because of the dilemmas of making the personal political that I described above. Making judgments as a feminist means making judgments about myself, and making judgments about others—friends, lovers, parents, co-workers, and other feminists—that may have very painful consequences. We have to make difficult choices about which battles to fight—because surely it would exhaust any activist to pick a fight each time there is cause to do so. Consequently, we have to make compromises, and we often have to compromise ourselves and our principles in the process. We need a feminist account of politics, therefore, that helps us to make sense of the impossibility of being a feminist in an only partially transformed world.
Moreover, we need to acknowledge that engaging in politics—whether in the bedroom, the boardroom, or the Oval Office—is risky. It involves taking the risk of being rejected and ridiculed, offending others, losing a fight, and even undermining the very causes we would support. It is no wonder choice feminists fear politics. We need to acknowledge these fears as legitimate without allowing them to paralyze us.
Hirshman, worried that women are opting out of elite careers, calls on feminists to sing the pleasures of work.Footnote 34 In contemporary America, it has become unfashionable to proclaim that one finds work pleasurable, and politically incorrect to insist that women who opt out are thereby missing out on some important element of human flourishing. Against these trends, she urges women to embrace “the love that dares not speak its name: love of work.”Footnote 35
It is in this spirit that I call on feminists to resist the temptation to reject judgment and exclusion, and to instead remind ourselves of politics' many pleasures. In particular, we need to celebrate the pleasures that arise from engaging in politics precisely with people who are different from and disagree with us—the ones who most threaten feminism with the criticisms that it is too radical, exclusionary, and judgmental. Encounters with our critics contain an important possibility of pleasure.
Here, I draw on Iris Young's argument that the eroticism in the encounter with otherness that happens regularly in city life can serve as a model for thinking of a new ethos of democratic engagement with otherness. Just as in politics, the eroticism of the other in city life is both the source of pleasure and danger:
The erotic dimension of the city … holds out the possibility that one will lose one's identity, will fall. But we also take pleasure in being open to and interested in people we experience as different…. We look for restaurants, stores, and clubs with something new for us, a new ethnic food, a different atmosphere, a different crowd of people.Footnote 36
This urban pleasure in difference—while it is not without its own risk of exoticizing otherness, or reducing it to a cuisine or lifestyle—serves as a model for reimagining the encounter with difference in democratic life as erotic. There is, for Young, a “pleasure in being drawn out of oneself to understand that there are other meanings, practices, perspectives on the city, and that one could learn or experience something more and different by interacting with them.”Footnote 37
This is the pleasure of exercising political freedom: in exchanging political judgments with others, I encounter new positions, new perspectives, that take me outside of myself. Encountering and learning about others, trying to see the world from their perspective, is not only threatening insofar as it challenges my positions, but it can also be erotic, exciting, different, and new.
Of course, for feminists whose very survival is threatened,Footnote 38 the idea that they should see politics as pleasurable may seem condescending and naïve. It may be difficult—if not impossible—for women under such conditions to experience politics as pleasurable. Perhaps this pleasure in learning from others can be experienced only under certain basic conditions—such as a guarantee of physical security—or only by those with certain habits of listening and being open-minded. Nonetheless, even—and perhaps especially—in situations where we feel most threatened, we need to be able to find some pleasure in politics in order to sustain our engagement.
With this in mind, we as feminists need to cultivate an erotic orientation to politics, one that enables us to hear criticisms of feminism as pleasurable invitations to learn about how others see us, how they experience their lives, how we might make better political claims in the future—claims that would include not by blandly embracing any and all choices, but by taking more thoughtful stands and giving more careful justifications to others that, we can only hope, they will find alluring.
