Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Bloom question
Here's a question that we may not get to in class, but I would love to hear you sound off on. Bloom calls feminism "an enemy of the vitality of classic texts". How do you make sense of this? Is his attack on feminism related to the arguments about education we were discussing in last class?
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Bloom has an interesting sentence in the same paragraph in which he labels feminism as an enemy of the vitality of classic texts: “The latest translation of Biblical text…suppresses gender references to God, so that future generations will not have to grapple with the fact that God was once a sexist” (66). Choosing to characterize the feminist movement by a supposed concern for expunging gender references is to fall in line with common media portrayals of feminists as petty and confrontational. Two years after Bloom published this book, a national study showed that among women who supported the issues of the women’s movement, only a third considered themselves “feminists.” Most women today who are committed to equality and fairness for women and girls would shudder to call themselves feminists.
In his section on relationships, Bloom writes, “A few radical feminists still feel the old-time religion, but most of the women are comfortably assured that not much stands in the way of their careers” (82). (I would parallel this claim to his claim that “Only obviously pathological lower-class types now hold the racist views of my young visitor.”) Despite the fact that thirty years later women are still earning 70 cents for every dollar that men earn in the same position – while achieving higher GPAs than men on the whole in every subject in high school and in college – Bloom feels that we are in a post-sexism, post-racism era. This is not terribly surprising, given that mainstream media outlets essentially dropped coverage of the women’s movement in the decade preceding this book, despite the fact that lobbying on behalf of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment was ongoing. News organizations shifted remaining coverage of women’s issues to “soft news,” making it easy to assume that the issues were largely resolved.
I would also say that Bloom believes in dichotomies of right versus wrong, good versus evil. Journalists are taught to think in dichotomies as well to make for more compelling stories, and the dualism of masculine/feminine implies that male is the opposite of female. It’s easy to predict the tagging of feminism as “bad” when contrasted against the “good” masculine norms in American society and history. It’s easy to portray a feminist examination of the sexist representations of women in great works of literature as an attack on an entire body of classic work.
His attitude towards feminism makes sense in the context of his fear that any “shared goals or vision of the public good” are eroding as a result of the way American history is taught. It also seems related to his argument that the principles behind the founding of the nation and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution should be give more attention in education and the factual history of the nation, or the ways in which American society has not lived up to those principles, should be given less. In terms of classic literature, it would follow that Rousseau’s work should be given more attention and feminist responses to it less.
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