Fear of Caring The Feminist Paradox

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Abstract
“Women and their vision of a more humane world are at risk,” warns Suzanne Gordon in Prisoners of Men's Dreams: Striking Out for a New Feminine Future (Little, Brown, 1991). Not long ago, she reminds us, a movement toward “women's liberation” aimed to transfigure reality by bringing women into the (mostly male) mainstream without forcing them to become like men. “Our emphasis on the value of relationships, interdependence, and collaboration,” says Gordon, “sought to balance work with love, hierarchy with healing, individualism with community.” Twenty years after the manifestos were struck, Gordon finds, however, that the new immigrants have been, for the most part, subsumed by the ruling class, their hopes and ideals sabotaged from within and without. “Placing competition above caring, work above love, power above empowerment, and personal wealth above human worth, corporate America has created a late-twentieth-century hybrid—a refashioned feminism that takes traditional American ideas about success and repackages them for the new female contestants in the masculine marketplace. This hybrid is equal-opportunity feminism—an ideology that abandons transformation…” Following are excerpts in which Gordon— a freelance writer and regular contributor to the Boston Globe who spoke with more than 100 women about their lives and work—presents the problems that some feminists didn't foresee and suggests some new solutions.

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