Ideological feminism has ghettoized and trivialized the subject matter of women's writing. As a successful ideology, it has foreclosed debate -- and debate is the hallmark of the public intellectual. The idea of a public intellectual gained momentum in Europe during the first half of the 20th century, when the conflict between Marxism and fascism was fierce. Both ideologies were totalitarian -- they claimed to embrace not only politics but also art, literature, scholarship and everyday social relations. And each side, for that reason, had its share of engage intellectuals: Martin Heidegger on the right; De Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux and Albert Camus on the left; and Arendt on neither side. English and American thinkers -- George Orwell, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Aldous Huxley -- followed their continental counterparts into the agora.
Feminist Fatale
Where are the great women thinkers? Thinking so much about women has shrunk their minds.
GENDER STUDIES
It was this world, with its habits of mind and deep interest in an array of intellectual pursuits, that nurtured Sontag's mind. She was always a woman of the left, and many of her pronunciamentos -- her fawning over North Vietnamese regulars who tortured American POWs, her characterization of the "white race" as a "cancer upon history," her insistence that the U.S. was to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks -- can make you wince. But she refused to embrace ideological feminism, though she came to fame at a time when she could have remade herself into a Kate Millett or a Greer. She eschewed turning the personal into the political, preferring subjects of universal interest: aesthetics, the role of writers and critics, the meaning of photography, the place of art in a totalitarian society.
Ideological feminism has failed to produce successors to Sontag not only because of its thin range of interest-group concerns but also because it has tried to systematically shut out -- and shout out -- dissent. This is why, when I think of female intellectuals today, only Camille Paglia comes to mind. Like Sontag, she writes boldly and forcefully on art, literature and politics. Trailing her is Gertrude Himmelfarb on the right and maybe Greer on the left. The vast majority of women who might otherwise qualify as public intellectuals would rather recite the feminist catechism or articulate some new twists and refinements on it than carve out a place for themselves in the larger public world.
