This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 42, Summer 2001.
One of the most protracted struggles of feminist history has been women’s struggle to gain access to the professions and institutions of the ‘public sphere’: education, medicine, law, the police, the military, politics and the priesthood. Feminists have argued for this not only on grounds of fairness, but also on the grounds that women’s presence inside them would change the institutions themselves for the better. But that argument depends on a number of questionable assumptions — for instance that women in public life are significantly different from men, and that once admitted, they will actually have the power to bring about radical change in institutions which excluded them for centuries. These assumptions, and more generally the challenges faced by women in contemporary public life, are examined critically in Clare Walsh‘s new book Gender and Discourse. Debbie Cameron has been reading it.
When the 1997 general election brought over 100 women to the House of Commons — the largest number of female MPs ever returned to Westminster — newspapers wittered on about the difference they would make. A creche would be installed, the toilet facilities would improve, and in the immortal words of The Observer, the debating chamber of the House of Commons would become ‘less of a bear garden’. The puerile jeering and farmyard grunting that lowers the tone of Prime Minister’s Question Time would give way, under the softening influence of the laydeez, god bless them, to something altogether more civilized.
Clare Walsh’s book Gender and Discourse is about exactly this: the perception that when you let women into a previously male-dominated institution, be it the House of Commons, the Anglican priesthood, a golf club in Surrey or a radical marxist cell, what will happen is that women will civilize it. They will knock off the rough edges — no more jeering, grunting, swearing, dirty jokes or war imagery — and bring their own distinctively feminine touch to the values and the language of the community they are entering.
This belief in women’s civilising difference is one of very few points on which crusading feminists and their staunchest opponents have often found themselves in agreement. It is hard to think of a case where women have fought for entry to a profession (like medicine or the priesthood) or access to a public role (like voting or serving on juries) without deploying the argument that the role or profession in question urgently needed women’s special qualities of sensitivity and nurturance. To which anti-feminists have just as regularly responded that this special feminine nature was exactly what you didn’t want in a voter/doctor/police officer — and shouldn’t men be allowed to behave like neanderthals in their own golf clubs, undisturbed by women’s impulse to put up curtains and engage in polite conversation?
The idea of men as ‘primitives’ whose natural inclinations are only kept in check by the civilising influence of women is remarkably pervasive and persistent. John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which has been on the bestseller lists for most of the last ten years, uses the metaphor of men needing to withdraw into their ‘caves’ (or more prosaically, their sheds and garages) as a periodic escape from the pressures of female civilisation. Men Behaving Badly, the aptly-titled sitcom in which two pathetic ‘lads’ chafe against the disciplinary restraints imposed by their more mature girlfriends, is inexplicably popular with both women and men.
But for radical women, this identification of their sex as a civilising influence is at least as much a curse as it is a blessing. On one hand, it does provide them with an argument which has historically been very effective in challenging women’s exclusion from powerful institutions. On the other hand, and this is what Clare Walsh is particularly concerned to show, it often means that women enter masculinist institutions on different and unequal terms, and prevents them, once inside, from pursuing the radical agenda which impelled many of them to enter in the first place.
Clare Walsh decided to look at women’s experiences of entering three types of male-dominated institution. One type is legislatures (as well as the Westminster parliament she examines the Northern Ireland assembly, with special reference to the Women’s Coalition). Another is the environmental movement, where she contrasts the experiences of women activists in mixed groups like Friends of the Earth with those of women in an all-women, feminist organisation, the Women’s Environmental Network. The third case is the Church of England, where she focuses on the experience of women who made the transition from campaigning for ordination to the priesthood to actually working as priests.
The book draws extensively on interviews with women actively involved in the institutions/organisations concerned, many of which are fascinating in their own right. However, since Clare Walsh has a particular interest in language, she also looks at the written texts produced by various groups, asking whether and how women’s and feminist texts differ from the mainstream male variety; and importantly (for reasons I will shortly come to) she analyses the representation of women activists, politicians and priests in the media. Partly she is asking the same question newspaper reporters asked after the 1997 election (though needless to say, she frames it much more intelligently): do women change the norms of public discourse? Is debating or Question Time a different, less brutishly adversarial event when women participate in it as a matter of course? Is the language of religion changed by women’s presence as priests? But in addition, she is asking another question: how does it affect women in public life to be subject to the belief and the expectation that they are there to civilise men’s discourse?
Ordaining sexism
To give something of the flavour of the argument, I will concentrate on the case of women priests in the Church of England. Though the issue of women’s ordination leaves me personally cold, the account Clare Walsh gives of women’s struggle to achieve it persuaded me that MOW, the Movement for the Ordination of Women, was a radical movement, and also a feminist one. Even very moderate women were (understandably) radicalised by the ludicrous and offensive arguments deployed by their opponents. Behind the bizarre theology (‘women can’t be priests because they are morally superior to men’ was one argument) lurked ancient irrational beliefs about women polluting sacred spaces and profaning sacred language, by sexualising everything they came into contact with. Possibly the most extraordinary statement Clare Walsh quotes (against stiff competition) comes from the ineffable Graham Leonard, the antifeminist bishop of London, who remarked that if he were to encounter a woman in the sanctuary (a space in a church reserved for priests) he would be ‘unbearably tempted to embrace her’. One hardly expects arguments about God to avoid irrationality altogether, but it is hard to summon up words to describe any argument in which this remark could count as a serious contribution.
The eventual vote in favour of the ordination of women was very far from producing equality, even on paper. Concerned about the divisive effects of the decision (and the possibility of Anglicans who opposed change defecting en masse to the Catholic church), the church adopted the peculiar doctrine of ‘the two integrities’ — Clare Walsh quite rightly calls it ‘casuistry’ — according to which it is equally valid to believe that God has called women to be priests, and to believe that he has not called women to be priests. People who believe the latter proposition are not obliged to recognise women priests’ existence. Antifeminist bishops are not required to ordain women, and sexist local congregations are not required to accept a woman vicar. (The church is governed by ecclesiastical law and not subject to the sex discrimination act.) Individuals within congregations who do not wish to receive communion from a woman are served by so-called ‘flying bishops’, antifeminists who visit regularly to minister to those who will not accept the ministry of women. Consequently, the status of women priests is not even theoretically equivalent to that of male priests. The authority of a male priest is a given, but the authority of a woman priest can legitimately be denied by any member of the church, from Joe Bloggs to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Fewer jobs are open to her, and no serious promotion, since women have not yet won the right to be ordained as bishops.
The Act of Synod which ratified this strange and unjust state of affairs is a straightforward example of unreconstructed sexism, albeit dressed up in the arcane language of theological argument, which conveniently obscures the fundamentally political nature of the issue. But women priests must also deal with the subtler sexism that results from widespread assumptions that they will bring something different, and distinctively female, to the church’s ministry.
Predictably, many of the women priests themselves believed that women would and should do things differently: for instance, reduce the power differential between clergy and laity, preach less abstruse sermons and put more effort into pastoral work in their parishes. These priorities can be seen in two ways: if on one hand they could be taken to express a feminist commitment to more egalitarian structures and a more practical, people-centred idea of ministry, on the other they could also be seen as pandering to the stereotype of women as not wanting power, but simply wanting to serve — just as many served, before women’s ordination, in the low-status, unpaid role of ‘deaconess’. The belief that women are particularly good at, for instance, dealing sensitively with the bereaved or counselling parishioners with social problems, is producing, Clare Walsh suggests, a sort of gendered public/private divide within the public role of priesthood. Women take care of the ‘private’, pastoral duties while men fulfil the more ‘public’, oratorical and managerial functions associated with the role.
Disclaiming feminism
Clare Walsh also says that many women who as campaigners for ordination were happy to call themselves feminists have ‘strategically disidentified’ from that label since becoming priests. Many have also dropped certain issues that preoccupied feminists in the ordination movement, notably the issue of nonsexist liturgical language. Unlike a commitment to democratise parish governance or put more resources into pastoral work, a commitment to introducing inclusive or feminine terms into the language of worship cannot easily be read as a traditionally feminine commitment to serving others. It is an unambiguously feminist challenge to male traditions, and women who pursue that challenge know they will be seen as ‘extremists’. Avoiding extremism is for some a form of self-defence (women priests have not been accepted easily: many have experienced verbal abuse, while one was badly bitten by a parishioner to whom she was administering the sacrament). For others it is justified pragmatically as a way of ensuring that women priests will retain enough support to have a chance of achieving their more ‘moderate’ feminist goals.
It is clear, then, that when women became priests, they faced pressures which they had not faced as outsiders campaigning to be ‘let in’. They were compelled to make all kinds of decisions about how to do the job they had fought for in the light of the attitudes and expectations they found among their superiors, their co-workers and their congregations. Even when these attitudes were not frankly misogynist, they were often essentialist, based on the expectation that women would have particular aptitudes, priorities and values. In addition, women were under pressure to ‘heal the wounds’ inflicted on the church by the long and bitter fight for women’s ordination, by doing what they could to placate their opponents (soft-pedalling their feminism, for example). In a properly christian spirit of reconciliation, MOW had endorsed this policy; by the time of Clare Walsh’s interviews, though, some former activists had come to regret their generosity, which was by no means reciprocated by the anti-feminist camp.
Another unexpected pressure on women priests came from the media, which have taken a disproportionate interest in them, and whose coverage Clare Walsh analyses. She finds that media reporting of women priests is obsessed with their appearance, portraying them as ‘frumps or femmes’, and also places emphasis on motherhood — pregnant priests or priests who have recently given birth have been consistently favoured subjects for media features. It is evident from her interview material that women priests cannot just ignore this sort of thing, but feel compelled to engage with the stereotypes, whether by conforming to them or by challenging them. An issue as trivial as whether earrings should be worn with clerical dress takes on weighty symbolic status when aired in the media, and women must then expend time and energy deciding how to deal with it.
Clare Walsh also discusses high-profile fictional representations of women priests, such as the character of Janet Fisher in the radio soap The Archers, and Dawn French’s portrayal of a woman priest in the TV sitcom The Vicar of Dibley. These are widely regarded as positive representations which have helped to allay mainstream fears about women priests as humourless harridans or frothing feminist neo-pagans (this last being an insult levelled against feminists who want to draw attention to the feminine or maternal aspects of God). But Clare Walsh’s informants were more critical, particularly of The Vicar of Dibley. They pointed out, for instance, that one strand in the series’ humour concerns Geraldine’s (the Dawn French character’s) frustrated attempts at romance — not something that has featured in previous comedies centring on male priests, but a consistent theme in the discourse of opponents of women’s ordination, who warned that the priesthood would attract a monstrous regiment of frustrated spinsters.
The writer of Dibley, Richard Curtis, has said that he wanted to make Geraldine ‘intelligent and compassionate’. Priests Clare Walsh interviewed agreed that she was both, but suggested this in itself constituted a new stereotype — the long-suffering woman vicar who remains calm and cheerful in the face of adversity — which was problematic for real women trying to ‘prove themselves’ in a context of suspicion or even hostility. Clare Walsh notes that the real woman on whom Geraldine is based, Rev. Joy Carroll, does not work in rural Dibley but in a disadvantaged inner-city parish. Whether by choice or because of the number of parishes which will not accept them, many women priests do work in particularly challenging situations, where material deprivation and the attendant social problems loom large in their day-to-day concerns. This goes strikingly unacknowledged in fictional portrayals of them.
The case-study of priests in the Church of England provides a particularly good demonstration of one of Clare Walsh’s main points, that women (still) do not enter masculinist institutions on equal terms. Even if we leave aside the structural inequality enshrined by the Act of Synod and the ‘two integrities’, which is peculiar (in both senses) to the Church, inequality results from the entrenched expectation that women will do the job differently, but without disrupting existing male traditions. They are neither allowed to be ‘the same’ as men, their competence and achievements judged on the same criteria, nor so different that they threaten men’s control over the institution. Their allotted role is to add the civilising feminine touch to a fundamentally masculine enterprise, and if they either decline to do this or take it too far they will face ferocious opposition.
The same pattern is repeated in all the mixed organisations Clare Walsh examined. In mixed environmentalist groups, for example, the high-profile managerial, media/PR and scientific functions tend to be fulfilled by men while women do fundraising and administration. A similar gendered division of labour obtains within mainstream political parties. What, though, of the cases where women have withdrawn from mixed organisations and set up their own?
Radically different
Both the women-only organisations examined in Gender and Discourse — the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC) and the Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) — appear to be genuinely and radically different from comparable mixed organisations. This is not, however, simply because their members are women; and it does not ensure either that they achieve their radical goals, though both organisations in Clare Walsh’s view have real achievements to their credit.
The women’s organisations are different, not because women are somehow naturally different, but because the organisations are committed to feminist principles and feminist political process. Clare Walsh does mention one other, nonfeminist women’s organisation, WAOW (Women Against the Ordination of Women). Although this is a women-only group, and strongly committed to the idea that women are ‘different’, its arguments and language are in fact very similar to those of male opponents of women’s ordination. Gender only makes a radical difference when it is part of a radical politics, i.e. feminism. In contrast to the ‘critical mass’ theorists who suggest that culture-change in institutions will happen when women make up 30% of their members, Clare Walsh argues that even very large numbers of women will have little or no impact if they accommodate to institutional norms and do not specifically organise for change. Conversely, she suggests that a very small number of women — for instance the two NIWC representatives at the Northern Ireland peace talks — may have a major impact if they are politicised, organised and determined.
The difference feminism makes is particularly marked in the language used by the NIWC and WEN, which is a more concrete, inclusive and accessible language than that of mainstream parties and environmental groups. In the case of the NIWC this kind of language was especially striking, even revelatory, because it contrasted so markedly with the clichéd oppositional rhetoric of the loyalist and nationalist groups that dominated Northern Irish politics. Clare Walsh remarks on the extent to which the Good Friday Agreement, a key document in the peace process, incorporated the language of the NIWC — coalition women, who as members of a cross-community organisation based on gender politics were well-positioned to negotiate across the sectarian divide, did a lot of the drafting. If that made them appear to other participants as typical women, facilitating others while effacing themselves, it also meant that ultimately, they had considerable influence on the outcome of the negotiations. The role they played also ensured that feminist concerns about women’s, and more broadly, human rights were written into the Agreement. This is a case where women really did civilise a form of political discourse, and when one contemplates its previous rank incivility, one can only applaud this astonishing achievement.
As regular readers of T&S will know, though (see issues 35 and 40), the NIWC received little applause: from mainstream reporting of the peace talks you would hardly have known the coalition was there, let alone that its members played a major role in drafting the Agreement. At the talks themselves, coalition women encountered a degree of sexist hostility even more astounding than that meted out to feminists in the Church of England. Men did not yield easily to the civilising influence of women, for in this context, as Clare Walsh remarks, the slightest intimation of civility (e.g. the idea that one might listen to an opponent’s argument, or express some willingness to search for an acceptable compromise) was perceived as threateningly radical.
Apart from the personal cost to coalition women of dealing with continual hostility and abuse, they were compelled to expend enormous amounts of time and energy enlisting support from the media, even the less hostile parts of which tended to patronise or ignore them. True, this courting of the media is part of the game now for anyone in politics; but there are particular difficulties in keeping the media sweet while retaining some vestige of feminist principle. As a feminist, Monica McWilliams did not want to be represented as the ‘leader’ of the coalition, nor defined primarily as a wife and mother, nor photographed making tea; but she was often unable to resist the media’s desire to represent her in these ways. Feminists like her are faced with a dilemma: believing that the personal is political, and that politics should deal with the things people care about, they do not want to deny that they have personal lives. But the culture in which they practise politics is one in which personalising often means trivialising, and is often used, specifically, to undermine women in public life.
A theoretical challenge
The existence and significance of dilemmas of this kind is something Clare Walsh tries to address at the level of theory as well as description. She is a good, clear writer and she never allows the theory to overwhelm the other material, but she does want to take issue with certain currently fashionable postmodernist ideas about language, gender and identity. This gives her work an additional dimension for feminists who are interested in such ideas (and more especially, in criticising them from a political standpoint) — though it should not deter other readers, since the ‘theoretical’ element does not dominate the book, and the occasional dense passage is easily skipped.
The position Clare Walsh criticises is associated with the postmodernist philosopher Judith Butler, and lays emphasis on the concept of ‘performativity’. What that means, roughly speaking, is that we ‘perform’ our identities rather than them being inalienably part of us, determined by our genes or our early childhood ‘conditioning’ or whatever. For instance, we bring ourselves into being as sexed and gendered subjects — women or men — when we repeatedly speak and act in ways that our societies deem ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. In some versions of this argument, the main point that follows from the ‘performative’ nature of identity is that you can, in effect, perform it however you like: just because you were born and brought up female, for instance, does not mean you have to go through life performing the identity of a woman. You can remake yourself as a man, or as something outside the traditional gender categories. As we know, more and more individuals are engaging in this kind of ‘self-fashioning’, not as a theoretical experiment but as a life-choice.
Clare Walsh is not dealing with the phenomenon of transgender (though she does mention the idea that priesthood for men has always been a form of socially-sanctioned gender ‘crossing’ and that this may be a reason why so many male priests are vehemently opposed to the entry of actual women into their ranks). However, she is dealing with contexts in which women have both the opportunity and the obligation to invent a new kind of gendered identity, because they are taking roles, such as ‘priest’, which were previously understood as exclusively masculine. And what she finds is that women in these contexts are not the free self-fashioning agents celebrated in some versions of postmodernist theory. On the contrary, they are severely constrained by the institutional and social structures in which their identities must be created and performed.
‘Performance’ is a theatrical metaphor which turns the spotlight, so to speak, on the performer. But performances have audiences, and it is their interpretations, rather than simply the intentions of the performer, which determine what the performance will actually be taken to mean. The woman priest who wants to talk about ‘God the mother’ cannot guarantee that her audience will interpret this as creative feminist theology rather than paganism. The women MPs who ostentatiously refuse to join in with what they call ‘barnyard noises’ in the House of Commons may intend this as a critical comment on the puerility of their male colleagues, but it is often interpreted by others as a sign of the natural feminine reticence which makes women less successful politicians than men.
In short, postmodernists have given too little weight to the truism that you can control your performance, but not your reception. In reality, understanding that discourse is a two-way process, we design our performances in the light of calculations about the reception they are likely to get. It is because of this that sexism, overt or subtle, can continue to exert such effective pressure on women whose ambition is to radicalise discourse rather than merely to civilise it.
Only the beginning
That doesn’t mean, of course, that women can have no positive impact on historically male institutions. Rather it means that just getting into the institutions is not the end-point of the struggle, but only the beginning. ‘Historic victories’ like the vote for women’s ordination or the election of a record number of women MPs should be regarded by feminists as neither historic (in the sense of marking an entirely new era) nor victories (in the sense of putting sexism decisively to rout). If politics is ‘the art of the possible’, Clare Walsh’s analysis suggests that perhaps we can best support our sisters in masculinist institutions by understanding that all things are not always possible for them. There are good reasons (as well as more dubious ones) why they cannot always be as radical as we want them to be. At the same time, Clare Walsh feels that we should not underestimate the extent to which many of them are in fact doing radical things, but strategically cloaking their real agendas in a language of moderation or essentialism.
This argument may depress or irritate radical feminists — why should feminists have to disguise themselves like this? — but if we accept that it has some purchase on reality, it might make us think about the potential of alliances with women whose institutional position has apparently led them to ‘compromise’ politically. Feminists inside institutions need relationships with feminists outside, and vice-versa. For radicals who remain outside (and thus also have more scope for remaining radical), access to the ‘establishment’ can be a route to getting things done. For feminists inside institutions, being able to refer to an outside constituency which demands x, y and z is a way of legitimising those demands — you are not just speaking in your own interest, but in the interests of people you are there to serve or represent (one reason why the women’s ordination movement succeeded was that two thirds of ordinary churchgoers supported it).
What I find most admirable about Gender and Discourse is that it gives a real sense of what it’s like to be a feminist woman in a world of sexist men (and for that matter, anti-feminist women like WAOW). The pressures, the dilemmas, the strategic compromises, and the sheer unremitting prejudice women constantly have to face, are evoked here in telling detail. The writing is lucid and its tone is measured, but the writer’s evident anger about some of the things she describes gives it an edge that I find pleasing. Also pleasing is the respect she shows for her interviewees, and more generally the way she injects a dose of common sense into debates where so much nonsense has been talked in recent years — not least, I regret to say, by academic feminists.
Rather than engaging in abstract speculation, Clare Walsh has taken the trouble to find out how women have experienced their hard-won freedom to participate in public life. She has exposed some persistent myths (e.g. that women are naturally, uniformly ‘different’, that institutional sexism is now a marginal problem, and that simply gaining access to institutions gives women the power to change them) and raised a number of questions of direct practical importance for feminist politics. It would be a pity if the book’s location in a series about language obscured its relevance for feminists more generally: it deserves a wider readership, and I hope that it will find one.
Reference
Clare Walsh, Gender and Discourse: Language and Power in Politics, the Church and Organisations (Longman, 2001)