Women are smart, it says here

[imomus]

Back in 1999 my friend Suzy Corrigan -- a Riot Grrrl when I first met her in 1990, and an American journalist based in London -- edited a book of short stories published under the title Typical Girls: New Stories by Smart Women. I got involved in the planning and promotion of the book, reading early drafts and designing the flyer for the launch party.

Right from the start, though, I hated the title and begged Suzy to change it. "Typical Girls" was fine -- I liked the Slits reference. The bit I hated was "Smart Women". It just sounded so patronizing, so weakly petulant; a "defiant" pat on the head that was meant to ennoble the book's contributors but instead belittled them.

Just what exactly was that "smart" doing there? Was there some assumption that people, on hearing the word "women", would immediately think of stupid people, and need this impression corrected? Since some of the world's greatest writers have been women, that didn't seem like a realistic fear. And what about the tension between "typical" and "smart", or the tension between "girls" and "women"? Were we to assume that all women (typical ones) were smart, contrary to expectation (and the law of averages)?

Assurances that women in general are smart (or becoming smart, or recently got smarter) are a staple of a certain kind of "femininst" article -- the kind that gives the impression that feminist writing sometimes encodes just as much (unconscious?) misogyny as any other kind of discourse.

In today's Observer, for instance, Mary Riddell interviews Tony Blair about his appeal to women. Why Asda Woman matters to Tony Blair tells us that "there are 80 years to go before equal pay; women earn £300,000 less than men in a lifetime; childcare costs up to £16,000 a year... flexibility often means part-time jobs, in which women, on average, earn 42 per cent less per hour than men".

So far so good. Income inequalities between all sorts of equally-qualified people need to be exposed mercilessly. The "smart women" meme makes its appearance here:

"When Blair started out, many women submitted to rubbish pay for dead-end work. Now a new generation, intelligent and hard-working, wants a career and enough support to make life tolerable and promotion possible."

Here, I guess, the assertion of women's intelligence is meant to remove any possible justification for those iniquitous pay figures. But it still seems unneccesary and patronizing. The figures condemn themselves. Nobody is reaching for phrases like "women are stupid" or "women are lazy" to justify them.

The current issue of art magazine Frieze is themed around Feminism in the art world. In the editorial, Polly Staple writes:

"In one stroke Stark deftly elucidated the dilemma of being a working woman and a mother while attempting to explore the subjective reality of a given situation. In other words, she was smart and funny, created her own framework for her contribution and proposed, like so many women before her, another way of simply getting things done."

Here again we see the combination of the idea of "the typical" with "the smart". Artist Frances Stark is a "housewife superstar", a "superwoman" who is both "smart and funny" and "like so many women before her".

I cringe and puzzle when articles explicitly tell me that women are intelligent. For a start, it's exactly the sort of essentialism that the writers usually decry -- a blanket statement made about all women. Clearly, as a blanket term, it's meaningless rhetoric anyway. If the sample group is "all women" or "all men", and if "smart" is a relative term referring to comparative intelligence within that group, they can't all be smart.

It really begins to look bad, though, when we try the substitution test. Articles about men talk far, far less frequently about how men, in general, are "smart".

Google finds 446,000 instances of the phrase "smart women" but only 184,000 instances of "smart men". The phrase "smart girls" gets 285,000 hits, the phrase "smart boys" only 71,100. The sentence "women are smart" scores 19,300 hits on Google, the phrase "men are smart" a paltry 691.

"Smart men" is obviously considered some kind of tautology. Or is it that men just don't need that "encouraging" -- and meaningless -- pat on the head?

Comments

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

A lot of my friends feel guilty because they're ultra-feminine, in a traditional sense,

That's actually a rather common issue these days. Much as there's great injustice in the gender order, there are some benefits to it. As successful as second-wave feminism was, one of its failings is that it fails to account for the fact that there are some women who, while they want equal treatment, are perfectly comfortable with other aspects of the traditional gender order. Saying that all women must militantly strive for high powered CEO positions and must become lesbian for political reasons is just as constraining a role as the traditionally feminine one.

Now that a lot of the rage of being oppressed has been spent, there's a strong urge to turn to the comfortable and familiar and so women of this generation aren't picking up the mantle as much as the previous few. And if a woman really can be anything, then why can't she be a homemaker? I think a major part of how the gender order will come to be depends on how women these days approach the topic of feminism, femininity, and what to do with all that's come before.

Personally I hope for a world where women are neither forced to be homemakers nor forced to be CEOs but rather can take whatever path she chooses and not have it be a political statement. Alas, I fear, even if all paths do become available, choosing one of them will always be a political decision. Because of the history, there's no choice that isn't simultaneously a comment on the history.