In my post last Friday celebrating the 160th anniversary of the Declaration of Sentiments, I quoted this line from that most worthy of feminist documents:
He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
I noted that our feminist foremothers at Seneca Falls were not just concerned with the issue of poltical rights and public justice, but with the world of private emotion. These foremothers knew, and knew very well, that a movement that concerns itself only with winning political rights, but not with the emotional well-being of an oppressed class, ends up fighting only half the battle. Hence I wrote, riffing off the lines from the Declaration above:
The personal is indeed political, and even more importantly, politics needs to be concerned with the intensely personal. Public freedom is a good, but so too is private happiness. And feminism, at its glorious and transformative best, is concerned with winning both — for women, yes, but, ultimately for all of us.
John Spragge makes a pair of criticisms below that orignal post, taking issue with my reading of the Declaration and my suggestion that the Seneca Falls conventioneers were willing to make personal concerns a central aspect of their agenda. John writes:
Politics exists to manage the public square, the shared spaces where we meet. But if the same politician promises to make me happy or make me good, we have a problem. Politics stops at my skin.
I certainly am not suggesting we form an Orwellian federal Department of Happiness that ensures that each citizen has a strong sense of well-being. But the fact is that unhappiness of the kind the declaration describes –an abject dependence, a lack of self-respect, a dearth of self-confidence — doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Though some unhappiness may be a result of poor personal decisions, or a result of some sort of familial abuse, or due to organic factors in the brain, a great deal of the kind of unhappiness that the Declaration laments is a direct result of public policies and social mores that treat women very differently from men.
Research on the epidemiology of eating disorders, for example, makes clear that for many women, social and cultural influences are more important than biological factors in causing extreme and dangerous dieting behavior. A teenage girl throwing up in the bathroom is privately miserable because of public standards about women’s beauty. Healthy feminist public policy often sees a role for governmental and extra-governmental organizations in addressing the causes of such unhappiness. For example, look at the much-discussed (and unfairly ridiculed) Spanish ban on extremely emaciated models. That’s hardly the stuff of Franco-era fascism, but it is an example of the appropriate use of the power of the state to push back against those elements in the culture that are most likely to cause anxiety, depression, and a crisis of self-confidence.
No feminist I know of is marching about declaring we must all have “strength through joy”. No one is suggesting that unhappiness, depression, or a lack of self-confidence somehow vitiates one’s feminist bona fides. And of course, feminists disagree mightily about the degree to which personal concerns of the sort mentioned in the Declaration ought to be the concern of pro-woman policy-makers. In the end, I think the distinction between the public and the private spheres is always a bit of an artificial one. What I do in my private life will sooner or later manifest in my public life, and my private fidelities and my private betrayals do have a bearing on my public behavior. (A case I’ve made in writing about the likes of Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, and Antonio Villaraigosa.) By a similar if not identical token, our private lives are deeply connected to public policy. There are few things more private than sexuality, for example — and battles over access to reproductive services, or access to paid parental leave make clear that these intensely personal issues have a definite public policy component.
Happiness is not a mandate for citizenship. But the pursuit of happiness is not an entirely private affair. The state has a role to play in ensuring a “level-playing field” for the pursuit of that happiness. Whether it’s in guaranteeing that insurance companies provide contraceptive benefits, or regulating the minimum BMI of supermodels, the state is playing a role in helping to ensure that women as well as men get an equal crack at freedom, autonomy, and joy. From a feminist standpoint, that seems to me to a fine thing.
Hugo:
The accommodations we make in the public square always affect the individual. That should go without saying. But I insist that the political respect the truly personal. Regulating body mass index of runway models makes sense because the government has a legitimate interest in public health, and I find it difficult to imagine a more public act than putting a model on a runway. As for your other examples, of Clinton et. al., use of money, power, and position to obtain sex, while not on view in the same way, still makes use of social assumptions and privileges, and for that reason, if no other, qualifies as a public act.
But I consider respect for privacy a form of humility which, no less than justice, belongs to the category of virtues that governments have a duty to display openly to the public. Just as I want governments to do justice where I can see it, so I want governments, movements, and ideologues to show me that they respect my most basic privacy. I want them to show the respect of finding some justification for any policy they advocate, other than making me happy or making me good. Politics stops at my skin.
Hey, I’m happy to consider psychological well-being as an issue of public health and thus of government concern — does that bridge our divide?
Hugo, you and I interact through the meeting place we call the world, and all that it means, from our economic system to our physical bodies. And because we meet in the physical world, and because (as Shakespeare movingly pointed out in Merchant of Venice) our bodies all respond to the same things in similar ways, we can meaningfully regulate matters like food safety, employment standards, and even the promotion of unhealthy choices like smoking or starvation.
But we also make an inward journey, in our own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and we make that journey alone. A fundamental distinction exists between that inner and outer world. However we constrain the actions of each other in the physical world, we have complete freedom to make our spiritual journey in a way that works best for us. When I say that politics stops at my skin, I do not express a desire; I state a fact. You can never really get inside the head of another person. At best (or worst) you can compel them to imitate your ideal. You will never know how the reaction you demand really relates to their state of mind, their inner thoughts.