Clementine Ford: the feminist goal is autonomy not choice

Clementine Ford is an Australian feminist. She is someone who believes that the overriding goal in life is individual autonomy. She has written, for example, that it is dangerous for women to seek a happy family life as a life goal. Why? For this reason:

it's dangerous to view it [family] as a life goal, as an act that will secure happiness at the expense of the pursuits that will secure freedom, independence and autonomy.
 

She wants women to go for freedom, independence and autonomy as life goals; if marriage and family are to happen then they should be arranged around women, rather than being seen as an aim or purpose in life.

But this sets up a paradox. If you believe that autonomy is the overriding aim, then this suggests that individuals should be able to choose as they will. So what happens if a woman chooses something that limits her autonomy, because she thinks there are more important things in life? If you say she shouldn't make that choice you are restricting her autonomous freedom to choose. But if you are happy to let her choose something other than autonomy, you are allowing women's autonomy to be compromised.

So what are feminists to do? I'm going to give Clementine Ford's response. In a column on "myths about women" her second myth is:

Women choosing things - anything - is a feminist act and can't be criticised.

She goes on to explain as follows:

But wait a gotdurn minute, I hear you cry! Wouldn’t being a stay-at-home be her choice? And isn’t choice what you bra-burning feminazis are all about?

A gold star to the chap in front! Yes, choice is very important. It is, in fact, vital when it comes to things like child-rearing, abortion, sex, work, life, the universe and everything in between. But ‘choice’ and the ability to exercise it in and of itself is not a feminist act; rather, it’s the result of demanding women be entitled to autonomy the same way men are. More importantly, defending women’s right to choose whatever they like doesn’t mean other women have a duty to agree with those choices or even respect them.
 

Her answer is that the goal is not so much choice as autonomy. So if women choose something other than autonomy, those choices should be criticised.

But that doesn't really solve the paradox. The only way to solve the paradox is either for feminists to get society to a point at which no woman chooses "incorrectly" or else to admit that autonomy is not always and everywhere the overriding aim in life.

(Note too the assumption in the sentence I bolded that men have an autonomy that women don't have. This, presumably, is what the average feminist believes - it would be interesting to let them live the life of an average man for a period of time to disabuse them of the notion.)

Conflicted motherhood

Joanna Murray-Smith confesses in this morning's Age,

I am leading the life the feminists of the '70s dreamed of: successful professional and mother - but it's no dream.

Why not? Because of the mental anguish she feels at not having time to spend with her children. She asks,

Where is the play time with our kids? Where are the long hours of unhurried togetherness?

She admits that "I go to bed at night asking myself over and over again how much our working lives really benefit our children?" and that "increasingly I resent the dishonesty of pretending that our children are not guinea pigs in an experiment that is, in many ways, a failure."

What is her response to this situation? On the negative side, she claims that "the true feminist quest [is] to continually re-examine women's choices", as if feminism itself could redress the balance and support the choice of women to stay at home and look after their children. As I've pointed out previously, the logic of feminist theory runs counter to women choosing to stay at home to care for their own children. It's a forlorn hope that feminism might reform itself and allow women to freely choose this option.

More positively, though, Joanna Murray-Smith does question the liberal idea that we should aim for unimpeded individual choice. She realises that women can't do, in reality, what they are told they can do, and simply choose to have everything at the same time. There will always exist impediments to individual choice. She relates how,

my generation of middle-class women, desperate to realise our mothers' dreams, sailed into the professions with the bluster of undimmable expectations

but having also become mothers,

we have woken up in our 30s and 40s and found that you can not be a master of parallel lives, only, with a little luck, of one.

She has become aware, too, that unimpeded individual choice has little to say about what we owe others or what our adult responsibilities are. She writes that women need to be,

vigilant not only to our desires but also to our mistakes, to find the elusive balance between our needs and our responsibilities to our children ... We have been taught to applaud our own rights, but now we need to question how the volume of that applause has rendered mute the rights of our children.

Her conclusion casts doubt on the whole political culture of unimpeded individual choice. She writes,

Perhaps we have reached the point where the feminist cliche of having choices is finally undressed. The gift of choices is booby trapped. The concept of choices is laden with the grief of loss. Something is always lost.