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Women and the Ideology of Victimization
| Article
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10122 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
3,799 Words |
| Author
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Jean Bethke Elshtain
Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Centennial Professor of Political
Science and professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
Author of several books, she is the editor of The family in
Political thought and coeditor of Women, War and Feminism. She
is the author of over a hundred essays in scholarly journals
and journals of civic opinion. She has been a fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a scholar-in-
residence at the Bellagio Conference and Study Center,
Bellagio, Italy and is currently a Guggenheim Fellow at work
on an intellectual biography of the Addams. |
There are real victims in our less than perfect world. The dictionary tells me that a victim is "living being sacrificed to some deity, or in the performance of a religious rite," or "one injured, destroyed, or sacrificed under any of various conditions." Our word derives from the Latin victim. Notice that victim is gendered as feminine. Should we make much of this etymological fact? There are radical feminists who insists that we must. Their arguments go much beyond cataloging instances, whether historic or current, of female victimization. They hold that the female is the prototypical victim, the victim past, present, and future. This ideology of the victim casts women as the victims of male oppression from the inception of humanity; indeed, female victimization takes on foundational status. The story of history is the story of men victimizing women.
Victim ideology diverts attention from concrete and specific instances of female victimization in favor of pushing a relentless worldview structured around such dichotomies as victim/victimizer, guilty/innocent, tainted/pure. The female victim, construed as innocent, remains somehow free from sin. An ideology that requires as its original position a picture of woman as Ur-victim is troubling, but it offers its proponents definite ideological advantages. One assumes a stance of purity. To sustain the presumption of purity and the feeling of victimization, however, one must keep upping the rhetorical ante in order to keep rage at a fever pitch. A feminist literary scholar, Patricia Meyer Spacks, warned several years ago that
"the discovery of victimization can have disastrous intellectual consequences. It produces… one note criticism. Readers newly aware of the injustices perpetrated on one sex find evidence of such injustice everywhere--and, sometimes, only evidence of this sort. They discover over and over, in language, structure, and theme, testimony to women's victimization."
The upshot, Spacks concludes, is almost invariably a shrill, monotonous rhetoric caught in the self-confirming cycle of its own story.
FEMINIST IDEOLOGY
In the world of feminist victim ideology, women are routinely portrayed as debased, deformed, and mutilated. By construing herself as a victim, the woman, in this scheme of things, seeks ton attain power through depictions of her victimization. The presumption, as I have suggested, is that the victim speaks in a voice more reliable than that of any other. (And
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