Page 72 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

66 CULTURAL STUDIES

them as mistaken analyses which have now been superseded. What I have
attempted to do in this article, however, is to understand how popular feminists
from Friedan to Wolf have engaged with one particular figuration, namely the
image of conspiracy, and to see how its logic continues to function in feminist
writing today, not least in the construction of the very category of the popular. In
effect, then, I am arguing that academic/cultural studies feminism needs to bring
the same strategies of reading to both its own past and to popular feminism as it
has already developed in its reading of popular culture, informed neither by an
uncritical acceptance of all feminisms in the name of sisterhood, nor by a
conspiracy theory of duped masses and unrelenting domination.

Notes

1 In this article I am using ‘popular’ to designate not so much the degree of
popularity (although the two books I concentrate on, The Feminine Mystique and
The Beauty Myth, were both bestsellers), but rather the way in which a certain
tradition of ‘middlebrow’ American feminism is marked out as ‘popular’ precisely
because of its modes of address and rhetorical structures, one of the most favoured
of which, I am arguing, is the trope of conspiracy. Since writing this piece, I have
come across the excellent article by Jennifer Wicke, in which she argues that ‘to
the extent that academic feminism has an opposite, it is not movement feminism
per se, but the celebrity pronouncements made by and about women with high
visibility in the various media’. Instead of immediately vilifying ‘celebrity
feminism’ as ‘a realm of ideological ruin’, counsels Wicke, ‘we must recognize
that the energies of the celebrity imaginary are fuelling feminist discourse and
political activity as never before’ (1994:753).
2 In her persuasive rereading of The Feminine Mystique, Rachel Bowlby makes a
similar point: ‘Friedan is constantly caught in this contradiction, which can be
smoothed over only by accepting the arbitrary distinction between true and false
dreams—between those that are from within and correspond to the “human”
potential, and those that are from without and are imposed by the manipulators of
the “feminine mystique”’ (1992:87). Bowlby also draws attention to the
conspiratorial aspects of the book, but does not elaborate this observation.
3 The passage comes from Ann Jones’s Foreword to her Women Who Kill (1981:vii–
xviii). Noting that ‘among academic historians and literary historians’ it ‘seems to
be incumbent upon the author to say that readers who gain the impression from the
book that men as a group have done something unpleasant as a group to women as
a group are entirely mistaken’, Jones concludes that, ‘if this book leaves the
impression that men have conspired to keep women down, that is exactly the
impression I mean to convey; for I believe that men could not have succeeded as
well as they have without concerted effort’ (1981:xvii).
4 Compare, for example, Faludi’s portrayal of the backlash: ‘In the last decade, the
backlash has moved through the culture’s secret chambers, traveling through
passageways of flattery and fear. Along the way it has adopted disguises It
manipulates a system of rewards and punishments…. Cornered, it denies its own
existence, points an accusatory finger at feminism, and burrows deeper