YOU ARE HERE: LAT HomeCollections


Feminist Fatale


February 13, 2005|Charlotte Allen | Charlotte Allen, author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus," co-edits the InkWell blog for the Independent Women's Forum.

When Susan Sontag died recently, she was mourned as America's leading female intellectual. So the question naturally arose: Is there anyone to take her place? If you can't come up with many names, you're in good company. The list is short.

This wasn't always the case. Ironically, during that part of the 20th century when overt discrimination barred many women from advanced educations, lucrative fellowships and prized teaching and editorial positions preparatory for the world of public letters, there were many brilliant, highly articulate female writers who combined a rigorous mind with a willingness to engage broad political, social and literary issues for an audience beyond academia. We still read their books (or at least their epigrams), and we remember their names: Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Mary McCarthy, Iris Murdoch, Hannah Arendt and Sontag, to name several.

Some of these women possessed glittering scholarly credentials. But most did not, because a public intellectual is more than simply an intellectual. Unlike the academic version who speaks mostly to fellow scholars, public intellectuals pitch their ideas to the general reading public -- and their writings appear in newspapers, magazines and books. Garry Wills is a public intellectual; Berkeley's jargon-laden postmodern theorist Judith Butler is not.

Public intellectuals also explore the implications of ideas, which distinguishes them from sharply observant journalists. When Sontag wrote about camp -- or Tom Wolfe about customized cars as kinetic sculpture -- they joined writing about popular culture with the long tradition of writing about high culture.

One possible explanation for the dearth of Sontag successors is our electronics-saturated age that is inexorably diminishing the number of people who read. Our hyper-specialized higher education system is another candidate. Academic postmodernism, with its contempt for the general public, has largely replaced the core liberal arts curriculum that once created a shared literary culture and an appetite for serious ideas.



Greer of "Female Eunuch" fame has lately taken up memoir-writing and a fascination with adolescent boys, and Ehrenreich similarly has branched out into socioeconomic topics ("Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America"). Even then, Ehrenreich looks mainly at the plight of female workers -- but the other women have stayed even closer to home, exploring subjects of interest mostly to like-minded women: gynecology, the backlash against feminism, dysfunctional families, marriage versus career, eating disorders, the beauty industry, pornography (does it victimize women or empower them?), guys who can't share their feelings, the professor who put his hand on your knee back when you were in college. That kind of parochialism disqualifies them as public intellectuals.

Los Angeles Times Articles