>and the US has recently been
>described (LRB) as the only western country where European feminism has
>taken hold that has witnessed a successful backlash.

More complicated than that. US feminism sprang from American roots and
acquired European theory later. Feminism in the US has largely succeeded,
in the middle class, at least, in very American terms--as an issue of money
and careers. There are still lots of holdouts, but the pattern is
clear--women attend professional and business schools at the same rate as
men, and are awarded more PhDs, and after a difficult generation they now
pass from schools into law firms and university departments, and into all
but the Presidential level of politics, with relative ease. And, outside of
communities of religious orthodoxy, there's considerable freedom of sexual
behavior. There is also much more awareness of issues like child support
and wife battering, and much more legal protection, but like all things
American this varies widely geographically.

Where I think the backlash has succeeded is in how women describe
themselves. Young women who have few worries about inequality or public
censure refuse to call themselves feminists. Partly I think this is a
result of the general American resistance to political theory (despite
what's been going on in the graduate schoold in the past few decades).
Years ago, in the very early days of feminism, men regularly attended
feminist meetings, with the understanding that we had to behave ourselves
and not try to dominate the discussion. At one such meeting of graduate
students at Columbia there was a lot of talk about the changes in society
that women had to bring about, transforming it to one in which cooperation
rather than competition ruled. One woman stopped everyone dead. "I don't
care about any of this. I want all the dirty things that men have."

Another factor, I think, was the publicizing by the right of
easily-parodied behaviors--not hard to do in a place where all ideas tend
to be reduced to simple slogans. Did Europe and Australia have parties to
celebrate abortions? Speculum parties? De rigeueur lesbian experimentation
by straight women? Plans for the eventual elimination of the reproductive
participation of men through parthenogenesis?

The effect of the parody was that a lot of women identified feminism with
what they saw as extreme behavior with which they didn't wish to be
identified. At the same time, there was public acknowledgement of the large
percentage of women, mostly working-class, who had been working outside the
home all along (my grandmother, for instance), and a large increase in the
number of working middle-class women, for financial reasons.

This of course is from my perspective as a New York male of a certain age
and class. Things might look very different in Iowa, or to a woman, or to a
working-class guy.

Among women poets in the US there has been no retreat that I'm aware of as
far as subject-matter is concerned. That battle was I think successfully
won by Adrienne Rich and Hornor Moore (whose "My Mother's Moustache" was a
landmark text) over thirty years ago.

Mark