Katha Pollitt.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Feminist journalist and poet - Interview

"Although feminism came out of the Left and naturally belongs on the Left, sometimes you wouldn't know it.'

Like Broadway, the novel, and God, feminism has been declared dead many times," Katha Pollitt writes in the introduction to her new book, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, published in September by Knopf. Pollitt herself is one of feminism's liveliest writers, tackling, in her delightfully witty prose, such diverse issues as family values, breast implants, male Muppets, and the notion that women are somehow more special than men. Her book is comprised of the essays and regular columns she writes for The Nation, as well as pieces that first appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Besides being one of America's best political essayists, Pollitt is an accomplished poet. She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including a National Book Critics Circle Award for Antarctic Traveler, published in 1983.

Katha Pollitt grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Radcliffe, and earned an M.F.A. in poetry at Columbia University. For several years she was poet-in-residence at Barnard College, where she has also taught writing. She worked as a copy editor and proofreader at Esquire and The New Yorker, and wrote free-lance book reviews, before becoming first Literary Editor and then an associate editor of The Nation.

I visited her in the cheerful, cluttered apartment she shares with her seven-year-old daughter, Sophie, and her partner, Paul Mattick, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When I arrived, she was attempting to make coffee.

Mattick intervened, averting a near disaster with the grounds and boiling water. "Women don't belong in the kitchen," they said simultaneously, laughing.

In person, Pollitt comes across the same way she does in her writing - funny and personable, extremely sharp - taking aim at stereotypes and fuzzy thinking.

As we talked, her four cats wandered in and out of her study, walking all over her desk and sitting on her lap. We were interrupted several times by phone calls and faxes from people who wanted to tell her about the rave reviews for her book.

Q: Why did you pick the title Reasonable Creatures?

Katha Pollitt: It's part of a quotation from Mary Wollstonecraft, the founding mother of modern feminism. She was the first woman to write a full-dress argument for the emancipation of women, and I'm a big fan of hers.

The quotation was, "I wish for women to be neither angels nor brutes but reasonable creatures." And what she meant was that women should be neither placed on a pedestal nor considered to be of a lower nature than men, but treated as human beings. I think it's truly amazing that 200 years later this is still a controversial statement. You still have to make an argument that women should have the same rights and responsibilities as men, beginning with the right to control your own body and what goes on inside it. So I think it's pretty timely.

I also chose the title because I think it points up my difference with what I call "difference feminists" - like Carol Gilligan, for example - who see women as being so differently formed from men that they make decisions according to a whole other set of criteria. Miraculously, it turns out that what this difference is is exactly the sexist stereotype, with a positive spin put on it: Women are more loving, more sharing, more caring, more intuitive, less hierarchical, "lateral thinkers," and all this. I wanted to set myself squarely against that style of feminism.

Q: Do you think that you are one of a few people who believes women and men are the same kind of creature?

Pollitt: No. Lots of people think it. But the other strand of feminism is also quite strong. And it's much more fashionable. And the reason is that it explains the world we see without resorting to the concept of sexism. What it says is that women don't have power because they don't want power. For example, Suzanne Gordon, in her book, Prisoners of Men's Dreams, thinks women go into low-paid jobs in the helping professions because they are more helpful people. This is a very silly idea. I'm saying that it doesn't have to do with the personal gender-characteristics of the people involved. It has to do with the economy, which is organized along gender lines, and with the way you're socialized.

Q: What do you think about Emily's List - an organization that gives money specifically to women candidates?

Pollitt: Well, I'm glad you're asking me this question. I have a very complicated relationship to Emily's List, which is this: I belong to Emily's List. I send money to people on their list. But at the same time that I am writing out my little checks, I am wondering, why am I doing this? These politicians quite often are not particularly enlightened or feminist or liberal.

I think that people in American politics are always looking for short-cuts. For example, if we elect women, will they automatically on the whole, on average, defend the interests of women, and be less warlike, and be more honest and altruistic and all this kind of thing? I think that, yeah, if you elect a feminist she's going to do that. But just being a Democratic woman is not going to do that. How many of these women are going to stand up and say that the Clinton welfare-reform program is going to devastate the poor and that it's sexist. And that in fact all women with small children ought to receive more benefits than they do? There are a few. Lynn Woolsey, for example, was on welfare, so she's a wonderful person to have in Congress. But some of the others, they're just as big on trimming the budget and "we all have to carry our weight" as the guys are. There's an illusion that women have only women's interests at heart. Women have all the interests of their class, just like men do.

Nonetheless, given identical politics, I'd rather have a woman than a man in office, because I think there's a value in gender-equity for its own sake. There are all kinds of issues where men and women do see things differently, not because women are lateral thinkers and men are hierarchical, but because women have a different life experience, and so they have different fears and different hopes as well.

But these kinds of small and marginal and subtle differences - you can't make a political movement out of them. You have to make a political movement out of politics. It can't be made out of voting for a this-colored person or a this-gendered person as if they'd almost unconsciously carry out your goals.

Q: What do you think about the prospects for organized left-wing politics in this country?

Pollitt: I guess I would have to say at the risk of startling or bothering some of your readers, I don't think there is a Left in this country. There are liberals in this country. But I don't know of any movement, really, that mounts any kind of fundamental challenge to capitalism, and to the basic way this country is organized. The way things are set up I think there is very little space to enact even liberal politics. You see this every time Clinton has some kind of vague, liberal notion that flits through his mind, like, "Let's vaccinate all the children." It immediately becomes immensely complicated and difficult and he's attacked on every front and then he drops it. Now, maybe some of that is a facet of his personality and some of it is a facet of Congress. But if there was a great, big organized movement saying, "Vaccinate the children! Vaccinate the children!" they'd figure out a way to do it. What I think is amazing is the way the left-er end of the spectrum has collapsed into Clintonism. You saw this with health care. And you see it with the crime bill. This is going to be the major achievement of the Clinton Administration - this insane punitive mess. You didn't see "the Left" out there on this issue. And I think the reason for that is the same reason you don't see Marian Wright Edelman out there on the hustings saying Clinton's welfare ideas...