In her second article addressing the absence of women at the leading edge of cultural change, Elizabeth Debold calls for an evolutionary elite to continue the work of women's liberation.

“How odd it seems,” writes Naomi Wolf, “that women, the majority of the human species, have not, over the course of so many centuries, intervened successfully once and for all on their own behalf.” Really odd, in fact. Take the failed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as one small example. This proposed amendment to the Constitution is a straightforward guarantee that women and men will be treated equally under the law. But women haven't posed enough of a collective political threat to get it passed. When I was in my mid-twenties, I was part of the efforts to rally support for the ERA. With another young woman who became a close friend, I went from house to house in a flat, featureless suburban neighborhood of West Palm Beach, Florida, to speak with women about it. I'll never forget the response of one woman, her Southern-tinged twang edged with indignation: “I'm raising my son to be a soldier and my daughter to be a lady.” This woman, whose name I don't know and whose face I cannot recall, stood in her driveway, chatting with a neighbor as her young son sped around her on his orange plastic Big Wheel trike. We faced each other briefly—me and my friend, this woman and hers—wordlessly threatening each other with our different assumptions about life. To me, she was one of the too many women who were unaware of their own oppression and so were blocking our collective progress, our ability to reach for success in the world. To her, I may well have seemed irresponsible in questioning what was natural between women and men, the security that we find in traditional roles.

The potential of a “once and for all” intervention such as Wolf is advocating, one that could actually shift women's status across the board, is momentous. Even though the women's movement itself has already created an enormous transformation in Western culture, the notion that all women will unite to make a further, irrevocable shift happen seems far-fetched. Indeed, fundamental tensions within and among women—like those felt on that suburban driveway in Florida, between the drive for success and the pull to security—make such a shift almost unimaginable. Now that we have the freedom to choose our politics and passions, women have spread across the political spectrum, developing positions that either straddle or try to force together the often contradictory aspects of our lives—our competing desires for success in the world and for security in relationship.

Is there a way to move toward Wolf's “once and for all” shift in women's status? Perhaps. But it is not going to come from all women uniting in the shared pursuit of this goal. The idea that there would ever be a monovocal movement that includes every woman is absurd. Men don't speak with one voice, and neither do women. The last phase of the women's movement started with a radical fringe—leftist women in the civil rights/Vietnam War era—whose efforts to raise consciousness and demand equality between women and men sent shock waves through the culture. Change, as evolutionary theory tells us, never comes from the center, from the status quo, but only from the edges. So an intervention that would shift the whole will have to start, again, at the radical edge. Transformation is an elitist process: not necessarily elitist in terms of social or economic privilege (although that can help to free one's energy for something more than mere survival) but elitist in terms of urgency and perspective. For womankind to move forward, for the possibility of an intervention “once and for all” to become a reality, a significant minority of women have to push the edge and develop a higher perspective that meets the often conflicting demands of our chaotic world.

Where are the women who are willing to push this edge? Even to recognize the need for an evolutionary elite goes completely against the grain of egalitarian postmodern culture. The liberation movements that ushered in postmodernism back in the sixties—like feminism and civil rights—opened Western culture to the value of diversity and difference and the recognition of a plurality of views. Hence, postmodernism is both radically egalitarian and individualistic. The notion of universal truth—that there is one right way to think—became outdated, which freed each of us to seek our own truth. In this postmodern world of liberated individuals, what feels right by me is my angle on truth, no better or worse than yours. Of course, no one really believes this. We each righteously hold on to “my truth” and look askance at perspectives that are different from our own. In that Florida driveway, I assumed that the other woman was expressing false consciousness—a dupe of the oppressive forces in a culture that wants to keep women sweeping the hearth. But her consciousness was not “false.” It was based on a different set of core assumptions. Her assumption that it is right for men and women to have specific and different roles is core to the modern worldview that has been ascendant in Western culture since the late seventeenth century. I was standing in her driveway to change that worldview—to bring in a postmodern perspective that values a plurality of options and choices. Today postmodernism is the dominant perspective of the culturally liberal, educated class. But now, for womankind to move forward, postmodernism is the edge that we need to reach beyond.

In a world where we are exposed to so many different perspectives, it is hard to distinguish where that postmodern edge is. Each significant cultural shift of the last millennium—from the traditional feudal societies to the modern world of industrial capitalism and, most recently, to egalitarian postmodernism—was triggered by a shift in the consciousness of a relatively small number of people. Forty years ago, the efforts of a very small minority of activists started a larger movement that catapulted the culture from the modern to the postmodern. While the resulting changes have had some effect on everyone in Western society, there are still large numbers of women who embody and express cultural perspectives that predate the postmodern. Many, in fact, still hold a traditional premodern religious worldview. And many more hold the perspective of the modern world, a world divided by gender, in which men occupy the public sphere of success and women, the secure domestic sphere. However, the snug and secure modern home was a microcosm of the feudal system—that's the significance of the adage “a man's home is his castle.” Thus, the leap that women made over the span of a few decades through the feminist movement is enormous: a jump from semi-feudal subservience in a man's castle to self-determination in a diverse and globalizing postmodern world. And frankly, not all of us—nor even most of us—have fully made this leap, which makes finding the edge from which to move forward even more difficult. Women of all stripes are now offering profoundly different suggestions about what should rightfully be our next step.

How do we recognize the real voices from the edge? I'll offer one clue: those who argue that there is no longer any need for an intervention “once and for all” are pretty sure not to be expressing something new. Ironically, such voices come from both ends of the existing political spectrum. Conservative writer Kay S. Hymowitz declares that “we are all feminists now,” citing a poll that shows that over ninety percent of adolescent girls surveyed support equal rights for women and almost as many don't believe that it's necessary to have a man in order to be a success. But before victory is declared, Hymowitz unequivocally states that the organized movement of women called “Feminism” (with a capital F) is dead: “It's over. As in finished.” Why? Because she doesn't believe that most or even many women want “to transcend both biology and ordinary bourgeois longings [for material comfort and emotional security].” She declares that “after the revolution, women want husbands and children as much as they want anything in life.” This is undoubtedly true—but Hymowitz uses the fact that the majority of women want a family life to argue that there is no further to go. While she acknowledges that it's inevitable that there will continue to be “a deep tension between
. . . female ambition [and the desire for children] that will spark many years of cultural debate,” Hymowitz doesn't see any reason to question our cultural arrangements and seems resigned to the fact that women will not reach parity with men in worldly power. Because our fast-paced economy is rooted in these gender divisions, it will always punish women who want to divide their time between success at work and security at home. As she puts it, “The very economy that stirs the imaginations and ambitions of young people . . . is the same economy that will never be particularly family-friendly and that often leaves ambitious working mothers behind.” But if we accept modernity's gender-based division of success and security as a given, then Hymowitz is right: the majority of women will end up choosing to have children and stay at home, if they can afford to. However, using this fact to argue that nothing more needs to change is misguided. If cultural transformation were left up to the majority, very little would ever change. The status quo will never fight for radical evolution—it never has.

Interestingly, a look to the left reveals a similar disavowal of the need for collective change. Karen Lehrman, a liberal feminist, concurs with Hymowitz that “the contemporary women's movement [has] outlived its usefulness.” Lehrman's reasoning is that feminist ideology has become too restrictive. Because women have been freed from the code of femininity that kept us in the kitchen, she believes that we are now each making our own individual conscious choices. She, along with other feminist writers, claims that women are no longer victims of society, no longer held down. In fact, she argues that a monolithic feminism—that sees women's oppression everywhere—is now oppressive to women's full and varied expression of who we are. As she writes in The Lipstick Proviso, “Women don't have to sacrifice their individuality, or even their femininity—whatever that means to each of them—in order to be equal.” While Lehrman believes feminism is critical for women's lives, she asserts that any collective movement that claims to represent the good of women as a whole is obsolete. She upholds each woman's right to seek success and security as she sees fit. Lehrman does suggest that the fact that so many women still seem to be freely choosing the security of home life means that we need to question more deeply what it truly means to make autonomous choices. For Lehrman, this deeper questioning will not come from participation in an organized movement but only through personal choice. In essence, she argues that it is now up to each individual woman to work out her own relationship with a divided world. Ironically, choice, the mantra of the feminist movement, has proven to be a double-edged sword—at first cutting through rigid restrictions on what women can do and now, through an emphasis on individualism, cutting off continued collective change.

It's the emphasis on personal choice without any larger context that marks the new postmodern, liberal status quo expressed by Lehrman and other Gen-X and Gen-Y feminists. “Do what you want, when you want” is the motto of a glitzily packaged feminism that attempts to move beyond victimization to a celebration of power. In Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards deplore the fact that the feminist slogan “the personal is political” has been “misinterpreted to mean that what an individual woman does in her personal life (like watching porn, wearing garter belts, dyeing her hair, having an affair, earning money, shaving her legs) undermines her feminist credibility.” In other words, because personal choice has become the core liberal feminist value, what those choices are don't matter. All is fair and feminist as long as you feel free and powerful. Lehrman goes so far as to suggest that it doesn't really matter what motivates a woman to exercise power as long as the choice is in her hands: “While. . . some women may not want too much power in the public sphere . . . many women want a great deal of it. And many women want power for reasons that don't always suit everyone's tastes. Some women want power solely to be able to buy expensive clothes, big houses, and elegant cars. Others want power to make political decisions that don't exactly chime with the reigning politically correct agenda. And many women (even some outspoken feminists) don't always acquire power or wield it in the nicest way.” The new feminist freedom simply comes down to doing—and getting—what you want.

These statements express no sense of right or wrong, better or worse—no moral claims—just a sense of entitlement to do as one pleases. Thus, while feminism has been harshly critiqued for creating an ideal of woman-as-victim, continually entitled to redress and special treatment, these recent approaches to feminism, ironically enough, express the entitlement of the postmodern narcissist that is the victim's alter ego. Both the position of victimization and the position of narcissistic entitlement are liberated from any sense of responsibility to anything other than the self. Moreover, doing what you want when you want it may not be freedom at all, but simply bondage to compulsively narcissistic cravings for sex, affirmation, pleasure, and power. In fact, the avowed amorality of postmodernism (which, for example, may sound like, “I have no right to judge anyone else's truth” or even “Before you say anything judgmental, walk a mile in that person's shoes”) is part of the reason that there has been such an extreme backlash against organized feminism from classic conservatives and fundamentalists. Feminism—as one aspect of postmodernity—is condemned for having led to the dissolution of the family, irresponsible parenting, and self-destructive promiscuity among girls. This is only true if one equates “feminism” with the entirety of the pluralist postmodernism that has eroded the moral consensus of the culture, which would be a vast oversimplification.

Postmodern feminism, regardless of its guise, is what we need to move beyond. The Janus-faced woman—simultaneously victimized and entitled—has trapped us in a narcissism that keeps us from working for the collective evolution of woman. And I would agree with many critics, such as Hymowitz and Lehrman, that feminism as an ideology has become strange—and estranged from women's lives. (The oft-cited, albeit distorted, position of the late pioneer Andrea Dworkin, who declared that all heterosexual sex is rape, is but one example.)

I have a suggestion: Why don't we abandon feminism as a postmodern ideology and instead embrace women's liberation as an evolutionary process? This could be the place from which to move forward. The willingness of the sixties activist women to open their own minds and evolve their own consciousness was considered extreme and even crazy, but today even conservatives can calmly note that the movement is over because it has succeeded so well in giving women options in life. This capacity to make real choices has been a true gift of feminism, specifically, and of postmodernity, in general. The next task is far more overwhelming: to move beyond the mere recognition and acceptance of pluralism's many perspectives and attempt to bring a higher integration to our fractured world. And whether or not we can reach that goal will depend on our ability to liberate ourselves from the deeper conditioning that rules our choices, the conditioning that compels us toward safety and self-satisfaction. Gaining freedom of choice is only the first step to becoming a conscious moral agent. After that, the nature of the choices that we make is critical—we can either support the status quo or we can reach for a higher perspective, a new moral ground, an evolution in women's consciousness.

There are some women who have pointed beyond the endless self-seeking of postmodernism. Interestingly (at the risk of alienating my younger sisters), they come from the old guard of the women's liberation movement. Their insights, taken together, call for us to move in a very different direction and, perhaps, can provide starting principles for the next phase of women's liberation.

1. We have to judge—starting with a good look in the mirror. In a poignant reckoning with the actions of Pfc. Lynndie England in Abu Ghraib prison, author Barbara Ehrenreich acknowledges that simply allowing women to have choices—to be in the military, for example—will not change the world. Why? Because “women can do the unthinkable,” the morally repugnant and downright evil. Her response pulls on us to give up the nineteenth-century belief that we women have less violence and more care in our hearts than men and to reckon with the reality of what we are truly capable of. Even as Ehrenreich appreciates England's predicament, her willingness to judge the young woman's actions invites us to make the critical distinction between, on the one hand, supporting the status quo and, on the other, transforming ourselves and society. All choices are not equal.

2. We need to create a higher moral ground beyond the self. Moral choices are the basis of our relationships with each other, and they cannot simply be based on what feels good or right to the individual. Nor can we move back to the rule-based personal morality of the religious traditions. Those moral codes were created for an ordered feudal society, not for an individualistic consumer culture. Carol Gilligan, in her groundbreaking work, In a Different Voice, discovered that men and women often use very different criteria for making moral choices—which is to be expected, given that both traditional and modern societies place men and women in very different roles. Yet, at the end of her book, she suggests that the next stage in moral evolution will demand that we move beyond this polarity of masculine and feminine ways of thinking and being. “In . . . maturity,” she says, “both perspectives converge.”

3. We have to reach beyond gender. To find our way to a new moral ground, we need to question our compulsive choices—the desire for sexual power, the pull toward security—and to seek something new beyond woman as we have known her. Gloria Steinem has been speaking for a few years about moving “beyond gender,” yet what that means remains vague. No wonder. It demands an extraordinary effort to find out who we are, beyond the victim, the entitled narcissist, the sexual provocateur, or any of the many faces of Eve. The transformation of consciousness that would be unleashed by women making choices for something beyond either personal success/power or the security of the hearth could transform society “once and for all” in ways we cannot imagine now.

4. Hierarchy is essential. Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade, argues against the postmodern credo that disavows vertical hierarchy in human relationship. “There is so much unreality about what we should move towards,” she observes. “People need structure. The issue is what kind of structure. We do need hierarchy. Hierarchy is an actualization where accountability doesn't just flow from the bottom up, it also flows from the top down.” If we place a value on the development of consciousness, we automatically create a hierarchy: those with a more evolved and inclusive perspective have a greater responsibility to work for the development of the whole. That means that we privileged postmoderns have to take the responsibility of being the elite to push the leading edge further.

What I hear in these women's voices is a call for a new kind of elite. The continuing liberation of the consciousness of woman will only come from those at the edge who feel an urgent need to move forward for the sake of humankind. The success of women's liberation thus far did not come about through simply seeking what I want. It came about through reaching for change far beyond the individual. As Susan Estrich, in her latest book, Sex and Power, asks the generations who have chosen postmodern self-satisfaction, “What about the sense of power and possibility that comes with the realization that what is is not inevitable, that the struggle is larger than you, that change is possible?” Right, what about that? Isn't women's liberation about the transformation of the world as ourselves? This is perhaps the most critical step toward something new. No longer can the context for our lives be the postmodern pursuit of pleasure and power or even the modernist desire for worldly success and homebound security. Without our eyes on something far greater than ourselves, we will never intervene “once and for all” on our own behalf. And if we don't, as Wolf warns us, “the future is ours to lose.”