This lecture explores both feminist and mainstream
cultural discourses about women who refuse
an ethical commitment to collectivity, and
whose politics differ from the largely left-leaning
feminist project. It also examines how avowedly
and vocally “selfish women” view feminism
and, indeed, women. Here I revisit the works
and words of two arch female individualists:
the Decadent French woman writer Rachilde,
who wrote a tract dedicated to explaining
her opposition to feminism in 1928, and the
Russian-American writer Ayn Rand whose philosophy
of objectivism describes the pursuit of “rational
selfishness”. And, in a final and shorter
section, I consider the role of the UK’s
own first female prime minister, Margaret
Thatcher, who became a cultural repository
for anxieties about powerful individualistic
women and whose own self-presentation embodies
some of the contradictions and difficulties
of propounding a discourse of selfishness
while female.
In contemporary feminist parlance, women who
achieve individual advancement and personal
economic emancipation within the capitalist
Western framework are often labelled “exceptional
women”, signifying that their advancement
has been achieved despite their gender, rather
than as part of a collective gain for all
women. Such women are perceived to serve a
patriarchal function, since their success
can be held up as an argument that structural
disadvantages, such as the “glass ceiling”,
do not really exist after all, on the basis
of the exception that proves the rule. “Exceptional
woman syndrome” is a frequently used term
to signify the selfishness of women who lack
both an awareness of the rarity and precariousness
of their own position, and a sense of solidarity
with other women.
“Exceptionality” has a second set of associations
that are also relevant to this project. Currents
in 19th-century European philosophy and the
aesthetic school of Romanticism inaugurated
the age of the modern individual by imagining
a singular figure: a sovereign subject to
whom the usual rules and moral codes that
control the masses do not apply. In Nietzschean
terms, the exceptional subject is an Übermensch,
a superman, a genius, artist, outsider, or,
as I have explored elsewhere, a master criminal
figure. That this figure is the fantasy creation
of a masculine imagination, and almost without
exception figured as male, makes it an intriguing
precedent, but a precedent nonetheless, for
the conception of subjectivity imagined by
these selfish women. Both
Ayn Rand and Rachilde propound discourses
of exceptionalism in this sense, both to set
themselves apart from the “common run”
of women, and to imagine fictional characters
whose achievements and originality transcend
the norm.
Another related concept, “individualism”,
originated in that same 19th century context,
and has become, in our neo-liberal moment,
a tainted concept, derided by critics of capitalism
as an ethically impoverished and philosophically
dubious form of subjectivity. The ideal of
“individualism” is used as a seductive
commercial tool, encouraging citizens to rebrand
themselves as consumers, and selling them
a perfectable version of the self, in line
with Michel Foucault’s analysis of the docile
bodies of modernity. Modern Western humans
identify with and internalize the subjectivizing
discourses of consumerism which appear, via
the smoke and mirrors of neoliberalism, as
gestures of authentic individualism. Critics
of what has become known as post-feminism,
of which I consider myself one, decry the
degree to which contemporary media and political
discourse exhort women to adopt a rhetoric
of individual empowerment, often through lifestyle
and consumer choices, as an alternative to
critique and activism.
However, it would be a mistake to assume that
a suspicion of neoliberalism and the version
of “individualism” that we know today
has to equate to an unquestioning endorsement
of the concept of collectivism as an untainted
or self-evident good. It bears stating that
collectivism qua ethic is itself often heavily
gendered, such that the very premise of feminist
solidarity can be seen to be overburdened
with reliance on the stereotype of women as
naturally predisposed towards favouring collaborative,
caring, and community-based modes of working
and forms of action. This, in and of itself,
can be an essentializing straitjacket for
women, and it is perhaps unsurprising that
more glamorous and personally pleasurable
versions of an albeit dubiously feminist message
might appeal to ambitious women who do not
wish to put the interests of others above
themselves, as women have been taught is their
proper role for centuries, or yet to introverted,
reclusive, or unsociable women.
Work on the feminist ethics of care, associated
with Carol Gilligan and her 1982 book In A
Different Voice, perhaps most explicitly embodies
the idea of women as somehow innately predisposed
to collectivity, from a feminist point of
view. Gilligan argues that women differ from
men in their approach to morality. Men prefer
a morality of rights, she claims, while women
prefer a morality of responsibility. The former
emphasizes separateness and individuality,
while the latter is underpinned by a concern
with connections and relatedness. Gilligan’s
gesture in this book is a rebuttal to prevalent
misogynistic modern ideas, such as Sigmund
Freud’s claim that women’s morality and
sense of justice are less fully developed
than men’s (“It must be admitted that
women have but little sense of justice, and
this is no doubt connected with the preponderance
of envy in their mental life”). Gilligan
argues that: “The ethic of care and responsibility
is at least as valid and mature as the ethic
of rights and justice.”
It is possible to see an interlocking and
seemingly infinite game of what Foucault would
call discourse and reverse discourse here.
The psy sciences tell women that they are
morally inferior. Feminists respond, motivated
by justifiable outrage, with assertions that,
to the contrary, women’s innate characteristics
accord them a superior morality. The flaw
in this response strategy is the acceptance
of the underlying assumption that there is
an innate “nature” of women that needs
to be defined and asserted as morally superior
or inferior. This fundamental political error
leads to a number of logical aporia and political
traps.
In turning to Rachilde and Rand, women whose
ethics, politics and aesthetics could not
possibly be further from Gilligan’s ethic
of care, my aim is not to recuperate these
avowedly anti-feminist names for a reconstituted
genealogy of feminism, in a sort of queer
reading against the grain; rather, I aim to
look at how figures who reject and are rejected
in turn by feminism pose interesting questions
about feminism’s own biases and internal
rules, and about the sort of female subject
deemed its proper subject. This project in
part arises from the research I undertook
for my book The Subject of Murder: Gender,
Exceptionality and The Modern Killer. In writing
that book it was to the figure of Myra Hindley
that my attention kept returning. Hindley,
as a woman complicit in the killing of children,
represented not only a hate figure for the
1960s gutter press, but also an embarrassment
for feminism, a betrayal, it seems, of what
feminism requires women to be in order to
be counted as women at all and worthy of representation.
Few feminists at the time, with the notable
exception of Germaine Greer, were willing
to consider that the disproportionate hatred
that accrued to Hindley, in comparison to
her lover Ian Brady, had everything to do
with her transgression of the feminine role
of care-giver, a transgression that made her
crimes appear far worse than those of her
male partner, which were understandable as
a mere aberrant extension of masculinity,
rather than a categorical travesty of nature.
You may think that this is a very extreme
example of the phenomenon I am exploring today
- the selfish woman - however I would like
to share with you an anecdote. I have encountered
more consternation and shock from feminist
and leftist colleagues when I have told them
that I am working on Rand and Thatcher, than
when I spoke about my research on Hindley.
It has been suggested that by giving my time
to a reading of Rand, rather than to reading
feminist writers, or to thinking about Thatcher,
rather than about the victims of her policies,
I am somehow betraying a feminist project.
I find this quite extraordinary.
We might assume that a feminist ethics would
wish to admit that the full range of human
attitudes and characteristics will be held
by women, as well as by men, since feminism
is sometimes described as “the radical notion
that women are human beings” (a definition
attributed to Cheris Kramerae). To deny women
any legitimate recourse to selfishness or
self-interest appears to be to short-circuit
the achievement of that radical idea and fall
back on a reactionary and one-dimensional
view of woman as natural altruistic care-giver.
It seems, then, that of all gender heretical
figures, and for those of all political colours,
the selfish woman is the most inconvenient
of deviants.
Of all the authors I have researched and written
on in my role as Professor of French Discourses
of Sexuality, one of the most enduringly fascinating
to me is the Decadent woman writer Rachilde,
pen name of Marguerite Eymery, whose lived
for almost a century from 1860-1953. In previous
projects, I have situated Rachilde as a sometimes
imitative, sometimes parodic and therefore
deconstructive, commentator on the discursive
fashions of her time: literary Decadence,
sexology, and degeneration theory. In that
context, Rachilde presents a uniquely dissident
female voice in an overwhelmingly male and
explicitly masculinist discursive field. In
this lecture, I consider Rachilde in slightly
different terms: as both an avowed individualist
and as a vocal enemy of feminism.
Rachilde’s biographer Diana Holmes has described
the Decadents at the turn of the century in
France as “instinctively more right- than
left-wing” in their “rejection of democracy
[which they understood as] the reign of the
barbarians”. Yet, unlike the establishmentarian
French right-wing, they were also anarchic
and counter-cultural in their critique of
bourgeois mores and morality, and in their
morbid and ambivalent celebration of the perceived
grand decline of society. The Decadents, then,
were that paradox: a group of individualists.
Yet, significantly, Rachilde’s work was
not critiqued as immoral in terms of its Decadent
thematics or its individualistic, anti-social
thrust per se; rather it was critiqued in
specifically gendered terms. For a woman to
have imagined the strong, perverse protagonists
against society who populated her novels led
to her being diagnosed as suffering from a
specifically feminine kind of neurosis. The
themes in Rachilde’s work: gender inversion,
sexual perversion, and baroque violence, were
not at all unusual in the context of Decadent
writing. But, whereas in response to the works
of her male contemporaries, such as Maurice
Rollinat, critics like Jules Boissière and
Henri Fouquier espied subtle parody and social
critique in such tropes, they instead termed
Rachilde and her work variously “sadistic”,
“ghoulish”, and “perverted” (Dubut
de Laforest). Even Maurice Barrès, a professed
admirer of Rachilde, wrote in the preface
of her novel of gender inversion, Monsieur
Vénus (in 1884), that it was the product
of “la maladie du siècle”, the malady
of the century, i.e. hysteria, and that Rachilde,
then a young woman of twenty, should be understood
as “une nerveuse” (a neurotic) and “une
fièvreuse” (a feverish woman), “gouvernée
uniquement par l’instinct” (uniquely governed
by instinct).
More recently, I have become interested in
the extraordinarily influential proponent
of unbridled capitalism and preacher of the
virtue of selfishness, Ayn Rand, born Alisa
Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg in 1905. (She
died in 1982). Her writing and her political
philosophy of objectivism are cited as major
influences on contemporary right-wing American
politics. (Figures such as senator Rand Paul
and Republican congressman Paul Ryan profess
admiration for her.) Her best-known novel,
Atlas Shrugged of 1957, which tells the story
of a strike undertaken by the most brilliant
and productive of society’s individuals,
at the behest of the mysterious John Galt,
“the man who stopped the motor of the world”,
has been described as the most influential
book in America after the Bible. And Ayn Rand
has been described by philosophers Douglas
Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen “among the
most controversial figures of our time”.
At the most superficial level, the controversy
can be traced to her single-minded pursuit
of the ideal of what she called “rational
selfishness” as the highest moral principle,
while denouncing altruism as an evil. In a
famed television interview with Phil Donahue
from 1979, Rand explains why, for her, altruism
is wrong:
Yet, despite the tremendous influence of Rand,
many critics dismiss her writing and philosophy
as childish and as naively melodramatic, as
appealing to impressionable college students
rather than to adult thinkers. I find this
charge particularly telling, as the combination
of selfishness or narcissism and being female
has tended to make selfish women the objects
of pathologizing discourses of immaturity
throughout the history of the psy sciences,
since a mature woman is defined in psychoanalytic
discourse as the child-bearer and doting mother,
whose narcissism has found its properly feminine
- that is secondary - form. This lends authority
to the dismissal of unrepentantly selfish
women such as Ayn Rand as less than full adult
subjects, and as doubly aberrant. That this
interpretation is not an exaggeration can
be seen by examining a review of Atlas Shrugged
by Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist
Spy turned Christian, in the National Review.
Chambers writes that Rand’s “dictatorial”
tone suggests to him that “children probably
irk the author and may make her uneasy”.
That such a comment would be made of a male
author is unthinkable. What is being taken
to task here is Rand’s failure at appropriate
demure femininity. Chambers then went on,
with outrageous hyperbole: “from almost
any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be
heard from painful necessity, commanding:
‘to a gas chamber, go!’”. And in similarly
exaggerated tones, Gore Vidal wrote of Atlas
that “Ayn Rand’s philosophy is nearly
perfect in its immorality”.
Rand consistently denied that the hostility
she faced as a philosopher and the often brutal
critical responses elicited by her published
fiction work had anything at all to do with
her status as a female thinker and author,
according to her close friend and biographer
Barbara Branden. Yet, Branden claims that,
in the business of being a published writer
and philosopher, “Ayn Rand was […] greatly
hindered by being a woman” (26) Branden
believes that these extreme and hyperbolic
critical responses have as much to do with
their author being female, as with the arguably
rebarbative elitism of her message, and its
uncompromising vision of individualism. Indeed,
if one thinks of the kinds of violently misogynistic
and individual male-glorifying material written
by contemporary male American authors, such
as Henry Miller and Norman Mailer (who explicitly
likened the psychopath to “the hero of our
age” in an essay published the same year
as Atlas Shrugged), and who faced much less
moral and aesthetic condemnation - it becomes
clear that it is Rand’s gender that leads
to Atlas Shrugged being demonised
quite to this degree and quite in these terms.
The misogynistic critical responses faced by both Rachilde and Rand should logically have
made them candidates for a feminist agenda, yet nothing could be further from the truth.
In her 1928 tract Pourquoi je ne suis pas féministe (Why I am not a feminist), 
Rachilde explains that “I’ve always acted as an individual, never thinking
of founding a society or overturning the one
that exists”. And Rand objects to
feminism precisely on the grounds that feminists
elevate their gender above their individuality,
creating a form of collectivism that she associated
with the hated Soviet communism of her childhood.
While believing that - quote - “the notion
that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’
is an ancient, primitive evil”, she was nevertheless unwilling
to support the idea of women as a class sharing
a claim to any particular rights or agenda:
Adopting wholesale the discourses about women
that characterize her cultural moment, and
that coloured the pathologizing and reductive
critical reception of her work, Rachilde figures
women as physiologically and psychologically
weaker than, and therefore inferior to, men:
“women are secondary when it comes to strength"
and "Women are the
inferior siblings of men simply because they
have physical weaknesses". And, echoing
the logic of feminine nervous frailty and
hysterical neurosis voiced by male literary
critics, she writes “Je suis une creature
douée, comme toutes les femmes, d’excessives
névrosités” (I am a creature endowed,
like all women, with excessive neurosis).
Rachilde seems to have operated a schizoid
view of herself, on the one hand arguing for
her right to freedom as an individual social
and creative agent who, in proto-Randian terms,
claimed “J’aime par-dessus la logique”.
(I love logic above all things); on the
other accepting that insofar as she was biologically
and psychologically a women, she was irredeemably
less than a man. That the notion of identifying
proudly as a woman writer - or a feminist
- should have been unthinkable to Rachilde
is understandable in light of this cognitive
dissonance, and it is unsurprising that Rachilde’s
calling card bore the legend: “Rachilde:
Homme de lettres” (Rachilde: Man of Letters).
Rand too seems to have been invested in a
surprisingly traditional view of psychological
femininity that was entirely at odds with
her assertions that career and worldly achievement
should be just as important to women as to
men, and that they were equally capable of
excellence in the creative and productive
spheres. Rand argued that “for a woman qua
woman, the essence of femininity is hero worship
- the desire to look up to man”
Consider the following conversation remembered
by Rand’s one-time lover and intellectual
heir, Nathaniel Branden:
I asked her “Don’t men worship women?
I mean the women they love?”
“Oh, I suppose so, but that’s not how
I would think of it. By ‘worship’, I mean
our highest capacity for admiration, reverence,
looking up. I see man as superior to woman
and….”
“Oh Ayn,” I protested. “You don’t.
You’re joking !”
“I am not joking,: she answered seriously.
“Superior in what? Intelligence? Creativity?
Moral worth?”
“No, of course not. In spiritual or intellectual
matters the sexes are equal. But man is bigger,
stronger, faster, better able to cope with
nature.”
Rand’s essentialist view of female inferiority
based on biology is expressed in terms that
are very similar to Rachilde’s. And, while
Rand once stated, with perfect misogyny and
in the embrace of a heterosexist straitjacket,
that she would not want to be a man, because
then she would have to love a woman, Rachilde
wrote, more thoughtfully:
"I’ve always regretted that I wasn’t a
man, not because I value one half of humanity
more than the other half, but because, obligated
by duty or taste to live like a man, to carry
all alone the heavy burden of life during
my youth, it would have been preferable to
have at least had the privileges of being
male".
This strikingly insightful comment shows Rachilde’s
frustration with the fact that, in her culture,
the only way to operate as a functional, agentic
subject and to have one’s strengths recognized
would be to be male. Yet she does not conclude
from this that the way to achieve her desired
right to personhood would be to make common
cause with other women with the same ambitions
and sense of injustice, and attempt to change
society. Rather she accepts that in preferring
logic and desiring an active social role,
she must take up the mantle of honorary man,
both literally, by cross-dressing while out
in the public sphere, linguistically by revelling
in the titles of “man of letters” and
“Mlle Baudelaire”, a sobriquet given to
her by Maurice Barrès, and in consciously
embracing and identifying with a stereotypical
masculine perspective, including the denegration
of women as inferior.
Similarly, in the introduction of the one
existing book devoted to the subject of feminist
interpretations of Ayn Rand, editors Gladstein
and Sciabarra contextualize that “for many
contemporary feminists, Rand might be viewed
as a masculinist in her exaltation of the
role of consciousness and reason”, echoing
Susan Brownmiller’s opinion that Rand is
“a traitor to her sex”, “spiritually
male” and “an example of the ways in which
a strong, male-directed woman accommodates
herself to what she considers to be superior
male thought.” Indeed, Barbara Branden recounts
the following anecdote:
Henry Hazlitt said to Ayn one day: “I just
talked with Lu Mises a few days ago. He called
you ‘the most courageous man in America.’”
“Did he say man?” asked Ayn. “Yes,”
he replied. Ayn was delighted.
The notion of a woman having to be like a
man in order to express agency is an idea
that carries across into the two writers’
fiction. While some feminist critics have
celebrated the innovative game of gender-bending
in Rachilde’s work as sexually transgressive
and daring, others have argued that it demonstrates
the degree to which Rachilde can only imagine
autonomy and agency for her female characters
by means of rendering them masculine; or honorary
males, using the gendered French language
to emphasize this. In Monsieur Vénus, the
dominant female aristocrat Raoule de Vénérande
is progressively addressed and discussed using
male titles and pronouns - she becomes “Monsieur
de Vénérande”, “il” (he), “le mari”
(the husband) while Jacques Silvert, Raoule’s
effeminate and increasingly feminized lover,
becomes “Mlle Silvert”. Individualism
and agency are understood as masculine traits,
incompatible with identification as female,
and the being of a selfish female protagonist
can only be expressed in terms of an adopted
role of masculinity. Similarly, in Atlas Shrugged,
Rand’s strong female protagonist, Dagny
Taggart, COO of Taggart Transcontinental Railway,
responds to her sister-in-law’s announcement
“I’m the woman in the family now” with
the words “that’s quite all right […] I’m
the man.”
Only very occasionally in her fiction writing,
does Rachilde gesture towards a specifically
female revolt of the self; a revolt against
what culture tells women that they are - and
what she herself has claimed they are in Pourquoi
je ne suis pas féministe without falling back on an adoption of masculinity.
La Marquise de
Sade of 1887 tells the story of Mary Barbe,
the eponymous female version of the divine
Marquis. (not coincidentally Sade is, of course,
one of the key proponents of the exceptional
sovereign subject inaugurated by the modern
moment.) La Marquise de Sade explores Mary’s
development from a little girl, frightened
by the sight of an ox being slaughtered in
an abattoir, into a wilful, egotistical, and
sexually sadistic young woman, who identifies
with and internalizes the brutality that she
understands to be the guiding principle of
society, and which she decides to visit, in
revenge for slights upon herself and other
females, upon the male. Addressing her new
husband, Louis de Caumont, on their wedding
night, Marie makes the following statement
about self, about the social expectations
of women, and about her refusal of the social
imperative in favour of a solipsistic assertion
of being:
"Louis, I have decided not to bear you an heir.
[…] I don’t want to get ugly nor to suffer.
What is more, I am enough, JUST BY BEING,
and if I could end the world along with me
when I die, I would end it".
The rareness of the position being articulated
here is borne out by Rachilde’s insistence
on the typographical peculiarities seen in
the piece of dialogue. The italics and upper
case letters that appeared in the manuscript
were to be scrupulously replicated in published
editions of La Marquise. Words which express
that which is not habitually expressed appear
in a form that sets them visibly apart from
regular speech. The “I am enough” bespeaks
disobedience to three discourses about what
women are supposed to be: (1) subject to a
psychological need of childbearing in order
to justify their own lives, (2) the complements
of men, in a heteropatriarchal logic that
is as self-serving as it is tendentious and
(3) profoundly social animals, natural carers
for others and essentially predisposed to
be for the interests of collectivity. It is
in this third regard that Rachilde’s character’s
gesture of refusal of female selflessness
- her insistence instead on self-full-ness
- is most pertinent for the larger argument
I wish to make.
In the case of Rachilde, then, it is in fiction
rather than non-fiction that the voice of
female selfishness articulates itself, albeit
occasionally, and in refreshing bursts of
textual exuberance, in terms that have to
do with providing a thorough-going rebuttal
of, and indeed counter-discourse to, the commonplace
idea of women’s role and relationship to
self. Similarly, it can be argued that in
some, if not all, of Rand’s fiction we may
find some accommodation of her insistence
that women are not inferior to men, despite
her less than enlightening comments on female
psychology as defined by the principle of
“hero worship”. In an article from 1978,
Mimi Gladstein discusses her controversial
choice to set Atlas Shrugged as a core text
on her Women’s Studies syllabus under the
rubric of “the liberated woman” or “she
who succeeds”. Gladstein bemoans a dearth
of American literature that depicts a female
character who - quote - “is active, independent,
professionally successful, sexually emancipated,
and doesn’t pay for it by dying in childbirth
[or] going mad.”.
Gladstein is not alone in celebrating the
character of Dagny Taggart. Tennis stars Bilie
Jean King, Martina Navaratolova, and Chris
Evert have independently cited the fictional
female railroad hero as an inspiration.
Rand has also stated that Dagny Taggart is
“the ideal woman”, writing “I had always
been somewhat frustrated by my presentation
of women, and eager to present my kind of
woman”. It is also via Dagny that
Rand allows herself to articulate the fact
that an agentic woman in the public sphere
may find herself facing extra biases and barriers
that have to do, not with her individual competence,
but with the role society expects women to
play, an admission Rand had refused to make
about her own career trajectory and critical
reception. So, I quote from Atlas Shrugged:
“You’re unbearably conceited”, was one
of the two sentences she heard throughout
her childhood, even though she never spoke
of her own ability. The other sentence was
“you’re selfish”. She asked what was
meant, but never received an answer. She looked
at the adults, wondering how they could imagine
that she would feel guilt from an undefined
accusation. She was twelve years old when
she first told Eddie Willers that she would
run the railroad when they grew up. She was
fifteen when it occurred to her for the first
time that women did not run railroads and
that people might object. To hell with that,
she thought - and never worried about it again.”
And it is left to Dagny to articulate some
of the complexities of negotiating between
contemporary cultural expectations of domestic
femininity and individual (heterosexual) desire
- complexities that Rand qua Rand often downplays.
The fact that, despite her blanket dismissal
of feminism, Rand would very much admire Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and its
critique of compulsory domesticity in 1963,
is perhaps already visible in 1957 when she
has Dagny musing:
There is a reason, she thought, why a woman
would wish to cook for a man… oh not as
a duty, not as a chronic career, only as a
rare and special rite in symbol of… but
what have they made of it, the preachers of
woman’s duty? … The castrated performance
of a sickening drudgery was held to be a woman’s
proper virtue.
The suspension points and disjointedness in
this extract are atypical of Rand’s prose
style and of Dagny’s thought processes.
Both tend to favour precision and unambiguousness;
characteristics of the vaunted (if psychologically
unrealistic) pure rationality of objectivism.
I would suggest that, as in the case of the
typographically odd Rachilde quotation, the
syntactical awkwardness here reveals the difficulty
of articulating the position that Rand and
Dagny gesture towards. For Rand to admit that
the constraints that society places upon women
may materially reduce their capacity to achieve
greatness, is for her to admit that men and
women do not face equal odds in their life
struggles and that female individualism - female
heroism - is actually socially harder won
than the male counterpart. A purely biological
rationale (men are stronger and better adapted
to nature) does not account wholly for the
difficulties faced by women in the public
and professional sphere, in comparison to
men.
One of the fascinating and frustrating aspects
of both Rachilde’s and Ayn Rand’s writing,
is the way in which it is in some
ways radical and daring while, in others,
stultifyingly reactionary. Both Rachilde and
Rand were women who wrote against many of
the most dearly held tenets of their culture.
Rachilde used the Decadent philosophy’s
rejection of society as a context and pretext
for putting her character Mary Barbe into
the role of social and sexual agent, the perverse
destroyer of family authority, and a solipsistic
innovator of woman’s right simply to be,
for herself. Rand created the one American
female protagonist that a women’s studies
professor in the 1970s considered worthy of
featuring in her university course as an example
of a proper heroine. Moreover, Rand argued
actively in the conservative 1950s for a woman’s
right to a career and equal pay. She supported
the right to abortion, calling it “a moral
right which should be left to the sole discretion
of the woman concerned”, and she detested
the dogmatic religiosity of the US right.
Yet, despite their own forms of genuine radicality,
both authors are, as we have seen, haunted
by an abiding sense of female inferiority
that both assume to issue from weaker physiology
rather than as a result of historical social
oppression. Both profess in non-fiction a
belief in an essence of femininity, even if
in fiction they show up the constructed nature
of female subjectivity and, especially in
Rachilde’s fiction, femininity as performative,
to a degree that has led me to write elsewhere
about Rachilde as a proto-queer writer. This
rigid binary gender logic results in Rand’s
case in particular, and Rachilde’s to some
extent, in a stultifying heteronormativity.
Rand assumes heterosexuality as an inevitable
for her fictional heroines, and as a superior
resort for the “natural woman”, rather
than being aware of it as a compulsory system.
I believe this point to be extremely significant:
Whether we agree with Rand’s political perspective
or find it rebarbative, it is certainly the
case that she was not a thinker who accepted
commonplaces. Her reversal of the Christian
morality of altruism as not only a philosophical
error, but a form of evil, her insistence
on selfishness as the highest virtue, demonstrate a
striking ability to think reverse-discursively
in the Foucauldian sense. Indeed, Rand’s
radical inversions suggest a relic of her
early reading of, and love for, Friedrich
Nietzsche, which she would later deny with
the claim that Aristotle alone of the philosophers
had influenced her thought and writing.
In fact, the counterintuitive alternative
ethics that Rand deploys resembles nothing
so much as the pronouncements of that other
alternative moralist, Nietzsche’s Zaroaster
in Also Sprach Zarathustra. Here are the terms
in which Zaroaster imagines joyous, virtuous
selfishness. The German is on the slide. I
shall read the English version:
"Bestowing virtue"—thus did Zarathustra
once name the unnamable.
And then it happened also,—and verily, it
happened for the first time!— that his word
blessed SELFISHNESS, the wholesome, healthy
selfishness, that springeth from the powerful soul:—
—From the powerful soul, to which the high
body appertaineth, the handsome, triumphing,
refreshing body, around which everything becometh
a mirror:
—The pliant, persuasive body, the dancer,
whose symbol and epitome is the self-enjoying
soul. Of such bodies and souls the self-enjoyment
calleth itself "virtue."
With its words of good and bad doth such self-enjoyment shelter itself as with sacred groves; with
the names of its happiness doth it banish
from itself everything contemptible.
And Rand describes selfishness thus, placing
the words in the mouth of her ideal moral
spokesman, John Galt: “[T]he first precondition
of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness
of soul which desires the best in all things,
in values of matter and spirit, a soul that
seeks above all else to achieve its own moral
perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself.”
There are many more examples I could draw
from Rand’s texts where both a quasi-spiritual
lexicon and a discourse of psychological health,
joy, and self-care are deployed in relation
to selfishness, in order to replace sacrifice
with self-interest as the greatest moral good.
Given her capacity for perverse thinking-against-the
grain and audacious reverse-discursive argumentation,
then, the fact that Rand leaves entirely intact
the most garden-variety discourses of misogyny
suggests more than anything the cultural and
epistemological boundaries to the task of
imagining what it would mean truly to value
the female individual qua individual.
A corollary of Rand’s belief in heterosexuality
as a natural and desirable order, and hero-worship
as the properly feminine position, is her
assertion of the impossibility of a female
President of the United States of America.
Rand expounds this theory, to the great consternation
of her audience, in the 1979 interview with
Donahue:
In “About a Woman President”, the essay
to which she alludes in the clip, Rand wrote
For a woman to seek or desire the presidency is, in fact,
so terrible a prospect of spiritual self-immolation that
the woman who would seek it is psychologically
unworthy of the job.”
According to Randian logic, then, a female
president may well have the capacity to be
a good president but in doing so, she would
be a bad woman, or more radically would logically
not be a woman.
That Rand, a powerful, influential female
individualist should have held these views
is lamentable; that they are the views of
her containing culture (an influence she would
have claimed did not affect her) is undeniable.
This internalized misogyny on the part of
Rand, and the wanting-to-have-it-both-ways
implied by the insistence that woman is not
inferior to man, yet she must be able to “look
up to him”, suggests Rand’s inability
to reconcile the central tenets of objectivism
with her perception of what being a woman
meant: the irreducible quality of something
in nature called “femininity”.
We have still to see the election of a female
President of the United States of America,
but Rand’s words shed interesting light
upon the particular form of misogyny both
embodied in, and produced in response to,
that consummate female commander-in-chief,
Margaret Thatcher. Representations of Thatcher,
both discursive and visual, are characterized
by a peculiar dualistic and internally contradictory
quality. Either the fact of a woman wielding
power feminizes the exercise of power and
the field of politics, or else in order to
be wielding such power in the first place,
Thatcher must in some way really be a man.
Rand’s objection to the principle of the
female president is in many ways prescient,
as the notion that to govern would involve
a betrayal or renunciation, or yet a grotesque
deformation, of what is culturally understood
as femininity was amply played out in coverage
of Thatcher.
In this cartoon, Thatcher’s power to swipe
Soviet influence off the Globe is figuratively
diminished by the fact that she is shown to
have done so using a feather duster, connoting
woman’s domestic role, and while clutching
the iconic black handbag. This chimes with
a strong current in political and media discourse
throughout the Thatcher years. During the
1979 general election campaign, Dennis Canavan
urged voters: - quote - “Don't let that
witch hang up her curtains in Downing Street.”
And in an article in The Guardian, ten years
later, in 1989, Marian Bowman reported on
a sexist backlash in parliament designed to
undermine the right-wing leader by referencing
her femininity. I quote the article: “Tory
MP Emma Nicholson is convinced that a bitter,
anti-woman undercurrent is flaring up in Parliament
and not just on the Labour benches. ‘They
will use anything to attack the Prime Minister
and I think they are sacrificing their acceptance
of women as equals to get at her.’ Inside
and outside Westminster, there’s talk of
political challengers being ‘hand-bagged’,
of curtains being bought for the retirement
home in Dulwich, of baby-minding the new grandson.”
At other times, however, Thatcher is figured
as a token man, an honorary member of the
old boys club. In this cartoon, in which she
is depicted waltzing with Ronald Reagan, the
caption - borrowed from the words, not of
Reagan, in fact, but of German Chancellor
Helmut Schmidt - tell us that she is “still
the best man in Europe”. The romantic overtones
of the image of the dancing power couple has
ambiguous shades of political homosociality
with the figuring of Thatcher as a “man”,
smooching with her equal, Reagan; a bitterly
ironic undertone given the repressive homophobic
policies of Thatcher’s regime.
In exploring the attitudes of Rachilde and
Rand, we have seen that both faced extraordinary
levels of inner conflict and uneasy contradiction
with regard to their desire to live, act and
write as individuals, while holding regressive
ideas about womanhood that poisoned and undermined
their vaunted self-regard. Thatcher representation 
reveals a similar path of constant contradiction and
dissonance, played out much more visibly on
the surface of her very person as a public
figure. To achieve election on a Tory ticket
in the 1970s, Thatcher could not have appeared
to be anything other than an ultra-gender-conformist
conservative woman - fitting that classist
and sexist category: “a lady”. Hence,
the exaggeratedly bouffed femme helmet of
golden hair, the perfect make-up, and the
fussy pussy-cat-bow blouses that were so easy
to caricature in cartoons and Spitting Image
puppets. Called upon to police conservative
ideas of traditional womanhood and family
values, on the one hand, all the while being
"the only real man in the cabinet" and “the
best man in Europe” for the purposes of
bellicose national interest, on the other,
Thatcher embodied Rand’s claim that a woman
taking on such a role would be placed in a
position of constant schizoid tension and
self-contradiction. Yet I would argue that
Rand’s mistake is in believing that this
is because the essential nature of woman would
be at odds with the desire to rule as Primary,
rather than because of the rigidity of the
patriarchal edict regarding what women may
properly be would be contraddicted by
inappropriate desire for power. Public hatred of Thatcher was freighted
with so much more than hatred of her politics.
Thatcher’s famous speech that is metonymically
referred to by its key soundbite, “The lady’s
not for turning” voiced, despite the dogmatic
intransigence of the literal message of the
speech - a refusal to re-consider regulation
of the economy - a chilling echo of an age-old
misogyny. Thatcher figures herself in the
third person as “the lady”, a female cipher.
The “turning” draws attention to the silenced
rhyme word “burning” that it puts under
erasure, reminding us of the punishment meted
out to those “deviant” women who threatened
to encroach on male authority, and were scapegoated
as witches in the burning times. And the brutal
misogyny of witch-burning returns in the commonly
seen and heard response to the death of the
hated former prime minister in the repetition
of the slogan and song: “Ding Dong the Wicked Witch
is Dead”. That a woman’s death is being
sadistically celebrated here in specifically
misogynist terms, rather than simply the death
of an unpopular and ruthless former Tory leader,
is an issue that it is ethically incumbent
upon us not to overlook, regardless of our
view of Thatcher’s policies.
An article that appeared just the other day
in New York Magazine online entitled 
“Ayn Rand: Girl Power Icon” asks whether Rand’s
right-wing politics and flip misogyny necessarily
prevent her being a source of “feminist
inspiration” for contemporary women. Noting
that an approximation of a well-known quotation
from Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead
- “The question isn’t who is going to
let me, it’s who is going to stop me”
- appears on T-shirts and Etsy jewellery designed
for women, the journalist asks whether one
should divorce the less politically savory
elements of Rand’s textual corpus from its
message of resilience, independence, and ambition,
that can seem genuinely inspiring to women.
The brand of “feminism” to which this
article alludes and appeals is precisely the
so-called third wave feminism or post-feminism
which I described at the beginning of the
lecture. Rand’s ideology and this brand
of neo-liberal feminism may seem to be relatively
compatible. Both advocate the interests of
an individual who does not make common cause
with others via class-based politics, and
who refuses to think in terms of the collective.
Both are powered by capitalistic logic and
market forces, and appeal to an upwardly mobile,
ostensibly white, middle-class, educated woman.
Yet, a much more invidious commonality between
Rand and third-wave feminism is the internalization
in both of values that may be to the counter-interest
of both individual women and women as a group.
Post-feminism can be critiqued as patriarchy
repackaged. That is, in being encouraged to
“choose”, for example, cosmetic surgery,
a certain style of clothing, or pole dancing
as a recreational activity, women are lured
into internalizing and aping an image of their
role that issues from the heteronormative,
male-oriented status quo, cunningly repurposed
as empowering options. They literally wear
their feminism lightly in the guise of “girl
power”-flavoured t-shirts. In Ariel Levy’s
words, women operating in this worldview become
“female chauvinist pigs”, individually
shoring up sexism and seeking acceptance on
masculinist terms, while selling short their
interests as women.
Rand’s core definition of selfishness, as
expressed in the introduction to her collection
of essays called, of course, The Virtue of
Selfishness is - quote - “concern with one’s
own interests”. Rand’s deep-seated view
of women as inferior, and her belief in a
masochistic essence called femininity, both
belie the surface-level claims that objectivism
offers both men and women the opportunity
to hold the self as one’s own highest value.
Her dogmatic refusal to accept that “interests”
may sometimes have to be defined on a class
basis - such as class woman - as well as defined
at the individual level, is in stark logical
contradiction to her willingness to herd women
together as a psychologically definable group
characterized by a propensity for hero-worship.
To clarify: if one can claim that women share,
as a group, something called psychological
femininity, then one cannot also - logically
- claim, as Rand does, that feminism is a
groundless movement based on a falsely construed
group interest.
Let us consider one last time our selfish women, Rachilde: "man of letters",
Ayn Rand: “the most courageous man in America",
Margaret Thatcher: “the best man in Europe”.
The message that women cannot be strong individualists,
and that those exceptional women who are,
somehow really are men, is a pervasive, cross-cultural
fantasy and a form of subjectification that
these selfish women also internalize. I have
been arguing precisely that the selfish women’s
internalized misogyny suggests the true sticking
point of a theory of rational selfishness
that is as available to women as to men. I
argue that an ethic of specifically female
selfishness may be so elusive as to be largely
unarticulated. That would be a selfishness
that fully comprehends the social constraints
placed on women and is able to ask whether
a given aim is in a woman’s interests not
only as an individual, but also as a person
who has been situated by the social order
as a woman - as “woman-function”, as it
were. Such a brand of selfishness - or self-full-ness
as I’ve been calling it - is, in the words
Rand used in another context, an “unknown
ideal”; something we have not yet properly
tested. My fascination with these inconvenient
deviant women is precisely that not only external
reactions to them, but also their own abreactions
in the form of deflections, contradictions,
and aporia when faced with the problem of
theorizing true self-interest for a woman,
tell us so much about what we are still not
quite allowed to be. Thank you.
