Katha Pollitt Interview

If anybody's entitled to take a dim view of current politics, it's Katha Pollitt, feminist, poet, columnist and associate editor of The Nation (the only home left for leftist intellectuals). The irritable clarity of Pollitt's thought, paired with a disconcerting habit of looking far enough to see what a stray political remark really means, has already produced Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, a recent National Book Critics Circle finalist. But through all her sharp-witted criticisms of political rhetoric, all her dogged reminders of cool truths, Pollitt remains strangely optimistic. She's waiting for the revolution. After a recent reading from Reasonable Creatures, Pollitt hosted a smaller discussion. Managing to look relaxed even in a straight-backed chair at the front of the room, she pushed up the sleeves of her cardigan and listened to a woman complain that you can't call yourself a liberal anymore. "I guess I'd have to take issue with that," Pollitt said firmly. "The right wing has been very good at getting their terminology to become the normative terminology -- and all that shows is that they are controlling the debate." "Unwed mothers" are back, for example, and so are "illegitimate children" -- even though such children are quite legal these days, and can even inherit property. Pollitt thinks it all started with George Bush and "the L-word," not to mention "'card-carrying member,' which assimilated the notion of the ACLU, a perfectly mainstream organization, to the Communist Party." She looked the woman straight in the eye. "I say call yourself a liberal, reclaim that terminology, don't let them do this." She's convinced there are more people than anyone realizes who stand to the left of the current debate, whether the issue is welfare or abortion or the environment. "People are genuinely upset about the prospect of drinking polluted water, breathing polluted air and watching our national parks become subsidiaries of mining corporations," she remarked. "But the structure of organized politics is now so rigid, and has moved so far to the right, that these deeply held sentiments are not heard." Mainly, she blames the irrational, deliberate shortsight of ambitious politicians, as well as the corruption of the "organs of the media" who frame the debate. Most of those, er, organs are now owned by major corporations who, realistically speaking, "are not going to investigate very carefully the way their power is maintained," she pointed out. "We need a re-emergence of real radical politics," Pollitt concluded. "Someone has decided everyone is conservative, therefore everyone plays to these voters. They are not the only people in the country!" She cited a recent poll in which more than 60 percent of women under 30 gladly called themselves feminists. You'd never know that from listening to the anti-feminist rhetoric of Christina Hoff Sommers, whose recent book was funded, Pollitt said, by grants from right-wing organizations. She and other anti-feminists are appealing to American individualism. "Americans are very reluctant to talk about the way in which they are part of a larger group, very reluctant to admit that they owe anything to anybody or stand on the shoulders of anyone who came before them," Pollitt noted. "Our ideal is the self-made man, and now we are going to have the self-made woman." The feminists who purport to support each other are fragmenting into race and class groups, an audience member pointed out. But Pollitt was briskly unconcerned: "Any political movement has fragments -- look at the Republican Party! They have everything from the Christian Coalition to unrestrained, get-out-your-dagger capitalists. In the long run, politics isn't going to be social work. You are not going to find upper-class women who are able to fight as well for the rights of women on welfare as those women could fight for themselves." Instead of infighting, she blames the unending street fights for legalized abortion and the esoteric quality of academic feminism for draining activist energy. "For me, feminism is a political movement, it's about changing our actual concrete circumstances and options in life," she explained. "For sociological reasons, women's studies has become connected to literary theory, so that it becomes a very radical act to analyze a Shakespearean sonnet from a feminist perspective. I don't think literature is what we need to fix." What we need to fix is economics, but we keep veering off into false solutions. "There is this idea that, for example, more education will solve the problem of job loss," Pollitt says in a personal interview later that day. "First it was, 'Blue-collar jobs are moving abroad, but that's OK because now we are all going to become white-collar workers.' The other countries will produce our steel and we will -- I don't know, write screenplays." Now, other countries are supplying high-tech expertise at lower costs, and, once again, economic gurus are offering "more education" as the solution. "The idea that having spiffy workers produces jobs is insane," Pollitt finishes. "But if they saw the contradiction, they would have to look somewhere else for the solution. And maybe there is none, short of something much more revolutionary." It's easier to blame the poor. In Reasonable Creatures, Pollitt notes that "what Clinton's more liberal defenders claim started out as a way to market anti-poverty spending to resistant suburban voters has become a competition over how to prevent the poor and 'illegitimate' from being born in the first place. And since this is America, land of Christian conservatives, rebellious taxpayers and right-wing politicians, this goal must be achieved in a way that combines the minimum of money with the maximum of social control." The logic is wrong, though. "Out-of-wedlock births do not explain why Donna Karan has her clothes produced in Hong Kong," she wrote, "or why $100 sneakers are made by Malaysian women paid 15 cents an hour. Nor do the sex lives of the poor explain why corporations nationwide are laying off thousands of white-collar workers, or why one out of five college graduates is working at a job that requires no college degree." The next solution from the right is to blame women. In her preface, Pollitt describes the flare of "a general suspicion that the country is going to pot, and that somehow or other this unfortunate development is largely women's fault." Then she gives angry examples of "the open sexism of the current assault on the poor: the deriding of child raising as 'staying home and doing nothing' (that's Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services); the lip-service-only approach to enforcing the child-support obligations of fathers; the calls for 'restigmatizing' nonmarital sex, which in practice means the old-fashioned double standard; the claim that only fathers can imbue children with respect for law, hard work, commitment." Since blaming women has been a frequent answer to history's problems, what makes women easy scapegoats? "I guess the short answer is misogyny," she grins. "Women were blamed for the expulsion of humans from the Garden of Eden, so there is a cultural precedent! Coming down to our own time, I would say that women are being blamed for major social transformations, like the end of the family wage. Now, this is not women's fault! It is not women's fault that a family of four can no longer be supported on one income, and it is not women's fault that both sexes find marriage a more complicated business than it used to be. But it looks like men are just doing what they have always done, and women are doing something different, so the changes must be women's fault." For starters, the premise is wrong: "Men are not doing what they always were, they are not supporting a family of four, they are not feeling they must marry a woman they make pregnant," Pollitt points out. "Do you know that in the 1950s, the rates of teen pregnancy were as high or higher? The difference was, those couples married. Then they got divorced in the '60s -- those were the people who were getting divorced, that's why there was an explosion of divorce in the '60s. "You can't make a shotgun marriage these days, because the guys don't have jobs," she continues. "It doesn't make any sense to say, 'Well, Annie, you have gotten yourself in a fine mess, Tim will have to marry you and he can go work at the plant.'" The shift doesn't get discussed, though, "because if you talk about everything as women's fault, you can deliver a sermon, you can run for election, you can make abortion illegal, there are all kinds of things you can do to make some people feel better. Others will feel worse, of course, but they are the people who are already disadvantaged, so their feelings don't count." A few minutes later, Pollitt flashes a quick analysis of the bottom line: "The whole ideology of this country works by pitting people against each other. That's what competition is." Ten years ago, for example, "these white guys weren't so angry, because the economy was expanding, we were all going to become white-collar workers. But it's hard to achieve egalitarian goals when the pie is shrinking." She does see "important, unstoppable tendencies toward equality," but she also sees "countertendencies toward more poverty, and more right-wing hyper individualism," with poverty's increase in crime fueling the fearfulness that demands its own guns. What she reminds herself in darker moments is "how unbelievably many people in America are not part of the political system." The "Contract with America" was published in TV Guide, for God's sake, "and yet polls show that most people had no idea what it was when the Republicans won the elections." These days, cynicism and apathy may be the sanest, most accurate responses: In Pollitt's opinion, the system does not express the will of the people, it expresses the will of the powerful. Meanwhile, we have "a whole parasystem for the rich," who don't have to worry about crime and health insurance because they live in guarded mansions or gated communities and have their very own "medical savings accounts." At the other end of the economic continuum, we have a welfare class that's being told it's not entitled to anything. So Pollitt rests her hopes in the middle, with the working and middling classes who are about to feel pain. "When people find there is no more after-school, something working people count on; when they find out that the library is now only open two days a week; when they sell off the public hospitals ... I live in New York," she says suddenly, "and we have a Republican mayor who is in the process of essentially destroying the public schools while insisting that he's only cutting fat. I find it very hard to believe that parents will take this lying down." Until the uprising, however, confusion and ignorance will continue to fan the flames of political rhetoric. "People don't understand their own system," Pollitt complains. "They don't understand that the suburbs where all those conservatives live are the product of federal policies -- the roads that get them there, the cheap housing after World War II, the governmental encouragement of suburbs. "People don't ask themselves, as they think of yet another theoretical, highfalutin reason there should be no government programs for the poor, why we have them in the first place," she continues later, picking up the train unbroken. "It's because there was a big depression in the '30s and an enormous amount of organized and unorganized rebellion -- strikes all over, major marches, enormous political ferment. That's why we have welfare. Roosevelt saved the capitalist system with it. "Social peace is very cheaply bought in this country," she adds abruptly, wondering aloud how the policymakers expect a mother in rural Mississippi to support herself and her children without help. "They are in the grip of this insane ideology, that if women do not have welfare they will get married. And the part they miss is that, first of all, there is no one for them to marry, because they put the men in jail. And second, the poverty of women is not the reason men get married." One commentator wrote that society should not force fathers to pay child support because they have no money, and, anyway, we want those women to get married. "But the men they would be marrying are the men who have no money!" Pollitt exclaims. Ultimately, she takes hope in human nature. "I do not believe that people are going to take the destruction of their lives and livelihoods and just say, 'OK, I'll go die now,'" Pollitt finishes. "Eventually all this cutting affects people who are used to being part of the political process, people who are not in a position to withdraw from the larger society to a gated community." And who might not even want to.