IN her preface Ethna Viney poses the question: Why, even in western society, has feminism failed to reach the majority of women? Her book is an attempt to answer it. Viney argues that "a flawed definition and interpretation of human sexuality" is one of the reasons for the restriction of feminism to a relatively small number of women. Specifically, by ignoring or denying the place pregnancy, birth and motherhood play in the aspirations and lives of most women, many of the best-known feminist theoreticians have cut themselves off from them.
This is a very ambitious book. In making her argument, Viney attempts an encyclopaedic survey of much of the literature on psychology and sexuality of the last century, along with her critical evaluation of it.
Such a global overview makes for a rather difficult read, and often her own very valuable insights have to be pulled out by the reader from among the references. For example, I would have liked her to expand on her view that, because men are culturally conditioned to pass from demonstrations of affection to genital arousal, this leads them to limit their expressions of affection towards their children for fear of its connection with abuse, but this is limited to one paragraph. I also found also that there were too many quotations from other authors to digest easily on a first reading, and, given the need to limit the size of the book, too few to give a complete account of their thinking.
But this is ultimately a rewarding book, and will be an invaluable tool for all those interested in feminism both historically and as a recipe for future society.
She examines the early theories of the immutably different social roles for men and women, arising from their physiological differences. This begs the question, she says: Why then has it been necessary to impose restrictions on the lives of women if their roles are dictated biologically? The connection between women and child-rearing has been used as the cornerstone of patriarchy. "Because this attitude is still used to exploit women, feminists, then and now, unfortunately countered this argument with a kneejerk reaction: they included the biological and sexual phenomenon of motherhood in the negative cultural forces oppressing women. In this they ignored the fact that motherhood for most women is a powerfully rewarding and supremely satisfying experience."
She goes on to argue that female sexuality includes childbirth and mothering. In particular, she embraces the idea of natural childbirth guru, Sheila Kitzinger, that childbirth can and should be a pleasurable experience, a variation and extension of the experience of orgasm.
Hundreds of thousands of women who have had children in the last decade or so will have learned from Sheila Kitzinger that the experience should not be painful, should even be pleasurable, if only they enter into it in the right spirit and with the proper preparation. However, few of them will have found it so. The problem with this is that they can then feel they somehow failed, that if only they had done something differently they could have got it right, and so the search for what Viney calls "the Great O" can become another oppression, another reason to feel inadequate. Her, and Kitzinger's, view that pregnancy and childbirth have been overly medicalised and mechanised has gained more widespread acceptance.
It would be a mistake, however, to focus on this aspect of her argument, which is much more comprehensive and complex than proselytising for natural childbirth, and for the inclusion of childbirth into the realm of female sexuality. Her overall argument - that motherhood is of central, though not exclusive, importance to most, if not all, women - loses none of its force even if most women, in most cultures, experience pain in childbirth.
She argues that some feminists, by denigrating motherhood, have colluded in a genitally-fixated male definition of sexuality, although she gives credit to the "cultural feminists" who challenge this view. "By focusing on genital intercourse, the battle for sexual equality is being fought on territory defined by male perceptions of sexuality."
What of men in all this? She rejects the view that male sexuality is limited to genital activity, and argues that this emphasis is a social construct. "Both male and female sexuality are complex with an instinctive unconscious/conscious drive to reproduce embedded in a desire for emotional intimacy and various physical pleasures . . . If female sexuality has been repressed by patriarchy, then so has male sexuality."
Viney's emphasis on the importance of motherhood has not led her to embrace the "family values" agenda. For her, the family as at present constituted remains an agency of repression of both women and men. Her book is an original and worthwhile attempt to address very broad issues within the context of an Ireland where much feminist discourse has been driven, by the experience of the link between religion and sexual oppression, into a particular ideological ghetto. It deserves to be read by all those, women and men, who have an interest in working towards a more humane society.