Feminist

Bill Kauffman Luther Martin: a voluble and drunken Maryland attorney who walked out of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 after warning his fellow delegates that their handiwork provided the framework for a centralized and militaristic empire that would efface regional distinctions and erode the liberties for which American patriots had fought and bled a decade earlier. An unheeded prophet who breathed the Spirit of ’76. Lionel Shriver Edith Wharton. Hardly unrecognized, but under-taught and too little familiar to the international literary readership (e.g., in Britain). A spectacular stylist, she wrote novels that still sound modern and perfectly accessible 100 years later – and she was a real feminist before the days the word meant humorless pill.

Sex and gender were supposed to be allies in the identitarian march of the feminist left. But gender, it appears, keeps butting up against the reality of sex. "I will say this and everyone's gonna hate me,” singer Macy Gray recently told Piers Morgan, “but as a woman, just because you go change your (body) parts, doesn't make you a woman, sorry.” (She subsequently apologized for her comments.) Bette Midler also elicited censure for her recent tweet: "WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name!" (She later qualified that her comments were not intended to be “transphobic.”) Women, generations of feminists have been telling us, are supposed to be powerful. They’re supposed to be capable.