On Women by Susan Sontag: An indirect approach to feminism

It needs to be taken as a given that this book will be worth reading – it’s Susan Sontag. Rather, then, let’s consider the book itself which, as a premise for a Sontag collection, is questionable. Her relationship to her own status as a woman wasn’t totally clear, tied up as it was with her fraught feelings around her lesbianism, and her difficult yet obsessive relationship with her alcoholic mother, the first great love of her life.

When it came to thoughts on women, Sontag was at war with herself. But then, it was this very mistrust of her own instincts that made her such a naturally uncomplacent thinker. We see it throughout her work, as when, in Against Interpretation, she rejects her naturally analytical bent in favour of direct sensuousness – an approach she always struggled with.

Here, Sontag treats with immense “seriousness” (a favourite word of hers) the ongoing dismissal of women’s capabilities, and explores how such attitudes are perpetuated by both sexes. The “meaning” (another favourite) of what it is to be a woman, and to perform women’s often low or unpaid menial work, is something she addresses with her usual, astounding bravura, most notably in The Third World of Women.

Yet, as anyone familiar with Sontag’s life, work and famously forbidding demeanour will know, she herself was the exception to the rule of patriarchal society (her marriage to Philip Rieff aside). And she knew it. So, while Sontag foresaw all too clearly the trap into which feminism has now fallen (where, rather than changing society’s basic structure, many so-called feminists have settled for the false ameliorations of appeasement and distraction), her writing on the topic is, ultimately, theoretical. Her feeling for women’s plight is not dissimilar to her feeling for the people of Sarajevo, or Israel, in that it’s one of intense empathy, rather than immediate experience.

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Not to suggest this indirect approach is a disadvantage. She herself makes the point that it’s a dangerous fallacy to say one must be or directly feel something to understand it, or, more importantly, to write about it. Compassionate intelligence is sufficient to be authentically insightful, and Sontag proves that here. Ultimately, she’s a thinker we need, pressingly, to revisit, so I’ll take any excuse – even women.