In her introduction to this pocket-sized new collection of journalism by the American writer Susan Sontag, the academic Merve Emre begins with a reassurance to (younger, I assume) readers that there’s nothing to be afraid of here. “A certain anxiety besieges the critic asked to introduce a volume of earlier writings on women, lest she should find the ideas expressed in them interesting only as relics of a distant, less enlightened past,” she declares, eyeing the smelling salts she presumably keeps about her desk for times just like these. But don’t worry. She has checked and there is no ghastly second-wave feminism to be found in these pages: “Far from prompting the gentle rebuke that they are ‘of their time’, the effect of reading them today is to marvel at the untimeliness of their genius.”
To read such a statement in isolation is infuriating enough, and not only because you grow increasingly weary of the conviction that the past must always be measured against our own, supposedly morally superior, times. I can think of lots of “earlier” feminist writing that is as good, if not better, than anything published more recently; if young feminists can’t, or won’t, acknowledge the debt we owe to those who came before us, they may be fighting the wrong cause. But then you read the essays that follow Emre’s, in which Sontag makes some of the most sexist and wrongheaded assertions I’ve read in a long time, and exasperation turns to bewilderment. What’s really going on here? What book did she read? When, you wonder, will the unwarranted allure Sontag holds for a certain kind of intellectual ever begin to fray?
Sontag’s On Women comprises seven pieces, arranged in chronological order, edited by the writer’s son, David Rieff; the earliest dates from 1972 and the latest from 1975. Four are polemical essays, and two take the form of interviews, while another is an extended riposte to the poet Adrienne Rich, who had the temerity to suggest in the letters page of the New York Review of Books that Sontag’s recent piece about Leni Riefenstahl (also in this book) failed to make any connection between fascism and the patriarchy (“Nazi Germany was patriarchy in its purest, most elemental form,” writes Rich). Sontag’s response to such criticism is completely disproportionate, and horribly sneering. Isn’t Rich, she asks, just like all feminists, those moaning minnies whose thinking is – Sontag is categorical – “a bit simple-minded”?
Such un-sisterliness is everywhere in On Women. Sontag’s long-term project, nascent when this book begins and more fully realised by the time it ends, has to do with setting herself apart; she is the special one, which makes solidarity tricky. At first, she’s attracted by feminism, or at least she’s prepared to go through the motions; maybe it will be useful to her. But it’s as if she hasn’t read anything: no Betty Friedan or Kate Millett, not a single page of Robin Morgan’s classic anthology of women’s lib, Sisterhood Is Powerful. All three women had published their big, stylish books before she wrote her mannered, paper-thin essay, The Double Standard of Aging (1972), in which she decides that growing older is really only a disease of the imagination, makes sweeping pronouncements about the sexual lives of spinsters, and talks contemptuously of the way “most” women take their lack of self-respect for granted.
As a piece of writing, it’s second-rate: it comes with no light or shade; she’s too much in the business of generalisations for her arguments to snare (her sentences kept slipping from my mind). Is it that she was young? No, in 1972 Sontag was almost 40. And in any case, nothing changes in the work that follows; her mind is set. “Women have trouble organising,” she pronounces in The Third World of Women, a written Q&A from 1973. “[They] are not easily disposed to respect one another and to take one another seriously.” What does she think of the struggle to legalise abortion? Well, it is suspect, she writes. It might be desirable on humanitarian grounds, but once the right is won “nothing in the situation of women will be changed”. Who needs change, after all? Liberation has been easy for her, except for “the envy and resentment I occasionally felt from other women”.
Slowly, it begins to dawn on you that Sontag believes women have only themselves to blame for the inequality and discrimination they experience; that they have chosen to go along with it, unable to resist the powerful allure of lipstick and Tupperware. Is this a particularly egregious case of internalised sexism? Or is it just Sontag’s regular exceptionalism, in a creakier format? I don’t know. But again, I find myself amazed by her reputation, still so burnished almost two decades after her death. There’s something almost hallucinatory about it at this point, a haze into which opportunistic publishers may duly step in, offering little more than a name to readers who probably would do far better trying out Andrea Dworkin for size.
• On Women by Susan Sontag is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
