Did Susan Sontag like women? I’m not so sure she did, which made the arrival of feminism in the early 1970s a complicated prospect. Should she get on board or scuttle the ship? I’m not talking about the private realm, of course. She liked, loved, lusted after and admired plenty of individual women. Although she declined to identify publicly as a lesbian, most of her sexual relationships were with women. But was membership of the second sex useful to the public project of Being Sontag? Judging from the evidence here, it was an ambivalent passport, sometimes flashed at the border and sometimes disparaged.
The essays that make up On Women are from the early 1970s, just as the second wave of feminism was breaking on the shores of New York. They weren’t originally published as a book, in the manner of Against Interpretation, the collection that established her reputation as a young avant-gardiste and intellectual force in 1966. Instead, they are wayside pronouncements from a jobbing writer whose high-low trajectory ran from the New York Review of Books to Vogue. Their appearance now is a posthumous creation that, the jacket reports, brings together Sontag’s “most fearless and incisive writing on women, a crucial aspect of her work that has not until now received the attention it deserves”.
What is actually revealed by the book, and especially by the decision to organise it chronologically, is the process by which Sontag approached, assimilated, dominated and expelled disquieting material. In the earliest essays, she’s plainly late to the party. The Double Standard of Ageing is the most dated and uncertain I’ve ever heard Sontag. It’s as if she’s stepped from Warhol’s Factory back into the anxious fug of the 1950s, with her timorous pronouncements about spinsters and old maids, her sweeping descriptions of how “women” (all of them? Everywhere?) routinely lie about their age, lest they are branded sexually obsolete, “ineligible”, over the hill at 35.
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been published nearly a decade earlier. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex had all appeared in 1970. Why on earth was Sontag serving up such gloop? Characteristic, too, that she notes the humiliation of segregating women into Miss and Mrs without acknowledging that an alternative had already been generated by women themselves. Ms magazine had been founded two months before, and the new word was everywhere that year.
Beneath her caution lurks something stranger. Women, she reports, are kept as children, “weak”, “servile”, “parasitic”. This is the consequence of society not biology, yet the solution Sontag proposes is not revolution, separatism, protest or any other upending of the iniquitous order. Women need to stop lying about their age and wearing makeup. “Women should tell the truth.” Somehow, it is their fault after all.
A year on, and she seems to have vaulted from the margins to the vanguard. The Third World of Women was Sontag’s response to a questionnaire sent to her and five other prominent women, including Simone de Beauvoir, by the Spanish-language quarterly Libre. Here she sketches out a far more radical, which is to say rigorously doctrinaire, account of women’s liberation. The tone is firm, exacting, definitive, a little testy: a good general who has mastered the brief and digested the background reading. “Anything less than a change in who has power and what power is, is not liberation but pacification.” “The women’s movement must lead to a critical assault on the very nature of the state.”
But odd wobbles in her knowledge base remain. She advises, grandly, that women’s groups should “lobby, demonstrate, march”, suggesting raids on beauty parlours and the defacing of sexist billboards, all tactics that the women’s movement was already using. Worse, there’s still the submerged sense that somehow weak, silly women are to blame for a predicament that Sontag herself doesn’t share. This exceptionalism is familiar to the seasoned Sontag watcher, recurring, for example, in 1989’s Aids and Its Metaphors, in which she describes herself as “quite unseduced” by the fantasies about illness that terrified her fellow cancer patients, a pose debunked by her own diary.
The questionnaire essay includes a swift biography: university at 15, married at 17, divorced at 24, independent, vigorously self-confident, travelling without the shelter of a man’s name, income or physical protection. She’s a shining exception to those servile masses, and here at least she’s careful to portray this as a matter of fortune, not talent; to differentiate herself from those successful women who slam the door in the face of others, cleaving to their special status and refusing to admit the cards are stacked. If the first responsibility of the liberated woman is to live “the fullest, freest and most imaginative life she can”, the second, she declares piously, is solidarity with her sisters.
By 1975, that sense of solidarity had eroded, never to be seen on such public display again. Perhaps Sontag no longer felt threatened by feminism or thought it could provide her with useful cachet. Certainly, she’d ceased to be intellectually invested in the project. It had become more important to define herself against the backdrop of her mutinous sisters, often by using exactly the techniques she’d recently decried. Her (brilliant) essay on the Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl and the aesthetics of fascism occasioned a scrap on the letters page of the New York Review of Books with the feminist poet Adrienne Rich, whose mild-voiced desire for Sontag to discover a familial connection between the grotesque object-making of fascism and patriarchy occasioned a snarling denouncement of “simple-minded … feminist plaint”.
There’s no question that Sontag is right when she says “it is surely not treasonable to think that there are other goals than the depolarization of the two sexes, other wounds than sexual wounds”. Of course, she had a right to choose her subjects. Of course, not every argument need spool back to the dominance of men over women. And, of course, feminism had – has – its simple-minded solipsism, its groupthink and hatred of defectors. But the fact remains that she wasn’t very good at it anyway.
As the Riefenstahl essay demonstrates, Sontag doesn’t come alive stylistically or intellectually unless she has cultural material with which to think. Her sentences only begin to accumulate their sonorous, unsettling meanings when she’s reading a photograph or applying the techniques of new historicism to a film, not when she’s making vacuous statements about women and beauty, terms so cavernous they echo. She can’t get purchase on the subject of sexual politics. She doesn’t possess the rage of Andrea Dworkin, her incantatory, haunted-house style. She isn’t an obsessive theoretician, a basement genius like Shulamith Firestone. Frankly, her heart isn’t in it.
What’s most noticeable about the last quarter of this book is that it starts to sound like Sontag. Her voice doesn’t quicken until it leaves the subject of women far behind. What she really wants to write about is death and history, about the multiplication of images and the sickening, suffering body as it travels through the devastations of time. Those were her subjects. This is not a very good book about women, but on Sontag herself – her machinations, her refusals – it’s as revealing as, well, a face with the makeup scrubbed off.
• Olivia Laing’s latest book is Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Picador). 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.
