4 - The Blessing of a Late, Female Birth: Gisela Elsner's Fliegeralarm (1989)

Summary

THE UNIFYING CONCERN of the preceding section of this book, the tendency to blame social and historical ills on men, is the target of Gisela Elsner's satire in the essay “Vom Flausch und Fluch der neuen Frau” (On the Fleece and Curse of the New Woman, 1988). In her typically trenchant diction, Elsner reports that “ein Steckbrief kursiert, auf dem statt einer Verbrechervisage ein Hodensack zu sehen ist” (a wanted poster is in circulation that shows not the face of a criminal but a scrotum). In this essay, she ponders the apparent consensus among the left liberal intelligentsia that men (bar a few anomalies) have contributed nothing to the world but its destruction. Elsner was not alone in her skepticism about the roots of this misandry. In the 1980s, the philosophers Frigga Haug and Christina Thürmer-Rohr caused controversy among West German feminists when they suggested that patriarchal structures would only erode when women became aware of their own complicity and investment in oppressive thought patterns, not least the ideology of separate male and female spheres. Thürmer-Rohr insisted that women too readily painted themselves as post hoc “Trümmerfrauen des Patriarchats” (rubble women of patriarchy), disclaiming responsibility for social affliction because they were not directly responsible for the economic or political decisions that had caused social and environmental harm. Women become “Mittäterinnen” (co-perpetrators), she argues, because they tolerate the destruction wrought by male-run institutions. As the term “Mittäterinnen” implies, however, Thürmer-Rohr primarily conceives the political failings of women in the context of an already guilty male society. Perhaps the most wellknown example of this widespread tendency in feminist circles is Margarete Mitscherlich's essay “Antisemitismus: eine Männerkrankheit?” Mitscherlich argues that female antisemitism stems from identification with male prejudice. She concludes that expressions of antisemitism among women do not contradict the long-standing psychoanalytical belief that interaction is central to the psychic world of women who therefore develop a morality, “die liebevoller, beweglicher und humaner ist als die des Mannes” (which is more loving, flexible, and human than men's).

Gisela Elsner reproaches such conceptions of femininity, which she particularly associates with the current discourse of “Neue Mütterlichkeit” (New Motherliness) that emphasizes the social value of qualities deemed maternal.