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Hear Her Roar by Cathy Young
Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, edited by Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 413 pages, $60.00, $19.95 (paper)
In Ayn Rand's lifetime, university professors regarded their students' interest in her writings with a mixture of scorn and dismay. Seventeen years after her death, the iconoclastic novelist-philosopher is becoming a respectable subject of scholarship. Most recently, a collection of essays on Rand has appeared in the "ReReading the Canon" series featuring feminist analyses of philosophers from Aristotle to Foucault.
That work, Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, edited by Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra (the authors, respectively, of The Ayn Rand Companion and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical), could not have pleased Rand, given her aversion to anything called "feminist." To some extent, this attitude reflected the anti-individualist, anti-capitalist slant of the modern women's movement. But it also had to do with Rand's peculiar views on sex and gender.
Was Rand a feminist? Some of the book's contributors-Gladstein, author Karen Michalson, psychologist and former Rand protege and lover Nathaniel Branden, and, with some reservations, biographer Barbara Branden-place her squarely within feminism's best tradition, pointing both to her own life of achievement and to her female characters: independent, strong women ahead of their time. As Nathaniel Branden puts it, "A feminism that sees woman at her best, as a heroic figure, will find support and validation in Rand's writings. A feminism that defines woman as victim and man as her evil oppressor will see Rand as the enemy."
Other contributors, such as libertarian feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor, philosopher Diana Mertz Brickell, and writer Thomas Gramstad, are more ambivalent. They argue that Rand's work has much to offer feminism but is marred by what Gramstad calls "flaws and inconsistencies in her notions of gender." All agree that nothing in Rand's basic philosophy is incompatible with feminism and that, in fact, her antifeminism was in many ways at odds with her individualism.
One obvious stumbling block for would-be Randian feminists is the infamous "rape scene" between Howard Roark and Dominique Francon in Rand's novel The Fountainhead. Is it rape or, as Wendy McElroy insists, "rough sex between consenting adults"? McElroy rightly criticizes feminists who...