I.

Women's issues are the most important issues of our times. Feminism has trivialized or marginalized them. And still I call myself a feminist, even as I know that to do so means to engage in a struggle for the soul of feminism in our time.

The change in the situation of American women during the thirty years since the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique ranks among the thunder claps of modern history--as a veritable social revolution. Foremost in this change figure a decisive increase in women's participation in the labor force and the sexual revolution, which have resulted in the emergence of women as primary individuals. With them have come a divorce of sex from morality and an even more chilling tendency toward a divorce between morality and reproduction, both of which are virtually unprecedented in human history. And although these changes were part of continuing historical development, the ones of immediate concern occurred in a remarkably brief period of time, roughly between 1967 and 1973.

Not everyone has found these changes easy to live with, and many have found them unsettling. As a result, in one way or another, women are drawn to the center of many of the most explosive issues of our times, and, as in the past, they are frequently blamed for every thing from violence in the schools to the collapse of Western civilization as we have known it.

It is not surprising that many people--including many women--have found the rapid changes in the situation of women unsettling, for those changes have affected virtually every aspect of most people's lives. Certainly, the response has decisively contributed to what have been called the culture wars--the highly publicized battles that are being fought over social and cultural issues: family values, abortion, sexual harassment, acquaintance rape. But as the debates swirl around us, it is worth remembering that the major changes are first and foremost economic. Women's increased participation in the labor force represents a fundamental shift in the pattern of women's lives, affecting not only their relations to the world of work, but to the lives of families as well, and to a decline in the influence of the family over women's lives.[1] The implications of this economic change have been all the more difficult to absorb because almost all of it occurred within a brief period and because it affected women of all ages, not just younger women.[2]

The main point nonetheless remains that the changes in attitude on both sides have followed changes in behavior. They did not cause them. Both contemporary feminism and the conservative reaction against it represent responses to a world that most of us find confusing. More surprising than the emergence of these two extremes is that, beneath all the public chatter and name-calling, growing numbers of Americans are making their peace with the changes and are trying to learn to live with them. It is as if the debate had sprung free of its social moorings. For this time, the angriest debates about what women should do and be have surprisingly little to do with most women's (and men's) sense of their own lives.

For most women the greatest challenge is to shape a story of their life so as to make some sense and help them to live it. In this effort, most women seem to know that in one way they are embarking on a journey for which they have no clear maps, and in another way they are also their mother's daughters. Women, in other words, are trying to weave together aspects of the old and the new under conditions in which it is not always clear how their story will end.

As even the profeminist media acknowledge, the official voices of feminism, notably the National Organization for Women, are moving further and further from the mainstream of American public opinion. Yet clearly, that very American public opinion is more aware of and sympathetic to women's issues than any would have dared to predict two decades ago. So what has happened to feminism? The issues are attracting more interest and engagement than ever: women, including married women with small children, are more likely to work than not; women, in large numbers, are demonstrating their ability to perform admirably in a wide variety of occupations only recently all but closed to them; women, with rare exceptions, still earn significantly less than men; in a world of no-fault divorce and proliferating single motherhood, women carry the primary responsibility for the bearing and rearing of children; women, in significant numbers, suffer sexual harassment, battering, and rape.

Three decades after the beginning of the contemporary women's movement, we face an extraordinary paradox. Women's issues have entered the mainstream of American consciousness and are widely accepted as relevant to most people's lives. Yet many women and most men doubt--or even reject--"feminism" as they understand its intentions and policies. Most American women do care about women's issues. They simply do not recognize feminism as a faithful or effective expression of their concerns. Too many women remain haunted by the idea that feminism is about the war between the sexes, not about the improvement of women's everyday lives. For most women, in other words, feminism "is not a story about my life."

II.

Traditionally, to the dismay of many feminists, the centerpiece of a woman's life was marriage and, beyond marriage, motherhood. Our postmodern economy has, as we all know, wreaked havoc with marriage, as the prevalence of divorce and the escalating numbers of single mothers abundantly confirm. Within a few decades, women have seen marriage dissolve as a reliable source of economic support. Despite the formality of equal access to divorce, the burden falls overwhelmingly on women. Men can and frequently do leave women with children to support and with inadequate resources, and men who remain in marriages increasingly need help to pay the family's bills. And then we have the growing numbers of women who bear children but never marry at all.

Yet even as the sobering evidence mounts, most women's commitment to the importance of marriage and family has not changed. Thinking about their own lives in 1990, American women overwhelmingly preferred marriage to any alternative, although many were developing new ideas of what marriage should mean. Women who wanted to be married split between those wanted a marriage in which men and women shared all responsibilities and those who wanted a traditional marriage in which men provided for the family and women took care of home and children. But in a mere twenty years the balance in preference has shifted decisively.

In 1974, most of the women who preferred marriage also preferred a traditional marriage. In 1990, most of them preferred a marriage in which women and men shared responsibilities. And women who preferred shared responsibilities might have been encouraged to know that roughly the same proportion of men agreed with them.[3] The majority of women, moreover, do not see their new commitment to work and careers as substitutes for their commitments to family. Thus, whatever the differences between women and men, their attitudes toward work and family have, in recent years, tended to converge. And although women's attitudes have probably changed more than men's, their goals for marriage have increasingly developed in very similar ways. The combination of sexual revolution and women's growing participation in the labor force has resulted in an encouraging commitment to a companionate marriage in which women and men share responsibilities.

III.

Women's changing attitudes toward the balance between work and family in their lives has followed directly upon their growing participation in the labor force. Women's rates of labor force participation and the ratio of male-female earnings have both been growing since 1900, but the regular presence of young married women and mothers in the labor force is a more recent phenomenon. For only after 1960 did younger, more educated women begin to enter the labor force in greater numbers. And the group that has been entering since 1970 has been gaining experience at a much more rapid rate. As a result, the education and experience of the female labor force are beginning to increase at a faster rate than those of the male labor force.

During the past thirty years, women, in unprecedented numbers, have been entering and remaining in the labor force, and today more than half of all American women work outside the home. Most do so because they must, many because they want to. As more women work outside the home, pay equity--equal pay for equal work--has understandably emerged as a primary concern of women in general.

It will come as no surprise that much remains to be done on this score. Perhaps more surprising is how much has already been accomplished. As the quality of the female labor force relative to the male labor force has steadily improved, so has the gap between male and female earnings steadily declined. From 1960 to 1980, full time women workers, on average, earned roughly 60 percent of the hourly wages of men--the notorious fifty-nine cents on the dollar. But then women began to close the gap, and younger women's ability to close it much more rapidly than older women confirms the importance of education for younger women. Today, young full-time women workers are earning 90 percent or more of what their male colleagues earn. And we have every reason to expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future.

The gradual rise in women's earnings relative to those of men has also been accompanied by a steady decline in the sex segregation of the labor force. Beginning in the 1970s, women have made substantial gains in the white color and managerial sectors, e.g. law, that were previously dominated by men.[4] And as women have begun to enter fields that were previously dominated by men, the number of women in sex-typed occupations (i.e. occupations that had more than 60 percent women workers) has begun to decline. (In 1970, about nine in ten women worked in "female" occupations, but in 1990 only three in four did.) One thing is sure, women's economic situation has not worsened: During the 1980s, it improved more than in any other decade for the last century. And since women's success has, for the first time, resulted in a direct competition between women and men for jobs and wages, we may expect that it will affect the wages of men adversely.

Women's growing presence in the labor force and, especially, some women's rise in occupational status, has confronted women with problems as well as opportunities. The workplace itself has traditionally been a male preserve, which many men have been reluctant to share. It is, moreover, not difficult to understand that direct competition between women and men for employment and wages might result in (some) men's resentment of women--and even a backlash. We may be sure that men's determination to continue to control the workplace has resulted in sexual harassment, although we do not know whether there is more than previously or whether it is simply being reported more frequently. We should not, however, assume that there is a single, negative male attitude toward women in the workplace, if only because many men have wives, daughters, and partners who work and, accordingly, benefit directly from the improvement in women's earnings.

With each passing year, the economic significance for families of women's wage labor rises. Initially, women returned to work for personal as well as economic reasons.[5] During the early 1970s, married women's earnings substantially increased their families' incomes, but if you take these women's expenditures into account, the net increase over the incomes of families in which wives did not work was only 5 percent. Thus, it is clear that many women simply wanted to work, in part from a preference to buy services for the household rather than perform them, but, perhaps especially, from a desire for economic independence. The security of a full-time job is a kind of insurance against a husband's death, disability, or desertion. Work also gives the wife more power to make decisions within families, including decisions about consumption. It is also clear that a cruel hierarchy has emerged among women, for wives who work have effectively defined the roles of women who do not as servants' roles. And their ability to spend money on themselves--travel, meals out, clothes, hair dressers, and manicurists--has etched this distinction in a sharp visual image.

In recent years, however, women's earnings have made substantial contributions to the economic life of households and have played a growing role in the economic differences among them. The income gap between families in which the wife works and families in which she does not has steadily widened, and as women's wages continue to catch up with those of men, it will widen even more.[6] The gap between two parent and female-headed families is widening even faster. By 1984, families with a wife in the labor force earned, on average, $22,000 more a year than female-headed families, although the difference between female-headed families and families with a wife at home was only $12,600 a year. The point of these figures is simple: Not all women are benefiting equally from new opportunities in the workplace.

Growing numbers of single mothers are acutely experiencing what is called the feminization of poverty. Non-working married women are experiencing new economic hardships, which have been exacerbated by the male unemployment of recent years. And, notwithstanding glittering new opportunities in the labor force, most women are still doing most of the traditionally female things that their mothers and grandmothers did.

Today, half of all mothers with children under age three are in the labor force. Today, a third of all American children, and more than two-thirds of African-American children, live in families headed only by a mother.[7] Women from all classes, races, and ethnic groups know intimately what it means to go out to work and then to come home to face children, dinner, shopping, cleaning, and the endless responsibilities of keeping life going. These pressures fall especially hard on single mothers who are still stuck in traditionally female occupations such as secretary. What do they do when there is a crunch at the office that requires everyone to work late and their child is at home alone? One woman solved the problem by having her twelve year-old son sleep on the floor of her office while she helped to complete a rush order.

Most women, in other words, feel torn between their needs as individuals and their needs as members of families--between their desire for equality with men and their desire for some protection for their differences from them. And, to the extent that women's lives and economic interests differ, women may divide as much or more against each other than against men as a group. Thus an academic woman, who prides herself on her feminism, recently told a group of graduate students that daycare was simply not a priority at her institution. Apparently she did not remember that the majority of female employees at any university are likely to be administrative, clerical, or cleaning staff.

IV.

The evidence strongly suggests that the feminist response to women's changing situation has primarily been carried by upscale--young, white, well-educated, and well-to-do--women. And, in many respects, feminism can be seen as a story about their lives. For these are the women who have committed themselves to careers that promise a high measure of personal fulfillment, not just a source of income. They are also the women who compete most directly with men for salaries and promotions at work and for the time to be busiest at home. I should be the last to suggest that their problems do not merit serious attention, but it is worth remembering that their problems are not always typical. Thus the gap between their lives and the lives of most American women helps to explain why so many women who wrestle daily with "women's issues" still insist that feminism "is not a story about my life." By the same token, most women are also reluctant to embrace "All in the Family" as an adequate story.

The public discussion of Murphy Brown's single motherhood painfully revealed how completely the different sides in the debate are talking past one another. Vice President Dan Quayle opened with a broadside against the bankrupt values of a cultural elite that was shamelessly promoting single motherhood. Feminists countered that Dan Quayle should not be condemning the morality of other people's lives. Apparently, neither side understood the American people do not perceive morality as the principal issue.

The single most important and abiding consequence of the sexual revolution of the last thirty years has been the general acceptance that young women, like young men, may have sex before marriage. The vast majority of Americans no longer see premarital sex as a moral issue, and most are also unwilling to condemn single motherhood on moral grounds. Furthermore, we know that the numbers of single mothers are dramatically increasing, and increasing most dramatically among women who have attended at least a year of college, especially if they are white and have professional or managerial jobs.[8] This is Murphy Brown--the upscale, successful woman who earns more than most American families. Why should Murphy Brown not have a baby if she chooses?

There may, in fact, be reasons, moral or other, why Murphy Brown should not, but they have little or nothing to do with what once would have been called the "morality" of her sexual life. Few people these days would be willing to condemn Murphy Brown simply for having sex. If grounds for condemnation there are, they concern parents' obligations to children. Does a woman have a responsibility to provide her child with a father? Does a man have a responsibility to live with his children and their mother? Needless to say, in a culture that primarily focuses on individual happiness and satisfaction, and in which adults still worry about who will nurture them, this is not a popular topic of discussion.

Women like Murphy Brown may be the most rapidly increasing group of single mothers, but they are far from being the largest. Most single mothers are African-American or Hispanic-American and poor, and their numbers are also increasing, but frequently not because of choice and frequently with disastrous consequences for their and their children's prospects. More than half of all African-American women and a third of Hispanic-American women now find themselves struggling to raise children alone, normally with pitifully inadequate resources. Single motherhood is the story of their lives with a vengeance, but normally not the story they aspire to.

To complicate matters further, poor women frequently end up as single mothers because they like men and because they like children. Many hope against hope that the man with whom they are having sex will marry them; many see the child that results from having sex as someone who will love them. Upscale women frequently become single mothers because they cannot find a man with whom they wish to share their lives, or because their lives do not have room for the kind of compromises that most marriages demand. They too may crave the love that they believe a baby will give them, but they normally do not expect the baby seriously to disrupt their careers.

Poor single mothers embody the collapse of the traditional story of marriage and motherhood, but hardly the triumph of feminism. Upscale single mothers embody some women's new found ability to live the lives that were traditionally lived by men. Notwithstanding superficial similarities, those two kinds of lives could not be more different, and both differ significantly from what most American women seem to want for themselves. Contemplating the lives of poor single women, many perceive the worst dangers that shadow their own situation; contemplating the lives of upscale single women they see a repudiation of qualities that they value in themselves.

Yes, most women continue to regard their family relations and responsibilities as the most important part of their lives. They primarily differ from women of previous generations in also wanting to participate effectively as individuals in the public world of work. Valuing a sense of themselves as women, they instinctively bristle if they perceive feminism as a war on everything that women have traditionally been. More and more, women of all races, classes, and ethnic groups are throwing off the traditional stereotypes that feminists so fiercely criticize. Yet even as they throw them off, many women cling to a sense of being a woman--to attitudes and practices that offer some connection with those who have gone before.

Feminists, as a rule, have scant patience with what has gone before, which they primarily see as a centuries-long male effort to silence and constrain women. But their anger in this regard blinds them to the extraordinary rapidity of change in our own time. Viewing women as having been deprived of so much for so long, they want women to have everything now. And although they may disagree about the meaning of "everything," and especially disagree about whether women should be recognized as equal to men or protected because they are different, most do agree on the importance of freeing women from men's domination.

V.

In Backlash, Susan Faludi charges that those who are questioning the gains and value of feminism have got it all wrong or are just dishonest.[9] Feminists have been victims of a counterattack from those who want to sweep women out of the way and return them to their traditional place in the bedroom and the kitchen. That, Faludi insists, is not what most women want. Most women want to be out in the world, want to consolidate the gains of the last few decades. Faludi has a point. Surprising numbers of women have come to value their ability to function as individuals in their own right. But even Faludi doesn't really "get it." For she assumes that women have embraced autonomy and self-determination as the main story of their life, whereas most women still hope to combine it with aspects of a more traditional story.

Faludi and others like her have primarily identified feminism with sexual and cultural issues, largely ignoring the social and economic issues that so decisively shape the lives of most American women. Focusing on these issues, upscale feminists have presented feminism as, above all, a war between women and men over scarce resources. But the resources that concern them--notably independence, power, and prestige--are ones to which only a tiny minority of Americans have access in the first place. Thus upscale feminists pay little attention to the ways in which their quest for ever greater freedom from male domination and the traditional stereotypes that men are charged with having imposed on women play themselves out among those who primarily worry about adequate food and medical care, not to mention some education for their children.

In this context, abortion has emerged as the defining feminist issue. Woe to any woman who expresses any doubts about abortion, for she will ipso facto have defined herself as no feminist at all. At the most visible extremes, the struggle over abortion pits those who support a woman's absolute right to her own body against those who support a fetus's absolute right to life. Between the two, there seems little possibility of compromise. Yet most American women (like most American men) do favor some form of compromise. Tellingly, the Supreme Court, in the Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania decision, unambiguously located abortion in the conflict between pregnancy and women's needs to participate in the labor force, stating, "The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives." For women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation, they must, in some measure, be freed from their "unique" reproductive capacities.

In the end, the Court took no clear stand on the cultural issues, preferring to stand on the pragmatic ground that experience has taught us that women must be able to earn their living and perhaps provide for children as well. But the pragmatic ground has a chilling aspect. For why, in the absence of some social support for pregnancy, does women's survival not depend upon being free of the liabilities of pregnancy? And why, if abortion is acknowledged as a woman's individual right, should not the bearing and care for children not also be her individual responsibility?

Unlike Murphy Brown, most women do not want to shoulder that responsibility alone. For most women know that without some support, children too easily cause women's economic inequality and, in some instances, their economic deprivation. To prohibit women from protecting themselves and their actual or potential children from such deprivation would, indeed, be punitive. Responsibility for children does limit women's mobility and opportunities--and accounts for much, if not most, of the remaining difference between men's and women's earnings. Unless, of course, you decided to free women from children.

Thus Casey captured an important undercurrent in feminism: For women to be equal participants in society they do not so much need freedom from men, which they may have if they choose, but freedom from babies. Anyone who spends any amount of time talking with accomplished and ambitious young women will sooner or later hear echoes of that undercurrent. A significant number of young women who are embarked on careers are postponing childbearing or planning to have a single child, and some are thinking of having no children at all.

VI.

Capitalist societies, especially the United States, have been grounded in what we might call a divorce between morality and power. While men were assumed to concern themselves with the business of running the world, women were assumed to provide its moral fabric, especially by raising the next generation, but also by doing all kinds of moral work for which the market was unwilling to pay. True, for centuries that tendency toward divorce was checked, but at least since the late nineteenth century the defenses have been steadily collapsing. For most of the nineteenth century, many (if not most) American women found genuine satisfaction in this sexual division of labor, occasional resentments notwithstanding. But at an accelerating rate since the beginning of the twentieth century, growing numbers of women have begun to find that the resentments outweigh the satisfactions. Increasingly, the moral work in which many women had taken pride began to look like servants' work. Under these conditions, the struggle to free women became, however unintentionally, a struggle to free them from the moral work upon which our society has depended so heavily.

The culture wars separate those who would force women to do society's moral work and those who would free women from it. In these wars, most women take neither side. However shrill the rhetoric of ideologues, women's need for help in raising children, equal pay for equal work, freedom from sexual harassment on the job, and all the rest does not necessarily commit them to either side in the struggle over values. Simply put, a woman's desire for safe, affordable daycare does not necessarily mean that she supports--or opposes--the right to abortion on demand or any position on other questions. Nor does many women's gut sense that children do best with some attention from their mothers necessarily mean that they--and the men in their lives--do not believe that she has a right, and perhaps an obligation, to work outside of the home. Nor does a woman's commitment to her right to work for equal pay and under non-harassing conditions mean that she would call herself a feminist.

Most women do not want to see women's issues as an all-out war with men, much less with children. But their reluctance has not led them to deny the importance of women's issues. Increasingly, the vast majority of American women--and men--accept women's issues as pressing national concerns. With each passing year, more and more of us are committed to the availability of high quality, affordable daycare, to maternal, parental, or family leaves, to equal pay for equal work, to the fair treatment of women in hiring and promotion, to freeing the workplace from sexual harassment, to the swift punishment of rape, and more. Women's issues lead inescapably into issues of health care, education, job training, and affordable housing. They touch upon every aspect of our lives. But most women, including many of those who are most committed to improving women's position in politics and work, still do not want to see women's experience simply as a story of victimization at the hands of naked male brutality.

VII.

Feminists have assumed that cultural and sexual issues would unite women. They do not. Many women cherish traditional values, even as they recognize that the world is changing. Many women perceive the most virulent feminist campaigns against acquaintance rape, sexual harassment, and pornography as directed against their own husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. Many women mistrust the feminist tendency to strengthen the government and its minions as unwelcome intrusions into their families and communities. And it is safe to assume that as women's position in society and the workplace continues to become stronger these differences among women will grow.

Economic differences among women may also be expected to continue to grow. And a feminism that is primarily associated with the aspirations of independent, upscale career women will continue to alienate women who, with or without some help from a man, primarily struggle to make ends meet. Indeed the visibly growing economic differences among women may help to explain why feminism has remained so resolutely silent on the question. To be sure, upscale women can support policies--daycare, health care, job training, and benefits for part-time workers--for which they and their families will have to pay a disproportionate share. But we should not blindly count upon their doing so, especially since so far their support has largely taken the form of hiring yet more experts (with benefits) to tell other people how to live their lives, while for their own children they hire nannies.

Historically, the strongest bond among women across differences of class, race, and ethnicity has been their ability to bear children and the experience of mothering that so many women have shared. In capitalist societies, especially the United States, women's maternal responsibilities have been taken as evidence that they were naturally suited for the moral work of society. Even today, some feminists insist that women--whether by nature or history--have a different, and by implication more nurturing, sense of morality than men. Yet the primary mission of contemporary feminism has been to free women from oppressive domestic roles.

Contemporary feminism has, in this sense, developed as a struggle for liberation from the moral work of society. Obviously feminists do not put it that way, but the conclusion remains difficult to avoid. And many on the traditional right have condemned feminism on precisely those grounds, claiming that women must accept their traditional responsibilities. No doubt, feminism has played a leading role in the attack on traditional values, but the attack would not have proved so resilient and widespread had not the foundation for those values already begun to erode. Today no amount of appeals to values, however justified, will alone turn back the clock. Social morality has always included the necessity that people who choose be able to practice it. Feminism's greatest mistake lies in not having understood that the changes that have revolutionized women's lives are public, not private, concerns. The great danger in this massive failure of vision is that the moral work of society will remain undone.

If that tendency persists, and make no mistake it is well underway, the Right will have as much to answer for as the Left. The Right has complied in the emergence of feminism as a leftwing, and increasingly radical, position. Day care, health care, family leave, and benefits for part-time workers do not undermine families. They strengthen them and, increasingly, may be necessary to their survival. What good does it do to preach marriage, when black men cannot find jobs? A man who does not work cannot contribute to his children's support, much less provide them with a wholesome model of parental authority. Paying for the services our people need, not to mention deciding the role of families, churches, communities, states, and the federal government in shaping them, is a political issue that requires extensive debate--a debate that must include the moral implications of policy but cannot be reduced to them.

Feminism, in moving toward a culturally radical, leftwing position, has draped itself in the mantle of equality, without stopping to consider what equality means. Since we may be sure that nothing is further than economics from the minds of most of those who speak most insistently in the name of equality, we may also be sure that, at best, they mean equality between women and men within the elite. These cultural messages play very differently on the street, where economic equity rather than sexual equality is the real issue. Yet the most of the Right, caught in the lure of individual prosperity, has ignored its opportunity. The answer to feminism is not punitive recriminations or even equality of opportunity, it is a new defense by the elite itself of social responsibility.

Notes

1. Steven D. McLaughlin et al.: The Changing Lives of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

2. Ibid.

3. The 1990 Virginia Slims Report, a study conducted by the Roper Organization Inc. for Virginia Slims, p. 45.

4. In 1960, about 60 percent of all female workers were in occupations that were at least 80 percent female; by 1980, only 46 percent of female workers were.

5. See E.P. Lazear and R.T. Michael, "Family Size and Distribution of Real Per Capita Income," American Economic Review (1980) 70: 91-107. In 1972-73, when married women were entering the labor force in large numbers, two-person households in which the wife worked had an income 35 percent higher than those in which the wife did not work, although if you take account of taxes and other expenses associated with the wife's working (clothes, meals out, etc.) the net advantage reduced to 5 percent. By the late 1980s, working wives were contributing 23-28 percent of household income, although the actual percentage diminishes when you take expenditures into account.

6. In 1970, the mean income of couples with working wives was $6,800 more than those without; in 1984, it was nearly $9,500.

7. Adapted from New York Times (July 14, 1993). The figures are 57 percent of African-American women are single parents and two-thirds of African American children are born out of wedlock.

8. New York Times, July 14, 1993.

9. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991).

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities at Emory University.