Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (25 page)

The Michigan Festival dealt with most other conflicts more expansively. Virtually any point of view or activity was allowed, and the personalized, therapeutic trend within feminism bloomed. A medical tent, called the Womb, offered both regular and alternative medicine, for example, and there were separate campgrounds for those who preferred quiet or chemical-free environments and for the physically challenged.
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Organizers placed no limits on topics for workshops, which could be scheduled in advance or created spontaneously. Merchants had their own tent, although soon enough they protested that they were forced to “hawk” their wares while musicians were paid for their appearances. “Women’s culture,” one of them objected, “is tilling the land and planting the seeds of a new way of perceiving the world. Cultural workers … are silver smiths, quilters, writers, musicians, silk screeners, woodworkers, potters, photographers, etc., etc. They are all of equal importance in the creation of a true reflection of women’s reality, of celebration and expression of a new vision.”
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Workshops on spirituality grew each year, and a tent was set aside for the discussion and practice of religion. New Age spiritualism was more than just a women’s practice through the seventies, of course, but feminist New Age spirituality had its own tenets. They sought new forms of ritual based on witchcraft and ancient matriarchal religions. In 1980 Z Budapest, the high priestess of the Susan B. Anthony Coven in Los Angeles, offered three workshops entitled “Goddess Religion for the ’80’s.”
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Attending festivals gave participants an opportunity to “visit” their “people,” to feel visible and at home at least once a year, but they had few illusions that it would ever be possible to extend that community in its purest form much beyond the episodic boundaries of these events. Thousands of women came to enjoy periodic “visits” to women’s culture, but there were others who wanted to live it every day. These were women who embraced the Utopian fantasy of a lifestyle that they believed would ultimately redeem the earth. The human complexities of trying to live purely in the “real world,” however, intruded at even’ turn.

The idea that an “all-woman” context would be naturally cooprative,
nurturing, and egalitarian shattered as women’s institutions—whether service oriented, like health clinics, or businesses—began to grow and to become more diverse. It was no simple matter to diversify the relatively homogeneous environments of these early feminist experiments. Staff turnover meant that new hires were not necessarily feminists (or white and middle class) and had a hard time understanding the constant effort to live up to “feminist values.”

Funding sources also placed demands not necessarily congruent with feminist suspicion of hierarchy and organizational structure. For example, the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women had been founded in 1973 by a group of feminist activists who had been working informally on the issue of rape for 2 years. Like many other such groups with roots in the women’s liberation movement, they were deeply committed to collective processes and extremely suspicious of government agencies. From 1976 to 1978, however, the LACAAW received a major grant from the National Institute for Mental Health. “So we really got structured, because it was a research and demonstration center…. We had an obligation in terms of products that we had to develop—training manual, educational manual—[we had to] develop the programs, and then evaluate them.” In addition, they suddenly had five new staff and their accustomed, informal ways of doing business, including midnight phone calls, no longer worked. “Well, we set ourselves up as a collective. Everybody made the same salary; everybody made decisions together…. There was a whole process of trying to develop a decision-making process that included hotline volunteers as well as staff. It meant that every discussion was agonizing.”
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Health clinics, shelters for battered women, rape crisis centers, bookstores, and collectives of all sorts began with the idea that there should be a total sharing of the work and no differences in salary. Because these were labors of love, intended to be of service to the women’s community, there was also an expectation that staff would accept extremely low pay. Several things conspired to disrupt this pattern, however. As founders aged, voluntary poverty was less and less attractive. Collective management, which forbade specialization, too often scorned the development of particular skills and made institutional management extremely
inefficient. New hires paid for by foundation grants or government sources, such as CETA (Comprehensive Educational and Training Act funding was relatively easy during the Carter administration), did not necessarily share the missionary impulse of the founders or their grounding in feminist community and values. For them, decent pay, allowances for child care, and the opportunity to develop specialized skills were self-evident necessities.

Frequently these conflicts played themselves out on the terrain of race, which was already a highly sensitive issue throughout the movement. Racial diversity grew dramatically both because a high proportion of clients in service organizations were poor women of color and because the ability to hire staff allowed organizations to act on their egalitarian ideals. Minority women expressed resentment about attitudes and behaviors they experienced as racist, however well intentioned. In a typical response, Women’s Advocates in St. Paul, Minnesota (one of the earliest shelters) held a Racism Workshop in May 1978. “Our purpose was to confront and deal with racism, staff to staff, staff to resident, and resident to resident. It was a very hard thing for all of us to deal with,…” They decided to establish a policy of ongoing workshops and a statement of principle that “Racist behavior will be confronted and anyone who persists in this behavior will have to leave.”
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Racism was not a simple matter of attitudes or good intentions, however. It overlapped with class, with unspoken stereotypes on all sides, and with previous history in the movement. Sharon Vaughan, founder of Women’s Advocates and later codirector of the Harriet Tubman shelter in Minneapolis, discovered only gradually the deep distrust of her black codirector toward middle-class white women. Sharon had chosen to be downwardly mobile, living on very little to realize her passionate commitment to ending violence against women. Her codirector, however, “never had any choices” and bitterly resented what she probably perceived to be an attitude of moral superiority. They clashed over the issue of merit raises for staff, which seemed logical to one and unbearably hierarchical to the other. “I won that battle,” Sharon remembers. “Wouldn’t even consider it.” A year later, the staff asked for her resignation on the grounds that she was racist. Only after that, going through
what she looks back on as her “Barbie Doll Breakdown,” did Sharon begin to express her own anger and to believe that “white women’s racism is in not being able to be angry. It is disrespectful.”
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Feminist businesses and cooperatives that were primarily lesbian frequently sought to realize a perfect merging of public and private, work and personal life, but they also found that effort to be fraught with danger. Virago, a Colorado feminist collective that produced cultural events, began as a volunteer effort. “But when they started getting paid through CETA, they didn’t do much and had all kinds of internal conflicts. Some women thought it should be fun as a business, others wanted to see it in terms of political culture. At least one person who was paid a salary did not work.”
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Many a business dissolved when primary relationships among key members broke up. Others sought the assistance of family therapists to sort through the tangle of emotional and professional issues that such relationships could engender. Sisterhood at work could, it turns out, lead to a dysfunctional family business.
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A group in Colorado sat down to record a discussion of what they referred to as “dissolution in the women’s movement” and raised many of the most fundamental dilemmas posed by separatism. “Why is it so hard to work side by side with someone you disagree with—why the terrible concern that everyone should agree on everything…. I started listening to people outside my circle of friends and workers. It really made my own life much simpler; I found my world was much larger than I thought.”
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Another reflected that in the separatist phase, “Everyone was either in a bookstore collective, newspaper collective, cultural or political collective. Everyone was doing process. For a while the energy was high. Meetings were numerous. We were everywhere…. [But] separatism was the isolationism of the purists. We divorced ourselves from money and capitalism. Money was evil; materialism was to be shunned. For many, it was only from the depths of poverty, when we started suffering from having no money for dentists or doctors or clothes or shelter or upkeep, that we came back to the ‘system.’ … In avoiding capitalism, we shunned learning how to deal and survive in a capitalist society. We had trouble running businesses, competing, paying bills, learning to pay women for their work…. Other isms are not equal to
feminism, but feminism must be available in the market place of ideas. We are learning we can be feminists and new ageists and socialists and environmentalists all at once.”
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J
UST AS CULTURAL
feminism grew from the earliest impulses of women’s liberation groups, so did socialist feminism, and the boundaries between the two were clearly permeable, as the previous quote demonstrates. Shorter lived, in an organizational sense, socialist feminism flourished between 1972 and 1976. After that its founders moved in two directions. Some turned in the mid-1970s toward work in liberal organizations with a strong bent toward equity and justice for those at the bottom of society, for example, 9 to 5 or policy-oriented groups. Others turned to the realm of ideas, looking for useful theory but not for ideology, questions to pursue more than answers. They emerged in the 1980s as some of the most important and original intellectuals in the academic field of women’s studies.

The failure of twentieth century socialist revolutions makes a concept like socialist feminism difficult to grasp in the twenty-first century, yet most left activists in the late 1960s were deeply disillusioned with the inequities of American capitalism and identified in some sense with the political vision of democratic socialism. Schooled in “participatory democracy,” few would advocate a massive state bureaucracy (as had developed in the communist world); rather they looked to experimental democratic alternatives to capitalism, such as workers cooperatives. Feminism was not welcomed by rigid Marxists, who insisted that women’s oppression was secondary to the oppression of workers, but most of the founders of women’s liberation included in their vision of feminism an ideal of economic equality that fit easily within much of the rhetoric about socialism. In such a context, the word
socialism
represented a humane alternative to capitalism, evoking images of a cooperative, egalitarian, and caring society.

The first socialist feminist groups (Bread and Roses in Boston and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union or CWLU) were founded in 1969 by activists who resisted the bifurcation of the movement into “feminist” and “politico” factions. Distinguishing themselves most
sharply from “liberal” feminists like NOW, they challenged the idea that equality for all women could be achieved within a social system built on inequality. At the same time they were highly critical of efforts to define sex as the primary source of all oppression and men as “the enemy,” and they also dissented from the more extreme visions of lesbian separatism. Their greatest concern was to build a movement that reached beyond the middle class to include issues and concerns affecting poor and working-class women. Thus, in the late sixties and early seventies, as radical feminist groups splintered, fractured, and succumbed to the gay-straight split, socialist feminist groups offered an alternative that seemed less ideologically purist and more oriented toward practical organizing. Because of their focus on outreach and organizing to achieve practical gains for poor and working-class women, their work was in many ways parallel to project-centered NOW chapters, but they were always, in addition, searching for an effective theory that could link an understanding of women’s oppression with other systems of economic and racial inequity.

Socialist feminists wrestled with the linked problems of theory (explanatory ideas) and practice (practical actions). Their theorizing not only sought to explain reality and offer a vision of the future, it was also intended to provide a practical method of achieving that vision. Rejecting the Left’s traditional emphasis on the primacy of class, as well as the radical feminist effort to supplant class with sex as the primary contradiction, they endeavored to find an effective way to bring these modes of analysis together.

Pragmatism and ideological precision did not always coexist easily, of course, yet the largest, most vibrant, and longest lasting socialist feminist groups were the least ideological, espousing a nondogmatic, highly pragmatic vision of socialism not unlike that of the American Socialist Party early in the twentieth century Adapting the women’s liberation decentralized approach, these groups did not demand ideological purity. Instead they stimulated an array of organizing experiments.

Bread and Roses in Boston arose in part to counter the narrowness of the radical feminist group Cell 16 and to create an autonomous space on the left for a woman’s movement to grow. Founders believed that they
were exploring a new stage of activism that would follow the initial experience of consciousness-raising: