Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (26 page)

We and many women friends feel like we’ve been through a phase, a stage, of working out our own consciousness, understanding of our past. [This] has taken the form of being angry at men a lot, men in general, and men of the left for women who’ve been in the movement before. That’s been really crucial for us, a way of beginning to shed self-blame, self-hate for who we are, really feeling instead of just intellectualizing—that it’s not our fault, as we find other women sharing our experience. And now, as we’re beginning to discover who we are, who we want to be, we’re ready to reach out.
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At this point, Bread and Roses was little different from women’s liberation groups then forming across the country except that they wanted to articulate their commitment to other struggles for justice and to move feminist organizing into the Left’s tradition of insurgent organizing and mobilization. In the beginning, of course, they had no real sense of what kind of organizing could achieve these goals, so they set out to “do everything.”

Bread and Roses and CWLU, in their initial years, evolved broad umbrella structures under which women’s liberation activism of all sorts could coexist. The impressive lists of activities in which they engaged mirrored those of highly active NOW chapters, which spun off projects on rape, health, education, or domestic violence and also organized consciousness-raising groups. Bread and Roses projects included organizing secretaries, organizing high school students, guerrilla theater, agitation-propaganda, study groups, an orientation committee to introduce new women to Bread and Roses, and a “strategy and tactics for the women’s movement” group.
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The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, which lasted until 1977, was even more diverse, encompassing at one time or another projects focused on day care, women in prison, workplace organizing, political education, a liberation school, outreach, a journal (
Secret Storm
), a legal clinic, a lesbian rap group, a rock group, a poster and art collective, and several health care projects, including an
abortion task force, pregnancy testing, and HERS (health evaluation and referral service).
⁸⁹

CWLU also produced some of the first efforts to articulate socialist feminism as a perspective within the women’s movement. Given a leadership with strong roots in community organizing, they also consciously set out to provide a political rationale for methods of organizing that might otherwise be criticized as reformist or bourgeois.
⁹⁰
In a crucial paper published in 1971 they defined a middle path between, on the one hand, an emphasis on “new lifestyles within a women’s culture, emphasizing personal liberation and growth, and the relationship of women to women” and on the other hand, “a structural analysis of our society and its economic base…. As socialist feminists, we share both the personal and the structural analysis.” CWLU drew on the ideas of Italian theorist Andre Gorz, who argued that it was possible to achieve “anticapitalist structural reforms” that, reformist in their specific nature, would nonetheless achieve genuine shifts in power away from the ruling classes.
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This, then, gave a rationale for socialists, who had agonized over how to link their involvement in issues like day care and health to their long-term goal of an egalitarian, socialist society.

In response to the success of the CWLU model and its theoretical initiatives, over the next few years 18 women’s unions formed, primarily on the East and West Coasts and in the industrial Midwest. Another catalyst was a socialist feminist conference over Thanksgiving weekend in 1972 called by a small group in Durham, North Carolina. In standard student movement fashion, 165 women heard about it through the movement grapevine, drove hundreds of miles to get there (oblivious to the holiday weekend they were missing), slept on floors, ate peanut butter, and debated earnestly with one another for several days. Most of them were unaffiliated with any formal group but they returned home to organize.
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Soon, in addition to the women’s unions and Bread and Roses there were a large number of Marxist-feminist discussion groups and several all women’s chapters of the New American Movement (a democratic socialist organization founded by former student activists), all of whom shared a sense with the women’s unions that they were a vibrant branch of women’s liberation.

Tensions in these groups shifted over time. Bread and Roses experienced the stresses of the early women’s movement, including the gay-straight split. Most of the socialist feminist groups that formed after 1972, however, included substantial numbers of lesbian members (in some instances a majority) who consciously chose a political environment that was not separatist. Instead, these later groups were torn by ideological struggle over the definition of socialist feminism. The ease with which CWLU had framed a rationale for socialist feminist organizing in 1971 proved elusive for subsequent groups at a time when the rest of the Left was being drawn into sectarian Marxist-Leninism. Indeed, the central task many groups set for themselves was ideological: they wanted to create a global analysis that would explain not only the relationship between patriarchy and imperialism but also all forms of oppression. Such an analysis, once discovered, would point the way to an effective strategy for overcoming these structures of oppression. As Barbara Ehrenreich put it in her keynote speech to the National Socialist Feminist Conference in 1975: “Whatever the issue, we do not seek individual solutions for individual women. We seek collective solutions and forms of struggle that heighten
collective
confidence.”
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What had been a statement of a few paragraphs for CWLU on the meaning of socialist feminism appeared as a 16-page statement of principles in the founding document of the San Francisco Women’s Union in 1974.
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As in the first years of women’s liberation, the search for ideological perfection, coupled with the politicization of personal life, meant that those who could claim greater oppression had a moral upper hand in debate. Because socialist feminist groups believed that working-class and minority women should be their primary constituency, they also continually berated themselves for their failure to attract such women. At the San Diego Women’s Union founding conference, for example (in an account published by the Berkeley/Oakland
Union
), the planning committee was “… attacked as straight, white and bourgeois…. [E]asily guilt-tripped into silence, they totally abnegated their power and women from the audience took the chair … the ‘confrontation politics’ of some of the most vocal women did not allow for dialogue.”
⁹⁵
Thus, in the name of diversity, debate was sometimes suppressed.

In Chicago, sectarian leftist organizations, such as the Socialist Workers Party, the Revolutionary Union, the Communist Worker’s Party, and the October League, tried on several occasions to take over the CWLU, seeing it as a quick and easy way to gain influence and a forum for their own “correct line.” When a sectarian group organized a chapter of CWLU in 1975, the steering committee decided to expel them (after extensive debate and much angst). These battles, took their toll, however, and the CWLU disbanded less than 2 years later.
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Socialist feminism inherited many of the same disintegrative forces that seemed to accompany feminist: growth and creativity from the beginning. For a few years, however, it seemed possible to build a national network and perhaps a national organization. Feminists in the New American Movement (NAM) who were also active in the autonomous women’s movement called a national conference at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the summer of 1975. It seems odd at first glance that in a movement so focused on separation from the Left, women active in a mixed organization should, be the ones to call for a national organization, but women in NAM were the only ones with an effective national network through which they had opportunities to meet and discuss at a national level. Several chapters of NAM were all women (including the Durham group that called the 1972 conference), and their allegiance to the women’s movement was as strong as if not stronger than their allegiance to NAM. They had already sponsored one national conference and produced a number of influential theoretical discussion papers.
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When the call went out, more than 2,000 women responded and hundreds more were turned away for lack of space and facilities.
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The yearning for a more effective structure and for a sense of national connection and movement was palpable.

Yet the dominant political style of the Left, and the lack of a coherent sense of what socialist feminism was or could be, made this conference one more occasion for the politics of division, blame, and guilt. Ideological conflict overrode any wish for organization building or strategic planning. The middle-class whiteness of those gathered revealed the movement to itself as overwhelmingly white, in contradiction to the values that brought them together in the first place. According to one of
the organizers, “Soon into the conference we had to scrap a lot of the agendas and gather on the commons to hear mostly white women denounce the planners as a bunch of racists and then have open mike about that for hours.”
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While the women’s liberation unions and feminists in NAM sought to create a socialist feminist practice, the ground swell of interest in socialist feminism found a different expression in a serious-process of theoretical study and debate.
Quest: A Feminist Quarterly
, founded in 1974, set out to pursue practical feminist theorizing that could bridge socialist, cultural, and liberal feminism. Theory seekers also began to reexamine traditional socialist ideas from a feminist vantage point, engaging in a kind of Marxist-feminist consciousness-raising. Driven by frustrations with the limitations of personalized consciousness-raising, the excesses of the sectarian left, and a hunger for satisfying explanations of the coexistence of economic, sexual, and racial oppressions, a series of Marxist-feminist study groups emerged primarily on the East and West Coasts starting in the early 1970s, peaking sometime in the mid-1970s (probably around the same time as the Yellow Springs Conference), and continuing in some instances well into the 1980s. One of the first such groups, initiated by women in the Union of Radical Political Economists (URPE), brought together people from New York, Boston, New Haven, and other parts of the East Coast for a twice yearly meeting at a camp in Connecticut owned by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (a long-standing pacifist organization). Linda Gordon remembers that it was organized rather like a scholarly conference, with panels and presentations. Key leaders were Amy Bridges and Heidi Hartmann. This large group, which came to be known as MF1 (for Marxist-feminist group number 1), spun off sister groups in several locations. MF3, for example, was in New York City. Another group formed in Boston.
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Many more Marxist-feminist groups, quite outside the linked groups of MF1, 2, and 3, sprang up across the country. Alice Kessler-Harris, frustrated with consciousness-raising, started a small Marxist-feminist group with several friends. Joan Kelly, Carol Turbin, Blanche Cook, Marilyn Arthur (now Katz), Renata Bridenthal, Amy Swerdlow, Pamela Farley, and others gathered regularly, first to read the three volumes of
Capital
. This was followed by reading and discussion of the works of contemporary European Marxists like Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams, as well as Engels and Mao. “[We were] reading the men stuff to see what we could understand about women. That was the operative question. It was wonderful.” Around 1975 or 1976 they joined MF3 as a group because they felt too isolated, but they found the MF3 group was far less rigorous and far more personal in its approach.
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Debbie Rosenfeldt joined an MF group in the Bay Area after moving to San Francisco State in 1979 to head the women’s studies program there. Her group included Judy Stacey, Donna Haraway, Barbara Epstein, and Kay Trimburger. For several years the group was “wonderful for my own thinking,” but it eventually followed the pattern of radical feminist groups, succumbing to an ugly, personal split.
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According to Alice Kessler-Harris, “The MF groups were a product, not a source, of the ground swell of commitment in the middle 1970s. The socialism and Marxism they espoused was not fully interrogated. [Rather] people came to explore. Many were academics, about two-thirds.”
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Gordon agreed and noted that in Boston the MF group had far more academics than Bread and Roses. Indeed, the membership lists of Marxist-feminist discussion groups reads like a who’s who of feminist scholarship in the 1980s.
¹⁰⁴
Perhaps because of their academic bent, these groups were on the whole more interested in questions (starting points for research) than in ideological prescription. Historians Linda Gordon, Alice Kessler-Harris, Joan Kelly, and Renata Bridenthal pioneered research on the history of working women, reproductive rights, domestic violence, and the role of the state.
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Blanche Cook, having written several books on Dwight Eisenhower, went on to a landmark, multivolume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Donna Haraway opened the way for a feminist philosophy of science.
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Economist Heidi Hartmann’s work on comparable worth at the National Academy of Science provided a crucial intellectual foundation for this innovative policy. She subsequently received a MacArthur (“genius”) awards.
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Kessler-Harris, Hartmann, Rosenfeldt, and Amy Swerdlow all either founded or later directed major programs in women’s studies. Several served on the editorial collective of
Feminist Studies
, one of the longest lived journals
in the field. Clearly the MF groups provided a stimulating and richly productive milieu that contributed substantially to the intellectual legacy of socialist feminism.