Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (27 page)

That socialist feminism dealt so explicitly with race, together with the decline of black nationalist ideology, created some new space for feminists of color. The intense conflicts over issues of race at Yellow Springs and later in the National Women’s Studies Association signaled an explosion of interest among women of color. The Combahee River Collective flourished in the late 1970s. At a series of retreats held across the Northeast between 1977 and 1979, they shared information about the dramatic growth of black feminist groups at the community level, in academic institutions, and among artists.
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One of the founders of the Collective, Barbara Smith, wrote an open letter in 1979 about the fact that “… the black community is having to deal internally with the implications of sexual politics, feminism and most crucially
Black
feminism.” The April 1978 issue of the
Black Scholar
, for example, “was an astounding mixture of pro-feminist even pro-Lesbian articles by, for example, Assata Shakur and Audre Lorde [alongside] the most reactionary anti-black women articles by black male writers.” Two issues of the same journal in 1979 took up the issue again. “[S]exual politics is finally up for discussion by black people,” she proclaimed, but black feminists face “a massive amount of resistance to the idea of black women being autonomous….” Smith expressed frustration that “white women do not grasp that the black feminist movement is in a very different period historically from the white feminist movement.” Relatively few black women were willing to identify publicly as feminists, and their emerging movement had not yet spawned the growth of institutions that could sustain it.
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The expansion of feminism among women of color, however, contended simultaneously with a backdrop of racial nationalism and the normative whiteness of the feminist movement. White groups founded on the assumption that women of color were “doing their thing” elsewhere suddenly confronted angry claims for inclusion. Anger and guilt played out a familiar duet in organizations, conferences, and the feminist media with increasing intensity throughout the late seventies and into the eighties.

White women’s recognition of the importance of multiracial perspectives sometimes led to concrete action. Reproductive rights, for example, could not be confined to the issues of birth control and abortion within poor and minority communities, in which an appalling number of women were sterilized without their consent.
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A group in New York that included founders both of Bread and Roses and of Redstockings organized the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA). They successfully pressured the City of New York and then the U.S. Department of Health Education and Welfare to issue stronger guidelines to ensure that women who were sterilized had genuinely consented to the procedure. Socialist feminist Rosalind Petchesky’s theoretical writings framed a broader agenda that linked their work to women throughout the Third World who both lacked access to safe methods of birth control and also were frequent subjects of murderous medical and eugenic experiments.
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Other times white women’s guilt expressed itself as patronizing dishonesty. In a letter to
off our backs
in 1979, Hope Landrine described her experiences of racism in the movement as a mix of “ingratiation and patronage … statements of the we’re-so-happy-that-
ONE
-
OF
-
YOU
-could-make-it type.” She tested the perception that white feminists avoid serious discussion of feminist theory and strategy with women of color at a women’s coffeehouse in New York. She would engage white women in discussion, challenging them with more and more outrageously absurd statements. The white women never disagreed with her, just smiled and asked a few questions.
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Although the most visible legacy of socialist feminism has been intellectual, it is important not to overlook the role of practice-oriented, practical organizing groups like CWLU and Bread and Roses, which provided the initial spark for the most innovative working women’s organizations in the 1970s: Women Employed and 9 to 5 (now District 925 of the Service Employees International Union). They were also critical to the creation of such organizations as CARASA that worked to bring issues of race and poverty into the feminist agenda and feminist perspectives into other struggles for social justice. Numerous socialist feminist activists moved into mainstream organizations as they sought ways of achieving concrete changes. Heather Booth founded the Midwest
Academy, which became the core of a national network of community organizations, and she subsequently worked as a political consultant to a wide range of electoral campaigns.
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In 1987 Heidi Hartmann founded the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which continues to produce studies that serve as ammunition for policy advocates on issues of equal employment, affirmative action, women and poverty.
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Caryn Nussbaum, founder of 9 to 5, later served as director of the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor during the Clinton Administration.

T
HE
N
ATIONAL
W
OMEN
’
S
Studies Association was perhaps the most ambitious attempt to bring the various strands of feminist radicalism into a national organization linked to mainstream institutions. Women’s studies programs had been building on hundreds of campuses since 1970, some responding to student demand, many as a form of outreach on the part of faculty who were activists in numerous other feminist groups and institutions. Frequently they involved many of the same people working in other feminist institutions. Deborah Rosenfeldt had been a faculty member in English at California State University at Long Beach since 1969, where she lived in a political collective of women and men all engaged in political and feminist activism. She was drawn into feminist activism through a women’s studies conference in Sacramento, where Florence Howe invited her to come to New York to work with the Feminist Press for a semester. She returned to help found the women’s studies program at Long Beach and then went on to San Francisco State where she became involved in a women’s studies program that was extremely multicultural from the outset. Despite a hostile administration, San Francisco State harbored a very activist, grassroots program with “lots of adjunct faculty, some students, a few permanent faculty [all of whom] worked as a collective, in meetings all the time.”
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Regional networks and conferences among women’s studies programs led to a growing wish for national connection. The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) was founded in January 1977 at a gathering of 500 women at the University of San Francisco. Rosenfeldt wrote at the time, “We came with a sense of history—the remarkable growth of women’s studies in the seventies, the struggles with
skeptical and often hostile institutions, the ideological disputes within the women’s studies movement (largely inseparable from those within the women’s liberation movement as a whole).”
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Participants were determined to create an organization that was not just another professional association. They wanted it to be an expression of the women’s liberation movement itself and to be broadly inclusive. For 4 days debates raged over membership, dues and sliding scales, and ways to include both formal women’s studies programs and community education. Five interest groups formed caucuses immediately: Third World women, lesbians, support staff, pre-K-12 educators, and students. On the first day the conference approved resolutions establishing a permanent Third World caucus and agreed that each of the major Third World groups (the term was not used in its traditional geopolitical sense but rather referred to Native Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and black Americans) would be represented on the yet to be created coordinating council. Other caucuses demanded similar representation.

The resulting council included representatives of geographical regions, educational levels, different educational settings (campuses, schools, and communities), and groups usually excluded from power in other professional associations (Third World women, lesbians, support staff, and students). The unwieldy result totaled 42.
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The preamble to the NWSA constitution stated,

Women’s Studies owes its existence to the movement for the liberation of women; the women’s liberation movement exists because women are oppressed. Women’s studies, diverse as its components are, has at its best shared a vision of a world free not only from sexism but also from racism, class bias, ageism, heterosexual bias—from all the ideologies and institutions that have consciously or unconsciously oppressed and exploited some for the advantage of others.
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The rapid proliferation of caucuses, however, soon made a cumbersome structure almost impossible. At the first NWSA annual conference,
May 30 to June 3, 1979 in Lawrence Kansas, the Annual Delegate Assembly was flooded with resolutions from caucuses. As one observer described it,

A major issue of this assembly was the racism manifested at the Kansas conference, and the neglect of the needs of poor and minority women. Locating the conference in a “college town” in the Midwest with all the incumbent registration, membership, and travelling costs negated the option for many Third World and poor women to attend…. The Third World Caucus … offered three pages of resolutions challenging NWSA to confront the rhetoric of its constitution and its commitment to all women, including women of color and to actively work to eliminate racism, classism, ageism and heterosexism from its organization.
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NWSA conferences were an amalgam of academic feminism and women’s culture, and they rapidly grew to involve well over 1,000 participants. Academic panels sat alongside workshops on feminist spirituality, arts and crafts displays, cultural events (the founding meeting featured a concert by Meg Christian; the first annual conference had a reading by Alice Walker), and highly politicized caucuses. As a rule, half of those in attendance were not even members of the association but came to experience women’s culture. Like music festivals, but more intellectual, NWSA provided a public space for an emerging lesbian community. As one participant described the second annual conference in Bloomington, Indiana in May 1980, “When I arrived there, I was immediately caught up in that energizing, celebrating atmosphere which often accompanies large gatherings of women…. Although only eleven workshops had titles mentioning the word ‘lesbian’, I soon felt immersed in a lesbian world of stimulating ideas, networking, art, politics, and high energy.”
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For others, the politics of race took precedence. A reporter for
off our backs
argued that “… the most significant aspect of the conference for me was the substantial amount of work done around issues of feminism and women of color.” Out of a large number of workshops and the Third World caucus came a call to focus the next
year’s conference on the theme of racism.
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Caryn McTighe Musil attended that conference in Storrs, Connecticut and left awed that 1,500 women “sat there and talked about racism. No other group did that.”
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NWSA’s founding meeting and the Houston International Women’s Year Conference both took place in 1977, and both revealed feminism moving into the mainstream. Far more Americans, however, were aware of Houston, which revealed that the Equal Rights Amendment had become a critical mobilizing symbol for feminists as well as for their opponents. The Equal Rights Amendment had been the centerpiece of the Houston Plan of Action, and for the next 5 years it provided a focal point for mobilization both of feminists and of their growing opposition. The symbolic power of the ERA in the late 1970s was pardy because, beginning in 1972, it had been seized by right-wing leaders like Phyllis Schlafley who used it and abortion to forge a series of new relationships with an emerging religious right. For these conservatives and traditionalists the Equal Rights Amendment symbolized the changes they feared most. The fervor of male leaders who became hysterical over the possibility of “unisex” bathrooms (as if every home in America didn’t have at least one) and the possibility of women in the armed forces facing combat alongside men underlined anxieties that feminism challenged the very definitions of “men” and “women.” Men were not the only strenuous opponents of the ERA, however.

Historians Jane DeHart and Donald Mathews have analyzed the ironies of a cultural conflict in which women were prominent on both sides. Women opposed to the ERA were often as suspicious of male intentions toward women as were supporters. Their fears, however, did not center on inequality in the public worlds of work, politics, and education. Rather they feared that without the coercion of the state, men would abandon their traditional responsibilities for the family, forcing women into an “unnatural” and unequal competition with men in the labor force. One North Carolina woman summarized conservative hostility to the use of governmental intervention to secure equity on the grounds of either race or gender: “
Forced
busing,
forced
mixing,
forced
hiring. Now
forced
women. No thank you.”
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Similarly, as the antiabortion movement grew, it drew on the (accurate) perceptions of
many women that American society devalued motherhood.
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In both cases, feminist efforts to guarantee equal rights and opportunities for women in public settings created an easy focal point for anxieties about female vulnerability caused by the profound structural changes in American society.