Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (33 page)

I
N THE EARLY
1980s feminists across the board were increasingly divided over what their agenda should include. Reforms like comparable worth involved feminists in a messy real world of compromise and partial victory. When they won through legal changes or collective bargaining, implementation forced them to contend with highly technocratic forms of implementation that relied on methods of job evaluation designed to serve employers and to reinforce market-based hierarchies. They could fight to close the gap between nurses and tree trimmers but not that between nurses and doctors.
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The underlying issue of difference between women and men proved sticky as activists discovered that they had no clear answer to the timeless question: are women fundamentally different from men? In the battle to tear down barriers to female participation in all-male clubs and schools, feminists debated whether they should embrace coeducation as better for all or preserve all-female schools for their ability to develop women’s educational and leadership potentials. Should all laws be written in a gender-neutral way, they asked, or were there occasions when women needed to be treated separately to make genuine equity possible? Feminists split, for example, over the issue of maternity leave (linked to the biological fact of bearing a child) versus parental leave, over the problem of sex-neutral divorce laws that overlooked economic disparities and differences in earning potential, and over the question of whether restrictions on the growing pornography industry amounted to
dangerous (and antisex) repression or an essential prerequisite to female liberty.

This last debate, argued most heatedly at a conference at Barnard College in 1982, became known among feminists as the “sex wars” because each side claimed to have the only truly feminist position.
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Through the late 1970s, feminist discussions of sexuality focused increasingly on pornography. An important strand of feminist theory by Kathleen Barry, Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, and Catharine MacKinnon argued that male sexual domination of women (as expressed in violent pornography) was the fundamental source of women’s oppression and that female sexuality was (or should be) diffuse and gentle. By 1980 some feminists yearned to reclaim the lusty and liberating tone of early consciousness-raising sessions that sought a joyous, assertive, invigorating sexuality. They began to challenge the notion that all pornography degraded women and especially the idea that banning or suppressing pornography was an effective strategy. The conversation, however, proved almost impossible as positions on either side hardened rapidly, claiming the mantle of true feminism. When law professor Catharine MacKinnon and writer Andrea Dworkin joined forces with right-wing evangelicals to propose city ordinances in Minneapolis and Indianapolis defining pornography as sex discrimination, other feminists opposed their idea as a violation of free speech and a dangerous step toward sexual repression.
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On campuses, however, the MacKinnon-Dworkin position usually held sway.

At the same time that some feminists debated whether women were essentially different from men or essentially the same, others were busy deconstructing the category of “woman.” The flowering of multicultural feminisms placed differences
among
women at the center of feminist theory. At the 1979 Barnard Conference on “The Second Sex Thirty Years Later,” African-American poet Audre Lorde offered a fierce challenge to the 1,000 overwhelmingly white participants:

It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory in this place and in this time without examining our differences, and without significant input from poor women,
black and third-world women, and lesbians…. [Differences must not be simply tolerated] but seen as necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic…. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

She concluded, “I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment upon the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. Yet to read this program is to assume that lesbian and black women had no input into existentialism, the erotic, Women’s culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power.”
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In response, the 1980 Barnard Conference took up the topic “Class, Race and Sex—Exploring Contradictions, Affirming Connections.” Sarah Lawrence College professor and longtime activist Amy Swerdlow opened the conference with an announcement that the time for the women’s movement to deal with differences had arrived. Black sociologist Bonnie Thornton Dill challenged the concept of sisterhood. She argued for a more political (less familial) understanding of feminism to accommodate the reality that women of color identify simultaneously with multiple movements.
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Recognition of the profound differences among women had a powerful impact on feminist theorists, most of whom, by the 1980s, were in academia. Lawyers and policy-oriented activists struggled with whether difference between women and men should be inscribed into law, but academics pursued the radical search for an overarching theory. The models that had seemed so compelling in the 1970s led in disparate directions. If feminist theories focused on analyzing patriarchy failed to account for differences of race and class (not to mention religion, ethnicity, and numerous other sources of identity), theories about race or class similarly rendered women and the dynamics of gender invisible. An analytical language, with which to think simultaneously about multiple sources of identity and structures of power, was simply not available.
For a time (from about the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s), socialist feminist scholarship made the most serious efforts in this direction, but in the waning years of the Cold War when movements against communist regimes exposed their authoritarian core, socialism was no longer a visionary language. Another alternative was the popularity of postmodern literary theories that challenged the stability of human identities, exploring instead the ways that the categories of language construct gender, race, and class and other sources of human identity and differentiation. Among literary critics, by the late 1980s feminist literary theory had become arguably the most prominent approach in the discipline, prompting many who had fought so hard to be taken seriously to reflect ambivalently on this new insider status.
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Theorizing shifted away from “the early feminist stress on the sociological and material” to focus “on processes of symbolization and representation.”
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In the hands of postmodernists, the very category “woman” seemed to crumble as their discussions became ever more esoteric and opaque to outsiders.
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Race, however, remained at the center of feminist theorizing because emerging voices of feminists of color tended to be literary or academic or both. Such authors as Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, and Barbara Smith forged new, multicultural directions within feminist scholarship.
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The shift in discussions of race, away from a dichotomous focus on black and white, was encapsulated in an anthology,
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981),
which was widely used in women’s studies courses throughout the 1980s.
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The emergence of multicultural feminisms and the difficulty of finding a feminist language that incorporated difference also had an impact on the feminist cultural institutions that continued to flourish in the 1980s. In 1981, Bernice Johnson Reagon, speaking at West Coast Women’s Music Festival, put it this way: “We’ve pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is ‘yours only’—just for the people you want to be there. Even when we have our ‘women-only’ festivals, there is no such thing…. we have just finished with that kind of isolating. There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It’s over. Give it up.”
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In 1982,
Cherrie Moraga, Latina lesbian feminist writer, argued that race and class had returned to the forefront of feminist concerns because of the emergence of Third World feminism: “The white women’s movement tried to create a new form of women’s culture that on some level has denied where people come from…. Whether the women were Irish or German or came from working class or Jewish backgrounds, the desire to have a women’s culture suddenly became devoid of race, class roots, what you ate at home, the smells in the air. Third-world feminism is talking about the vital, life-giving necessity of understanding your roots and how they influence your entire life.”
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The annual National Women’s Music Festival, founded in 1974, rebounded from financial and organizational disarray in 1982 and within a few years took on formal organizational trappings with a producer and a clear division of responsibilities.
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“Women’s music,” with its own stars (Margie Adam, Holly Near, and Sweet Honey in the Rock), labels (Olivia Records), and production companies, flourished through the 1980s.

Many of these activities also represented a new level of public activity and visibility for the evolving lesbian community. Cultural events and annual demonstrations, such as “Take Back the Night” marches in cities around the country, functioned as public rituals in which lesbian feminists remained visible to themselves and to society. For lesbians, as for feminists as a whole, the eighties, despite backlash, were a time of growth and maturation, in which complexity and differentiation coexisted with growing capacity. The separatist lesbian feminism born in the 1970s continued to flourish in a variety of women’s culture events, in rural lesbian communes, and in an array of cooperative businesses related to arts, music, and spirituality. At the same time, younger “lipstick lesbians” begin to deride their “granola lesbian” elders’ understanding of a “lesbian lifestyle” rooted in 1970s, women’s liberation-style feminism. They insisted on their right to play with the erotics of self-presentation and gender ambiguity (for example, wearing lipstick with tuxedos). They also refused the assumption that same-sex relationships required them to forego the joys and pains of motherhood. With artificial insemination (either with the help of sympathetic physicians or using
the “turkey baster” method at home) and adoptions by the thousands, lesbians—and a few gay men—began yet another redefinition of the family.
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Finally, the sudden appearance of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and the homophobic reactions to the initial definition of AIDS as a “homosexual disease” made separatism of lesbians from gay men seem less salient for many younger lesbians. They expressed their solidarity by joining new forms of activism, from professional lobbying operations to community networks of care for the ill to the theatrical exploits of ACT UP and Queer Nation.

Feminism also took a new turn in a diffuse women’s spirituality movement linked to a new strand of cultural feminist theory and action under the banner of ecofeminism. The term “ecofeminism” was coined in 1974 by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne, but it did not emerge as a theoretical stream within feminism in the United States until March 1980 at a conference on “Women and Life on Earth” in Amherst, Massachusetts. Carolyn Merchant, one of the key theorists of ecofeminism, described how

Over a three day period 500 women explored the meaning of ecofeminism as a force for the future. They concluded that, as mothers, nurturers, and caretakers, women should direct their creative energies to heal the planet, bringing to the public sphere the care and concern of women for all of life, and that, as feminists, women should work to transform the institutions of modern society that discriminate against women and minorities.
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A summer institute on “Ecology and Feminism” at Goddard College in 1980, a second ecofeminist conference on the West Coast in April 1981, and the appearance of environmental themes at a host of other feminist gatherings in 1980-1981 signaled an explosion of interest in the topic.
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Ecofeminism drew most heavily from important strands in cultural feminism, including writers as diverse as theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther, Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, and Nancy Choderow.
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What these held in common was an analysis that linked the patriarchal domination
of women with domination of the earth and claimed for women a special relationship with nature. Whether they viewed the connection between women and nature as a product of history or an essential expression of women’s biological capacity for childbearing, they asserted that women had a unique vantage point from which to speak out against both patriarchal domination and ecological devastation. In Susan Griffin’s lyrical version, “I know I am made from this earth, as my mother’s hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth … all that I know speaks to me through this earth and I long to tell you, you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what we know: the light is in us.”
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Ynestra King’s manifesto in 1981, “The Eco-feminist Imperative,” brought the threads together:

We believe that a culture against nature is a culture against women. We know we must get out from under the feet of men as they go about their projects of violence. In pursuing these projects men deny and dominate both women and nature. It is time to reconstitute our culture in the name of that nature, and of peace and freedom, and it is women who can show the way. We have to be the voice of the invisible, of nature who cannot speak for herself in the political arenas of our society.
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