I saw a copy of Susan Brownmiller’s memoir/history of the women’s liberation movement In Our Time on the bookshelves at Half Priced Books, and at half the price, I figured it was well worth the price to learn some feminist history, so I picked it up. I’m super glad I did; I hadn’t read much WLM stuff in a long time, and I forgot how it just crackles (even at a distance of time) with energy, hope, and intellectual stimulation. It’s amazing to go through all the various accomplishments achieved in such a short period of time, from Roe v. Wade* to the founding of rape crisis lines to the formation of sexual harassment theory to the anti-domestic violence movement. Prior to the second wave of feminism, the idea that women were men’s equals was something of a joke; after it, all but the most anti-feminist reactionaries at least has to pretend to believe in women’s equality even as they try to undermine it. Brownmiller recounts it all from her spot inside the belly of the beast, and it’s a real page-turner. You can still feel her enthusiasm for the feminist ideas, energies, bonding, and bright light of real righteousness on behalf of an idea that turned from laughable to inarguable within in a short period of time.
I also appreciated her strong attempts to be achingly honest about all bad stuff that went down, even as she’s not superhuman and therefore (being a human being) lapses into self-serving versions of some events. But on the whole, I thought she was pretty damn good about trying to be fair even when recounting some uglier clashes she had with other women in the movement.
The book was long and jam-packed with information, too much to cover in a review, so I’m breaking down some thoughts on just the pieces that really churned my brain. Fancy bold headings and everything for this!
In-fighting. One of the most revealing and distressing threads that runs through the book was the tendency of movement women to stab each other in the back at the slightest provocation. From the absolute beginning of radical feminism, this nasty squabbling tortured the movement to the degree that I could only imagine they were able to get things done because their ideas were so good, even if they were crippling themselves with circular firing squad behavior. The main instigating force was success and mainstream attention, or more who got it and who didn’t get it. Nowadays, I think most feminists have adopted the idea that there’s something basically sexist about holding back women’s ambitions—you’re feeding a patriarchal tool of oppression if you make a woman feel guilty for simply wanting to excel—but back then it was much easier to express straightforward envy as a sign that someone was de facto oppressed. Blame the crude sort of Marxism that forgot the “from each according to his abilities” part. If a sister demonstrated talent and got more attention than another who didn’t have that exact talent, accusations of ambition would fly, as well as demands that the talented sister step down. The long feminist history of punishing success (which I think happens a lot because women are already trained by the patriarchy to feel shame in overshadowing anyone, making it oh-so-tempting to “trash”—the common term then for attacking sisters with unsavory levels of success or talent—someone, since you know she’ll take it to heart) was shockingly straightforward in the day.
What killed me was how otherwise sharp women couldn’t see that trashing someone for putting her ambitions ahead of the movement was straightforward projection. If you ask someone to step down who has the talents to reach out to others and get them involved in the movement because you feel overshadowed, you’re putting your own envy in front of the goals of the movement of getting more women involved. That says something, but I haven’t quite figured what to think about it. One thing that’s glaringly obvious from this text is that the trashing phenomenon had wholly negative effect of making it hard for objects of frequent trashing to be able to separate a genuine criticism from a criticism that’s been concocted by someone grasping for a reason to going on a trashing campaign. Brownmiller has serious problems separating out, for instance, the nonsense about how she’s a homophobe because of the phrase “lavender herring”, which was in context a cute quip and by no means a swipe at lesbians and more serious criticisms about her indelicacies in addressing the Emmitt Till murder in her book on rape Against Our Will.
Domestic violence. Brownmiller got into a nasty fight with some battered women’s advocates after writing an article expressing her belief that a battered woman who didn’t intervene when her partner killed their daughter was culpable for negligence. Her bitterness over this casts a shadow over some of her criticisms of the movement. While she has interesting things to say about how it would be beneficial to study the personalities and circumstances of the victims to get an understanding of why they don’t leave (even if they have the means) or why they keep falling into these relationships, she’s unnecessarily dismissive of activist concerns that research into the victims would only be turned around and be used to blame the victims. As someone who can write with touching sympathy of the plight of rape victims who are blamed for not fighting back, for leaving their house, etc., surely she should be able to understand that people who are defensive of patriarchal authority will look for any and every reason to blame domestic violence on the victim. But she shrugs off this concern. I ultimately agree with her that more knowledge is always better than less, but DV activists have a serious point you should not shrug off.
Pornography. Brownmiller threw her lot in with the anti-porn people, and her chapter on the whole movement is pretty damn fascinating. She tries to be honest, even if she coughs up the same routine defenses of the anti-porn movement against the accusations of prudery. No we’re not, she’ll argue, and then she’ll write something blatantly prudish (her appalled reaction to a conference celebrating kinky sexuality reads, at points, like some wingnut whining about the queers and their hawt sex), which undercut my sympathy for her point about how it’s all a little silly.** In fact, she doesn’t want it to be silly, because then she’d have to face up to what I would consider the most effective pro-sex feminist point, which is that kinkiness is an extension of the idea that sex is playtime for grown-ups. The conflation of anti-S&M with the more general criticisms of misogynist porn (which is not contextualized as a kink, and the consumers of which usually rush to minimize their responsibility to take ownership over their desires for it) was a fatal flaw for the anti-porn feminists, and it did show the prudish streak in the movement that destroyed their credibility on points where they have firmer ground, about the construction of masculinity, etc.
Still, after she issues the standard denials, she tells the story and then admits that anti-porn feminism did itself in with the prudery, and especially with the way that Mackinnon and Dworkin cozied up to the right wing to pass blatant censorships laws (one of their allies in Indianapolis openly bragged that he wanted to use the law to ban copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves). And I sympathized with her mourning the fact that the anti-porn movement created so many intractable hostilities in feminism that it functioned as a death knell for radical feminism, which had been shockingly successful up until then. I’ve written before on how I think both sides have a point, and the truth about porn lives in the shades of gray that both sides can be pretty damn good about ignoring, and this chapter gave me a lot of insight about why people fear venturing out of their camps and meeting in the middle.
All in all, a very important book for a younger feminist like myself, who was basically born after the vast majority of the women’s liberation movement’s successes, to read. For feminist blogging fans, the parallels between now and then are pretty amazing, especially in terms of sheer intellectual energy. It’s also fun for all the historical details, like the scene with Susan Brownmiller and Eldridge Cleaver going on TV to talk about rape in front of an audience of women from the La Leche League. You just can’t make shit like that up.
*The chapter on abortion rights alone is instructive in the fight against the simplistic red state v. blue state model. Abortion was legalized throughout the nation through a plot hatched by different groups of feminists in two “red” states—Roe germinated at a garage sale in Austin, TX and Doe was kick-started in Atlanta, GA.
**I call it the nerds getting laid phenomen, i.e. Margaret Cho’s crack about the overlap between S&M devotees and Trekkies. It’s not a bad thing, really, but there is an amusing difference between people who say “polyamorous” and those who just sleep around.
76 Responses to “Memoirs of a revolution”
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Excellent review and might I also add that the book is available on Amazon.com with used copies starting at a $1.26! Who cannot afford that for a good feminist read? Hell, even I ordered one (and I’m the poorest person in America — that has housing)!
Thanks Amanda!
Thought you might find this interesting:
That was from: The 5 Biggest Dating Mistakes That Men Make
By Andrea Syrtash, ONDatingSpecial to Yahoo! Personals
Pablo, what does that have to do with anything?
I remember the DV case that Brownmiller took that stand on. Joel Sternberg beat his adopted daughter to death after beating Hedda Nussbaum into psychological damage from which she never seems to have really recovered. In the coverage of the murder, Nussbaum was blamed for not being the wonderful self-sacrificing woman who threw herself under the train for her kids, and Joel Steinberg didn’t get nearly as demonized as she did. Brownmiller’s take on it was just appalling for a feminist of any age.
As for the early feminist infighting, I think those women were still trapped by the way they’d been raised. Girls were brought up to view men as meal tickets and the conditioning was much more powerful and inescapeable. It was a lot worse then than it is now, when we have some distance. I used to listen to my mom, who was by no means a feminist, and she just hated other women. Why? Because you just couldn’t hate men. There’s a powerful taboo against hating men. Then again, women get brought up to be passive aggressive. It’s the only way powerless people have access to power. Lots of women feel all kinds of contradictory and frightening emotions about both having power themselves and other women having power. You can’t be raised in this culture without picking up on the loathing that’s built in for women.
As for current inter sisterly warfare, well, feminism isn’t a monolith–and not even woman who calls herself a feminist is one. I’ve gotten stabbed in the back a few too many times to believe that that self-labelling any longer. It’s like Camille Paglia calling herself a feminist. Is she?
Oh, yeah, and there’s also “The World Split Open.” It’s another good tale of the early years.
Pablo, what does that even mean?
I always tell guys that women want to be treated as individuals. I think we all get sick of hearing about what “women” want.
Good points, all around, ginmar. Between this book and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, I’ve had a lot of reason to think about the way people living under oppression turn on each other instead of taking on the larger, scarier enemy. A real fighting-for-scraps mentality infects all stripes of anti-oppression movements, and the attacking of successful feminists reveals this. But it’s short-sighted. Men maintain dominance in no small part because male solidarity against women is enforced, even against men’s will. (You don’t want to join this rape? What are you, a pussy?) There’s a perception of solidarity even when it’s not real—look at the white men who support G.W. Bush, even though he fully intends to screw them out of a middle class lifestyle. If only we could create a version of it that was dedicated to justice….
The whiff of victim-blaming was evident in her discussions of battered women. I get the impression that Brownmiller thought the domestic violence campaign overshadowed her work on rape, which is really unfair. But she reacted by pitting rape victims against DV victims, as if the former were more “real” somehow, because rape is supposedly a one-time thing, and battered women have a lot of time to get out. I found myself wondering if it occurred to her that many battered women are victims of repeated rapes.
I spent last week hanging out on some non-feminist boards and OMG you would not believe the bullshit going on there. Women casually refer to other women as ‘bitches, tramps, filthy whores, and jealous’, all the while engaging in the most petty and spiteful backstabbing you can imagine. So it makes me come to feminist boards with a new eye, let me tell you.
I think oppressed people scrabbled for scraps because not only is there a very real taboo against blaming men, there’s real consequences for it. I mean, the taboo againast blaming men is just unbelieveably strong. Newspapers say, “A woman was raped,” not that “A man raped a woman.” ‘She got beaten” and so forth. “She got pregnant”—how? By herself? I read an article recently–from Newsweek—where they talked about these mass shootings and how ‘people’ committed them. But it’s not people. It’s men. Nailing men in general is really hard, but how do you make it stick? When you’re blaming passive male behavior that enables more aggressive males to do horrible shit to women, you always run up against the other consequence of passive aggressive bullshit: because it’s passive, any response looks really aggressive, even if it’s just honest.
Brownmiller’s attitude on DV is just astonishing to me because to me DV and rape are two sides of the same coin. Then again, it almost seems like some of the early feminists were kind of afraid of actually taking their ideas to their logical conclusion. It’s still scary today. I mean, it’s not a conspiracy by men; it’s a self perpetuating system in which passivity by men allows other men to be far more aggressive and hateful. Even so, the idea that DV and rape don’t immediately smack you in the face as springing primarily from the same motives is astonishing to me. Then again, DV victims do arouse hatred, don’t they? RApe victims get bashed as sluts or liars but DV victims get bashed as being weak and to blame for their own fates. Oh, wait…Never mind.
At the time, rape in marriage was impossible and didn’t exist legally, if I remember correctly. Talk about spitting in the face of male privilege. It’s easy to forget just how much the early feminists were risking.
Also, if Brownmiller thought rape was a one-time event, well….You’d think her own research would prove otherwise. It seems like most women have a history of awful experiences on the sexual harassment/ assault scale, at least if they’re not the sort of women who go, “Oh, I’ve never experienced sexism.”
Great post and I’m definitely gonna buy me that book (if and when I ever get my dissertation done…).
I found that article that Pablo put up, and while its certainly not terrible, I think it does reveal some of what we’re up against. The whole anger that men feel about ‘dating rules’ is ultimately about feeling cheated that there aren’t any - some women like some types of men, and some others. The fact that there’s no simple way to ‘win’ pisses a lot of guys off, and I have to suspect that it comes from deep insecurity: if I don’t feel secure in who I am and what I have to offer, then I’m not dating to find someone I’ll like marrying/dating/having non-commitment-oriented fun with. Instead, I’m dating as a way of boosting my sense of self - but if I don’t feel secure, then I need some way to get that boost short of earning it. So the person doesn’t matter, simply because it’s the success that matters. And the only way to have that success is if there’s some rule I can follow that will ‘work’ on women - and so women have to be conceived as alike in some fashion: ‘Woman’, not Emma or Jane, or whoever you’re actually with.
The insecurity of men in response to the changes in the ‘rules’ is one of the big things reproducing patriarchy at the micro-level. When you follow the rules and they don’t work (because your with a human being who doesn’t fit the profile) it’s evidence that feminism is destroying romance. If you follow the rules and they do (cause the woman you’re with enjoys that aspect, or has been conditioned to look for those cues) then it’s evidence that all women are alike, and feminism is BS. The fact that these two thoughts are totally contradictory doesn’t matter - patriarchy offers men the consoling fiction that the weakness a man feels inside is caused by feminism - as opposed to by insecurity that can be cured by living life as a full and free human being.
And yes - I just read Erich Fromm: what he says about economics and politics can be applied to patriarchy too. Either way, society’s choice is clear - it’s socialism or barbarism.
Great post and I’m definitely gonna buy me that book (if and when I ever get my dissertation done…).
I found that article that Pablo put up, and while its certainly not terrible, I think it does reveal some of what we’re up against. The whole anger that men feel about ‘dating rules’ is ultimately about feeling cheated that there aren’t any - some women like some types of men, and some others. The fact that there’s no simple way to ‘win’ pisses a lot of guys off, and I have to suspect that it comes from deep insecurity: if I don’t feel secure in who I am and what I have to offer, then I’m not dating to find someone I’ll like marrying/dating/having non-commitment-oriented fun with. Instead, I’m dating as a way of boosting my sense of self - but if I don’t feel secure, then I need some way to get that boost short of earning it. So the person doesn’t matter, simply because it’s the success that matters. And the only way to have that success is if there’s some rule I can follow that will ‘work’ on women - and so women have to be conceived as alike in some fashion: ‘Woman’, not Emma or Jane, or whoever you’re actually with.
The insecurity of men in response to the changes in the ‘rules’ is one of the big things reproducing patriarchy at the micro-level. When you follow the rules and they don’t work (because your with a human being who doesn’t fit the profile) it’s evidence that feminism is destroying romance. If you follow the rules and they do (cause the woman you’re with enjoys that aspect, or has been conditioned to look for those cues) then it’s evidence that all women are alike, and feminism is BS. The fact that these two thoughts are totally contradictory doesn’t matter - patriarchy offers men the consoling fiction that the weakness a man feels inside is caused by feminism - as opposed to by insecurity that can be cured by living life as a full and free human being.
And yes - I just read Erich Fromm: what he says about economics and politics can be applied to patriarchy too. Either way, society’s choice is clear - it’s socialism or barbarism.
True, but Brownmiller was a big voice in defining rape as something that could happen to a married woman by her husband. Which is why her blindness to some aspects of DV is bewildering; repeated raping your wife is actually a pretty far gone behavior. I forget the percentages of batterers who do it, but it’s not even the majority, I think. It’s up there with breaking bones in terms of level of battering violence.
Now I make it sound like Brownmiller doesn’t accept the feminist analysis of DV. She actually does; she praises the shelter system and agrees fully that battering is part of a patriarchal structure of oppression and the natural result of a model of marriage that posits that men are the masters of their wives. So it’s really a very fine point of contention, which is how many battered women stay in their relationships because they’re warped somehow and are getting something out of it? At the time, the question was verboten for victim-blaming fears; now I think experts are willing to reopen the question without as much fear that exploring the fucked-up reasons women stay is the same thing as saying you’re not a victim when you are clearly a victim.
Yeah, and she was instrumental in moving discussions of date rape from “She just changed her mind,” to “Only afterward was it possible for the victim to acknowledge what actually happened.” It’s always fit together intellectually, because, well, it’s the same thing.
Really? About batterers raping? I was under the impression it was a huge percentage, so much so that early versions of the Conflict Tactics Violence Scale omitted sexual assault entirely because it so skewed their results and was a uniformly male-on-female event. (Cue the MRAs!) Rape is always a big deal with batterers; my impression was that it was one of the key ways of breaking the victim’s will.
I’ve noticed this in other Second Wave feminists: how they often seemed to suddenly see how far they’d come from society’s orthodoxy, and how close they were to a precipice of their own making, and how scary it must have been. For us, these days, not so much, but I’m older than you, and I felt that. For single unmarried women of my generation, tossing aside the trappings of traditional womanhood felt like stepping off a cliff, even though there was a veneer of acceptance. For them, they were attacked constantly, it must have felt like drowning. I guess I’ll never understand how Brownmiller couldn’t get DV the way she did rape. I sort of blocked the Steinberg article from my memory.
ginmar and Cola-
I just thought it was funny. i read it 5 minutes after i read Amanda’s post. The women’s movement(as we know it today)is in its forties, and here is this advice columnist writing that being treated like an equal is not preferable nor even the same as being treated like a woman.
Seriously, get over yourself. Your arrogance is getting pretty nauseating at this point. No one is envious of you. I think at this point, you’re more an object of pity than anything, with your lack of self awareness and rampant privilege spewing all over the place
RE: the DV and rape thing: it strikes me, that even if individual episodes of violence don’t include physically forcing a woman into sex, a woman who is in that situation may very well feel incapable of saying no to her partner anyway, because she’ll be “punished” for it later on (even though a different pretext will be used to “justify” the violence).
It’s easier to understand the mindset of a battered woman when you think of her as a hostage.
Well, it’s a huge percentage of batterers who rape, but I think it’s like 30-40%, not like 80% or whatever I would have guessed. I think it’s easier for a lot of batterers to contextualize their violence as acceptable if they partition certain things that they don’t do, like rape.
However, it’s hazy, since a lot of batterers demand sex after a beating, often to console themselves into thinking that she is not upset and everything is okay. Which is rape-like to actual rape, since the victim might be complying with the sex out of fear more than desire.
It would be interesting if someone did a cross-analysis of hostage psychology and that of battered women.
Lloyd—huh? I’m not talking about anti-feminists who are obsessed with me, you know. And I don’t think they’re “jealous”, just, I don’t know, angry at the loss of male privilege and I’m an easy target.
I actually was hoping he was talking about Pablo.
I’ve read the whole thing over again, and I can’t even figure out what he’s referring to…
Well, hostages often get help and assistance and there’s no asking, “Why didn’t you leave?” Battered women who leave are likely to be killed.
i sort of remember the naussbaum thing & i may be wrong but i thought the outrage over her part in her daughter’s death was that she wasnt just passive, but that she also horribly abused the girl, on her own of her own volition.
You’re remembering it wrong. There’s no evidence she ever abused the girl, and considerable evidence that she did what she could in her limited capacity to protect her. Hedda Nussbaum herself was so horribly abused that she was near death by some accounts when the girl was murdered.
that’s the sad thing about running a social movement, no matter how big it is.
Brownmiller gets to be the “rape lady” and then she is competing against the domestic violence folks-
I don’t know enough about the history to say if this was an intentional conflict, or if it was a few groups competing for the attention of a larger audience.
Brownmiller’s one particular person. Lots of feminists get along just fine, and today I doubt you’ll find DV prevention and rape prevention people at odds. So?
Re: Fighting For Scraps
Nancy Friday in The Power Of Beauty talks about the way in which women cope with the fact that in our world there’s very rarely enough of anything for anyone: not enough time, not enough money, not enough food, not enough sleep, not enough attention, recognition, or access to resources, and not enough control over our own lives. She says that we deal with this by striking an intramural bargain in which it’s understood that even tho’ we as individual women may be deprived of things we need or could use, we can console themselves with the thought that other women, collectively regarded, can be counted upon not to be doing much better. No member of the sisterhood may take, or may be seen to take, more than her fair share; that’s the rule.
She brings this up in order to account for the way extra-gorgeous women are encouraged or pressured to deflect the feelings of envy/hostility their looks can provoke, but it’s an observation which can also work in other contexts.
I think Friday makes a valid point, and I think it’s a point which is still very much in force. A few days ago a female novelist posted a review of a biography of Bella Abzug over at the Books section of the WaPo website. Much of the review was dedicated to a discussion of Bella Abzug’s weight problems and harsh voice. These characteristics of Bella Abzug’s were not described in an admiring or even very tolerant manner. The unspoken message was clear: here was a woman who was hard to overlook (she took up too much space) and here was a woman who was hard not to overhear (she made too much noise). IOW, here was a woman who accepted more than her due, and that, Dear Readers, is So Just Not On. (Interestingly enough, in the same review the reviewer tells a story about Betty Friedan in which Betty Friedan too is seen grabbing more attention than is good for her.)
I don’t want to introduce any cavils about this post, which, as usual, is cool, but I’d like to propose that you may be dealing with a feminine convention (”no woman-in-good-standing is allowed to be a show-off“) which predates Marxism, even the crude kind. My guess is that the Marxism was probably called into service to buttress up the anti-show-off tradition, rather than the reverse…but that’s JMO.
{”London also drew from her an admission that she should have done more to help Lisa on the night of her final beating. When Nussbaum dissolved into tears, London asked who the tears were for. “Hedda,” she answered, then added as an afterthought, “and Lisa.”}
It was a shocking case. i dont recall all the details, but yes i do recall hedda was abused severely over the 8(?) years with steinberg. and i do realize & believe that there is a dv syndrome that happens psychologically. i just dont know that *every* situation of dv is the same & that there s not possibly more of a gray shade inside each situation in which personal responsibility is a factor. for example, is it impossible that someone like hedda had brought her own personality flaws, maybe of narcissism?, into that relationship? it doesnt invalidate the dv situation & any of the attending behaviors associated with it, but it might explain how someone might feel sorry enough to cry for themselves & not the abused-to-death child,
im sure my saying this will rile some people, but it doesnt make sense to me that *every* situation of dv is the same & that there is zero culpibility, with regards to cases where children are harmed, say.
And I sympathized with her mourning the fact that the anti-porn movement created so many intractable hostilities in feminism that it functioned as a death knell for radical feminism, which had been shockingly successful up until then.
One thing about the early successes then splits in radical feminism.
John D’Emilio notes some similar things in gay politics…victories in the early 1970s transforming into losses in the later 1970s and 1980s.
It’s not only about movement fragmentation. It’s true, also, that there was a general demobilization of leftish movements throughout the 1970s. The state also reconsolidated it’s power, and became less open to challenge than it was in the early 1960s. Finally, the late 1970s in particular saw the rise of the right as a backlash and political force. We should also remember the role of recession and how the Southern Strategy was able to tie a lot of these things together. Just a note that the split probably had less to do with the loss than many of these other issues.
We’re not talking about ’somebody like Hedda.’ We’re talking about her, the actual person, the actual case. So why talk about somebody ‘like’ her? She’s a real person and there’s little to dispute about the case, unless you’re one of those people who wants to kick a woman who had been knocked so far down she never seemed to have recovered. At a certain point, the abuser has to be responsible for the abuse. Nussbaum was beaten nearly to death by Joel Steinberg. Let’s talk about him and the abuse he inflicted, shall we?
Nussbaum attempted repeatedly to flee the home, only to be returned to the home her attacker by cops, by friends, and by family. She wrote a book in 2005. As soon as I get some money, I’m buying it.
I have no special insight on this, but I wonder if the fragmentation often seen in reform movements might be driven by the very disempowerment the reformers fight. I think there’s probably a lot to be said for the views expressed upthread, but in addition there’s the fact that when you’re in a position of fighting against an entrenched and vastly more powerful enemy it makes a lot of sense to concentrate efforts on one front, win there, and then reposition resources onto the next front. In this view fragmentation comes from differing perceptions of which front is most likely to yield victories that can be built upon. Given the lack of resources, any effort which detracts from the attack on the weakest point of the enemy’s flank is de facto helping the enemy. Since different people bring different understandings of both their own capabilities and the enemies weaknesses to the table, there will inevitably be differences of opinion over the best route forward. It’s the size of the power differential that turns these differences into bitter conflicts - if victory was assured, minor shifts of resources away from ones’ preferred approach would be de minimis. With victory very much hanging in the balance even minor diversions threaten the entire campaign.
I don’t suggest that this is the root cause of fragmentation - people, especially passionate, action-oriented nonconformists, rarely need much of an excuse for squabbling. However, I think that the dynamic I outline above may be part of what drives squabbles to become major splits, complete with denunciations and anathematizations (if that’s a word).
If a sister demonstrated talent and got more attention than another who didn’t have that exact talent, accusations of ambition would fly, as well as demands that the talented sister step down.
I agree with your insight about asking said sister to step down, but are you sure it’s fair to say that talent is the reason some people got/get more attention? I’m not sure about historical cases; I bring this up because, IIRC, you mentioned this idea in a thread at Tiny Cat Pants about WOC’s very current complaints… And in that kind of situation, at least, I’m pretty sure a big reason some people get more attention than others isn’t so much talent as it is racism. And related things like classism and marketability in our racist/sexist/classist marketplace.
Well, keep in mind how women aren’t even allowed to disagree without the culture invaliding our concerns, there, too—we’re catty, bitchy, having catfights—nothing important, after all. How much of how we view dipsutes between women is influenced by that?
togolosh, I don’t think fragmentation is special to progressive movements. It’s part of all social movements. The exception is when people maintain a mobilized presence for an extended period of time and overcome their differences.
I think it is important to remember (as I do) that our first consciousness raising groups felt so bold. Women were portrayed in pop culture as being unable to get along. Cat fighting - you know. It was part of the patriarchal mythology that women were insanely, jealously fighting over those few fabulous men. Gah.
I remember inviting my mother to one of our group meetings in 1970. She had no idea at all how to relate Convention wisdom said, “Well, of course these women are in-fighting.”
Lastly, the collaborative model was born largely out of the WLM. The business model was the patriarchal model of hierarchy. This is a richly informative post and I thank you. I am a second wave feminist and I feel 200 years old hearing about Brownmiller and her work, but it is a wonderful surprise.
Now, while I’m not brand spanking new here, “privilege” is not something that’s come up in very many threads I’ve posted in, and even then it’s been in passing. So what exactly do you mean when you say this? That somebody’s showing he’s not able to sympathize with women because he’s never experienced what they have due to being male, or something else?
Now, while I’m not brand spanking new here, “privilege” is not something that’s come up in very many threads I’ve posted in, and even then it’s been in passing. So what exactly do you mean when you say this? That somebody’s showing he’s not able to sympathize with women because he’s never experienced what they have due to being male, or something else?
That is probably one way they tell themselves they aren’t bad people. Here’s another thought: if rape’s often more about punishing the victim than sating sexual urges, that’s one more reason why a batterer might not feel the need. He’s already punished whoever he is with by beating them, so he might have gotten all his aggression out and have none left–at the time–for rape.
If you’re male, you’re conditioned to believe that if women like you, you have something to be proud of, and if women don’t like you as more than a friend, then you’re pitiful. So a lot of men date women for just the reason you describe. Insecurity.
How OT would it be to talk about this in greater detail? Specifically, talking about how practitioners of BDSM were–and perhaps are–viewed, and if the role they preferred (dom/sub, top/bottom) as well as their gender were a big factor in determining how people in the feminist movement (such as Brownmiller) felt about it.
anathematizations (if that’s a word).
togolosh- it IS a word! as in i found several examples of other people using it in semi-formal contexts. (yeah, i google shit constantly, i’m weird.) kuh-razy.
rob- i hate to do this to you but i feel like “privilege” IS pretty commonly invoked, sometimes explicitly and all the damn time implicitly, on this blog, and so i’d suggest that you follow up your (very worthwhile) inquiry about the concept with some outside reading. you could probably start with http://www.finallyfeminism101.blogspot.com/ , started and moderated by tigtog, a commenter you might have seen here at pandagon. but there’s plenty of other places to look as well, including some really fantastic anti-racism groups.
fwiw, and maybe this was part of what caused the confusion over the term, i’m really not sure lloyd webber was addressing pablo. hard to tell but it sounds like it was aimed at amanda and probably related to her mention of intra-movement “jealousy”/trashing.
actually, the blog’s migrated to http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/ so posts later than may won’t be at the url i gave you. whoops.
by the way, it’s participatory and collaborative, so if you have any questions or any answers you’re meant to feel welcome to post — *after* reading to make sure you’re not covering much-trodden ground, of course, cause that’s the whole point.
sorry for the slight tangent but i thought this would be a good moment to promote the site, which is a super idea and which i haven’t visited enough lately, to anyone who might have missed its inception.
That somebody’s showing he’s not able to sympathize with women because he’s never experienced what they have due to being male…?
all that said, your guess isn’t that far off. privilege is, among other things, what spares you the inconvenience of having to step into someone else’s shoes or see the world from their perspective. it’s not that “you’re a guy so you will never be able to see it from my pov”, but rather “you’re a guy so you’ve never HAD to see it from my pov and can AVOID seeing it from my pov if you wish to”. whereas the world is “written” by men and so women have to learn the dominant male perspective as well as having their own, the world is “written” by whites and so people of color grow up having to know what the “white world” is like — w.e.b. dubois called it “double consciousness”.
privilege is lots of other things too, but you almost-hit on a very important intangible part of it.
…gah, and i’m done. sorry for so many posts in a row.
The FemiNazis have executed 40 million innocent unborn babies and counting, and these bloodthirsty vampires still want to be portrayed as “victims” … ???
ROFL. Did Eric just hit BINGO in one sentence?
Hey Amanda– about the infighting in the day: you know the countercultural drill from the alt.rock IMS scene. Anyone who achieves the slightest degree of “mainstream” success (even if this is measured only by the production cost of a single issue of Ms.) is a sellout. That argument, like the indiscriminate sniping you mention here, makes it very difficult to distinguish good people with legitimate and necessary talents of public persuasion (like Ellen Willis, to mention one of the more influential radfems) from frauds, pretenders, triangulators, and (ahem) sellouts (like Camille Paglia, to mention someone who seized upon a couple of radfem lines of argument and defanged them for TV).
Alice Echols’ Daring to Be Bad is a great account of the era, by the way. If you’re looking for Something To Read Next.
The FemiNazis have executed 40 million innocent unborn babies and counting, and these bloodthirsty vampires still want to be portrayed as “victims” … ???
Indeed. Goosestepping their leather-booted way across the unsuspecting land of America, blood dripping from their snarling fangs as they suck the very lives of innocent babies from those poor disembodied wombs, the stink of Zyklon B mixing with the whiff of the graves from which they’ve unholy risen, the sound of the “We Worship Satan” remix version of the Horst Wessel Lied echoing from their inhuman throats, and of course, all that fetishistic black leather - probably made from unborn Jewish infant-hide…
God, will no-one save us from the FemiNazi Vampires?
No. Make peace with your deity if you have one, because you, sir, are fucked.
roula: Thanks for the link and the clarification, as well as hating to do it to me.
It might come up a lot, but the only thing I can remember off the top of my head is somebody saying “your privilege is showing” in one comment in another thread. I had an idea at the time what they meant, but I wanted to be sure after it was mentioned again by Lloyd here.
I’ll try not to bring up stuff that’s been covered before, but it may happen.
I had decided that if vampiric Feminazis weren’t too off-topic then the thing I was hoping to talk about concerning BDSM was less so. Used the search function to look for “BDSM” as well, and it didn’t look to me like what I wanted to talk about had been previously blogged about here.
I had it all typed up and then I looked at it and thought “this might be almost as long as the actual blog entry. Maybe you shouldn’t post it all at once, if at all.”
So I’ll just save the text somewhere until I get a better idea one way or the other whether it’d be welcome or not.
The very short version is this: if a woman is a feminist and happens to be into BDSM and submissive, can that be problematic for her? If it isn’t today, did it used to be back then? Is one’s sexuality even relevant to the question of whether or not they’re advancing or hindering the cause of equality for women?
(Apologies for making two successive posts again, but when I said to roula “thanks for hating to do it to me”, I was referring to the fact that it wasn’t very long ago at all that nobody would’ve cared at all how I might take their replies. So, really, thanks.)
“What killed me was how otherwise sharp women couldn’t see that trashing someone for putting her ambitions ahead of the movement was straightforward projection. If you ask someone to step down who has the talents to reach out to others and get them involved in the movement because you feel overshadowed, you’re putting your own envy in front of the goals of the movement of getting more women involved.”
What if the goal of the movement is to be leaderless? Surely, if someone emerges as a leader in a movement devoted to leaderlessnes, then they are betraying the movement? Have you read the 1970 essay by Jo Freeman “The Tyranny of Structurelessness“? It is a terrific essay, in that she argues that the movement needs leaders, but I think Freeman was regarded as a heretic for writing it, and the basic gist of the argument was ignored for a long time.
Rob–
Don’t you think that it probably depends on the woman, insofar as how she feels about herself being a sub? I know women who are, and don’t see it as a problem. I could have ended up that way– had been introduced to the idea of rape before the idea of sex, and been threatened and assaulted by boys when I started developing. But I couldn’t stand the idea of relying on violent fantasies, much less acting anything out, so I practiced pleasure to more pleasant fantasies until I didn’t have to associate sex with my earlier negative images anymore.
Everyone’s different.
There are certain patterns you see in this sort of service work that quite frankly you see over and over and over and over. It’s more than in just the feminist field. Some of the patterns seem to be changing, thankfully, but the changeover is just as painful as anything else. The main reason that patterns are changing is that intellectual growth on these issues is moving away from single-issue thinkers to more big picture outside the box thinking.
The first pattern is to be recognized. It’s simple, the assumption is that there’s a limited amount of time, energy and resources (both physical AND emotional) in the world, and your promoting your issue takes away from me promoting mine. This is what you see in the DV vs. Rape thing. Even though both issues when we look at it seem intrinsically related, to someone looking at it through a microscope, they’re not going to see the links.
The second pattern, is to believe in the system. That the goal is to work within the existing framework to fix or patch up the problem without changing the framework. This just doesn’t work. Well..it can for a while, but all you’re doing is holding the fort down while it’s getting worse and worse, usually.
No, for any issue worth fixing, systematic change is essential. It should be the first thing we think about, not an afterthought.
Rob,
I recommend this book. Specifically the chapter that includes this:
It’s all about context, intent, and trust.
The circular fire squad, backstabbing phenomenon was probably in part a hold-over from the experience of left-wing politics in general. Civil rights, labor, peace movements, socialism, and on and on have long been beset with a tendency to attack the members mindlessly or for showing “untoward” personal ambition.
As Amanda explained, it’s largely a function of internalizing the dominant group opinion and using against each other. Also to blame though are a desire of ideological purity over coalition (less true in the women’s movement I think because the ideology was largely being developed simultaneous with political action), personal conflicts that become disguised by ideological jargon, and a sense that anyone trying to lead is inevitably going to become a new Stalin or Franco.
I agree with your insight about asking said sister to step down, but are you sure it’s fair to say that talent is the reason some people got/get more attention?
Yes, but that doesn’t mean that some talented people get ignored. There’s two ways to address the issue of some talented people getting attention while some talented people get ignored. But the way you phrased this makes it almost seem that if some talented person doesn’t see success, that means that the people who have success are not talented, and I strongly disagree. You can go the negative route and demand that those who are luckier step down, feel guilty, give up their hopes and ambitions. Or you can seek ways to spread the opportunities. I think the former seems a lot easier, which is why it was the first choice of early feminists. I’m not sure what anyone thinks now; solutions seem far and few between. It’s different now, since there’s a since that white privilege and racism are at stake, and back then it was “talent privilege” that was considered suspect, to be blunt about it. They really were openly hostile to women who achieved on merits. If there’s similarities between now and then, it’s mostly to my mind the sense that someone should jettison her own career as some sort of penance, even if it does nothing to help anyone else.
Brownmiller’s section on Gloria Steinem was interesting. Steinem was abused non-stop by her sisters, and while she didn’t handle everything with aplomb, I did feel sorry for her. Brownmiller tries to be fair to Steinem and mostly is, but even she takes a jealous swipe because Steinem was able to launch a magazine and Brownmiller failed at that. There were accusations that Steinem worked for the CIA (by feminists I really admire, even) and other stuff that I can’t help but think was just nonsense. And a lot of it was driven by the sense that Steinem didn’t “deserve” her attention because others were not getting the attention. But for all that Steinem did some things that were less than perfect, I think on the whole she is good people and she, in retrospect, appears to have been very generous and gracious. She started a magazine and gave a lot of movement women jobs and exposure.
Good point, Michael. It’s easy to make a fetish out of being an outsider—my sympathies are definitely there—to the degree that purity starts to be determined by how outside you are. And you big time see this with the feminist movement, especially back then. Now feminism is more mainstreamed so I don’t think there’s near the flinching if a feminist seeks some kind of mainstream success like a paycheck.
When it comes to rock music, my attitude is that the bashing of people for being mainstream is just lazy. It’s a way to feel like you’re a rock snob without putting the work into actually learning about various bands. But in reality, there are a lot of bands that were huge hits for legitimate reasons, which is they are in fact really great. The Who can be great without that meaning that your scuzzy but brilliant local punk band is not.
While I haven’t reread this book in a few years and thus can’t recall exactly how Brownmiller addresses the infighting/success problems, I think that it’s important to recognize a couple of different aspects of this problem. “Fighting for scraps” is only one part; the other is that radical feminism sought to question, destabilize, and fundamentally alter society. Thus achieving success as defined by the mainstream and not questioning that success but accepting it as one’s due would in fact represent a betrayal of the movement, a form of “selling out.” The dilemma, of course, is that for a movement to grow, new people need to be convinced of the worth of it’s ideas, and radical groups tend to have trouble with how to do outreach without relying on mainstream ideals, ie what makes someone a “good” speaker, how to get media coverage that does not distort movement positions, etc.
But the way you phrased this makes it almost seem that if some talented person doesn’t see success, that means that the people who have success are not talented, and I strongly disagree.
That’s a good point — certainly the people who get noticed are very talented. I still think there is a piece missing from your analysis, though, which is that sometimes there are real reasons some talented people get passed over. We’re not living in a pure meritocracy, obviously, because some talented people become very successful while some equally talented people do not. Right?
So I think there are other factors at work here, and noticable patterns to who becomes successful and who doesn’t, which are important to acknowledge.
It’s not just that some people are more talented, and/or lucky. And implying that’s all that’s going on here (by not acknowledging the other factors) is sort of like being that guy who’s saying that poor people are poor because they’re lazy… “But a lot of middle class people work really hard.” Of course they do, but that’s beside the point.
Anyway. I really don’t have many complaints about these ideas in the very narrow context of early feminism. I only bring this up because of the way I was seeing it get extrapolated in that Tiny Cat Pants thread, which I think is a very dangerous route to go.
Amanda wrote:
“Brownmiller got into a nasty fight with some battered women’s advocates after writing an article expressing her belief that a battered woman who didn’t intervene when her partner killed their daughter was culpable for negligence.”
This obviously refers to the Joel Steinberg/Hedda Nussbaum/Lisa Steinberg case. Only Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbauim know exactly how Lisa died, or which of them did what. It is very clear that she was horribly battered. When admitted to Elmhurst Hospital, which serves the Rikers Island Jail, the surgeoins were unsure if they could save her leg. Later, reconstructive surgery on her face took fifteen hours.
But there remain those who think it possible that she, rather than he, really murdered the child. There are many mysteries about this, which probably never will be cleared up. She, however, was, in the end willing to testify, and he wasn’t. The prosecutors thus chose to focus on him. Thery may well have been right, but we’ll never know.
Steinberg was quite definitely a repellent psychopath. For example, he actually accepted a fee from Lisa’s natural mother for taking the child off her hands. He also was a crackhead. A few days before Lisa’s death he took her along to Albany to argue an appeal for one of his crack-dealing clients. The client later commented that he felt worried that the attorney representing him was also a crackhead. He also paid Steinberg in cocaine.
Nussbaum herself was a heavy substance abuser. If I recall, she maintained a recipe book which recorded her various efforts to arrive at an optimal way to freebase cocaine into crack. She was hardly a poster girl for battered women.
I recently retired from forty one years as a social worker, and had many years experience of child abuse work. Few abuses result in death, and this case was anomalous in many ways.
Brownmiller, by the way, wrote a mediocre fictionalized treatment of the case that did little to shed light.
Rob, I’m certainly not discouraging discussion of BDSM, but there’s a whole blog devoted to the interaction of BDSM and feminism here. Not that I’m endorsing the bloggers’ views there; in fact, the month on that blog has a running disagreement between me and Trinity and others … but that discussion is sorta the raison d’etre for that space.
closing a tag
Heh, ok Thomas, I’ll check it out. I just thought that since the subject had kind of come up (in Brownmillers reaction the conference celebrating kinky sexuality), it might not be out of place here.
TY for the excerpt, Swedgin. For brevity’s sake, I’ll just say that I totally agree with the statement “Just because you like to be tied up, spanked, and called ‘bitch,’ doesn’t mean you’re a bad feminist,” for the same reasons that I don’t hate myself (anymore) for liking those very things.
Yeah, they are. I didn’t have an easy childhood or adolescence either, although it was nowhere near as bad as what you describe, and I’m pretty sure that contributed to the way I turned out. The other thing was that it sort of snuck up on me before I could make a decision to say “OK, I don’t want to be into this, so I’m going to focus on other things when I’m masturbating.” By the time I saw a shrink out of desperation and he suggested I try that, it was too deeply entrenched. That’s why I write in the stuff I’ll copy and paste below that people don’t get to choose this, because I certainly didn’t and I’ve talked to many others (both Dom/me and sub) who felt either guilty or ashamed about their sexuality at first. But I guess the lack of choice isn’t universally true, as I realize from reading your comment.
Anyway, here are the last couple of paragraphs of what I wrote last night:
I hope that the majority, today at least, don’t judge too harshly. Cause the thing is that nobody gets to choose their fetishes. I didn’t want to be saddled with my particular set of kinks, but there they are. They’re not gonna go away, much as I used to want them to, as much as I tried to get rid of them or suppress them. Same kind of thing for a woman. She doesn’t get to choose how she turns out sexuality-wise, either.
The thing that finally helped me come to terms with it was the realization that what I do behind closed doors or even in a club somewhere does not define who I am by itself. It’s a persona, an alter-ego, a way of acting that I adopt part of the time, and the rest of the time I’m not like that. Likewise, what a woman does in certain environments with certain people does not define her. It doesn’t define who she is any more than the roles an actor takes define who she or he is; they are just playing a part. So am I. So is the hypothetical woman. Perhaps in their normal day to day life they resemble that part they play…but then, perhaps not. I’d say calling it “playtime for grown-ups” is as accurate as any other way I’ve seen or heard it described. It’s just play, it involves pretending to a certain extent for most if not all people who are into it, so why worry about it or take it seriously?
“…all that fetishistic black leather - probably made from unborn Jewish infant-hide…”
So Jews really are black, at least in utero. I always wondered about that. Thanks for the heads-up.
~snark~
I still think there is a piece missing from your analysis, though, which is that sometimes there are real reasons some talented people get passed over.
I 100% acknowledge that. But I don’t think the “step down” energy is the way to address that. Brainstorming creative ways to combat racism or lookism or whatever it is that makes one person more noticed than another is very energy-demanding, and often likely to fail, though. So I see why a lot of anger gets directed towards the circular firing squad instead. It’s understandable, if frustrating.
I brought it up at TCP because I was reading it at the time and the parallels were a revelation. It was both comforting and kind of depressing all at once. But thinking about it more, there’s both similarities and differences. With my book cover, there was a lot of good faith arguments going on, and I accepted that and took it to the publisher. With Jessica’s, however, I think there was way too much energy invested in making her a target, energy that she would not attract if she wasn’t a big time blogger.
rob- i don’t want to take things really OT but wanted to add a couple more things. would you mind if i got your email address?
I 100% acknowledge that. But I don’t think the “step down” energy is the way to address that. Brainstorming creative ways to combat racism or lookism or whatever it is that makes one person more noticed than another is very energy-demanding, and often likely to fail, though.
Thank you for acknowledging it. : )
I agree completely that asking folks to step down is not the way to go, and is unfair, and doesn’t make any sense. As energy-demanding as that other work is, though, I think it’s vital. If we (feminists in general) aren’t here to do that (anti-oppression) work, why the heck are we here? It’s a piece of the puzzle as surely as writing great feminist books is, I think.
With my book cover, there was a lot of good faith arguments going on, and I accepted that and took it to the publisher. With Jessica’s, however, I think there was way too much energy invested in making her a target, energy that she would not attract if she wasn’t a big time blogger.
I wonder privately whether the differences between those situations may be more related to the “accepted that” part than the “making her a target” part. But that is neither here nor there.
Thanks for the exchange.
As energy-demanding as that other work is, though, I think it’s vital.
Agreed 100% again. Which is why I find infighting and finger-pointing to be frustrating. It utterly drains people of energy that could be used to actually improve the situation.
On Jessica’s book cover—I think the concerns were overblown. And the huge stink over basically nothing created this situation where I was joking, before I released my book cover, about what it was going to be—pro-rape? Too much skin? Which made it much harder to take genuine concerns seriously, because they happened on this backdrop of relentless noise. In fact, I was basically only brought to reason by the intervention of people I know act out of good faith and are actually friends who would never try to hurt me. Which is what I found to be an interesting parallel between now and then, because it was the same situation. Lots of crying wolf makes it hard to rouse your sympathies when the wolf is actually coming.
And no, thank you. It’s clarifying.
A couple of things to consider about those times that makes them a bit different from today. Many women had come out of the antiwar movement where sexism was rampant. Men took the glory jobs, got all the media adoration, while women did the grunt work.
So to see the same kind of dynamics playing out in the women’s movement: with some women getting the glory while other women were doing the grunt work and being ignored seemed doubling shocking. We thought we were building a new world, and up comes that same old shit. We thought the grunt workers were going to get the credit they deserved. They didn’t then and they don’t today. Yet another unaccomplished goal!
The accusations about Steinem weren’t that she worked directly for the CIA, but that she worked for a CIA-funded institution called the “Independent Research Service”. She has never denied that. What she has denied is that she provided detailed reports to the CIA on specific individuals who attended international youth conferences. Redstockings claimed to have uncovered those reports.
Again, think of the times. This was in the early 1960s when a quite a few liberals believed fighting communism and outing communists in our midst was an acceptable practice. Many of the egregious activities of the CIA were not well known at the time.
In addition, no one was aware that U.S. intelligence agencies were deliberately infiltrating and generally messing with activist organizations at the time. So even if Steinem did provide reports to the CIA about specific people, she’d have no reason to believe they’d be used to interfere in progressive movements in the U.S.
The other thing of which there is no doubt is that Steinem’s friends and lawyers came down hard on Redstockings when they tried to publish their book, “Feminist Revolution”. The chapter on Steinem was removed and Redstockings was not allowed to mention that deletion in the book. For years, there was an address you could write to in New York City to get a type-written copy of the excised chapter. I’ve read it in the archives of radical history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The closest thing I could find online is here.
FTR, I disagree entirely with your interpretation of the book cover discussion, but I’d rather not rehash that discussion.
Mostly I thought I could provide a point of view you may not have considered about how times have changed between then and now.
A couple of things to consider about those times that makes them a bit different from today. Many women had come out of the antiwar movement where sexism was rampant. Men took the glory jobs, got all the media adoration, while women did the grunt work.
So to see the same kind of dynamics playing out in the women’s movement: with some women getting the glory while other women were doing the grunt work and being ignored seemed doubling shocking. We thought we were building a new world, and up comes that same old shit. We thought the grunt workers were going to get the credit they deserved. They didn’t then and they don’t today. Yet another unaccomplished goal!
The accusations about Steinem weren’t that she worked directly for the CIA, but that she worked for a CIA-funded institution called the “Independent Research Service”. She has never denied that. What she has denied is that she provided detailed reports to the CIA on specific individuals who attended international youth conferences. Redstockings claimed to have uncovered those reports.
Again, think of the times. This was in the early 1960s when a quite a few liberals believed fighting communism and outing communists in our midst was an acceptable practice. Many of the egregious activities of the CIA were not well known at the time.
In addition, no one was aware that U.S. intelligence agencies were deliberately infiltrating and generally messing with activist organizations at the time. So even if Steinem did provide reports to the CIA about specific people, she’d have no reason to believe they’d be used to interfere in progressive movements in the U.S.
The other thing of which there is no doubt is that Steinem’s friends and lawyers came down hard on Redstockings when they tried to publish their book, “Feminist Revolution”. The chapter on Steinem was removed and Redstockings was not allowed to mention that deletion in the book. For years, there was an address you could write to in New York City to get a type-written copy of the excised chapter. I’ve read it in the archives of radical history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The closest thing I could find online is here.
FTR, I disagree entirely with your interpretation of the book cover discussion, but I’d rather not rehash that discussion.
Mostly I thought I could provide a point of view you may not have considered about how times have changed between then and now.
rob_to_4@yahoo.com
So Jews really are black, at least in utero. I always wondered about that. Thanks for the heads-up.
If you’re going to engage in racism, you might as well try for a Grand Unified Theory of stupid bigotry.
Did you know the Elders of Zion are responsible for rap music?
The thing that always gets left out of discussions of infighting and purges in left-wing politics is the fact that right-wing groups and organisations have the same tendencies. Powerstruggles, backstabbing, viciousness, underhand tactics - it’s not the flavour of the organisation, it’s organisational politics.
We just flagelate ourselves over it while the Right celebrates their Darwinian processes.
Nice review. I’m always happy to hear “younger feminists” express excitement about movement politics even when they realize what we painfully did at the time — that movement women were as flawed as their non-movement sisters.
I had a brief but powerful and deep involvement with the women’s movement in the early 1970’s when I was working for a “radical feminist” women’s center in San Diego as a Vista volunteer (the old domestic peace corps).
You’re right, I think, that we accomplished so much despite the in-fighting because there was so much to be accomplished. And, in hindsight, the ground we broke seems more or less inevitable (though it certainly didn’t seem so at the time).
In starting our own battered women’s shelter, some women argued that providing social services was anti-revolutionary (imagine saying THAT with a straight face today) because it would retard the class struggle that would (they hoped) result in a working class uprising.
To those truly “radical” feminists, groups like the National Organization of Women were traitors, looking to obtain as big and as unfair a share of the patriarchal pie as their (presumed) husbands had.
Still, the women who worked for little to nothing in those days on behalf of women’s rights accomplished quite a lot. Despite opposition from the few, we opened the battered women’s shelter AND a women’s credit union AND originated and implemented a Skilled Trades Readiness Training Program to assist women’s entry into the skilled trades, not to mention securing for women for the first time since WWII jobs at one of San Diego’s then-largest employer, National Steel and Shipbuilding. We ran consciousness raising groups and study groups and a women’s newspaper. We provided free employment services and were aligned with a “free” school (where my roommate taught).
Though full civil rights for all opposed groups (notably the GLBT) have not yet been accomplished, civil rights and free speech were the boomers’ great accomplishments. Though we must continue that work and remain vigilant, I see the current young adult generation’s great social project as global rather than local.
This generation has the enormously difficult task of addressing in a meaningful way the criminally unequal distribution of economic resources between the “first” and the “third” worlds; the taking of responsiblity for “our” contribution to those disparities; and, maybe most importantly, our finding a way to halt and then remedy the damage we have done to the environment.
These leaps forward will be more difficult and perhaps more profound that finding a way to admit that women, too, could be doctors and lawyers and machine fitters and welders and plumbers.
“They really were openly hostile to women who achieved on merits.”
Let’s assume for a moment that some of the radical feminists of the 60s were also loyal to socialist politics (a few them clearly were, explicitly). How do you build a politics that both celebrates people who succeed on the mertis, but also remains faithful to socialis ideals?
I’ve been to communes in America (TwinOaks, in Virginia, for instance) where this still comes up as an issue, from time to time. My impression is, even when you’ve very smart people working on this issue full-time (as you do at Twin Oaks), it’s still quite hard to reconcile communitarian impulses with the celebration of promotion based on merit.
“They really were openly hostile to women who achieved on merits.”
There were raidcial feminists in the 60s and 70s who were promoting a socialist form of economics. How were they suppose to reconcile their politics to the celebration of success based on merit?
I’ve been to certain communes here in America (TwinOaks in Virginia, for instance) where this still comes up as an issue. Celebrating the success people can acheive based on their talents is tough to reconcile with the ideal of keeping everyone in perfect equality. Even when you have very smart people forcsed on this issue for a major part of their life (as you have at TwinOaks), one finds that tension, rather than resolution, is the norm. My impression (though of course I could be wrong) is that is nearly impossible to reconcile communitarian impulses with a strong committment to economic equality for all.
Of course, one could dismiss the concerns of those radical feminists who subscribed to socialist politics, but in other threads, you (Amanda Marcotte) have described your politics as socialist, so I assume these are concerns that you take seriously.
“but in addition there’s the fact that when you’re in a position of fighting against an entrenched and vastly more powerful enemy it makes a lot of sense to concentrate efforts on one front, win there, and then reposition resources onto the next front. In this view fragmentation comes from differing perceptions of which front is most likely to yield victories that can be built upon”
Your language includes the phrase “reposition resources onto the next front” which is language drawn from military operations. If radical movements were highly centralized and highly hierarchical, then this kind of language might make sense. But, instead, radical politics tend to be extremely decentralized. This decentralization no doubt plays a role in the frequent fractures that appear.
“radical feminism sought to question, destabilize, and fundamentally alter society. Thus achieving success as defined by the mainstream and not questioning that success but accepting it as one’s due would in fact represent a betrayal of the movement, a form of “selling out.””
That’s well said, Rebecca. That sums up the whole problem. Abbie Hoffman compalined about “hip capitalism” which was trying to co-opt radical energy be re-uisng some of the slogans in advertising. To accept a paycheck in exchange for the chance to spread one’s opinions is also to asscept the values that are implied by that paycheck.
I should have added this sentence to my last coment:
You can’t overthrow an economic system that is based on monetary exchange, by accepting money in exchange for promoting your viewpoint.
But there remain those who think it possible that she, rather than he, really murdered the child. There are many mysteries about this, which probably never will be cleared up. She, however, was, in the end willing to testify, and he wasn’t. The prosecutors thus chose to focus on him. Thery may well have been right, but we’ll never know.
Those are only mysteries to sexists who just must pin the blame on the woman. What a great victim blamer you are, Celsus. You go right on having those paranoid fantasies about a horribly battered woman. Good job.