|
Article Excerpt
IN RECENT WRITING ON THE HISTORY and potential of women's studies, socialist feminism is rarely mentioned, leading Judith Gardiner to ask: "What happened to socialist feminist women's studies programs" of the 1970s? (1) This question leads to two additional kinds of questions. First, what are the histories of these programs; what characterized them in the 1970s, and what happened to them in the 1980s and 1990s? What is their continuing impact if any? Second, how are these programs represented in current histories, analyses, or commentaries on women's studies? What difference does their invisibility make? I see both approaches as dialectically interrelated, and therefore my answers move back and forth between them.
In my mind I am participating in a struggle over whose version of the history of the 1970s women's movement, and in particular of women's studies, predominates. All social movements generate struggle over who gets to tell the story and how different positions are represented. A relevant example for the themes of this article is Ellen DuBois's argument that socialist feminism, which linked women's equality with other struggles for justice, has been written out of women's history of the 1920s in favor of a polarization between the equal rights and separate spheres feminisms. (2) In 1995, Lise Vogel explained why she agreed to write an encyclopedia article on socialist feminism:
The popular reconstructions of the 1960s and 1970s made little sense to me. Where I remembered an exciting jumble of organizations and collectives working on behalf of women's liberation, the media described white middle-class wives and daughters seeking individual fulfillment. Collective struggle vanished from the screen, together with voices of working-class women, women of color, lesbian women and, of course, socialist-feminist women. (3)
I begin this essay by defining and recovering socialist feminist praxis of the late 1960s and 1970s, Next, I argue that, since its first organizations in 1969, socialist feminist praxis developed theory and practice around race that influenced the agendas of women's liberation and women's studies. Third, I critically evaluate why these struggles around race have been consistently erased. Finally, I consider the contribution of women's liberation, in general, and socialist feminism, in particular, to the institutionalization of women's studies in order to gain fresh understanding about ways that women's studies can combine theory and practice, engage in institutional struggle, and foster participatory democracy. Equally important, but beyond the scope of this article, would be revisionist analyses of class and lesbianism in socialist feminist praxis.
The analysis draws on my own experience in founding women's studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo) in 1976 and my years as a faculty member and sometime administrator since then, my participation in the discussion group, Marxist Feminist Group 1 from the 1970s through the 1990s, and on recent scholarship on the women's liberation movement and women's studies. My overall goal is to explain why the history of socialist feminism in women's studies is important, challenging current trends in women's studies that implicitly devalue history and dismiss early women's studies as individualist, white, and middle class.
DEFINING SOCIALIST FEMINIST PRAXIS
Most courses on feminist theory devote some time to socialist feminist theory, distinguishing it from other forms of feminist theory. (4) However, these analyses of theoretical concepts are not particularly useful for this article, which focuses on the theory and practice of socialist feminist movements and institution building, what I am calling socialist feminist praxis, in a specific period of history, the late 1960s through the 1970s. There is very little written on this topic; for instance, Ruth Rosen's history of the modern women's movement does not even mention socialist feminism in the index. Similarly, socialist feminist praxis remains obscured in The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers. Of the nine references to socialist feminism in the index, only five are related to women's studies, two by me. Mary Jo Buhle's introduction never mentions the topic, despite the fact that she has herself written a book on U.S. women and socialism. Fortunately, there is a small, but growing, body of scholarship in history and sociology that begins to offer fuller documentation of women's liberation, in general, and socialist feminism, radical feminism, black feminism, and Chicana feminism, in particular, as political tendencies and as organized practice in the late 1960s and 1970s. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon make a good start by reprinting documents from all these tendencies within women's liberation. They emphasize the fluid interactions among different tendencies--particularly radical feminist and socialist feminist--in the late 1960s and early 1970s, suggesting that "most members of women's liberation did not identify with any of these tendencies and considered themselves simply feminists, unmodified." Their work helpfully conveys that this was a period of motion, openness, and invention, rather than of ideological exclusion. However, it is misleading in underplaying the organizational forms of these tendencies with which many women's liberationists identified. (5)
Sarah Evans clarifies the importance of distinct organizations, while agreeing that ideological boundaries were fluid. (5) She argues that both radical feminism and socialist feminism developed from the 1967 groups calling themselves Radical Women in New York and Chicago, whose politics were differentiated from both the women's peace movement and from the New Left in not being willing to subordinate women's issues to other causes, but all else was open to debate. As the growth of the women's liberation movement accelerated, both radical feminism and socialist feminism emerged from within this relatively undifferentiated politics. Evans documents the founding of two distinct socialist feminist groups-the Chicago Women's Liberation Union and Bread and Roses of Bostonin 1969, the same year the better-known radical feminist group Redstockings was founded in New York. While radical feminism and other tendencies continued to grow, socialist feminist women's unions also multiplied throughout the country, at one time numbering as many as eighteen. In addition, Evans notes the existence of several Marxist feminist discussion groups by the early 1970s and of women's chapters of the New American Movement, a socialist feminist organization. (6)
Evans astutely suggests that it is hard for people today to understand the vitality of socialist feminism as a political tendency, because with the end of the cold war dominant ideas tend to associate socialism with dogma and totalitarianism. (7) To the contrary, in the early years of women's liberation, socialist feminist praxis did not follow an orthodox set of ideas. Rather it was guided by the social conditions that birthed it. It was in between the emerging radical feminists and the existing Left. Fed up with the sexism on the Left, socialist feminists believed that their practice needed to include the fight for their own liberation. At the same time they did not agree that women's liberation could be achieved separately from other struggles for social and economic justice. Thus, socialist feminists saw the fight to end male supremacy as key for social justice, but it was not the primary contradiction, rather it was one among many. Most commentators on early socialist feminism identify struggles against racism as well as class exploitation as key for women's liberation. (8)
Evans argues that socialist feminism by 1976 began to take on a new shape, losing its grassroots practice with the growing conservatism of the time. Socialist feminists either went to work in more liberal reform organizations or they focused on analyzing women's oppression in the context of capitalism, the family, and sexuality. Evans credits this creative socialist feminist theorizing with stimulating the growth of women's studies by posing questions about institutions and demanding research that aimed at social change. Thus Evans suggests two distinct periods of socialist feminism: one tied closely with mass movement practices and the second, more focused on theory, research, and analysis. It strikes me that feminists are more familiar with the post-1976 period of socialist feminism in part due to Alison Jaggar's analytical framework in Feminist Philosophy and Human Nature (1978) that presents socialist feminism as the most highly evolved version of feminist theory, rather than existing simultaneously with radical feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. (9)
Benita Roth helpfully complicates the emerging picture of women's liberation when she challenges the received wisdom that women of color feminism developed after white feminism; instead, she argues that white feminism, black feminism, and Chicana feminism developed simultaneously but separately. Despite contact between members of these different movements, they remained separate in theory and practice. Although this analysis is still contested, I believe it offers a good interpretation of existing data. Her research emphasizes that in analyzing women's liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars need to ensure that they use a variety of grids--race/ethnicity as well as political tendency--in order to comprehend the full politics of the women's liberation movement. (10)
SUNY Buffalo's women's studies program in the early 1970s gives a good sense of the fluidity of ideas and practice coexisting with named political tendencies and of the distinct divisions and alliances related to race and class. Although we didn't identify our women's studies program as socialist feminist, we recognized that the leadership in the program--three full-time faculty--was socialist feminist. (11) The framework of women's liberation brought people with all sorts of politics and backgrounds together. Students, staff, and faculty came to build women's studies from the National Organization for Women (NOW) and consciousness raising groups as well as from the civil rights, Black Power, American Indian, gay liberation, lesbian feminist, New Left, sectarian Left, and antiwar movements. A small but steady number of...
|
