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Article Excerpt
IN AN IMPORTANT 1998 ESSAY, "Whose Feminism, Whose History?" Sherna Berger Gluck pointed to "the deep investment on the part of the participants in the early days of the women's liberation movement in preserving the primacy of our particular experience and analysis." In her view, the growing recognition of feminist activism by working-class women and women of color had not been sufficient to force reconfiguration of the received paradigm. As a result, she argued, the writing of this history "might best be left to the new generation of feminist scholars ..., a generation whose understanding of historical processes is not tied up with their own direct experience and the sense of 'ownership' that this seems to have engendered." (1) Examination of five recent works on this period, one by a veteran, four by somewhat younger-generation scholars, confirms, contravenes, and complicates Gluck's provocative assertion.
DREAMS OF INTEGRATION
In The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. Winifred Breines, writing as both a scholar and a veteran of 1960s and 1970s radical and socialist feminist activism, looks at interactions between black and white women in the civil rights movement; the universalit assumptions of white feminists; the racially divided socialist feminist milieu(s) of Boston-Cambridge during the seventies; and the eventual accomplishment of respectful, if tentative, coalition work in which white feminists learned to accept the leadership of black women activists on issues concerning the black community. Breines interrogates her position as an early participant to examine how "white nostalgia" for the dream of an integrated society and movement shaped both her initial research agenda and the consciousness of white feminists more generally.
Gluck's charge that first-generation scholars have "settled into complacency and not tackled the problems inherent in producing a morecomplicated, multilayered history" is challenged by Breines's self-critical analysis of the assumptions and contradictions that informed racial thought and practice among white socialist feminists (and by implication white feminists more generally). (2) This occurs on two levels in particular: one, a thoughtful characterization of the racial attitudes that characterized post-World War II liberalism; the second, a more specific examination of white feminist activism as exemplified by the Boston socialist feminist group Bread and Roses.
In the first of these, Breines portrays a version of the form of white racial consciousness that we know as the ideology of color blindness. Although color blindness is today most often associated with conservative opposition to affirmative action and multiculturalism, Breines rightly characterizes its 1950s and 1960s version as the product of post-World War II liberalism, an "idealism in which racial difference was almost expressly denied" (8) and in which the ability to overlook race was indeed esteemed as a moral/political accomplishment. A particularly telling detail is Breines's account of her early fascination with Edward Steichen's The Family of Man, which used photos of families from a multitude of societies, nationalities, and racial and ethnic groups at different stages in the life cycle, to express, in Steichen's words, '"the universal brotherhood of man"' and '"the essential oneness of mankind"' through its depiction of "the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life." "Color-blindness, our supposed sameness," Breines comments, "moved us; it certainly did me" (10).
For white activists and supporters, the civil rights movement seemed both to articulate and fulfill the dreams of a "universal, racially integrated sisterhood and brotherhood ... where, hand in hand, we would work to create a just world" (9). (3) But color blindness, which tended to see inequality in attitudinal terms, had complex implications for this generation of white activists and the movements they participated in. At the time, Breines notes,
the early, idealistic "family of man" phase seems to have contained the assumption that upholding universalist ideals, like integration, made the one who upholds them into a newer sort of white person. ... It made us different, we thought (11).
No longer implicated, one might add, in the system of racial privilege and the divisions that accompanied it. The unspoken and deeply problematic assumption was that these "different" white people should be recognized as such by black activists.
These attitudes played out, Breines argues, in consequential ways in the development of 1960s and 1970s feminism. The ideals of 1950s liberalism and of the early civil rights movement enabled young white women to "imagine[d], naively, that our 'I' was 'we'; we thought all women were us, and we were all women" (10). The implications of such a formulation were evident in both ideology and practice, even within socialist feminist groups such as Bread and Roses that were distinguished by their recognition of class and race as systems of power within a capitalist society.
In a chapter titled "Learning about Racism: White Socialist Feminism and Bread and Roses," Breines points to the feminist critique of the nuclear family as exemplifying the ideological disjuncture between white and black women activists. Bread and Roses members called for the "abolition of the family as an economic unit and as the only socially sanctioned living unit of our society" (89), describing it as "an institution of privatization" (90) that should be replaced by new forms of personal life, supported by the social provision of childcare, housing, and reproductive labor. As socialists, they sought to extend social provision equally across society and thus to eradicate class and race differentials; in doing so they failed to recognize not only black women's attachment to the family as "a unique site of resistance to the ravages wrought by racism," (91) but the fact that their own "ability to cut off ties with men and families" (95) was founded on the security of class and race privilege. This point has often been made, but Breines's account is not only severe in its criticism of the tone of many of these pronouncements, terming them "mechanical and cold" (91), but insightful in its apprehension of the "blindspots of privilege" that made possible such analyses, that left these women unaware that "their middleclass whiteness inflected their politics as profoundly as race did black women's politics" (95).
Breines's sympathetic but critical portrayal of how universalist values and race-blindness shaped the worldview of white activists is courageous and compelling, as is her autocritique of "white nostalgia" for the dream of a race-blind society as an artifact of white privilege. One of Breines's preferred and distinctive ways of working, in this book as in others she's written, is to couple historical research with personal observation and remembrances. (4) This serves her well in the analysis of white feminists but less well in her discussion of black activism, where she can't rely on the use of small but telling observations to illuminate larger realities. She has worked hard to understand that black activists did not, for the most part, share the dreams of white liberals and radicals and to acknowledge that differences "enriched the movement" even as they "made trouble" (190). Yet there is a persistent disjuncture between the evidence she presents and the conclusions she draws.
This is exemplified by Breines's discussion of the civil rights movement, which identifies black-white cooperation within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) "as moments of interracial connection," albeit "fragile" ones (49). Looking at relations between black and white women staffers and volunteers. Breines concedes that although "friendships developed, especially in the early years ... on balance, the record indicates that distance prevailed" (48). More broadly, she acknowledges that black activists did not typically share in whites' "romanticization of interracial harmony in the civil rights movement,'1 and that integration was, for most of them, more a political means to achieve equal rights than a goal of "building community with whites" (13-14).
Despite these insights, and in considerable tension with them, Breines develops a narrative are in which black and white women "came together to create a free and racially integrated society," but "had to separate in order to find one another years later" (7). It would appear that Breines retains a vestigial attachment to the very universalist values and assumptions that her thoughtful account seeks to undermine. This is further revealed in passages that extend to both black and white feminists' goals and sentiments that more accurately characterize white women activists, as when she writes of black and white socialist feminists that "they were forced to acknowledge differences they did not know they had, did not want to have, and that nevertheless deeply divided them" (17). The idea that black women were, like white women, unaware of racial differences and that they longed to erase these differences, stands as powerful evidence of her residual investment in the universalist ideal. For Breines, the central issue is the failure of her generation to establish an interracial feminist movement, a failure she views with unambiguous regret.
The books by younger-generation scholars stand in marked contrast to Breines's approach, both analytically and evaluatively, even emotionally. All of them see difference as a source of valuable activism and fruitful theory production. Kimberly Springer, in Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980, identifies black feminists as "the first activists in the United States to theorize and act upon the intersection of race, gender, and class" (2), thus explicitly counterposing her work to "previous women's movement histories...
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