RE: Feminism (posted originally on marxism@lists.panix.com)
Hi All, My question was a more rhetorical one guys. Yoshie said that work, as I was suggesting pomo is, that concentrates on the life of the mind is a waste of time. One of the things she mentioned was that the life of the mind confuses issues when it come to doing actual activist type work. This is not exactly what she said. She may be able to give you a better answer - I didn't keep the post. Anyway, I was suggesting that feminism didn't start outside of the mind. Pomo, in fact, would help support burgeoning theoretical approaches to scholarship, because it takes into account the need to reevaluate theory. It is a dialectical approach as Kristeva points out. -Nico -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jim Devine Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 12:29 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: Feminism (posted originally on [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Nicole wrote: So, how did feminism start? As someone who was outside the process, my impression was that the recent wave of feminism that came out of the 1960s anti-war and other movements in the US was a reaction to the male chauvinism of the "New Left" leaders. Paraphrasing, many women said: you men talk about liberating Vietnam, liberating Blacks, etc., but what about women? Why are you men making all the decisions while we make coffee? (FYI, according to eye-witness accounts I've heard, no bras were actually burned, at least at the first, famous, "bra-burning" event.) BTW, I can see no reason why feminism is necessarily postmodernist, nor why postmodernist is necessarily feminist. (Justin, thanks for the summary of what "pomo" means.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Feminism (posted originally on marxism@lists.panix.com)
Nicole wrote: So, how did feminism start? When I moved up to Boston in 1970 to take an assignment with the branch of the Socialist Workers Party, the new feminist movement was beginning to take shape. Unlike other groups on the left, the SWP took an entirely positive attitude toward the movement, even though some of the feminist leaders had no use for Marxism and us in particular. They can be faulted on the former, but not on the latter. The strongest feminist group was called Female Liberation, which emerged out of something called Cell 16. The principal leaders were Roxanne Dunbar and Abby Rockefeller. One or two of our comrades were assigned to work in Female Liberation, but they were not welcomed--nor were they excluded. One of the leaders of Female Liberation, besides the 2 already noted, was a woman named Nancy Williamson whose husband was in the SWP branch. Not only was their marriage was on the rocks, she hated the SWP as well. In 1971 changes began to be felt both in Female Liberation and the SWP, as Marxism and feminism began to cross-pollinate. (In addition to Female Liberation, there was another group called Bread and Roses that was more broadly based. One of the women who led Bread and Roses was an old-timer named Gustie Traynor, a working class member of the SWP in her 60s of Sicilian descent. She really wasn't too keyed into the new feminist movement, but she was an expert on the "woman question". She had read Kollontai and just about every other Marxist thinker on the subject.) Another important element was the publication of SWP'er Evelyn Reed's "Woman's Liberation from Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family", whose thesis is indicated in the title of the book. The idea of a matriarchy was immensely attractive to the young women coming around the feminist movement at the time. Although many saw their oppression as wrapped up in their gender, Reed was always clear in her lectures to them that only the overthrow of capitalism could open up the possibility of regaining the independence and power once enjoyed under matriarchies. Reed's thesis was controversial both inside and outside the party, but she was respected as an audacious thinker whatever one thought of her theory. Another key shift that opened up the possibility of feminists moving closer to the SWP was the mass radicalization itself, focused on the Vietnam antiwar movement. Among a rather broad layer of radicals, including feminists and black nationalists, a recognition was taking shape that the primary contradiction--capitalist property relations--would have to be resolved in order for particular oppressions to be overcome. In 1971 the Boston branch ran Peter Camejo against Ted Kennedy for the office of Senator. He was a gifted speaker and often spoke to crowds of several hundred at local campuses or our headquarters. These talks, ostensibly election campaign speeches, were meant to recruit people to the SWP. Among those who came around in this period were a group of about 5 or 6 Female Liberation activists. After they joined, the SWP went through a feminist transformation mostly on the strength of the example set by the new members. In some respects this was reflected in a total embrace of the ideas of the feminist movement, which were synthesized with Marxism. This, of course, was the direction that the party was taking on a national level. Boston and New York were spearheading this development. In short order, women assumed leadership responsibilities in the branch as everybody had become sensitized to the kind of male chauvinism that existed on the left, but a shade less so in the SWP. The branch had about one hundred members, and half were women. The branch executive committee was majority woman. The other profound change took place on personal and social institutions in the branch. Women began to leave oppressive relationships at a rapid pace. Many also became lesbians, including the woman I was in a relationship with. Sexual roles were being redefined under the impact of the gay liberation movement as well. Most rank-and-file SWP'ers assumed that the party would embrace the slogan of the movement that "Gay is Good". In the first sign that the SWP was to retreat from the 60s radicalization, the 1973 convention passed a resolution written by the party leadership that it was wrong to support such a slogan. Furthermore, we could not orient to the gay movement as we had to the woman's movement. And why? We did not know enough about psychology to pass judgement on whether "Gay is Good"-- that was the excuse. We also characterized the gay movement as insufficiently proletarian. This was the first hint that the SWP was moving in a workerist direction. In about 4 years, the party launched a "turn" which would effectively cut its ties to the feminist movement. It stated that all of the social movements would be based in the industrial trade unions. This included the peace movement, the antiracist movement and the
Re: Feminism (posted originally on marxism@lists.panix.com)
Nicole wrote: So, how did feminism start? As someone who was outside the process, my impression was that the recent wave of feminism that came out of the 1960s anti-war and other movements in the US was a reaction to the male chauvinism of the "New Left" leaders. Paraphrasing, many women said: you men talk about liberating Vietnam, liberating Blacks, etc., but what about women? Why are you men making all the decisions while we make coffee? (FYI, according to eye-witness accounts I've heard, no bras were actually burned, at least at the first, famous, "bra-burning" event.) BTW, I can see no reason why feminism is necessarily postmodernist, nor why postmodernist is necessarily feminist. (Justin, thanks for the summary of what "pomo" means.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
Re: Re: Feminism (posted originally on marxism@lists.panix.com)
Jim Devine: As someone who was outside the process, my impression was that the recent wave of feminism that came out of the 1960s anti-war and other movements in the US was a reaction to the male chauvinism of the "New Left" leaders. Paraphrasing, many women said: you men talk about liberating Vietnam, liberating Blacks, etc., but what about women? Why are you men making all the decisions while we make coffee? (FYI, according to eye-witness accounts I've heard, no bras were actually burned, at least at the first, famous, "bra-burning" event.) While this might have been an element, I suspect that the true driving force was identification with groups in struggle, such as American blacks or Vietnamese. The Boston-area feminists had no background in the New Left. When the Gay movement arose a couple of years later, it was on the basis of a riot against police harrassment at the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village. BTW, I can see no reason why feminism is necessarily postmodernist, nor why postmodernist is necessarily feminist. (Justin, thanks for the summary of what "pomo" means.) I honestly have never read any of the pomo feminists, except for a Judith Butler article in NLR that originally was presented at a plenary talk at the last Rethinking Marxism conference. It seems fairly obvious to me what the connection is based on, however. When Foucault became a critic of Marxism, he directed his fire at a rather hidebound variety: the French CP. Against the sexism and traditionalism of the party tops, he oriented to the social movements of the 1960s and 70s, particularly those that involved a large element of the 'personal'. (Foucault was gay.) So you end up with a kind of boneheaded dichotomy between French Stalinism (Walter Reuther with a hammer-and-sickle) and liberatory movements emerging in the wake of the 1968 student movement. Most of the French postmoderists were grappling with the problem of Stalinism, although their literature rarely made distinctions between Roger Garaudy and, for example, CLR James. The answer to all this is to deepen the Marxist dialectic and not to dump Marxism. Without socialist revolution, personal emancipation is hollow. Somebody like Judith Butler can babble on all she wants about "performativity" but as long as there are capitalist property relations, most of the women in the world will continue to be beaten by their husbands, forced to take second-rate jobs at lower pay and denied cheap and safe abortion. Louis Proyect The Marxism mailing-list: http://www.marxmail.org
