Carol, Judith and others —

It is difficult to grasp today - but the year 1968 especially - was a political whirlwind. The Tet offensive, the Paris Uprising (first live event on trans-Atlantic satellite), Mexican government crackdown on students prior to the Olympics---just to name a few. The air was electric with change. And the air, like today's internet, was instantaneously communicating new ideas.

In March 1969 when the Redstockings Abortion Speakout took place, 100 or so of us students at Sarah Lawrence College ($L[pound sign]?), 30 minutes to the North, were having a sit-in in the administration building. (We demanded the college rescind its 3rd tuition raise in 4 years making room and board $4,000!!)

The only way in and out of the building--we had locked all other entrances--was through a side window that opened into what had once been the parlor of the Lawrence mansion. I distinctively remembering Carla Heffner coming in, removing her coat, as she described having just been at the Abortion speak out, and how exhilarating it had been. During our eleven day occupation we spent a lot of time in this parlor in discussion. Heffner's just speaking about the Abortion Speakout had power in the room. And a ripple of change began to effect others, as more personal experiences bubbled to the surface.

A more pivotal moment would come a few nights later. Bernadine Dorhn and Barbara Reilly from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Vicki Breitbart (SLC'63) of Community Newsreel (now Third World Newsreel) came to visit. The parlor room was packed to the gills. Dorhn and Reilly wanted to discuss interlocking imperialist issues and Breitbart had films to show. One of the films, was a newly made short piece on the "position" of women. Short, black and white, it was a dramatic piece, with sound overlay. The film was the first visual analysis of the subjugation of women. Specifically, I remember a woman standing, ironing. The film was crude, yet very powerful. And right after the lights came back on, a free roaming spontaneous consciousness raising began. There were no particular questions we were trying to answer, as Carol Hanisch describes of the New York Radical Women gatherings. One hundred strong, a flood gate of women's experiences opened up. For me, I still "see" and "feel" that moment, when literally my head cracked opened and out flew a mass of traditional concepts: marriage, economic dependency, subservience. In a way, the eleven days of our sit-in was a kind of revolving and constant CR. We lost that fight. The SLC Board refused any dialogue with us. But, we had changed ourselves and, in our departing statement, committed ourselves to making change in the larger world.

In the Summer, after I had graduated, there were, as I recall, city-wide women's liberation meetings, that went on into the Fall. They were held Sunday nights in the basement meeting hall of the Washington Square Methodist Church on West 4th Street. Several hundred women came. The room was truely packed. All kinds of things were discussed and planned. It was consciousness raising and action combined We began to formulate activities---an action here, a newspaper, day care, and more. I remember feeling so empowered by the possibilities among the women; and then I would get into the subway and return to the Weatherman collective in Brooklyn which I recently joined. By Fall my "thirteen minutes" with Weatherman were over. At a meeting of the city-wide Women's Liberation Sheila Paige and I called to form a film "collective". The roots of Women Make Movies are from those sessions.

.......to be continued...... Ariel Dougherty

Thanks for this background, Carol. Related to this and to Rivka's comment, I'm curious about how (in the essay and here) black women get erased in the blacks/women analogy. But, rather than flatten out the reason for this as racism, I'm hoping you can talk bit about your relationship to black women in the Movement while you were in Mississippi, particularly any in leadership positions on local projects. Perhaps there are nuances of exclusion or omission that get overlooked with assumptions about attitudes toward race. Thanks!---Kimberly

Hello, this is Chude Pam Allen.  I wrote the following before reading Rivka's, Kimberly's and Judith's latest contributions.  But I want to go ahead and share it as is.  I realize this is a discussion and I will respond.  But I've needed to get my thoughts together first about what I was thinking.  So here goes, and Rivka, I am so glad you've joined the discussion!

    I want to start by thanking you, Carol, for writing the introduction.  When you add the context for your paper with Ariel Dougherty's introductory paragraph, I think we have a good sense of how it was when we first began organizing an independent women's liberation movement in the late Sixties.  

    I would add that at the beginning most of us were activists.   I took it for granted that we were for self-determination for oppressed peoples everywhere and that our commitment to understanding our own oppression fit into this larger worldwide struggle.  I assumed we understood that capitalism was a cruel, exploitative system that in essence was anti-life.  

    I thought that women could start with their personal lives and would move automatically to placing themselves in the larger historical and worldwide context.  In 1970 I sent a copy of my pamphlet, "Free Space, A Perspective on the Small Group in Women's Liberation," to Pat Robinson of the Mt. Vernon New Rochelle black women's group.  She wrote back that she hoped I was right that we could start with the personal and reach a radical understanding of the world.  But she didn't think so.  Later she wrote that she thought "The political is personal" was a more useful formulation.

    Yet, in the fall of 1967 it was radical to be in a room with just women.  You didn't get into that room without moving through opposition.  Women as well as men said we shouldn't be meeting.  When Schulamith Firestone and I held that first meeting at my apartment in NYC in the fall of 1967, one woman came to tell us we shouldn't meet.   Her objections dominated the meeting.  She wouldn't let up.  The rest of us were clear we wanted to meet.  (My memory is that Anne Koedt was there.)  Happily that woman didn't come back to our second meeting.

    We were mostly white and mostly college educated in the early women's liberation groups.  We had no choice but to use our own lives as the raw data for developing an analysis of sexism.  And in those early years when the paradigm was black white, I know a lot of us were waiting for black women to tell us the details of their lives.  To help us flesh out our understanding.  A lot of us always knew we couldn't supply the whole picture.  We knew that people with privilege never have all the information.  I was thrilled when not only black women, but also Asian women and Latinas shared their stories and analyses.

    Still, for those of us who were white, white supremacy was our Achilles heel.  The ideology of white supremacy puts white people at the center.   It encourages us to think our experiences are primary and everyone else's is an addition.   We were generalizing from a small sample of experiences and it was very hard to remember we weren't speaking for everyone.

     I'm an inductive thinker.  I move from personal experiences to trying to make sense of them in a larger context.  I was and am an advocate of women trying to understand their lives by telling the truth about how it really is.  I wouldn't want to give up "The personal is political."  I still find it useful.

    What, then, encourages us to remember our experiences aren't enough for understanding the full picture of how patriarchy affects women throughout the world and how capitalist penetration has distorted the economies in which they live?  For those of us who are white, and perhaps for anyone living within the U.S., I can see that we needed to keep asking the question, "How do our personal experiences obscure the larger picture?"  Not just, how do they fit into the larger picture, but how do they distort or hide a larger truth?

    Well, that's what I wrote yesterday and I realize as I read it over that it may seem I am denigrating what we did in women's liberation.  That wasn't my intent.  I respect us a lot.  I respect our courage and our perseverance as well as our intention.  I think we did some really good work.  But I wasn't correct that women who start with their own lives necessarily will extend their analysis past sexism in the U.S.  Since I'm an inductive thinker, that's my weakness also.  Pat Robinson consistently told me I needed a wider base from which to analyze women's oppression.

    I've now read what Rivka, Kimberly and Judith wrote and need to think about the questions raised.  However, Kimberly, I think Pat Robinson and the Mt. Vernon, New Rochelle women are important for understanding the relationships between black and white women in those early years.  I consider Pat a mentor.  I was always against the blacks/women analogy.  I wrote a paper opposing the analogy in January 1968 and read it at one of the NY meetings.  I don't think I understood the reasons the white women were using it, however.  Years later Rivka told me she thought the white women were trying to get legitimacy.  I think she's right and I realize now how important it was to me that Pat Robinson came to see me in December 1967 to ask about our group.  She didn't tell me we shouldn't be meeting.  She encouraged me to be conscious of class.

    Regarding the southern freedom struggle, I do recommend the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement website discussion on "Women and men in the Movement." (www.crmvet.org).   It's different from anything I've ever read or heard.  And Carol, I note you're not in the Veterans Roll Call list.  I hope you'll sign up and also, anyone else who was an activist in the South.

I have to admit to being a bit flabbergasted by the direction of this discussion of "The Personal Is Political" as racist and/or excluding Black women. I have been aware of many attacks on the what is called "Second Wave Feminism" by the ensuing "Waves" (particularly in Women's Studies) as white and middle class, but I wasn't aware that it was now going after some of the cornerstone ideas of our movement.

I did run into it personally a few years ago when a Women's Studies student writing her thesis on Redstockings asked to interview me. In preparation I asked to see an outline of what she was planning to write about. Her thesis was that Redstockings was a single issue group which, by choosing to focus mainly on abortion, was an example of the racism of the early WLM. It wasn't stated that bluntly, but that was the essence. When I tried to explain to her that she was wrong on both counts, she got very defensive and huffy. When she told me that since I had been a mere biased participant and she was the impartial scholar more qualified to interpret history, I decided not to do the interview. The facts didn't matter to her; she would put her own spin on it.

I think part of the problem, not only with WL but also with Black liberation and the Left, is that they have become too centered in the academy. It's where a good many former activists fled when the '60s movements began to fall apart. (I too considered it, but I never got there.) I've only dipped my toe into the academic waters, but what I see is a great disconnect to the discussions going on there and the on-the-ground ongoing organizing and theory work, limited as it may be in today's anti-radical, anti-activist climate. The old saying about "angels dancing on the head of a pin" comes to mind, but I think it's much more insidious than that.

I can't help but wonder from whom this attack on the WLM from within the academy and other intellectuals comes from and why. I see it as part of the political attack to discredit the radicalism that rendered such change in the 1960s and early 1970s. Some seem to be building their careers on this stuff. In feminism, advocates claim that they "liberated" (or at least advanced) the early WLM from its terrible racism and classism. In some cases this seems to be a substitute for actual involvement themselves in any movement organizing activity. Organizing words on a page is one thing; organizing real people quite another. If they were in the fray instead of critiquing it from above it all, perhaps they would see that such false theory actually feeds the separatism that already exists by spreading untruths and rumors about women's liberation. It also makes it more difficult for us to do real self-criticism on the issue. There is admittedly a lot to work out, but it won't happen in an atmosphere of "Gotcha." Not all mistakes of a racial nature are racism. Some are just mistakes of ignorance, like the white women at the Sandy Springs Convention who thought Black women have no history of feminism and therefore were wanted to exclude them because they were afraid their only interest would be in anti-racism. Somebody did a good job of burying Black feminist history, too.

The attack on us has been so successful in large part because the truth is actually the opposite of what they claim. That is, we WERE and STILL ARE so concerned about race and class that we easily fall into a paralyzing state of angst over it that PRECLUDES doing the real work of organizing anything that will actually be effective in pulling down the INSTITUTIONAL lynchpins of male supremacy OR racism and capitalism. The new "multiracial feminists" seem to rarely engage with the various institutional basis for oppression.

When I read the charge that the WLM was only "secondarily concerned with racism" I want to say, "Of course, it's the WOMEN'S liberation movement, stupid." I can't imagine anyone complaining that the Black movement is only "secondarily concerned with feminism." The old bugaboo that women must always put their own needs last is still alive and well in 2006. Oppressed groups need organizations to represent their interests. The struggle to end racism needs its own organizations to do that just as the struggle to end male supremacy does or the struggle to end capitalism does. At the same time, these organizations have a responsibility to make equality within the organization as complete as possible.

I realize what I've just written does not directly answer some of your specific questions but I must stop for now. Below is an excerpt from a speech I gave at a Women's Studies Conference in 1999 which might be helpful, and we can pick up again any questions you still have (as well as new ones, no doubt).

"Today many feminist historians are accusing the early women's liberation movement of having been racist. ...

"Although we were racist in the sense that all American's are racist because one can't fully escape it in a society where all white individuals benefit from racism and its institutions, which have so much more power than the individual. We are all compliant to some degree, whether we want to be or not, just as all men are compliant in male supremacy whether they want to be or not. But there are degrees of racism just as there are degrees of sexism.

"When I read articles by the Jenny-come-latelys to feminism criticizing us for being racist from their own theoretical ivory towers, I want to ask them what THEY have DONE to combat racism. Have they risked their lives and careers, as so many of us did, and many instances still do, to fight racism? We did something about racism, we didn't just talk about it, though we did plenty of talking, too. Somehow I never hear any convincing examples from our critics of just HOW we were racist, except that the WLM was mostly WHITE.

"In the late 1960s almost every woman I knew in the WLM was concerned that our groups were mostly white and we would have greatly preferred to have been in well-integrated groups because we knew the theory we were developing would be more complete. The only exceptions I can think of were women who were afraid that Black women weren't feminist, that they would take over our groups and have us all fighting racism instead of male supremacy. This comes from an ignorance of history?and not just on the part of white women. It has only been in the last 10 to 15 years or so that the great historical contributions of black women to feminism have begun to be uncovered or rediscovered and disseminated?and that dissemination remains largely in academia, which is not where most women live.

"Our inability to form integrated groups was based in the reality of the time?that there was a great surge of Black Nationalism taking place that prevented it. Black women were under enormous pressure, in many cases, to stay away from those "white women's groups." They also were understandably quite reluctant to criticize black men in the presence of white women who often did not fully understand their dilemma. We had to accept this as a fact of life, though at the same time we tried to make common cause whenever we could. For example, When I was organizing for women's liberation in Gainesville, Florida in the early 1970s, a judge who had made some very horrendous racist and sexist rulings was up for appointment to a U.S. District Court. Women's liberation joined with the local black liberation organizations and SDS and held marches and rallies and protested his appointment from all angles. I think we helped stop his appointment and the joint action was able to forge bonds between the groups at a period of intense Black nationalism.

"I think it worked because each group was clear and upfront about why it opposed this judge and none tried to jump in front of everybody else and claim the spotlight. We live in a very opportunistic society and there is opportunism and competition in movements as well. Some people are more serious than others; some want liberation while some want to publicize themselves or enjoy the celebrity position of a rebel. That certainly plagued the movement in the 1960s and it still exists today. We have to think through what is best for reaching our big goal. Learn when to step back and know when to step up to the plate. Know when "in your face" works and when another method might be more effective. Revolution is an art as well as a science. When we are not artful and scientific in our approach, we make enemies of potential allies.

"Anyway, because of such attempts to build unity, the leader of a regional Black Power organization invited a group from Gainesville Women's Liberation to meet with its Black women's caucus. It was a very interesting meeting in which we discovered that not only were we dealing with many of the same male supremacist problems, but that our demands for solving them were more similar than different. The meeting confirmed our belief that black women were perfectly capable of taking care of business, whether inside of, or separate from, our so-called white groups.

"This accusation that women who get together in a feminist group that is all white, whether the members want it that way or not, are automatically racist is very simplistic and destructive. A few years ago I tried to organize a local women's liberation group. We had about 25 women at the first meeting, none of whom were African-American, though a few had been invited. A white woman got wind of this and came to our meeting demanding that we discuss why there were no black women in the room. After we discussed it extensively and could come up with no way to change the situation?she had no solutions either?she left, self-righteously saying she would not be part of any group that did not have people of color in it. Her disruption left many of the women feeling guilty and unable to deal with the situation and they didn't return. Even for those who remained, the spirit of the group had been broken and it soon fell apart. This needless confrontation contributed to its demise.

"The fact is that we still live in a racist and highly segregated society and women's liberation cannot solve that problem single-handedly. The same women who accuse us of being racist will heatedly criticize Stokely Carmichael for his semi-public off the cuff comment that "the position of the women in SNCC is prone" while not bothering to mention a white Abby Hoffman's more public and equally sexist remark that "The only alliance I would make with the women's liberation movement is in bed." I should tell you that not only did Stokely Carmichael do dishes in the homes that hosted civil rights workers in Mississippi, his Black power theory had a profound and positive influence on our own theory. Many men, black and white, have supported women's struggle through the centuries."
?

     Hi, it's Rivka again. I want to add some comments before the discussion closes, so I too will have to put reactions out without further contemplation and editing. Thanks, everyone, for your ideas and insights. It's been good to hear how you have responded to the criticism that the WLM was white and middle-class.

     First of all, I want to differ a little with Chude's interpretation of what I said to her, some years back, concerning why many white feminists used the woman/black analogy. I wasn't really saying that "the white women were trying to get legitimacy." Rather, I would emphasize how difficult it was initially to get people to think about relations between women and men in political terms at all. The idea seemed ludicrous to many and was ridiculed by leftists (male and female) as well as non-leftists.

     In general, people's thinking then still was so pervaded by ideas that women and men simply were "different," as ordained by nature or by "God," and "vive le difference!" Some people openly equated women's "difference" with inferiority, while others gushed about "complementary" roles. These ideas were deeply ingrained in most of our psyches as well; hence the need to do intensive consciousness-raising for ourselves as well as for the public. (As I recall, Kathie Sarachild deemed the latter "consciousness organizing.") As we increasingly saw similarities between the dynamics of sexism and racism, the powerful political analysis developed by the Civil Rights (and then Black Power) Movement became an important tool for trying to shift consciousness toward understanding women's status in terms of an institutionalized system of male domination.

     To indulge, for a moment, in simplistic, wishful, retrospective thinking: If we had talked about "sexism/racism analogies" rather than "woman/Black analogies," would that have been a less problematic formulation that also might have led us to address more how the two systems interact? If we had analyzed more and spoken more about the differences as well as the similarities between racism and sexism, would that have helped build more of a bridge with women's liberationists of color? Okay, enough ahistorical second-guessing.

     Back to "the personal is political." It was interesting, Chude, to read what you said about Pat Robinson's concern that starting with the personal might not lead middle-class white women to become radicalized and politicized about issues of racism and class as well. My own experience was that the C-R process from the personal to the political did have a broader radicalizing and politicizing effect on me as well as some of the other white women I knew then, from both middle-class and working-class backgrounds. I could relate to Cathy's comments of getting a firm ground from which to fight on multiple fronts. I also knew white, middle-class women who were not really radicalized and politicized in a broader way, though I think they did not go through as intensive a process of C-R as many of us did in the early days.

     I think the concepts "the personal is political" and "sisterhood is powerful" (and all they entailed) were important tools for women in different ethnic groups and class positions. But, along the lines of what Carol said, those concepts couldn't by themselves solve the problem of "a racist and highly segregated society."

    Let me say a bit about "sisterhood is powerful." I can't put my hands on it now, but at the beginning of the '70s, a group of Asian American women in Berkeley, CA (students and non-students) put out a journal on Asian women that included one article in which the author expressed how wonderful it was to be feeling the power of sisterhood, in relation to other Asian women. With regard to sisterhood being powerful across racial/ethnic, class and other divides, some of the untold story of the early WLM and ongoing women's movement is the remarkable extent to which women did cooperate across those lines in so many ways and in so many contexts to make remarkable strides in advancing women's liberation. That does not negate the other side of the story: that many factors including racism, ignorance, fear, anger, insensitivity, separatism, segregation, cultural differences, ethnic pride and loyalty, classism, homophobia, different priorities and commitments, divisive strategies employed by men, historical circumstances, etc. kept women from coming together more powerfully across those divides.

    There's so much more I'd like to respond to, for example about the term "radical feminism," about the trajectory of Women's Studies (with which I've been involved for 36 years), about self-criticism and helpful vs. unhelpful criticism, about my own experiences after I decided that I personally no longer wanted to be involved in women's movement groups that were predominantly white women (but, Carol, I certainly didn't go and trash and disrupt such groups), and more. I also would like to pursue helpful formulations on the issue of racism and the WLM, such as Kimberly's "nuances of exclusion or omission" and Carol's "not all mistakes of a racial nature are racism." But it's late and I'm off to sleep.

    Thank you to the organizers of and other participants in this discussion.

    This is Chude Pam Allen:

        Cathy Cade and I spoke last evening and she asked me if I thought the young women today comprehend the situation we found ourselves in when we first started meeting in women's groups.  She remembers the self-questioning, not just the ridicule and challenges.

        The New Orleans group Cathy mentioned in her submission started before we began meeting in NYC.  I know this to be true because I learned about that group before I went to the 1967 SDS conference at Princeton over Thanksgiving weekend to recruit women.  

        I also learned that Kathy Barrett, who'd been a member of the New Orleans group, would be at the SDS conference.  Kathy was part of a theater group that performed during the lunch break.  Therefore, she wasn't at the women's caucus where I said I wanted to start an independent women's movement.  I sought her out later, finding her high up in the seats of the lecture hall where people were meeting. 

        So each time Cathy Cade and I discuss the early WLM groups, I say the one in New Orleans was earlier than NY.  She always questions me, but I know I'm right because of recruiting Kathy Barrett. 

        This may seem a small thing, but Cathy Cade's memory of self-questioning (should we be meeting, are our problems really important, etc.) is a reflection, I believe, of timing as well as the fact that those women had been active in the Southern Freedom Movement. 

    Consciousness was changing.  By the time I discovered in the fall of 1967 that I wasn't the only woman in the U.S. thinking about women, I had no question I wanted to meet with other women, alone, without men.

       That is the point, after all.  We wanted to meet without men.  We wanted to talk to each other and share without their input, control or containment.

        We were challenged and ridiculed and, as Cathy Cade said in her entry, we began to discover that almost the exact same words were used.  And I'm beginning to wonder if the opposition itself helped us develop that understanding that the personal is political?