Browse
Ellen Willis on "Escape from Freedom: What's The Matter With Tom Frank (And The Lefties Who Love Him)?"
You've reached the homepage for the discussion of Ellen Willis' essay "Escape from Freedom." We welcome your comments, questions, responses and debate! To add comments, scroll down and click "comments" below. Don't forget to sign up, if you haven't already, and log in at the top right. And don't forget to weigh in on the memorial page
.
You can download the full text as a .pdf to your computer here read it online from the radicalimagination.com.To keep up with new comments, simply click on the tiny envelope at the top right of this message. The paper should highlight yellow and you'll receive an email notification of changes!
Bio
Ellen Willis (1941 - 2006) was an important figure in the women's movement and one of its most provocative and challenging essayists. Her 1969 "Women and the Left" was an important texte de rupturein the emergent autonomous women's liberation movement. "We intend to make our own analysis of the system" she declared "and put our interests first, whether or not it is convenient for the (male-dominated) Left)...." Willis was a cofounder of two of the earliest women's liberation groups, New York Radical Women, and Redstockings, and later a key activist in anti-censorship and "pro-sex" feminist groups such as the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task force (FACT), The National Coalition Against Censorship, and No More Nice Girls.
A former editor of The Village Voice, Willis wrote extensively in publications such as The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, Salon, and Dissent. She is the author No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays, Wesleyan, Conn: Wesleyan UP, 1992; Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll, 2d ed, Wesleyan, Conn: Wesleyan UP, 1992; and Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial, Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
At the time of her death, she directed the Cultural Reporting and Criticism concentration in the graduate program of New York University's school of journalism.
************
Many of her articles are available online, including on the following sites:
http://journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/willis.html
http://www.thenation.com/
http://as.nyu.edu/object/ellenwillis.html
Women and the Myth of Consumerism (1969)
http://fair-use.org/ellen-willis/women-and-the-myth-of-consumerism
Commentary:
"[S]uppose the left had consistently stood up for the principle of a feminist, democratic culture?"
In "Escape from Freedom" Ellen Willis challenges the political analysis popularized by Thomas Frank and embraced, she says, in "liberal left" periodicals such as The Nation, Dissent, The Progressive, Mother Jones and The American Prospect. "There is widespread agreement," she describes, "that the left must concentrate its energies on promoting a populist economic program, and that the Democrats, if they want to win elections, must stop being identified as the party of 'upper middle class' feminists, gays, and secularists, preoccupied by what Lind calls 'inflammatory but marginal issues like abortion.'" This approach, again confirmed in the November 2006 "liberal manifesto" signed by some of the same authors Willis targets, uses a narrow, male definition of the "economic" issues. "To argue that one's 'material interests' have only to do with economic class" she writes, "is to say that sexual satisfaction or frustration, bodily integrity and autonomy or the lack of same in the sexual and reproductive realm, the happiness or misery of our lives as lovers and spouses, parents and children are ethereal matters that have no impact on our physical being."
Willis criticizes "the broad left, including liberal feminists" for their "strategy of appeasement" since the mid-1970s:
Many men on the left had supported the women's movement only reluctantly and ... they jettisoned this baggage with relief. But plain sexism was only part of the story. It could not explain why Betty Friedan attacked feminist radicals and proclaimed herself "pro-family"; why feminist leaders insisted that the Equal Rights Amendment had nothing to do with abortion or lesbian rights or a critique of traditional sexual roles; why advocates of legal abortion began apologizing, praising the moral commitment of their opponents, and talking about "choice" in the abstract rather than the procedure that dare not speak its name.... [I]n truth their lack of conviction that a majority of Americans could be won over...to a politics of equality, freedom and pleasure reflected their own deep doubts about the legitimacy of those values.... Predictably, the strategy of pandering to the right was an abject failure.... Why would anyone support a movement that won't stand behind its own program? But the left did not learn the obvious lesson---that to back away from fighting for your beliefs on the grounds that you have no hope of persuading people to share them is to perpetrate a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For Willis, cultural radicalism, far from being a diversion, is "rooted in the core elements of the democratic ideal: equality and freedom." The 1960s version was not the first such outbreak, Ellis contends. A previous wave, from the late 19th century to the 1920s, "built the framework of cultural modernity: feminism, sexual reform and birth control movements, youth movements, self-conscious homosexuality, psychoanalysis, avant-garde art and its associated bohemianism, the Russian Revolution with its short-lived burst of sexual, domestic, and educational reforms, the social and cultural ferment of the Weimar Republic." Nor is the current backlash new: "The first great right-wing-populist backlash movement was Nazism."
Robyn Muncy joining.
Thanks to Judith for getting this conversation going. Ellen's article raised for me exactly the issue that Judith refers to, namely, how can it be that feminism is construed as a "cultural" phenomenon rather thana "political" one. Given that feminism defined many of the issues central in the 1980s and 1990s to electoral politics, I find it exasperating that even in left-leaning academic and political circles, feminism is being construed as outside politics. In what sense can battles over public policy on domestic violence, reproductive rights/technologies, funding for health care and research, marriage, comparable pay, sexual harassment/workplace equity be imagined as outside "the political"?
What does it take to move an issue firmly into the category of the political? As Judith says, these issues are no longer usually confined to the personal or private, but intermediate categories seem to have emerged to buffer the category of the political. "Cultural" or "moral" have been favorites, haven't they? Is it that as women and other marginalized groups have succeeded in defining compelling public issues and thus setting the political agenda, those at the center have created new categories that seem effectively to protect "the political," to protect the center from being understood as transformed by these former outsiders? that developing intermediate categories becomes a way of maintaining (gender) turf? Is this refusal to see feminism as political a way of maintaining a foundation for left or liberal masculinity?
I have only questions.
Posted by Hello, I'm Katha Pollitt. Lots of reasons why feminism has been put in the 'cultural" or "moral" camp. There's the sense that some have --religious conservatives and sociobiologists, for ex --that arrangements about family and sex are part of a permanent order, whether divine or natural. So the changes feminism proposes are either doomed to failure, or inevitably superficial, or blasphemous – in any case outside the realm of appropriate political give-and-take. And then of course there's the belief of some leftists that feminism is basically the icing on the radical cake – sure, it's good, but it's not very important: it doesn't challenge the fundamental political arrangements of society, which are those of class.
But some of moving feminism into the cultural camp comes from feminists themselves. it's the legacy of the Personal is Political – every woman judging every other woman, and all ending up feeling trashed. if EVERYthing you do is a matter for public scrutiny--what you wear, read, watch, buy and eat, who you sleep with and how,to say nothing of your most intimate fantasies etc – it is hard to maintain the solidarity a political movement requires. Nobody's perfect! and so, imo, the movement responded in two ways: a few issues, inextricably and obviously part of public policy, became political banners feminists of all stripes could carry: reproductive rights, Family Medical and Leave Act, equal pay and access to all jobs and schooling, increasing number of feminist women in politics, acceptance of gays as members of mainstream society. The other stuff – work/'stayhome, beauty issues, sexual tastes (antiporn/"pro-sex") – was pushed to the side, ie out of the realm of organized "political" feminism. The debates over those topics flourish, and can be incredibly bitter, but can be kept in line by the live-and-let-live philosophy of individualist 'choice feminism." That has a real downside, in that it tends to obscure the social context in which those choices are made. But there's a reason for it!
Judith again.
Good point, Katha, that a '"live-and-let-live... choice feminism"helps curb some of the worst dogmatic incursions of "politics" - or rather dogmatism - into personal life choices, but, as you suggest, at what cost? Two other things. Saying something is political is not quite the same as saying it is fair game for any public scrutiny. How I dress is certainly political, and I should and do think about it. But that doesn't mean that I/we authorize political comisars to decide. There are many different politics, and mine is not stalinist or dictatorial, but more like some sort of democratic self-management in which being political doesn't imply democratic centralism, a party line or any such thing - but it's still political. Second, the question is where we draw the line in this divide, and the divide has been determined by the dominant. As long as gender, race and class decides what we push into the private, that divide must be challenged.
A point in passing: today in France, the most violent skirmish is supposedly around religion, and pushing it back into the private. The Left and secularist feminists are the agents of this and the target is mainly Islam. "It's fine as long as it remains solely an intimate and private practice." However being "muslim" is so racialized that it cannot be comprehended as a religious matter, and do we all think that religion should be private? Or public but separate from the State?
Robin, re your question about what it takes to move something into the political realm. Other than the place it takes in electoral politics (ie post Webster when abortion made the Republicans loose some races) I tend to think it has a lot to do, as Ellen says, with economics. So what about housework? When Wages for Housework quantified and redubbed this activity as domestic labor did it become political for those Lefties targeted above? It has been studied by the OECD. Hmm.
Hi, Sonia Jaffe Robbins checking in:
Some thoughts I had after reading Ellen's piece. Seems to me there's more than one audience involved here. There's us, what I think of as Ellen's community: feminist, on the left in some fashion. There's the male left, who Ellen's critiquing, but also trying to persuade. Then there's the larger, mainstream people out there, who we all want to persuade to the wisdom of our ideas. So when we talk about politics, that means something rather different to each of these audiences. Maybe this is obvious, but... For feminists, it's gendered power relationships. For the male left, it's class power relationships plus policy issues and elections. And for mainstream people, it's primarily elections and hoping the people they elect will make their lives more comfortable. And I think that "the personal is political" feels intrusive for both the male left and the mainstream. They don't want to hear about it, because it means they will have to confront personal power relationships. Combine this with the incessant privatizing of everything, in the U.S. at least, and the insistence on individual responsibility rather than social responsibility, and the space for "political" shrinks. Maybe what's happening is that the shrinking political space is filled up by Right-wing cultural issues, which the male left thinks is a distraction and fails to offer its own cultural critique from the left because it has its own problems with the feminist cultural critique. Hope this doesn't sound too muddled.
Hi, Kathy Scarbrough here. I have a different take on the matter of which issues are admitted to the political realm. I think equality of women and men in the home is still too hot to handle and that is why it isn't considered "political". My perspective is informed by my age (50), life situation (Ph.D who made compromises in career for 2 children now in secondary school) and my understanding of feminist history. I believe that the organization of economic activity would have to be restructured if men truly became equal partners in raising their children (and that's political!). An equal partner provides much more than just the money children need. Emotional support takes time. If men spent more time at home doing child care and housework they wouldn't be able to work the crazy hours required of most full time jobs. Because the issue is too hot to handle it is trivialized by those still protecting their privilege. Trivialization is same old, same old. I think this is what Sonia was also saying, am I correct? And it IS a privilege to be unfettered by family in the economic realm. Of course, class makes some difference here, it takes two working class jobs to live these days. And the kids suffer. The economic demand here, naturally, is that each job should provide a living wage.
On another thread, I agree that the abuse of "the personal is political" did burn out activists but I don't think this was the main force pushing so called "personal" issues aside. It was the liberal takeover, with its domination of the media (cutting off the radicals) and appeasement strategy that killed the movement, as Ellen so ably argued. I think its fascinating to consider all the ideas that were thrown out by early liberationists and review which ones failed and which were accepted. I'll mention just two that came up in Ellen's paper and that Katha mentioned. The critique of the nuclear family failed, wouldn't you agree? Turns out people LIKE their families (which may reflect some of that Darwinism Katha referred to) while at the same time the critique of unequal power relations within the family was broadly accepted. Likewise for porn--turns out many people will admit to LIKING sexual stimulation but at the same time can condemn the exploitation of women used to provide it. We, as a society have been through thesis and antithesis. The synthesis has been accepted without much fanfare.
Lastly, I have to say Ellen's observation that Nazism was the first great right wing populist backlash sends chills up my spine. Considering where we find ourselves today...
This conversation is clarifying. One point to keep in mind, I guess, is that issues of gender and sexuality were at the center of American politics, if by politics we mean elections and public policy, for the last third of the twentieth century. Feminism was winning to that extent. It is dispiriting, though, that many who have considered themselves allies of feminism now want in the most explicit terms to shove gender justice off that political agenda in an effort to win elections, thinking as they seem to that working-class Americans are expressing some kind of false consciousness if they are concerned about issues of gender and sexuality. But Ellen has made the kind of intervention that we will probably have to keep making to resist this attempt.
For the left-liberal audience and probably the mainstream audience that Sonia very helpfully identifies, we probably need to return to making explicit the economic and traditionally political dimensions of women's subordination to men. It sounds so simplistic, but given discursive moves by Frank and others to categorize feminism as a cultural issue, we probably have to respond with more of precisely what Ellen set out to do: demonstrations (yet again . . .) that women remain subordinate to men in the labor market and workplace; that women's political power remains unequal to men's; that unpaid caring work is connected to economic possibility and to possibilities for political participation; that reproductive freedom is connected to market labor; that violence against women is connected to reduced economic opportunity (both as cause and effect) and the like. I know we thought these arguments were made once and for all, but it seems that we have to return to them.
On the issue of "choice feminism," I would love to hear more discussion. Surely all of us do want to create a world in which both women and men are freely choosing their life work and family forms, but maybe we haven't made clear enough that the world we now have is not such a world. Have we somehow not clearly demonstrated the constraints operating on all of us and the unequal prices we are paying (thank you, Kathy) for what seem to some to be free choices? Maybe we have not shown blatantly enough that the options among which we are choosing, in many cases, just aren't good options.
Hello. Judith again.
Sorry this conversation was interrupted by technical problems. Let's start up again.
Robyn, could you expand upon your question: "Is this refusal to see feminism as political a way of maintaining a foundation for left or liberal masculinity?"
Kathy, re: the liberal takeover, I agree, and particularly with the way in which the Left started kowtowing to the center. I remember in the 80s when radical friends started saying "Golly gee, we went too far in our demands for abortion! It's a really serious issue that we took too lightly." And far more, I find the feminist tendency to assume "others" will not be mobilized by those issues that mobilized us, to be condescending and often innacurate.
best
Judith
Chude Pam Allen checking in. Sisters, I have found it difficult to figure out how to enter this conversation. Indeed I've spent two days trying to formulate a response. I don't care what the white liberal Left thinks. At the same time, I care about class and don't want to be part of a feminism that thinks only in terms of male-female. I agree that choices are made within a social context and that the question of how we choose to live our lives is political. I also think all choices have consequences. I agree that emotional work takes time and that we need to see that as a political issue.
Ellen's article is excellent. One of the things she wrote that resonated for me is: "The cultural radical impulse is rooted in the core elements of the democratic ideal: equality and freedom." That's certainly how I experienced the Sixties and Seventies movements for social change. I started out wanting to end racism, poverty, violence and oppression, but I also wanted to be free. I came to understand freedom required organizing against sexism and homophobia as well. My own experience is that people change in the process of trying to effect social change.
Of course, activists didn't always agree on what freedom might mean anymore than we always agreed on tactics and demands. Some people did things others found abhorrent. Some did things they later regretted. Change is disruptive personally as well as politically. That's been my experience.
Ellen wrote: "Cultural radical demands immediately question and disrupt existing social institutions, yet building democratic alternatives in a long-term affair: this leave painful gaps in which men and women don't know how to behave with each other, in which marriage can no longer provide a stable environment for children but it's not clear what to do instead. Is it really surprising that cultural revolution should cause conflict?"
Well, no it's not surprising. It's not even surprising that conflict existed within our own groups and movements, not just between the radicals and the rest of society. It would have helped, though, to have understood conflict would be a given.
Robyn Muncy asks "What does it take to move an issue firmly into the category of the political?" I would answer that it takes people mobilizing for change, which includes, but isn't limited to, organizing and demonstrating for laws that either guarantee people equal rights or get rid of laws that curtail freedoms. How is such a movement for women's liberation, not just equal rights, to again become a force capable of successes? Ellen said you don't build a movement by retreating, didn't she?
I keep thinking about courage. We had courage in the Sixties. Yes, it was a more affluent time and a lot of us white activists had never had to worry about bread and butter issues. But a whole lot of people risked their lives in the southern freedom movement; the majority of them were not affluent northern whites. And along with civil rights, there was the demand to be treated with dignity and respect and to have freedom of choice. It was never just about civil rights.
In 1967 when I was recruiting women to start an independent women's liberation movement, I spoke to a lot of women who were opposed, not just men. (Indeed some men were supportive and helpful.) If approval or media support were necessary for us to organize, we would never have formed a women's liberation movement. It took courage, a different courage than facing possible death in the South, but courage nonetheless.
No, you don't back down on issues like abortion, although I was never for separating abortion from choice because of the forced sterilization of women of color in the Sixties.
Chude, lots of things to think about, but allow me to make a very personal comment, embarrasingly, probably naively so, about courage. In recent years, friends, all radicals and feminists, have repeatedly encouraged me to silence, to stop taking so many risks, particularly since I hate conflict. I have started observing, and seeing that most people around me these days do not take risks, or only do so after serious strategic thinking. I, often stupidly, almost always just dive on in. I have started thinking these last years that part of this has to do with being Jewish: I grew up with the paradigm of silence being the same as collaboration, and so I can never be silent in the face of injustice. Yet this is a dramatic, even tragic oversimplification of reality, even of the Shoah. And one I hope to temper vis-à-vis my children. Although courage is a necessity, how do we sort between the naïve, moralistic brashness that is not always the most productive stance, and that truly moral - dare I say, revolutionary courage that helps us make quantum leaps politically? Obviously a big piece of this is the difference between the individual and the collective. As Ellen wrote (and Alix Kate Shulman reminds us in her obit) "Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that." But what do you do when you witness injustice and there's no movement with which to connect? (Right now, one of my great joys is the emergence of a Black movement in France with whom to ally over my everyday experiences of racism.)
It's Katha Pollitt again. Here's one problem I have with Ellen's piece. Tom Frank is basically talking about electoral politics: what kinds of issues will bring socially conservative white working class voters back to the Democratic Party. He argues that the winning platform is big govt investments in health care, education, jobs, wages, worker safety and so on, to be paid for by taxing corporations and the wealthy. These voters go for social-conservative candidates, he argues, because the Democrats have essentially abandoned them on economic interests: the would care more about those interests than about gay marriage and abortion if they were actually given a choice. The 'economic populists" who make this argument might even agree with Ellen that personal freedom, sexual liberation and ending male domination are worthy goals. They just don't see how that agenda fits into wresting state legislatures out of Republican hands ASAP, winning the White House in 2008 and so on. Ellen was not really interested in short-term electoral strategizing-- after all, she acted as Stanley's press secretary when he ran for Gov of NY state as a Green, which was not exactly practical. But that's what Frank and other promoters of "economic populism" care about.
I was never entirely on board with Ellen when she talked about radicalism and freedom and liberation. In our numerous conversations about this, I usually argued that something she thought looked potentially liberating, like nonmonogamy or communal households with quasi-marital legal standing, would be, in practice, another arena for male chauvinism to flourish.
Robyn rejoining.
Chude says that we move an issue into the category of "the political" through collective action. While I agree that collective action is a part of the answer and believe that feminists actually did succeed through multiple kinds of action in putting feminist issues on the political agenda in the 1970s and 1980s, I now see that this achievement may not be maintained without persistent counteraction. That is, Frank and others are now pushing back against that achievement, it would seem, and so feminists are required to stay active to prevent Frank and his ilk from succeeding in de-politicizing feminism. Eternal vigilance really IS the price of freedom. It makes me tired, but there it is.
When I asked earlier, Judith, whether Frank's move might be an attempt to shore up left-liberal masculinity, I was imagining that the effect if not the intent of his discursive move to box feminism into the category of "culture" and not "politics" might be to box women into that cultural category right along with feminism and thus re-create a category of issues/action/analysis marked exclusively as "male." Given that women have been trying to break into the category of "political actor" for a century and have managed to gain only tentative purchase there, I find such moves pretty threatening. The end of such a move might well be to identify "true politics" (once again) as a foundation for masculinity. It is very interesting to me that Frank's message comes at a time when the first woman finally holds the position of Speaker of the House and a woman is a genuinely viable candidate for the presidency and a second woman now acts as Secretary of State.
On the issue of maintaining women's issues in the category of "politics," I am reminded of events early in the twentieth century when activist women in the US along with male allies succeeded in getting a third party--the Progressive Party of 1912--to include on its party platform a long list of programs that were previously considered to be "social" issues and not "political" issues. These included things like social insurance and protective labor legislation. In many places where men and women alike fully supported the creation of these programs and were giving everything they had to electing candidates for their new party, still, the requirements for becoming a Progressive party candidate were to support only a short list of programs that included economic regulation of business and an end to political corruption. No candidate had to pledge to support the "social programs" on the party platform in order to run on the Progressive party ticket.
I take this evidence and subsequent history to mean that, as Judith suggested earlier in our conversation, only a very narrow range of issues is unfailingly considered to be "political." Those are foreign policy and economic issues very narrowly conceived, conceived in fact to include pretty much only taxes and the overt regulation of business. All other issues--even including social insurance programs and labor legislation--have always been vulnerable to exclusion from our understanding of the "political." And, since women have been especially associated with those "social" or now "cultural" issues, they have been vulnerable to exclusion from the political as well, with the result that women have not yet achieved anything like equality with men in electoral politics and policymaking.
ALice Echols here. Sorry to be joining this discussion at such a late date, but I didn't get the initial notice. As usual, Ellen's analysis is wonderfully trenchant and on the mark. For those too young (or too old) to remember, she reveals that Frank's anti-culturalist left politics has a depressingly substantial history. What most intrigues me about this piece is Ellen's analysis of why it's been the Right that, time and again, has successfully exploited personal politics at the ballot box. Ellen emphasizes the extent to which leftists, when faced with the intimation of backlash in the early seventies, capitulated, allowing themselves to be held hostage by their own sexual shame. She also points suggestively to the ways in which Reaganism offered a version of freedom, much of whose appeal lay in its rejection of the preachy, sanctimonious liberalism of the Carter years. Republicans, succeeded, she argues, in recoding freedom in such a way that the (liberal) cultural elite appeared "guilt mongering" and "repressive."
I agree, but I think that many Americans considered both the Left AND feminism moralistic forces of repression. In "What's the Matter with Tom Frank," Ellen stresses Left puritanism, but as anyone familiar with Ellen's work knows, in the late seventies and early eighties she spoke out repeatedly against feminist puritanism as she cautioned against making feminism reducible to the struggle against pornography. Much of what made Ellen so inspirational (the "original riot grrrl," wrote one critic) is that she understood the importance of personal politics while resisting the censoriousness so often associated with its practice.
Hello all. Judith Ezekiel here. Breaking the ice? Remember: don't use hyphens which turn into strike thoughs.
Naomi Weisstein brought this article to the attention of a group of us on an email list of feminists scholars and activists. She thought, and I agree, that it is an important article. Ellen, before she died, had agreed to lead this discussion. I'm sorry we have to do it without her.
After reading Ellen's piece, I started thinking, going back to our discussions on the Personal/Political divide, that the women's movement has made a lot of so-called personal issues into public, collective issues, but NOT fully political. This is why they are now subject to being recircumscribed as "cultural" and thus potentially marginalized (though not reprivatized in the sens of individual) by relativists and demoted by the neomarxists and liberals alike. Thus abortion (though said to be a "private matter") is a part of the "culture wars" not political battles. Posted by Judith Ezekiel at Feb 08, 2007 17:54 | Permalink | Remove | Reply To This