Feminism is in a state of crisis. It is revealing that we have groups of activists on campus dedicated to nearly every conceivable political issue, but there is no organization of feminists. It is the new f-word, as most would rather be called a fucker than a feminist. As the conservative sage Pat Robertson defined it at the 1992 Republican Convention, “Feminism ... encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” The complex history of women’s struggle helps to comprehend our current dilemma and move forward with a program for women’s liberation.
Today, the Democratic center-left has silently suppressed feminism, caving to the bigoted culture warriors, while the radical left tends to dismiss feminism as merely bourgeois individualism, insignificant compared to the oppression of poverty and fomenting class struggle. Moving beyond this tactical pragmatism, it is time to assert the centrality of women’s liberation for the left.
We live in a patriarchal society that accepts as essentially unproblematic the routine beating, raping, and murder of women. The accepting silence surrounding violence against women exposes the functioning hegemony of patriarchal power. Tomorrow’s Take Back the Night March helps break the silence and expose the violence, but we need more than events. We need a movement.
Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44, more prevalent than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined. In 1990, a study found that in more than one-third of marriages, women were battered repeatedly every year. During the 20 years following the “feminist revolution” of the early 1970s, 31,260 women were murdered by their boyfriends, husbands, or fathers. This represents a femicide on the scale of September 11 every two years for two decades straight. Yet we have silence. We have a war on terror. Where is our war on patriarchy?
Appropriately, the first generation of revolutionary women to stand up and wage war against the men who oppressed them learned their lessons in the antislavery struggle. Activists in a movement of religious perfectionism that attempted to realize God’s uncompromising justice on earth, women abolitionists like Sarah and Angelina Grimké quickly recognized the parallels. In 1837, Sarah Grimké published a “Letter on the Equality of the Sexes” with a demand that feminists must still rally around: “All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.”
During Reconstruction, important precedents were set for the next 50 years. The 15th Amendment posed a sharp dilemma to women whose political education had come through the abolitionist movement. They could support the enfranchisement of men of African descent, while inscribing the word “male” in the constitution for the first time, or they could abandon their abolitionists allies and fight against the amendment. This led to a coalition with the notorious racist George Francis Train that supported women’s enfranchisement but opposed the 15th Amendment’s inclusion of the word “male.” It was an ugly compromise, but this moment also marked the creation of a distinct women’s movement.
Post-Reconstruction, the suffrage movement took an increasingly conservative, racist, and nativist tact. Women should be given the vote, these elite women suggested, as a measure to counteract the appalling influence of ignorant Negroes, despicable Slavs, and lowly Italians. It was no coincidence that women’s suffrage passed in 1920 at a moment of intense political reaction more generally, including the Palmer Raids against socialists from 1919 to 1921 and the passage of explicitly racist immigration measures in the 1921 Emergency Quota Act.
The 1960s and early 1970s marked an important return to earlier radicalism, challenging interpersonal oppression with the critical slogan, “the personal is political.” The successes of this generation of pioneering fighters have been revolutionary. They have, as historian Linda Gordon notes, “transformed the lives and aspirations of the majority of women in ways unmeasurable by statistics ... raising women’s intellectual, economic and political expectations, increasing intolerance of wife beating, rape and other violence against women.”
But their legacy is also ambiguous. From the radical insight that the “personal is political” came a white middle-class movement with a practical program that spoke mostly to the needs and frustration of affluent, professional women. Feminists tended to understand liberation in individualistic, libertarian terms. Freedom was defined in terms of equal access to markets, a definition that had much more substance for elite women than for the working-class. Envisioning the cash-nexus as the embodiment of freedom, feminists unintentionally legitimated the forms of coercion, exploitation, and oppression implicit in the liberal freedom of market capitalism.
The feminist tradition carries within itself difficult compromises, unsavory alliances, bigotry, and blindness towards certain forms of violence and power, but it is nevertheless a powerful and necessary strand of radicalism on which the left must build a program for democracy and freedom. Feminism must become part of a politics not simply about distributing poverty, wealth, and power equally between men and women, but also a politics of collective democratic power for workers, individual dignity for all human beings, and a freedom that transcends the choices of market incentives. Men, the brotherhood of patriarchs, have an equal, if not greater duty to join the feminist struggle. Feminism is not a “problem” with certain angry and difficult women, it is a program for liberation and a vision of justice for all.
Rudi Batzell is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and sociology. He is an editor for El Participante, a member of Lucha, and the former chair of the Columbia Undergraduate Journal of History. History and Politics runs alternate Wednesdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com