1
Generations of Feminism

Politics makes comics of us all. Or we would weep.

Sheila Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas

I have been thinking for some time now about relations between political generations and the enduring impact of those formative moments which first enable us to make some sense of the world, and our place within it - an unjust and shabby world, whatever our personal circumstances. Such moments remain all the more powerful if, like many of my own generation who became students in the 1960s, you have hoped - with whatever levels of scepticism and self-mockery - to participate in the making of history. They leave their mark, even as changing times cause one to rethink, perhaps even to renounce, one's former political presumptions. Yet what often leaves erstwhile political crusaders with little more than mournful and confusing feelings of loss and regret - whatever our capacities for irony - is the way in which new narratives emerge as collective memories fade, writing-over those which once incited our most passionate actions.

So it has been with Women's Liberation, that second wave of feminism which arose out of the upsurge of radical and socialist politics in the late 1960s. It grew rapidly as a mass social movement, peaking in the mid-1970s before dissolving as a coherent organization by the end of that decade. It affected the lives of millions of women. Over a quarter of a century later, however, the sparse amount of thoughtful scholarship analysing the distinctiveness of that upsurge of feminist activism must struggle for attention amidst a glut of texts delineating its contemporary academic progeny - largely scornful of its rougher parent, and the motley basements, living-rooms, workplaces and community centres in which it was hatched. This is not just a female Oedipal tale, as disobedient daughters distance themselves from their mothers' passions, seeking recognition for themselves. It is also a sibling affair, as feminists contend with each other; fearful, perhaps, of being overlooked should we fail to keep abreast of new theoretical fashions, or else unable to admit the inadequacies and contradictions of past attachments.

Acts of Memory

A small band of feminist historians, mostly in the USA, who are trying to recapture the diversity of the movement in which they participated, declare that they cannot recognize themselves, or others, in what they see as the distorting accounts of Women's Liberation circulating in contemporary feminism. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, for example, are gathering material for a multi-volume collection of literature from the movement in the USA. They are joined by others interested in archiving the local histories of Women's Liberation, such as Patricia Romney, documenting a group of fifty women of colour based in New York and Oakland, California, who - along with other black activists in the sixties and seventies - became the forgotten women who 'fell down the well' (as Carolyn Heilbrun puts it) in subsequent rewritings of women's liberation as exclusively white.1 These historians are well aware of the dangers of their proximity to their own research, of how memories are muted or reshaped by subsequent perspectives and interests, whether one's own or those of younger recorders. At a recent symposium on the history of women's liberation in the USA, Margaret Strobel recounted that even when rereading her own diaries and letters she is amazed at their failure to match her current recollections of the events she recorded there.2

Reading our own histories through the interpretations of others can be more unsettling still. Awareness of the tricks of memory, and the dearth of thoughtful reflections on a remarkable period of feminist activism fast being forgotten, prompted two other veteran US feminists, Rachel DuPlessis and Ann Snitow, to embark upon their own memoir project: not in search of 'truth unmodified', but to seek out the ambiguities and ambivalences with which those who gave birth to the movement would now recall their engagement in its past. Open, questioning and self-critical, as they introduce the rich and varied collection which ensues, they nevertheless argue compellingly that caricature and forgetting is the greater danger haunting women's political actions: 'For amnesia about political movements is not only an innocent effect of general forgetfulness, but is socially produced, packaged, promulgated, and perpetuated.'3 I agree. It is extraordinary - exciting and troubling in equal measure - to read these distinct and divergent accounts from women whose lives were shaped by their belief that collective action could (and, for a while, did) transform everything, from personal lives to workplace conditions, social policy, the law and almost every aspect of culture. It is important, if only to realize quite how strange their rhetoric and sensibilities appear in the current political climate; the words not so much of another generation, with less sophisticated ideas, as of another species.

As if foreseeing this impression, Meredith Tax mourns: 'I feel like one of the last surviving members of a nearly extinct species - the committed left-wing feminist'.4 Although still working successfully to promote women's writing and struggles through the international forum Women's WORLD (Women's World Organization for Rights, Literature and Development) which she helped to found in the 1990s, Tax knows she can no longer make her own voice heard at home. A pointed reminder of changing times, at least for those aware that it was she who published one of the earliest underground classics of women's liberation, Woman and her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life (1970), which sold 150,000 copies in pamphlet form around the world. I could quote from it to this day.

Contemporary texts reviewing recent feminist history provide sobering examples of how the past is read through the concerns of the present: invalidating earlier meanings and projects as well as erasing their heterogeneity. Moreover, the displacement of former struggles and perspectives is all the more disconcerting when contemporary theorists, starting off from an abhorrence of binary logics and a scepticism about all attempts to generalize, go on to draw false contrasts and make reckless generalizations of their own. It is this which startles me when I read accounts of the distance self-proclaimed 'nineties' feminism has travelled from women's liberation, and what now appears neatly homogenized as 'seventies' feminism.

Dubious Contrasts

A distinguished British collection of feminist thought, edited by Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips, Destabilizing Theory (1992), highlights what it refers to as 'the gulf between feminist theory of the 1970s and 1990s'. It opens with the assertion: 'In the past twenty years the founding principles of contemporary western feminism have been dramatically changed, with previously shared assumptions and unquestioned orthodoxies relegated almost to history'.5 Quite so. But just what is being dispatched here? Was it all of a piece? And is it equally anachronistic for contemporary feminists?

'Seventies' feminism is criticized for its 'false certainties'; its search for structural causes of women's oppression (indeed for its very notion of 'oppression'); its belief in women's shared interests (indeed, its very attachment to the notion of 'women' or 'woman'), and so forth.6 'Nineties' feminism, in contrast, has replaced what is seen as the naive search for the social or material causes of women's oppression by complex elaborations of the discursively produced, hierarchical constitution of an array of key concepts: sexual difference in particular, binary oppositions in general, and the hetero/sexualized mapping of the body as a whole. Destabilizing Theory rejects what it proclaims to be the assumptions of 'Enlightenment' thought: 'a notion of a powerful and self-conscious political subject, a belief in reason and rationality, in social and political progress, in the possibility of grand schemes of social reform'. It is impressively cautious about the 'ambiguous status of theory', yet it still risks a few generalizations of its own: tending towards a totalizing dismissal of 'seventies' feminism, and the reduction of dissimilar projects to common ground: 'Feminists have moved from grand theory to local studies, from cross-cultural analysis of patriarchy to the complex and historical interplay of sex, race and class, from notions of a female identity or the interests of women towards the instability of female identity and the active creation and recreation of women's needs and concerns.'7

A comparable tension can be found in an American collection aiming 'to call into question and problematize the presumptions of some feminist discourse': Feminists Theorize the Political (1992), edited by Judith Butler and Joan Scott.8 Its introductory essay is also cautious about drawing comparisons between different phases of feminism, aware that contrasting 'post-modern' feminism with an earlier 'modernist' feminism buys into precisely the conceits of modernity itself, sharing all its enthusiasm for identification with the 'new' and...