Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 15:22:56 -0600
Subject: 'Unity', feminism, socialism


>>> Ryan Daum <rdaum-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>  4/19/96, 12:49pm >>>
And this is so typical of the kind of ultra-left argumentation 
against feminism that goes on: imagine that liberal feminism holds 
hegemony in the movement.  It doesn't.

In fact, it's so uneven it's not even funny.  For years the leader of
the national feminist organization here [Canada] was a Trotskyist --
a former member of the grouping I'm in, actually.  The leadership is
de facto socialist, and yet huge parts of the membership are liberal
feminists, etc.
***

I think that socialism has not as much outspoken influence within US
feminism, but there is lots of struggle against the bourgeois crap,
and that has been going on for a few decades already.  I've been
studying both the history and present tense of "feminisms" lately,
and the struggles are clear and on-going.  Betty Friedan is nearly a
laughing stock in the circles I run in, and in major undergraduate
courses.  Ah, pity the poor middle-class housewife who wants a job in
order to be 'fulfilled'.  

Friedan's got a very limited point to be made, BUT who's gonna clean
the house and care for the kids when both parents work full-time? 
Poor women, of course.  Who wishes they had the _choice_ of being
able to be economically secure without being required to work at any
job they can get?  Poor and racially oppressed women, of course. 
Poor women have _never_ had the [admittedly problematic] opportunity
to be housewives, they have always 'worked outside the home'.  

The idea that women in US began working during WWII is only partly
true - a few went from housewifing to factory and back to housewife. 
Most of them were already working, as house-maids and sharecroppers,
and they were thrilled to be making decent money compared to that. 
After the war, they still had to work or starve, but they were forced
back into crap-work.  Skilled welders were forced into being
cafeteria workers and such.

I enjoy the way that bell hooks rips on the bourgeois white stuff,
pointing out racism and classism within some of the feminist
movement.  Friedan, and many other ruling class 'feminists' have
contributed to fighting specific ideas within their own class, and
such, but they exclude the concerns of most women.  

I think the most exclusive, divisive thing that some of the
privileged leaders do is to proclaim unity, to claim that all women
have the same problems, a common interest, etc, while sweeping the
actual immediate diverse concerns of many women right under the rug. 
Their attempts to silence dissent in the name of unity is the thing
which actually destroys unity.  

If unity is to be achieved within feminist movement, it must
recognize and allow full participation of women in poverty, working
class, women of color, even as they challenge the attempted hegemony
of well-off white women.  My response is not to write off 'feminism'
but to continue concrete struggles while working within both feminism
and leftism to improve my own understanding and the quality of
thought and analysis in both overlapping camps.

It seems to me that something similar to the attempted hegemony
within feminism occurs within the left, when try to proclaim unity of
the working class and oppressed people generally by denying the
dissent of some of those very people, telling them that all their
real problems will be solved by fighting capitalism and insisting
that 'we really all have the same interests, only you people just
don't know it.'  

Is it some kind of 'unity with difference' that is needed?  That
phrase sounds like some kind of buzzword, but I can't recall where I
heard it.

Lisa


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