RETHINKING OUR FEMINIST PRIORITIES

RETHINKING OUR FEMINIST PRIORITIES –
WHAT DOES “MAKING A DIFFERENCE” IN OUR COMMUNITIES MEAN?

Presented at the Delaware Women’s Conference 2000

by Vivian Houghton

In the brochure advertising today’s Delaware Women’s Conference, there was a blurb describing this particular workshop. The blurb advertised the workshop as a - and here I quote - “how-to on empowering yourself politically.” The workshop was also portrayed as a primer for a whole range of activities, including community activism, getting appointed to boards and even electoral politics. In conclusion, the brochure’s workshop description comforted its readers by assuring them that - and I am quoting once again - “getting involved isn’t as difficult as you think.”

Well, I’m not sure of that. Therefore, during my allotted time this afternoon, I would like to talk about what it means to get involved and to effectively impact on our communities, both locally and nationally. In fact, what I want to talk about specifically today is why becoming politically involved is in reality more difficult than you think, not less difficult. In other words, I am here today to argue against one of the very things that the conference brochure claims to be true. I reject the idea that getting politically involved isn’t very difficult. I think it’s extremely difficult. This doesn’t mean I think political action is without value and shouldn’t be pursued. I think just the opposite - I think political action is very valuable and should be pursued. I just don’t happen to believe that productive political action is easy to pull off. As a matter of fact, I’m not always sure that people, particularly people from the more comfortable sections of the middle class, know what political action is anymore. I don’t say this with animosity. I say it simply because I see no reason to talk here today if I don’t attempt to describe some of the actual dilemmas facing feminists and other activists these days.

One of these dilemmas is a confusion about what “getting involved” means. Sometimes people think they are becoming politically involved when they say, “I want to do such and such in order to change the world”- and yet, as sincere as they might be, many of the people who make such statements are often more into self-therapy than they are into serious political action. What I mean by this is that their motivation for becoming active has more to do with the desire to feel good about themselves than it does with a long-term commitment to actually change anything. Such self-therapy can range from writing a check for our favorite cause to volunteering our services once a month to a sex-education clinic. Don’t get me wrong, writing a check or helping out at a sex-education clinic are useful activities - it’s just that they do not necessarily rise to the level of political activism, and sometimes they have more to do with self-congratulation than world-alteration.

But even without this confusion between self-therapy and political action, the nature of effective political action is elusive. Today’s world is often more complicated than we’d like it to be and, because of this, developing strategies for changing society, or changing particular aspects of it, is not an easy task. Take the role of Women’s Studies in higher education as an example.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of Women’s Studies was nothing but a gleam in the eye of the new feminist movement. But that gleam was a big one, and feminists dreamed of altering the nation’s patriarchal mind-set through the development of such programs. After years of faculty debates, campus organizing, editorial page fireworks, and gender related dialogues in places as diverse as synagogues and union halls, Women Studies programs and departments eventually became a part of many academies. There is no doubt that from a feminist perspective the growth of Women’s Studies programs was a good thing. I think there is also no doubt about this fact from a humanistic perspective. By digging in the soil of history, these programs excavated what was previously hidden - the role of women and their so-called invisible lives in the rise and fall of civilizations and cultures. In doing this, in unburying what was once buried, Women’s Studies added valuable insights to a wide range of disciplines, including history, political science, literature, philosophy and so on.

And yet in spite of such accomplishments, there was much that feminists did not foresee. Take the University of Delaware’s Women’s Studies program as an example. According to UD’s Undergraduate Catalogue a few years ago, the university is very proud of its Women’s Studies division. The Catalogue proudly proclaimed that “Women’s Studies . . . is designed to foster in students a knowledge of the rich heritage, challenges, and concerns of women.”

Unfortunately, all this talk about women’s rich heritage is more rhetoric than reality - this becomes especially clear when we look at how the university handles the actual women who teach in UD’s Women’s Studies program. The two women who teach the program’s entry level courses have been kept as half-time faculty in spite of the fact that in most departments in the College of Arts and Sciences these women’s course loads would make them full-time. Both women have been in these continuing half-time assistant professorships for almost a decade.

What makes this situation even worse is that the two women are the only faculty members holding appointments exclusively in Women’s Studies. The Administration’s treatment of these two women exemplifies the discrimination that in general haunts women in the workforce, where women are disproportionately relegated to low-paying and part-time work. It is ironic that Women’s Studies, which is based on the idea that examining women’s role in society is a necessary first step in abolishing gender inequity, should itself be the site of inequity.

So, should we be proud that we helped create such departments, or should our pride be tempered by an awareness of how weak we were in the follow-through? Too much of what the feminist movement has created is like this - it has fallen far short of our dreams. Even worse, too much of it has degenerated into a stale professionalism that is more interested in career ladders - and that mostly for white women - than in struggling, in serious and systematic ways, against how those ladders are off-limits to far too many poor and minority women.

I point out these issues, because such issues show how the very act of choosing what to become politically involved in is often more complicated than it seems. Should we be satisfied with the creation of Women’s Studies programs that don’t give their staffs sufficient economic security, or should we picket those programs? Should we applaud the fact that Hillary Clinton, a feminist, was able to influence White House decisions on public policy, or should we criticize the feminist movement for being so enamored of Hillary’s high position that the movement bailed out on attacking the White House when the White House set in motion a welfare reform policy that tossed millions of women and children into economic disarray?

Becoming politically active is one thing. But figuring out the relationship between feminist philosophy and feminist activism is quite another. At the very least, understanding the relationship between feminist philosophy and feminist activism requires some serious introspection. It also requires rethinking some of the feminist movement’s assumptions.

Take economic security as an example.

There has always been an assumption in official feminism that biology is a profoundly unifying link that guarantees a certain degree of solidarity between women. But as time has shown, not only is such feminist solidarity not guaranteed by biology, that solidarity is in many ways more frayed today than it was 30 years ago. Biology might have given all women breasts, but it hasn’t made all women economically similar. Not even the female invasion of the workforce over recent decades has changed this. Whereas in the 1960s only 3 out of 10 women worked outside their homes, today approximately 7 out of 10 women do so. That’s an increase from 30 percent to 70 percent. Yet during the same time period that this change occurred, the economic gap between the country’s haves and have-nots increased. Among other things, this means that semi-professionals and professionals saw their incomes go up dramatically in comparison to people in working class jobs. Adjusted for inflation, the waitress, nurse’s aid, cleaning woman and saleswoman earn less today than they did 30 years ago. On the other hand, females in more prestigious occupations - occupations like physician, welfare supervisor, professor, lawyer - have been more successful at staying ahead of the inflation rate. It’s weird but true that the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s helped set the stage for this situation. The feminist movement did so by providing a springboard for many talented, mostly white women into professions that were previously off-limits to women. These hard-driving, creative, ambitious, career-minded ladies often became the spokeswomen for the feminist movement. Much of what they had to say was intelligent, as far as it went. But the problem was that their message didn’t go far enough. What they had to say often did not resonate with poor women, working-class women or women of color.

We are living today with the legacy of this division. This is why I mentioned the welfare reform issue earlier. In 1996 when Clinton signed the welfare reform bill, the official feminists for the most part were no where to be found. It was as if they had forgotten that out of the 14 million people on welfare, 9 million or 64.3% of those people were children and the vast majority of the remaining people were women. They apparently also had forgotten why it was a bad idea to force women off the welfare roles so they - the ex-welfare women - could then be used as low-paid labor by companies aching to raise profits by driving down their labor costs. The feminist movement’s lack of sensitivity to the economic complexity of many women’s lives does not bode well for the women’s movement’s future

Feminism’s silence on welfare reform in the late 1990s was a silence of the heart, as well as of the mouth. It was a sign of a movement that has lost sight of when and for what political activism is supposed to be employed. In such a context, it is difficult to say that getting involved is as easy as the brochure for this conference suggested. In order to become active in a meaningful way, a movement must first know what its priorities are. It is not clear that today’s feminist movement knows this. Activism is about self-empowerment, but it is also about more than that - it is also about reaching out to others and helping to empower them. Without coalition-building between classes and races, there can be no strong feminist movement. There also can be no strong feminist movement if the movement remains too beholden to either of the two political parties. The women’s movement, for it to once again become dynamic, must be independent of spirit and willing to question capitalism’s underpinnings. It must communicate an aura, not of professional prim-and-properness, but of grass-roots grittiness and multi-cultural pride.

At the beginning of the 21st century, U.S. feminism is at a crossroads. Either it will choose again to be an agent of social change, or it will further evolve into a bureaucratized network that substitutes talk and symbols for action. Wearing a pink ribbon to show people that we are concerned about breast cancer can be helpful in publicizing our concern, but if such so-called “actions” are seen as replacements for organizing large numbers of people to fight the institutions that promote ill health in our society, then the women’s movement has truly lost sight of what activism is.

In closing, let me return briefly to the question of coalition building. I live in Wilmington. Wilmington’s metropolitan area has a population of over 400,000 people. The city proper, however, has a population of just about 70,000 -- 52.2% African American, 42.4% white and 5.4% Hispanic and other ethnic/racial groupings. Not surprisingly, Wilmington suffers from economic concerns typical of U.S. urban areas. Also not surprisingly, these concerns possess a racial element. The average per capita income of all Wilmington residents is $14,256, and this breaks down racially to an average per capita income for whites of $21,605 and for blacks of $9,016. Also, a total of 11,644 city young people age 17 or under live in poverty -- 4,111 of those young people are white and 7,533 are African-American. On top of all this, Wilmington’s family median income is 15% below the national average and 45% below the median family income in the city’s suburbs.

Feminists should be interested in such issues. If we do not understand why we should be interested such issues, we also probably will not understand, when it happens. why our movement grows even weaker than it is now over the coming years. To re-establish feminism as a powerful force that must be reckoned with in the 21st century, we must build a diverse movement. We need more grassroots leaders from the so-called bottom of society. We must not invite these leaders in as “guests” who are visiting “our” movement. We must invite them in and tell them that they are welcome to take over our movement and inject it with new life.

This is what we need.

This is what our future must look like.

This is the only kind of “getting involved” that will do the women’s movement any good.

Thank you.