Contradictions 2007

SF Freedom Summer School
August 11th, 2007
Contradictions within the Movement—and

Moving Beyond them
Supplemental Readings
Chapter 11, “Beyond Freedom Summer,” in People Make Movements, is relevant
Contents:
• In Our Time--Memoir of a Revolution by Susan Brownmiller
• Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo by Casey Hayden and Mary King
from Hayden and King to a number of other women in the peace and freedom movements (1965)
(It is widely regarded as one of the first documents of the emerging women's liberation movement.)
• The Personal Is Political by Carol Hanisch (1969) with 2006 Introduction
• Hanisch on "The Personal Is Political" an Internet Discussion

From May 26 through June 11, 2006, "The 'Second Wave' and Beyond" hosted a special forum among
scholars and activists led by Carol Hanish and inspired by her article "The Personal is Political" and the new
introduction. Comments by Carol Hanisch, Judith Ezekiel, Chude [Pam] Allen, Ariel Dougherty, [Margaret]
Rivka Polatnick, Kimberly Springer, Stephanie Gilmore, and Cathy Cade.
Recommended Links:
http://www.crmvet.org/disc/women1.htm
http://colours.mahost.org/articles/crass8.html
Recommended from SFFS media library:
DVD’s BOOKS
• Mississippi, America • Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and
• Freedom on My Mind Environmental Protest
• Berkeley in the Sixties • Personal Politics: The Roots of the
• Scandalize My Name Women’s Liberation in the CRM and
• Brother Outsider the New Left
• Once Upon a Time when We Were • Deep in our Hearts: Nine White
Colored Women in the Freedom Movement
• The Long Walk Home • Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung
www.educationanddemocracy.org 1
• Deacons for Defense Heroins of the CRM 1830-1970
IN OUR TIME-- MEMOIR OF A REVOLUTION
By SUSAN BROWNMILLER
Excerpt The Founders
Of the thousand or so white volunteers who joined the southern civil rights struggle during the mid-sixties, at least
half, including myself, were women. Many of us went on to found—or to play a major role in—the Women's
Liberation Movement a few years later. History seldom offers parallels this tidy, but as it happened, many of the
female abolitionists of the nineteenth century had gone on to organize for women's suffrage. These two vivid epochs
were separated by more than a century, yet nearly identical forces applied. After fighting alongside men in a radical
movement to correct a grievous wrong, the women then woke up and wondered, "What about us?"
Political organizers understand that the important thing about action is reaction. There you are, taking a stand,
struggling to express a new idea, and the response is so powerful—positive or negative—that it reverberates into new
responses and reactions, especially in you.
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were part of the American delegation that traveled to London in
1840 for a World Anti-Slavery Convention. As the high-minded congress got under way, the male abolitionists voted
not to accredit and seat the women. For ten days Mott and Stanton watched the proceedings from the visitors' gallery,
where in mortification and anger they hatched the idea for a women's rights congress that became the historic Seneca
Falls Convention of 1848.
White women in the civil rights movement during the 1960s were also consumed by a vision of equality, one
that seemed important enough to risk our lives for. (And one white woman, Viola Liuzzo, did in fact lose her life to a
sniper on the Selma-to-Montgomery March.) Although Martin Luther King, Jr., came to embody the stoic heroism of
those hopeful years, to kids on the college campuses, and to many older radicals like me, SNCC, the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the true cutting edge of the movement.
SNCC had been formed after the lunch-counter sit-ins in February 1960. And it was SNCC that sent out the
call for an army of northern volunteers to help register black voters in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, the call
to which so many white women responded. SNCC was cast in the image of a young, fearless black male, a concept that
may have been necessary for its time, but its corollary was that women of both races were expected to occupy a lesser
role.
Jan Goodman and I were in the second batch of volunteers for Mississippi Freedom Summer. No longer part
of the student community from which SNCC drew most of its volunteers, I was by then a researcher at Newsweek,
stuck in a dead-end job, and Jan was directing inner-city programs for the Girl Scouts. During our orientation session
in Memphis, we were told that Meridian needed emergency workers. Michael Schwerner, the project director, James
Chaney, a local organizer, and Andrew Goodman, a summer volunteer who hadn't had time to unpack his duffel, had
just been murdered in nearby Neshoba County, although their bodies would not be found for another forty days. When
no one else at the Memphis orientation session volunteered for Meridian, Jan and I accepted the assignment. Between
us, we had a good ten years of organizing experience, hers in Democratic primaries and presidential campaigns, mine
in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and both of us together in voter registration drives in East Harlem. The
night we arrived in Meridian, a field secretary called a meeting, asking to see the new volunteers. Proudly we raised
our hands. "Shit!" he exploded. "I asked for volunteers and they sent me white women."
On other projects in other Mississippi towns that summer, white women were reminded of their second-class
status as movement workers through a variety of slights. Because of the southern white male's phobia about mixing the
races, our presence in the volunteer army of integrationists was construed as an added danger to the movement's black
men. I do not wish to underestimate this danger, but there will always be a germ of a reason, sound or unsound, behind
the perpetuation of sexist practice. When antiwar activism got under way a year or so after Mississippi Freedom
Summer, there was also a logical reason why women in that movement were relegated to second-class status: the draft
for the war in Vietnam directly affected young men. Women the world over are required to modify their behavior
because of things that men fear and do.
SNCC was a "beloved community" to Mary King and Casey Hayden, an encompassing lifestyle dedicated to
the perfection of moral virtue. They were among the first white women to have staff jobs in the Atlanta headquarters.
Mary was the product of six generations of Virginia ministers on her father's side. Casey, from East Texas, entered
student politics through the Christian ecumenical movement and helped to found Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), the primary force on the white New Left. She had married Tom Hayden but they were living apart.
The two women studied the French existentialists in their evening hours to broaden their understanding of theory and
practice. When they'd exhausted Camus, they turned to Simone de Beauvoir. Certain passages in The Second Sex
spoke to them so directly that they began pressing the book on others. Some people in the movement started grumbling
that Mary and Casey were undisciplined sentimentalists "on a Freedom high."
In the fall of 1964, Mary and Casey wrote a position paper on women in SNCC that owed its inspiration partly
to Beauvoir and partly to their experience in their movement work. "The average white person doesn't realize that he
assumes he is superior," they wrote. "So too the average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem
because of the assumption of male superiority. Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep-rooted and
as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro."
Expecting ridicule, the two white women did not sign the paper they passed around that November at a staff
retreat on the Mississippi coast. Thirty-seven manifestos and proposals had been prepared for the retreat at Waveland,
and most were being ignored. A wrenching split within the organization was consuming everyone's energy.
One evening Stokely Carmichael and a few others took a welcome break down at the dock. Camping it up, he
joked, "What is the position of women in SNCC? The position of women in SNCC is prone."
Alas for Stokely, his riff became nearly as famous as his later calls for Black Power. While language purists
wondered if Carmichael had really meant "supine," his jest came to symbolize the collection of slights suffered by
women in SNCC.
One year later Mary King and Casey Hayden gathered the courage to sign their names to an expanded version
of their paper and mailed it to forty women activists against the Vietnam War. The second broadside recounted a list of
movement grievances—who gets named project director? who sweeps the office floor? who takes the minutes? who
speaks to the press?—before it concluded "Objectively, the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on
anything as distant to general American thought as a sex-caste system. Therefore, most of us will probably want to
work full-time on problems such as war, poverty, race." King and Hayden titled their paper "A Kind of Memo."
Another year passed and "A Kind of Memo" found its way to a national SDS conference that convened at the
University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana two days after Christmas in 1966. Fifty women, a lot for that time,
caucused in the school cafeteria to discuss it.
"Heather Booth and I were there," recalls Marilyn Webb, who would play a significant role in the founding of
Women's Liberation in Washington D.C. "When the SNCC letter from Mary and Casey was read aloud, it precipitated
a three-day marathon discussion about women in SDS. We'd been dealing with civil rights, with the Vietnam War,
we'd been urging resistance to the draft with slogans like 'Women Say Yes to Men Who Say No'—that had been our
mentality. This was one of the first conversations where we talked about what was happening with us. We ended up
talking about everything, including our sexuality."
Community organizers trained by Saul Alinsky, who ran workshops and wrote primers on the principles of
activism, Marilyn Webb and Heather Booth were soon to marry New Left leaders. They were to try as well to marry
the new women's thinking to SDS. The political union, however, was not to be.
The following April, "A Kind of Memo" surfaced yet again, this time in Liberation, a leftist-pacifist magazine.
Having served as catalysts, Mary King and Casey Hayden then retired from the fray. SNCC, their beloved community,
no longer welcomed white participation. They had lost their political moorings. It would be characteristic of the
emerging feminist movement that various women would surface for brief moments in leadership roles and then,
exhausted by the effort, depart from the scene.
SEX AND CASTE: A KIND OF MEMO

From http://www.cwluherstory.org/CWLUArchive/memo.html
from Casey Hayden and Mary King to a number of other women in the peace and freedom movements(1965)
(Editors Note: Casey Hayden and Mary King circulated this paper on women in the civil rights movement based on
their experiences as Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee volunteers. It is widely regarded as one of the first
documents of the emerging women's liberation movement.)
We've talked a lot, to each other and to some of you, about our own and other women's problems in trying to live in
our personal lives and in our work as independent and creative people. In these conversations we've found what seem
to be recurrent ideas or themes. Maybe we can look at these things many of us perceive, often as a result of insights
learned from the movement:
Sex and caste: There seem to be many parallels that can be drawn between treatment of Negroes and treatment
of women in our society as a whole. But in particular, women we've talked to who work in the movement seem to be
caught up in a common-law caste system that operates, sometimes subtly, forcing them to work around or outside
hierarchical structures of power which may exclude them. Women seem to be placed in the same position of assumed
subordination in personal situations too. It is a caste system which, at its worst, uses and exploits women.
This is complicated by several facts, among them:
1) The caste system is not institutionalized by law (women have the right to vote, to sue for divorce, etc.);
2) Women can't withdraw from the situation (a la nationalism) or overthrow it;
3) There are biological differences (even though those biological differences are usually discussed or accepted without
taking present and future technology into account so we probably can't be sure what these differences mean). Many
people who are very hip to the implications of the racial caste system, even people in the movement, don't seem to be
able to see the sexual caste system and if the question is raised they respond with: "That's the way it's supposed to be.
There are biological differences." Or with other statements which recall a white segregationist confronted with
integration.
Women and problems of work: The caste system perspective dictates the roles assigned to women in the movement,
and certainly even more to women outside the movement. Within the movement, questions arise in situations ranging
from relationships of women organizers to men in the community, to who cleans the freedom house, to who holds
leadership positions, to who does secretarial work, and who acts as spokesman for groups. Other problems arise
between women with varying degrees of awareness of themselves as being as capable as men but held back from full
participation, or between women who see themselves as needing more control of their work than other women
demand. And there are problems with relationships between white women and black women.
Women and personal relations with men: Having learned from the movement to think radically about the
personal worth and abilities of people whose role in society had gone unchallenged before, a lot of women in the
movement have begun trying to apply those lessons to their own relations with men. Each of us probably has her own
story of the various results, and of the internal struggle occasioned by trying to break out of very deeply learned fears,
needs, and self?perceptions, and of what happens when we try to replace them with concepts of people and freedom
learned from the movement and organizing.
Institutions: Nearly everyone has real questions about those institutions which shape perspectives on men and
women: marriage, child rearing pat-terns, women's (and men's) magazines, etc. People are beginning to think about
and even to experiment with new forms in these areas.
Men's reactions to the questions raised here: A very few men seem to feel, when they hear conversations
involving these problems, that they have a right to be present and participate in them, since they are so deeply
involved. At the same time, very few men can respond non-defensively, since the whole idea is either beyond their
comprehension or threatens and exposes them. The usual response is laughter. That inability to see the whole issue as
serious, as the straitjacketing of both sexes, and as societally determined often shapes our own response so that we
learn to think in their terms about ourselves and to feel silly rather than trust our inner feelings. The problems we're
listing here, and what others have said about them, are therefore largely drawn from conversations among women only
and that difficulty in establishing dialogue with men is a recurring theme among people we've talked to.
Lack of community for discussion: Nobody is writing, or organizing or talking publicly about women, in any
way that reflects the problems that various women in the movement come across and which we've tried to touch above.
Consider this quote from an article in the centennial issue of The Nation:
However equally we consider men and women, the work plans for husbands and wives cannot be given equal
weight. A woman should not aim for "a second?level career" because she is a woman; from girlhood on she should
recognize that, if she is also going to be a wife and mother, she will not be able to give as much to her work as she
would if single. That is, she should not feel that she cannot aspire to directing the laboratory simply because she is a
woman, but rather because she is also a wife and mother; as such, her work as a lab technician (or the equivalent in
another field) should bring both satisfaction and the knowledge that, through it, she is fulfilling an additional role,
making an additional contribution.
And that's about as deep as the analysis goes publicly, which is not nearly so deep as we've heard many of you
go in chance conversations. The reason we want to try to open up dialogue is mostly subjective. Working in the
movement often intensifies personal problems, especially if we start trying to apply things we're learning there to our
personal lives. Perhaps we can start to talk with each other more openly than in the past and create a community of
support for each other so we can deal with ourselves and others with integrity and can therefore keep working.
Objectively, the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on anything as distant to general
American thought as a sex?caste system. Therefore, most of us will probably want to work full time on problems such
as war, poverty, race. The very fact that the country can't face, much less deal with, the questions we're raising means
that the movement is one place to look for some relief. Real efforts at dialogue within the movement and with
whatever liberal groups, community women, or students might listen are justified. That is, all the problems between
men and women and all the problems of women functioning in society as equal human beings are among the most
basic that people face. We've talked in the movement about trying to build a society which would see basic human
problems (which are now seen as private troubles), as public problems and would try to shape institutions to meet
human needs rather than shaping people to meet the needs of those with power. To raise questions like those above
illustrates very directly that society hasn't dealt with some of its deepest problems and opens discussion of why that is
so. (In one sense, it is a radicalizing question that can take people beyond legalistic solutions into areas of personal and
institutional change.) The second objective reason we'd like to see discussion begin is that we've learned a great deal in
the movement and perhaps this is one area where a determined attempt to apply ideas we've learned there can produce
some new alternatives.
The Personal Is Political by Carol Hanisch

INTRODUCTION
January 2006
The paper, “The Personal Is Political,” was originally published in Notes from the Second Year:
Women’s Liberation in 1970 and was widely reprinted and passed around the Movement and beyond in the next
several years. I didn’t know just how much it had gotten around until I did a Goggle search and found it being
discussed in many different languages.
I’d like to clarify for the record that I did not give the paper its title, “The Personal Is Political.” As far as I know,
that was done by Notes from the Second Year editors Shulie Firestone and Anne Koedt after Kathie Sarachild brought
it to their attention as a possible paper to be printed in that early collection. Also, “political” was used here in the board
sense of the word as having to do with power relationships, not the narrow sense of electorial politics.
The paper actually began as a memo that I wrote in February of 1969 while in Gainesville, Florida. It was sent to
the women’s caucus of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) a group for whom I was a subsistence-paid
organizer doing exploratory work for establishing a women’s liberation project in the South. The memo was originally
titled, “Some Thoughts in Response to Dottie’s Thoughts on a Women’s Liberation Movement,” and was written in
reply to a memo by another staff member, Dottie Zellner, who contended that consciousness-raising was just therapy
and questioned whether the new independent WLM was really “political.”
This was not an unusual reaction to radical feminist ideas in early 1969. WLM groups had been springing up all
over the country—and the world. The radical movements of Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam War, and Old and New Left
groups from which many of us sprang were male dominated and very nervous about women’s liberation in general, but
especially the spectre of the mushrooming independent women’s liberation movement, of which I was a staunch
advocate. Arriving in New York City after ten months in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, I had found SCEF to
be one of the more mature and better progressive groups around. It had a good record of racial, economic and political
justice work since New Deal days, and I joined its staff in 1966 as its New York office manager. SCEF allowed New
York Radical Women to meet in its New York office, where I worked, and at my request agreed to explore setting up a
women’s liberation project in the South. However, many on the SCEF staff, both men and women, ended up joining
the criticism of women getting together in consciousness-raising groups to discuss their own oppression as “naval-
gazing” and “personal therapy”—and certainly “not political.”
They could sometimes admit that women were oppressed (but only by “the system”) and said that we should have
equal pay for equal work, and some other “rights.” But they belittled us no end for trying to bring our so-called
“personal problems” into the public arena—especially “all those body issues” like sex, appearance, and abortion. Our
demands that men share the housework and childcare were likewise deemed a personal problem between a woman and
her individual man. The opposition claimed if women would just “stand up for themselves” and take more
responsibility for their own lives, they wouldn’t need to have an independent movement for women’s liberation. What
personal initiative wouldn’t solve, they said, “the revolution” would take care of if we would just shut up and do our
part. Heaven forbid that we should point out that men benefit from oppressing women.
Recognizing the need to fight male supremacy as a movement instead of blaming the individual woman for her
oppression was where the Pro-Woman Line came in. It challenged the old anti- woman line that used spiritual,
psychological, metaphysical, and pseudo-historical explanations for women’s oppression with a real, materialist
analysis for why women do what we do. (By materialist, I mean in the Marxist materialist (based in reality) sense, not
in the “desire for consumer goods” sense.) Taking the position that “women are messed over, not messed up” took the
focus off individual struggle and put it on group or class struggle, exposing the necessity for an independent WLM to
deal with male supremacy.
The Pro-Woman Line also helped challenge the “sex role theory” of women’s oppression that said women act as
we do because “that’s how we were taught” by “society.” (We all can think of things we were taught to think or do that
we rejected once the forces that kept us thinking or doing them were removed.) It was consciousness-raising that led to
the emergence of the Pro-Woman Line with its scientific explanation based on an analysis of our own experiences and
an examination of “who benefits” from women’s oppression. Understanding that our oppressive situations were not
our own fault—were not, in the parlance of the time, “all in our head”—gave us a lot more courage as well as a more
solid, real foundation on which to fight for liberation.
“The Personal is Political” paper and the theory it contains, was my response in the heat of the battle to the attacks
on us by SCEF and the rest of the radical movement. I think it’s important to realize that the paper came out of struggle
—not just my struggle in SCEF but the struggle of the independent WLM against those who were trying to either stop
it or to push it into directions they found less threatening.
It’s also important to realize the theory the paper contains did not come solely out of my individual brain. It came
out of a movement (the Women’s Liberation Movement) and a specific group within that movement (New York
Radical Women) and a specific group of women within New York Radical Women, sometimes referred to as the Pro-
Woman Line faction.
Of course there were women within New York Radical Women and the broader feminist movement who argued
from the beginning against consciousness raising and claimed women were brainwashed and complicit in their own
oppression, an argument rooted in the sociological and psychological rather than the political. They, too, helped in the
formulation of Pro-Woman Line theory. By arguing the then “standard wisdom” against us, they forced us to clarify
and hone and develop and refine and articulate the new theory so that it could be spread more widely. After New York
Radical Women meetings, the Pro-Woman Line faction would usually end up at Miteras, a nearby restaurant that
served fantastic apple pie a la mode. There we would discuss how the meeting had gone and the ideas that had been
talked about until two or three in the morning, both agreeing with and challenging each other in wonderful, lively
debate among ourselves.
In September of 1968—six months before “The Personal Is Political” was written, the Miss America Protest
brought home to many why the Pro-Woman Line theory we were developing was so important when it came to taking
action outside the group. In another paper entitled “A Critique of the Miss America Protest” I wrote about how the
anti-women faction of the protesters detracted from our message that ALL women are oppressed by beauty standards,
even the contestants. Signs like “Up Against the Wall, Miss America” and “Miss America Is a Big Falsie” made these
contestants out to be our enemy instead of the men and bosses who imposed false beauty standards on women.
Political struggle or debate is the key to good political theory. A theory is just a bunch of words—sometimes
interesting to think about, but just words, nevertheless—until it is tested in real life. Many a theory has delivered
surprises, both positive and negative, when an attempt has been made to put it into practice.
While trying to think how I would change “The Personal Is Political” paper if I could rewrite it with today’s
hindsight, I was actually surprised how well it stands the test of time and experience. There are a few things I would
elaborate on, like my simplistic definition of class, and there are a few statements in the paper that are badly in need of
further development. Perhaps the two that bothers me the most are: “Women are smart not to struggle alone” and “It is
no worse to be in the home than in the rat race of the job world.”
The first statement doesn’t mean that women are smart not to struggle at all, as some have interpreted the Pro-
Woman Line. Women are sometimes smart not to struggle alone when they can’t win and the repercussions are worse
than the oppression. However, individual struggle does sometimes get us some things, and when the WLM is at low
tide or invisible, it may be th best we can do. We need to always be pushing the envelope. Even when the WLM is at
high tide, because our oppression often takes place in isolated circumstances like the home, it still takes individual
action to put into practice what the Movement is fighting for. But individual struggle is always limited; it’s going to
takes an ongoing Movement stronger than any we’ve seen so far to put an end to male supremacy.
On the second point, I have come to agree with Susan B. Anthony that to be free, a woman must have “a purse of
her own.” Women can’t be independent without participating in the public workforce. That also means uniting in a
fight for public childcare and for a restructuring of the workplace with women’s equality in mind, while insisting men
share the housework and childcare on the homefront, so that women don’t end up having to do it all.
I wish we could have anticipated all the ways that “The Personal Is Political” and “The Pro-Woman Line” would
be revised and misused. Like most of the theory created by the Pro-Woman Line radical feminists, these ideas have
been revised or ripped off or even stood on their head and used against their original, radical intent. While it’s
necessary that theories take their knocks in the real world, like everything else, many of us have learned that once they
leave our hands, they need to be defended against revisionism and misuse.
What follows is the original version of “The Personal Is Political” as edited from the memo for the 1970
anthology, Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, edited by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt. —
Carol Hanisch
The Personal Is Political February, 1969

For this paper I want to stick pretty close to an aspect of the Left debate commonly talked about—namely
“therapy” vs. “therapy and politics.” Another name for it is “personal” vs. “political” and it has other names, I suspect,
as it has developed across the country. I haven’t gotten over to visit the New Orleans group yet, but I have been
participating in groups in New York and Gainesville for more than a year. Both of these groups have been called
“therapy” and “personal” groups by women who consider themselves “more political.” So I must speak about so-called
therapy groups from my own experience.
The very word “therapy” is obviously a misnomer if carried to its logical conclusion. Therapy assumes that
someone is sick and that there is a cure, e.g., a personal solution. I am greatly offended that I or any other woman is
thought to need therapy in the first place. Women are messed over, not messed up! We need to change the objective
conditions, not adjust to them. Therapy is adjusting to your bad personal alternative.
We have not done much trying to solve immediate personal problems of women in the group. We’ve mostly
picked topics by two methods: In a small group it is possible for us to take turns bringing questions to the meeting
(like, Which do/did you prefer, a girl or a boy baby or no children, and why? What happens to your relationship if your
man makes more money than you? Less than you?). Then we go around the room answering the questions from our
personal experiences. Everybody talks that way. At the end of the meeting we try to sum up and generalize from
what’s been said and make connections.
I believe at this point, and maybe for a long time to come, that these analytical sessions are a form of political
action. I do not go to these sessions because I need or want to talk about my ”personal problems.” In fact, I would
rather not. As a movement woman, I’ve been pressured to be strong, selfless, other- oriented, sacrificing, and in
general pretty much in control of my own life. To admit to the problems in my life is to be deemed weak. So I want to
be a strong woman, in movement terms, and not admit I have any real problems that I can’t find a personal solution to
(except those directly related to the capitalist system). It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I
really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say.
So the reason I participate in these meetings is not to solve any personal problem. One of the first things we
discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time.
There is only collective action for a collective solution. I went, and I continue to go to these meetings because I have
gotten a political understanding which all my reading, all my “political discussions,” all my “political action,” all my
four- odd years in the movement never gave me. I’ve been forced to take off the rose colored glasses and face the
awful truth about how grim my life really is as a woman. I am getting a gut understanding of everything as opposed to
the esoteric, intellectual understandings and noblesse oblige feelings I had in “other people’s” struggles.
This is not to deny that these sessions have at least two aspects that are therapeutic. I prefer to call even this aspect
“political therapy” as opposed to personal therapy. The most important is getting rid of self- blame. Can you imagine
what would happen if women, blacks, and workers (my definition of worker is anyone who has to work for a living as
opposed to those who don’t. All women are workers) would- stop blaming ourselves for our sad situations? It seems to
me the whole country needs that kind of political therapy. That is what the black movement is doing in its own way.
We shall do it in ours. We are only starting to stop blaming ourselves. We also feel like we are thinking for ourselves
for the first time in our lives. As the cartoon in Lilith puts it, “I’m changing. My mind is growing muscles.” Those who
believe that Marx, Lenin, Engels, Mao, and Ho have the only and last “good word” on the subject and that women
have nothing more to add will, of course, find these groups a waste of time.
The groups that I have been in have also not gotten into “alternative life-styles” or what it means to be a
“liberated” woman. We came early to the conclusion that all alternatives are bad under present conditions. Whether we
live with or without a man, communally or in couples or alone, are married or unmarried, live with other women, go
for free love, celibacy or lesbianism, or any combination, there are only good and bad things about each bad situation.
There is no “more liberated” way; there are only bad alternatives.
This is part of one of the most important theories we are beginning to articulate. We call it “the pro- woman line.”
What it says basically is that women are really neat people. The bad things that are said about us as women are either
myths (women are stupid), tactics women use to struggle individually (women are bitches), or are actually things that
we want to carry into the new society and want men to share too (women are sensitive, emotional). Women as
oppressed people act out of necessity (act dumb in the presence of men), not out of choice. Women have developed
great shuffling techniques for their own survival (look pretty and giggle to get or keep a job or man) which should be
used when necessary until such time as the power of unity can take its place. Women are smart not to struggle alone
(as are blacks and workers). It is no worse to be in the home than in the rat race of the job world. They are both bad.
Women, like blacks, workers, must stop blaming ourselves for our “failures.”
It took us some ten months to get to the point where we could articulate these things and relate them to the lives of
every woman. It’s important from the 5 standpoint of what kind of action we are going to do. When our group first
started, going by majority opinion, we would have been out in the streets demonstrating against marriage, against
having babies, for free love, against women who wore makeup, against housewives, for equality without recognition of
biological differences, and god knows what else. Now we see all these things as what we call “personal solutionary.”
Many of the actions taken by “action” groups have been along these lines. The women who did the anti-woman stuff at
the Miss America Pageant were the ones who were screaming for action without theory. The members of one group
want to set up a private daycare center without any real analysis of what could be done to make it better for little girls,
much less any analysis of how that center hastens the revolution.
That is not to say, of course, that we shouldn’t do action. There may be some very good reasons why women in the
group don’t want to do anything at the moment. One reason that I often have is that this thing is so important to me
that I want to be very sure that we’re doing it the best way we know how, and that it is a “right” action that I feel sure
about. I refuse to go out and “produce” for the movement. We had a lot of conflict in our New York group about
whether or not to do action. When the Miss America Protest was proposed, there was no question but that we wanted
to do, it. I think it was because we all saw how it related to our lives. We felt it was a good action. There were things
wrong with the action, but the basic idea was there.
This has been my experience in groups that are accused of being “therapy” or “personal.” Perhaps certain groups
may well be attempting to do therapy. Maybe the answer is not to put down the method of analyzing from personal
experiences in favor of immediate action, but to figure out what can be done to make it work. Some of us started to
write a handbook about this at one time and never got past the outline. We are working on it again, and hope to have it
out in a month at the latest.
It’s true we all need to learn how to better draw conclusions from the experiences and feelings we talk about and
how to draw all kinds of connections. Some of us haven’t done a very good job of communicating them to others.
One more thing: I think we must listen to what so- called apolitical women have to say—not so we can do a better
job of organizing them but because together we are a mass movement. I think we who work full-time in the movement
tend to become very narrow. What is happening now is that when non- movement women disagree with us, we assume
it’s because they are “apolitical,” not because there might be something wrong with our thinking. Women have left the
movement in droves. The obvious reasons are that we are tired of being sex slaves and doing shitwork for men whose
hypocrisy is so blatant in their political stance of liberation for everybody (else). But there is really a lot more to it than
that. I can’t quite articulate it yet. I think “apolitical” women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as
long as we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,” we will fail. What I am trying to
say is that there are things in the consciousness of “apolitical” women (I find them very political) that are as valid as
any political consciousness we think we have. We should figure out why many women don’t want to do action. Maybe
there is something wrong with the action or something wrong with why we are doing the action or maybe the analysis
of why the action is necessary is not clear enough in our minds.
This is a copyrighted article.
Hanisch on "The Personal Is Political"

http://scholar.alexanderstreet.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1501
From May 26 through June 11, 2006, "The 'Second Wave' and Beyond" hosted a special forum among scholars and
activists led by Carol Hanish and inspired by her article "The Personal is Political" and the new introduction published
here. Please read the discussion (with comments by Carol Hanisch, Judith Ezekiel, Chude [Pam] Allen, Ariel
Dougherty, [Margaret] Rivka Polatnick, Kimberly Springer, Stephanie Gilmore, and Cathy Cade).
[Excerpts from website]
Hello all. Judith Ezekiel, here, . . . . Also, since there's surprisingly little written on the consciousness-raising groups
and process (we are lucky to have a few exceptions such as Pam Chude Allen and Lisa Maria Hogeland with us), could
you describe your first experience? The history of your group(s) and the nuts and bolts of how it worked? And can you
remember how you started to theorize about the personal? Did you debate the term CR as opposed to rap group and
small group?
Various early feminists cited different inspirations for the groups: Celestine Ware cites T-groups of industrial
psychologists and the Human Potential Movement, you and Kathy Amatniek both link it to the revival-style mass
meetings in the Southern Civil Rights Movement where blacks would testify on their personal experience of
oppression. You and Charlotte Bunch-Weeks refer to the process of "speaking bitterness" used in Mao's China.
Charlotte Bunch-Weeks. Others spoke of the "Guatemalan Guerrilla approach" of the SDS. Did you discuss any of
these sources of inspiration before hand, or only afterwards?
Posted by Judith Ezekiel at May 26, 2006
This is Carol Hanisch responding . . . Greeting to all, and especially to Chude Allen, who I knew as Pam in New York
Radical Women (hereafter referred to as NYRW) nearly 40 (YIKES!) years ago. Actually, NYRW was my first major
experience with feminist organizing and thought. I'd read Betty Friedan's FEMININE MYSTIQUE the summer of
1964 while working as a UPI reporter fresh out of college in the Des Moines Bureau (which was also where I
encountered major work discrimination). There had been rumblings of feminism in college (Drake University in Des
Moines), especially over dorm hours for women while the guys had none. Although I found it interesting, Friedan's
book did not strike a major chord with me. As an "Iowa farm girl," I had no contact with suburban American
housewifery except on TV and the movies, and I had no desire to become any kind of housewife, though I assumed I
would marry and have children. Obviously I hadn't thought that one through, but this was a gut reaction, not an
ideological one!
I spent that summer wishing I were in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi where several of my college friends
had gone. (There are a lot of incorrect assumptions that participants in the 1960s movements were mainly from Coast
cities. At least six volunteers from Drake went to Mississippi that I know of, at least three of them were from rural
Iowa.) But I had come out of college laden with loan debt, and since the notes had been co-signed by my parents with
the farm as collateral, I felt responsible to pay some of it off first. In June of 1965, I took a month's leave of absence
from my job and headed for Mississippi--a decision that totally changed the direction of my life. At the end of the
month there I resigned from UPI and stayed nine more.
. . . I moved to NYC from Mississippi in 1966, . . . Shulie Firestone . . . was talking about forming a radical women's
group in New York . . . . I had also gotten back in touch with Kathie and we had been discussing the need for a
women's liberation movement that could do for women what the Black liberation movement was doing for Black
people. . . . I think it was Shulie and Pam (and maybe Anne Koedt -- Chude, maybe you can shed further light on this.)
who actually called the first meeting of what would become NYRW. . . . Several of us had been active in the Civil
Rights Movement in the south, especially in Mississippi. It had inspired us and taught us some very important things
about social change. We had watched Black people bravely get up at community organizing meetings and "testify"
about their oppression and we saw how it helped people unite through the mutual understanding of their situation.
Our experience in the black freedom movement had led us to three important theories:
• First, to change women's oppressive conditions we would need to build a mass grassroots movement for
women's liberation of women willing to take the risks and do the work necessary to achieve progress for
women as a whole---not just for a few tokens.
• Second, that to build such a movement, we would have to have a radical, that is deeply rooted, understanding
of our conditions in order to develop a radical theory to guide our actions and unite us.
• Third, that our own experiences as women were the most reliable source of that information for formulating
and spreading our theory.
Ann Forer, one of the founding members of NYRW, planted the seed for consciousness-raising when we were trying
to decide what to do after the Jeanette Rankin Brigade action in January 1968. Kathie Sarachild later formulated the
theory behind consciousness raising into a program that she distributed at a national WLM conference near Chicago
over Thanksgiving of 1968. She described that critical moment of insight that came from Anne in the Redstockings
book, FEMINIST REVOLUTION:. . . . "And then she went on to give some examples. And I just sat there listening to
her describe all the false ways women have to act: play dumb, always being agreeable, always being nice, not to
mention what we had to do to our bodies with the clothes and shoes we wore, the diets we had to go through, going
blind not wearing glasses, all because men didn't find our real selves, our human freedom, our basic humanity
'attractive.' . . . . we decided on the spot that what we needed, in the words Ann used, was to 'raise our consciousness
some more.'" . . .See www.redstockings.org
We had some pretty heated arguments in the beginning over just how to proceed. Some women weren't
interested in talking; they just wanted to do random actions. Some wanted a group to study books that had been written
about women. But many of us didn't trust all those books, mostly written by men, about how women thought and felt
and why we did what we did. Consciousness raising eventually won out in NYRW. Some women formed other kinds
of groups on the side, but kept coming to our meetings.
We explored many aspects of our lives by sharing our experiences with each other, discussing them, drawing
conclusions and sometimes writing them down. We would begin the meeting with a group of related questions. . . We
usually went around the room, at least initially, to answer the questions. For some, this was a way to keep some
women from monopolizing the discussion and encouraging everyone to speak. Some of us saw it as a way to keep the
discussion on track by returning to the question each time. But in a good CR meeting there was always a lot of back
and forth, sometimes loud and raucous as we nervously recognized our own experience in someone else's or fell into
heated disagreement. There was a lot of knowing laughter and sometimes tears of pain and recognition of "You
too?" . . Women's "bitch sessions" or "rap groups" mushroomed all over the country in 1967-1968. . . .
As for influences . . . I remember Kathie turning up at a NYRW meeting in the SCEF office with a sign that read:
SPEAK PAINS TO RECALL PAINS — the Chinese Revolution
TELL IT LIKE IT IS — the Black Revolution
BITCH, SISTERS, BITCH — the Final Revolution
Carol, Judith and others —
It is difficult to grasp today - but the year 1968 especially - was a political whirlwind. The Tet offensive, the Paris
Uprising (first live event on trans-Atlantic satellite), Mexican government crackdown on students prior to the
Olympics---just to name a few. The air was electric with change. And the air, like today's internet, was instantaneously
communicating new ideas.
In March 1969 when the Redstockings Abortion Speakout took place, 100 or so of us students at Sarah
Lawrence College . .. .were having a sit-in in the administration building. (We demanded the college rescind its 3rd
tuition raise in 4 years making room and board $4,000!!). . . During our eleven day occupation we spent a lot of time in
this parlor in discussion. Heffner's just speaking about the Abortion Speakout had power in the room. And a ripple of
change began to effect others, as more personal experiences bubbled to the surface. A more pivotal moment would
come a few nights later. Bernadine Dorhn and Barbara Reilly from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Vicki
Breitbart (SLC'63) of Community Newsreel (now Third World Newsreel) came to visit
. . . . .basement meeting hall of the Washington Square Methodist Church . .. Several hundred women came. . .
. . It was consciousness raising and action combined We began to formulate activities---an action here, a newspaper,
day care, and more. I remember feeling so empowered by the possibilities among the women; and then I would get into
the subway and return to the Weatherman collective in Brooklyn which I recently joined. By Fall my "thirteen
minutes" with Weatherman were over. At a meeting of the city-wide Women's Liberation Sheila Paige and I called to
form a film "collective". The roots of Women Make Movies are from those sessions.
.......to be continued...... Ariel Dougherty

Posted by Ariel Dougherty at May 27, 2006
This recent discussion is by Becky Thompson in her 2002 article "Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology
of Second Wave Feminism." . . . ."[1] Multiracial feminism requires women to add another level of awareness-to
stretch the adage from 'The Personal Is Political' to, in the words of antiracist activist Anne Braden, 'The Personal is
Political and the Political is Personal.' [2] Many issues that have been relegated to the private sphereare, in fact, deeply
political. [3] At the same time, many political issues need to be personally committed to-whether you have been
victimized by those issues or not. [4] In other words, you don't have to be part of a subordinated group to know an
injustice is wrong and to stand against it. [5] White women need not be victims of racism to recognize it is wrong and
stand up against it. [6] Unless that is done, white women will never understand how they support racism. [7] If the only
issues that feminists deem political are those they have experienced personally, their frame of reference is destined to
be narrowly defined by their own lived experience(pp. 551-552).” . .. .I do perceive, along with Thompson, a
problematic history in which many white women related to the slogan or used the slogan in ways that facilitated their
not taking an active stand against racism and not developing a sufficiently multiracial understanding of feminism.
At times I don't know how to reconcile my different reactions when it comes to the Women's Liberation Movement
and racism. It seems to me at that point in history, the women who chose to focus primarily on sexism and male
supremacy made essential contributions to developing and deepening the understanding of women's oppression, in
ways that benefited all women. Yet the women who made that choice tended to be white women, and the ideas and
actions they developed reflected their "racial" identity in ways that were problematic and contributed to racism in the
white sectors of the movement and to the racial divides in the women's movement as a whole. I'm trying to articulate
the contradiction that focusing more narrowly on sexism and not as much on racism and classism allowed new, more
radically feminist ideas to emerge, and yet focusing on sexism also seemed in some ways to distort the ideas of
feminism in ways that at worst, facilitated racism and classism and at minimum, did not adequately address the
interactions of sexism with racism and classism. This same contradiction seems to me to arise with the slogan and idea
that "Sisterhood Is Powerful." .. … I think work still needs to be done in addressing the contradictions embodied in late
'60s radical feminism--i.e., appreciating how vital and cutting-edge it was for women's liberation and understanding
also in what ways it was problematic. Most descriptions of radical feminism that I read in books about feminism and
the women's movement I think do not accurately characterize or do justice to the radical feminism of the '60s, in ways
similar to Thompson's second paragraph. …
Posted by M. Rivka Polatnick at May 31, 2006
…. I'm curious about how (in the essay and here) black women get erased in the blacks/women analogy. But, rather
than flatten out the reason for this as racism, I'm hoping you can talk bit about your relationship to black women in the
Movement while you were in Mississippi, particularly any in leadership positions on local projects. Perhaps there are
nuances of exclusion or omission that get overlooked with assumptions about attitudes toward race.
Posted by Kimberly Springer at May 31, 2006
. . ..I find the way the term "radical feminism" has been used in the historiography of the last decade or so more than
problematic. It has been used in many books to mean everything (or, for some authors, at least everything white) but
liberal feminism of the 1960s and 70s. It claims as its own everything written by women who use the term "radical"
(meaning more or less leftist, or radical+feminist, not radical-feminist). It generaly leaves out, or separates out entirely,
socialist feminism. And it portrays an either-or movement that doesn't reflect what I observed. I've pushed for using
the term "liberationist" for this period, even if there are distinct political philosophies and organizations that
emerge. . . . . A case can be made for reclaiming the appellation "radical" to refer to all of women's liberation;
however given the usage as a specific current in the movement, I feel that doing so inevitably flattens out the
movement. It wittingly or unwittingly takes part in the radical feminist/politico and other such debates and potentially
allows supporters of the specific current to lay claim to all that liberationists have done."
. . . . In Dayton, a few Black women came to a few CR group meetings, but didn't stay. They told their white friends
and comrades in the group that they were too busy with other things. In the second generation or microcohort of the
mid-70s, two Black women organized a series of CR groups for Black women only, at first in the Women's Center, and
later in Black churches and they were a resounding success, for the same reasons given in Chude Pam Allen's Free
Space and other white feminist's writings. However the move out of the Women's Center happened because of lack of
sensitivity of white feminists in the Center.
Hello, this is Chude Pam Allen. . . I want to start by thanking you, Carol, for writing the introduction. . . . I would add
that at the beginning, most of us were activists. I took it for granted that we were for self-determination for oppressed
peoples everywhere and that our commitment to understanding our own oppression fit into this larger worldwide
struggle. I assumed we understood that capitalism was a cruel, exploitative system that in essence was anti-life.
I thought that women could start with their personal lives and would move automatically to placing themselves in
the larger historical and worldwide context. In 1970 I sent a copy of my pamphlet, "Free Space, A Perspective on the
Small Group in Women's Liberation," to Pat Robinson of the Mt. Vernon New Rochelle black women's group. She
wrote back that she hoped I was right that we could start with the personal and reach a radical understanding of the
world. But she didn't think so. Later she wrote that she thought "The political is personal" was a more useful
formulation.
Yet, in the fall of 1967, it was radical to be in a room with just women. You didn't get into that room without
moving through opposition. Women as well as men said we shouldn't be meeting. When Schulamith Firestone and I
held that first meeting at my apartment in NYC in the fall of 1967, one woman came to tell us we shouldn't meet. Her
objections dominated the meeting. She wouldn't let up. The rest of us were clear we wanted to meet. . . Happily that
woman didn't come back to our second meeting.
We were mostly white and mostly college educated in the early women's liberation groups. We had no choice but to
use our own lives as the raw data for developing an analysis of sexism. And in those early years when the paradigm
was black white, I know a lot of us were waiting for black women to tell us the details of their lives. To help us flesh
out our understanding. A lot of us always knew we couldn't supply the whole picture. We knew that people with
privilege never have all the information. I was thrilled when not only black women, but also Asian women and Latinas
shared their stories and analyses.
Still, for those of us who were white, white supremacy was our Achilles heel. The ideology of white supremacy
puts white people at the center. It encourages us to think our experiences are primary and everyone else's is an
addition. We were generalizing from a small sample of experiences and it was very hard to remember we weren't
speaking for everyone.
I'm an inductive thinker. I move from personal experiences to trying to make sense of them in a larger context. I
was and am an advocate of women trying to understand their lives by telling the truth about how it really is. I wouldn't
want to give up "The personal is political." I still find it useful.
What, then, encourages us to remember our experiences aren't enough for understanding the full picture of how
patriarchy affects women throughout the world and how capitalist penetration has distorted the economies in which
they live? For those of us who are white, and perhaps for anyone living within the U.S., I can see that we needed to
keep asking the question, "How do our personal experiences obscure the larger picture?" Not just, how do they fit into
the larger picture, but how do they distort or hide a larger truth?
. . . . I think Pat Robinson and the Mt. Vernon, New Rochelle women are important for understanding the relationships
between black and white women in those early years. I consider Pat a mentor. I was always against the blacks/women
analogy. I wrote a paper opposing the analogy in January 1968 and read it at one of the NY meetings. I don't think I
understood the reasons the white women were using it, however. Years later Rivka told me she thought the white
women were trying to get legitimacy. I think she's right and I realize now how important it was to me that Pat
Robinson came to see me in December 1967 to ask about our group. She didn't tell me we shouldn't be meeting. She
encouraged me to be conscious of class.
Regarding the southern freedom struggle, I do recommend the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement website
discussion on "Women and men in the Movement." (www.crmvet.org). …
Posted by Chude Pam Allen at May 31, 2006
…. your question of "How do our personal experiences obscure the larger picture" and more particularly, negate the
experiences of others, outside of our vistas. In CR groups, the idea was not originally to validate everything we did
(ok, you might understand why a woman ended up with an abusive man, but not to the extent of encouraging her to
stay), but to build that collage of experiences, and to supplement it, confront it with the experiences of others through
their writings. So an all-white, antiracist CR group tried to include Black women's experiences via personal
discussions and writings, but this part, I believe, failed. Or at least it did not transmit any antiracist consciousness
beyond the generation/cohort that had been involved in Civil Rights and/or Black Power. As much as I believe that
CR was important, crucial, revolutionary, I don't think it was good at extending significantly beyond the experiences of
the women involved.
As far as the use of the Black-woman analogy, indeed, it made Black women invisible and hurtled them into a black
hole, a no-woman's-land that defies telling, that Kimberle Crenshaw so much more eloquently describes. Yet it was
indeed so powerful as a means of not only gaining legitimacy and making certain people see what white feminists
meant.
. . . . To me, "liberal feminism" = NOW, and NOW = Betty Friedan, and a smattering of other older, work-within-the-
system women who comprised the original board. I wouldn't call all NOW feminists radical by any stretch, but many
in the chapters were, and they had very radical perspectives on and actions for a number of things. To me, the
liberal/radical dichotomy flattens out the numerous and varied feminist actions, perspectives, goals, outcomes,
strategies, and viewpoints. . . . . So I am quite intrigued by what to do with all of these labels.
. . . In today's academic climate, black studies and women's studies are often pitted against one another, and
many suggest informally that it has been that way. Both (as well as other studies programs) came out of radical
political activism among academics -- and shook up the ol' ivory tower -- but I wonder the extent to which such
programs were pitted one against the other. . . .
Posted by Stephanie Gilmore at Jun 01, 2006
I have to admit to being a bit flabbergasted by the direction of this discussion of "The Personal Is Political" as racist
and/or excluding Black women. . . .I did run into it personally a few years ago when a Women's Studies student
writing her thesis on Redstockings asked to interview me. In preparation I asked to see an outline of what she was
planning to write about. Her thesis was that Redstockings was a single Issue group which, by choosing to focus mainly
on abortion, was an example of the racism of the early WLM. It wasn't stated that bluntly, but that was the essence.
When I tried to explain to her that she was wrong on both counts, she got very defensive and huffy. When she told me
that since I had been a mere biased participant and she was the impartial scholar more qualified to interpret history, I
decided not to do the interview. The facts didn't matter to her; she would put her own spin on it.
I think part of the problem, not only with WL but also with Black liberation and the Left, is that they have
become too centered in the academy. It's where a good many former activists fled when the '60s movements began to
fall apart. . . . what I see is a great disconnect to the discussions going on there and the on-the-ground ongoing
organizing and theory work, limited as it may be in today's anti-radical, anti-activist climate. The old saying about
"angels dancing on the head of a pin" comes to mind, but I think it's much more insidious than that.
I can't help but wonder from whom this attack on the WLM from within the academy and other intellectuals
comes from and why. I see it as part of the political attack to discredit the radicalism that rendered such change in the
1960s and early 1970s. Some seem to be building their careers on this stuff. In feminism, advocates claim that they
"liberated" (or at least advanced) the early WLM from its terrible racism and classism. In some cases this seems to be a
substitute for actual involvement themselves in any movement organizing activity. Organizing words on a page is one
thing; organizing real people quite another. If they were in the fray instead of critiquing it from above it all, perhaps
they would see that such false theory actually feeds the separatism that already exists by spreading untruths and rumors
about women's liberation. It also makes it more difficult for us to do real self-criticism on the issue. There is
admittedly a lot to work out, but it won't happen in an atmosphere of "Gotcha." Not all mistakes of a racial nature are
racism. Some are just mistakes of ignorance, like the white women at the Sandy Springs Convention who thought
Black women have no history of feminism and therefore were wanted to exclude them because they were afraid their
only interest would be in anti-racism. Somebody did a good job of burying Black feminist history, too.
The attack on us has been so successful in large part because the truth is actually the opposite of what they
claim. That is, we WERE and STILL ARE so concerned about race and class that we easily fall into a paralyzing state
of angst over it that PRECLUDES doing the real work of organizing anything that will actually be effective in pulling
down the INSTITUTIONAL lynchpins of male supremacy OR racism and capitalism. The new "multiracial feminists"
seem to rarely engage with the various institutional basis for oppression.
When I read the charge that the WLM was only "secondarily concerned with racism" I want to say, "Of
course, it's the WOMEN'S liberation movement, stupid." I can't imagine anyone complaining that the Black movement
is only "secondarily concerned with feminism." The old bugaboo that women must always put their own needs last is
still alive and well in 2006. Oppressed groups need organizations to represent their interests. The struggle to end
racism needs its own organizations to do that just as the struggle to end male supremacy does or the struggle to end
capitalism does. At the same time, these organizations have a responsibility to make equality within the organization as
complete as possible.
….
"Our inability to form integrated groups was based in the reality of the time?that there was a great surge of Black
Nationalism taking place that prevented it. Black women were under enormous pressure, in many cases, to stay away
from those "white women's groups." They also were understandably quite reluctant to criticize black men in the
presence of white women who often did not fully understand their dilemma. We had to accept this as a fact of life,
though at the same time we tried to make common cause whenever we could. For example, When I was organizing for
women's liberation in Gainesville, Florida in the early 1970s, a judge who had made some very horrendous racist and
sexist rulings was up for appointment to a U.S. District Court. Women's liberation joined with the local black
liberation organizations and SDS and held marches and rallies and protested his appointment from all angles. I think
we helped stop his appointment and the joint action was able to forge bonds between the groups at a period of intense
Black nationalism. I think it worked because each group was clear and upfront about why it opposed this judge and
none tried to jump in front of everybody else and claim the spotlight. We live in a very opportunistic society and there
is opportunism and competition in movements as well. . . .That certainly plagued the movement in the 1960s and it still
exists today. …
"… Gainesville Women's Liberation to meet with its Black women's caucus. It was a very interesting meeting
in which we discovered that not only were we dealing with many of the same male supremacist problems, but that our
demands for solving them were more similar than different. The meeting confirmed our belief that black women were
perfectly capable of taking care of business, whether inside of, or separate from, our so-called white groups. . .
"The fact is that we still live in a racist and highly segregated society and women's liberation cannot solve that
problem single-handedly. The same women who accuse us of being racist will heatedly criticize Stokely Carmichael
for his semi-public off the cuff comment that "the position of the women in SNCC is prone" while not bothering to
mention a white Abby Hoffman's more public and equally sexist remark that "The only alliance I would make with the
women's liberation movement is in bed." I should tell you that not only did Stokely Carmichael do dishes in the homes
that hosted civil rights workers in Mississippi, his Black power theory had a profound and positive influence on our
own theory. Many men, black and white, have supported women's struggle through the centuries."
Posted by Carol Hanisch at Jun 01, 2006
This is Chude again. I too get angry when I feel the charge of racism is used to discount and trash the Women's
Liberation Movement. It's like being slapped in the face. . . .In 2004 I wrote a letter to a young white activist, who'd
written off both the Woman Suffrage Movement and Women's Liberation in an article. I wrote 8 drafts! I needed to
get past my anger so that I could try to place us in the context of our times. . . I never supported separating the struggle
against racism from the struggle against sexism and once I understood class, the bourgeois class structure. I don't see
how you can. It's all connected. (I see homophobia as part of sexism.) If the personal is political, then who you are
and how you were raised encompasses all of it. I think our job was and is to pay attention to how our privileges distort
our point of view. That's true for women of color as well as white women.. . . I don't think those of us who are white
need to be defensive about why women of color didn't join WL groups in large numbers. . . .Given how much we were
disdained and attacked by both the white and black leftists for challenging patriarchy, this commitment to speak our
truth took courage and commitment. It was also an affirmation of our humanity." . . .I think that issue of respect is so
important. But I have a question about how you see survival choices as being different from opportunism. Look at the
universities now. It would seem that in some women's studies classes white women students need to dismiss us as
racist in order to get good marks.
Posted by Chude Pam Allen at Jun 01, 2006
Carol Hanisch writing. Chude, you bring up a very important question about survival choices and opportunism. It
comes up in many forms and I see it as one of the "burning questions" still to be answered.
It's so often brought up in terms of the appearance issue and the claim among some (especially young)
feminists that this emphasis on sexiness is "empowering" for women, while others claim that it only further "raises the
bar" and that it goes backward, at least as far as Jezzabel! There is also a class and race aspect to this as "dress up"
doesn't come cheap and the emphasis on appearance seems to deepen the color divide.
I cringe to recall a discussion with a white mother who claimed black women were responsible for the sexiness
of the way young white women dress as it stems from the videos on MTV. Hello: ever seen Madonna, et al. And
there's the capitalist angle that soft porn is so lucrative.
I do see feminists using The Pro-Woman line as justification for not struggling with this. On the other hand, I
don't think women should feel a need to "go around in overalls and combat boots to be a considered a feminist" as they
often put it. How does one determine where the line should be drawn. I would really like to hear from others on this.
This from Cathy Cade: My first Women's Liberation meeting was in New Orleans in 1967. Most of us attending those
first meetings were white and knew each other from having worked in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. That
would be about 5 of us; plus there was a local Black woman and two white sisters who'd grown up in Louisiana who
owned a bookstore in New Orleans.
At one of the first meetings the question was raised whether given the great needs in the Black community was
it right for us to be meeting to focus on our needs. How great were our needs after all? Two of the women helping us
get together and raising this question with real anguish were also new mothers no longer acting as activists in the way
that they had in the past. They were mothers of daughters.
After the meeting at one of our houses we were hanging out with each other and our male friends. Informally
we began to talk and I noticed that each woman who had been in the movement had experienced considerable teasing
about going to this women's meeting from the men in our lives. It was this realization of what we went through to just
go to a meeting that helped me decide that yes, this was important, the personal is political.
It wasn't long before I realized that meeting in this women's group and thinking about women's liberation
meant that now I, as a white woman, was fighting oppression grounded in my own experience---a much more solid
place from which to fight. I've continued to do anti-racist and feminist work, ever grateful for a grounded place from
which to fight.
Posted by Stephanie Gilmore at Jun 02, 2006
Hi, it's Rivka again. . . .It's been good to hear how you have responded to the criticism that the WLM was white and
middle-class. First of all, I want to differ a little with Chude's interpretation of what I said to her, some years back,
concerning why many white feminists used the woman/black analogy. I wasn't really saying that "the white women
were trying to get legitimacy." Rather, I would emphasize how difficult it was initially to get people to think about
relations between women and men in political terms at all. The idea seemed ludicrous to many and was ridiculed by
leftists (male and female) as well as non-leftists.
In general, people's thinking then still was so pervaded by ideas that women and men simply were "different," as
ordained by nature or by "God," and "vive le difference!" Some people openly equated women's "difference" with
inferiority, while others gushed about "complementary" roles. These ideas were deeply ingrained in most of our
psyches as well; hence the need to do intensive consciousness-raising for ourselves as well as for the public. (As I
recall, Kathie Sarachild deemed the latter "consciousness organizing.") As we increasingly saw similarities between
the dynamics of sexism and racism, the powerful political analysis developed by the Civil Rights (and then Black
Power) Movement became an important tool for trying to shift consciousness toward understanding women's status in
terms of an institutionalized system of male domination. . . . My own experience was that the C-R process from the
personal to the political did have a broader radicalizing and politicizing effect on me as well as some of the other white
women I knew then, from both middle-class and working-class backgrounds. I could relate to Cathy's comments of
getting a firm ground from which to fight on multiple fronts. I also knew white, middle-class women who were not
really radicalized and politicized in a broader way, though I think they did not go through as intensive a process of C-R
as many of us did in the early days.
I think the concepts "the personal is political" and "sisterhood is powerful" (and all they entailed) were important
tools for women in different ethnic groups and class positions. But, along the lines of what Carol said, those concepts
couldn't by themselves solve the problem of "a racist and highly segregated society."
Let me say a bit about "sisterhood is powerful." I can't put my hands on it now, but at the beginning of the '70s, a
group of Asian American women in Berkeley, CA (students and non-students) put out a journal on Asian women that
included one article in which the author expressed how wonderful it was to be feeling the power of sisterhood, in
relation to other Asian women. With regard to sisterhood being powerful across racial/ethnic, class and other divides,
some of the untold story of the early WLM and ongoing women's movement is the remarkable extent to which women
did cooperate across those lines in so many ways and in so many contexts to make remarkable strides in advancing
women's liberation. That does not negate the other side of the story: that many factors including racism, ignorance,
fear, anger, insensitivity, separatism, segregation, cultural differences, ethnic pride and loyalty, classism, homophobia,
different priorities and commitments, divisive strategies employed by men, historical circumstances, etc. kept women
from coming together more powerfully across those divides. . . .
Posted by M. Rivka Polatnick at Jun 03, 2006
……
Ariel, here, again. . . . But I am afraid, today, the broader issues of sexism in our society...are not on that table still
for discussion. Racism is, because communities of color have insisted, kept it there, and pushed at the dialogue. But
we women, for many reasons, have allowed our agenda to slip off the table. And so, sexism, except in rape cases,
and a few other items that ebb and flow from the news, like trafficing in India, slip below the public radar . . . In the
absolutely HUGE amount of media activism today....IndyMedia etc etc.....there is almost NO coverage of women's
issues... I mean NONE. So we are at an odd political, historic moment....where/when young media activist need to
come together as women, in women only groups and re explore, redefine, hold new consciousness raising sessions, and
some of them identify women's issues to document..... Or, if they don't.....??? Our issues, feminist issues will slip
further underneath the table. …
Posted by Judith Ezekiel at Jun 04, 2006
. . . . the personal has become public, and in some cases maybe even collectivized, but not political. And it is
currently, I believe, being depoliticized and re-privatized.. . . I think of how so many of my female students believe
that they will create egalitarian couples; they would never do all the housework and child-raising, oh no. They think
they will be able to do this despite the hostile culture around them and in isolation from a social movement. So even if
these students have a feminist take on housework, they do not understand it as fully political since they believe that it
can be changed individually: in other words; force of character will transform what, even if they say it's systemic, is
understood as a bad attitude and not a truly Political phenomenon that must be changed through collective struggle.
Furthermore, and this links to the question of the Culture Wars, huge numbers of people care enormously, and
mobilize politically around what used to be thought of as personal, most obviously abortion and reproduction, (gay)
marriage, but also other issues of sexual politics. Despite the fact that millions now see these as public, important
issues, they are constantly being demoted as less important than the real political (and economic) issues of work,
unemployment, etc... in particular by liberals. . . .
Posted by Judith Ezekiel at Jun 04, 2006 17:31 | Permalink
This is Chude Pam Allen: . .. . This may seem a small thing, but Cathy Cade's memory of self-questioning (should
we be meeting, are our problems really important, etc.) is a reflection, I believe, of timing as well as the fact that those
women had been active in the Southern Freedom Movement. Consciousness was changing. By the time I discovered
in the fall of 1967 that I wasn't the only woman in the U.S. thinking about women, I had no question I wanted to meet
with other women, alone, without men. That is the point, after all. We wanted to meet without men. We wanted to
talk to each other and share without their input, control or containment. We were challenged and ridiculed and, as
Cathy Cade said in her entry, we began to discover that almost the exact same words were used. And I'm beginning to
wonder if the opposition itself helped us develop that understanding that the personal is political?
In those early years, then, there was the question of women meeting by themselves without men and the question of
building an independent women's liberation movement. That is, was the group to be a caucus with allegiance to a
mixed male-female group? When I read Carols introduction to the Personal Is Political paper, it seemed to me the
charge that the women's groups "were just therapy," reflect the real discomfort some women and men had about an
independent movement, not just the issue of women meeting alone. And Carol's paper reflects how seriously we took
ourselves as an independent movement as well as the importance of consciousness raising. Do you agree, Carol?
This is Carol. . . . There were a number of reasons women wanted to meet separately from men. As Pam pointed out,
some wanted to build an independent WLM and some wanted to be a caucus in the broader movement. Some declared
they wanted a separate women's group to fight capitalism (New Women in NYC, for example). The common thread
was that we were ALL fed up by how women were treated by men. Some focused first on the mistreatment within the
movement (SDS for example) and started out as caucuses or in direct response to that experience. Some immediately
focused more broadly on bringing a radical feminist analysis to society as whole. (I think this was due to a large extent
to how deeply involved the women in the group were in the New Left. In NYRW, for example, that tie was looser than
in many other groups, and many had experience in the workforce beyond the academy. We also had "Old Left"
influences, positive as well as negative.) Some women wanted separatist groups for self development and some saw it
more like a union situation where the workers needed to be out of the earshot. And many were a mixture of the above.
As I recall it, the group Dottie Zellner was in New Orleans was concerned mostly with schools and peace. They were
an all women's group, but not a Women's Liberation group. . . .
This is Chude posting an email from Cathy Cade She is responding to: "I wonder if the opposition itself helped us
develop that understanding that the personal is political?" Cathy wrote, "That's exactly my point. Isn't that clear? The
New Orleans group was independent, not a caucus of any group." So from Cathy Cade's perspective then, yes, the New
Orleans group does qualify as one of the earliest, if not the earliest, women's group.
Now I, Chude, have a new question. Is there a distinction to be made between being part of an independent
women's group and wanting to build a movement? It is so clear in Carol's "Personal Is Political" piece that she is
writing with the consciousness not only of being part of a movement, but wanting to build one. That's how I felt.
Posted by Chude Pam Allen at Jun 06, 2006 15:03 | Permalink
I think the question is "an independent women's group for what?" Independent women's groups already existed, like
Women's Strike for Peace. The question about the N.O. groups is what was its purpose, not just its composition. At the
time we started the WLM, NOW was a mixed male/female group fighting for equality, but it was still mostly a
lobbying group with limited membership. They became a mass membership group only after the WLM began and
showed the way. And they never had the guts or the will to kick out the men, though I know for a fact that a lot of
them wanted to. What we did in NYRW was an independent women's group wanting to build a Women's Liberation
Movement to deal with male supremacy. That was what was new. I don't know if the New Orleans groups was doing
the same thing.
Carol here. . . . An important ingredient to this, as Judith pointed out, was the influence of the counterculture, which to
a large extent, was an "opting out" of fighting the system. Even the communes that were set up were mostly
established as retreats rather than as serious challenges to the status quo. It went from "me" to "me and mine" but never
to "me and mine and everybody else too." Given the strength of the capitalist culture of rugged individualism and its
entrepreneurial outlook in the U.S., perhaps it could not have been otherwise. In the end, most of these communes met
a bitter end or withered away, but the ideology of "me and mine" lives on.
I think another factor was the growing and disheartening defeats of so many of the movements for major social
change, not only in the U.S. but around the world. The defeat of the WLM (and I mean "defeated," not "dead") took
place in this context. Many of our authentic leaders and activists were/are AWOL, wounded, burned out, marginalized,
or backed into single issue organizing. There is little unity among the old guard and not much willingness to have the
hard conversations that it would take to revitalize the movement or even fight to disperse ideas, old and new.
….
On a related by slightly different point, I recently came across this quote from a speech by Daniel Singer at the 1997
Socialist Scholars Conference ." (It's at www.monthlyreview.org under the title, "Why Marxism? in the November
1997 issue) . . . .it does seem from both my reading and experience that there are many who are "into fragmentation as
a permanent fact of life and make a virtue of division." Th[e latter] would be those who love to talk about the divisions
in the WLM while ignoring the basic uniting factor of male supremacy, which was what brought us together in a
complex and amazing unity across all kinds of divides. . . . Those busy "deconstructing" the WLM seem to take great
pleasure in its destruction, just as we found great joy in building it. Why? Can somebody please explain what's going
on there?
Rivka here again . . .. it's hard to convey to those who've grown up after the impact of the WLM what a low level of
consciousness there was initially concerning relations between women and men as something political, as a real and
serious issue of inequality and injustice, with severe consequences in many areas of our lives. . . . Women who took up
the WL cause were mocked and their concerns trivialized; yet, at another level, those with a stake in male supremacy
did sense a real threat to their power. This added the element of aggressive hostility to the trivializing responses, a
powerful and confusing mix for some of us on the receiving end, who were struggling to develop and "hold on to" a
new consciousness and a new courage to stand up to the deeply embedded system of male supremacy, supported by
virtually every institution in the society. (Our consciousness-raising sessions and groups gave us the power and support
to be able to do this.)
Furthermore, people on the left who didn't yet truly grasp the WL issue of sexism (or who were resistant to it or saw
it as not very important) kept trying to shift our focus, our discussions, our analyses, and our actions back to class and
race, which was more established and familiar ground for them. The WL cause needed space to emerge and grow so
that it could take its place on the left-wing agenda.
I felt that those of us focusing mainly on addressing male supremacy were making an important contribution to
liberation struggles in general, because we were putting great effort into bringing forth an important "piece of the
puzzle" of oppression, without which the other social justice movements could not be successful.
It seemed to me at the time that white women generally were more able to put sustained effort into launching the
women's liberation cause (which required a sustained focus and effort) than were most women of color activists, who
were dealing with an array of political commitments, pressures and counter-pressures that pulled them in many
directions. A lot of the early white women's liberationists also had other political commitments, but I still felt that we
had the "luxury" of making the WL cause primary in our lives. I thought that we were in the best position to pursue a
militant and radical feminism (what that meant to me is another whole discussion), whereas many women of color had
to (or chose to) "pull their punches" in some ways, at least publicly, when it came to taking on male supremacy "whole
hog." I remember attending what I think was a Young Lords (Puerto Rican movement) rally, at which a woman or two
in that organization spoke about women's liberation, but it seemed to me they were constrained by their position and
the context from fully voicing the dimensions of the problem of sexism. There seemed to me to be limits on what they
could address and how they could address it.
. . . . Yet I also was aware of women of color who were serving on "front lines" of antisexist struggle, as individuals
and in groups. Examples of the latter in the NYC area were welfare rights organizations, the Black Women's Alliance
(which became the Third World Women's Alliance), and the Black Women's Liberation group who wrote the powerful
defense of Black women's right to use birth control (on which I did research, much later). They all certainly got flak
too.
. . . .I myself, by the latter 1970s, had become more and more dissatisfied with working for women's liberation
in predominantly or exclusively white groups. In the Bay Area, I took part in various efforts to understand more deeply
the ways in which overt, subtle, and institutionalized racism affected the women's movement and Women's Studies
(and everything else), and I also began to do more in the way of personal and group antiracist actions.
After a set of experiences involving intersections of sex, race, and class, I decided to seek out organizations doing
feminist work that were not predominantly white. I initially joined the Coalition to Fight Infant Mortality (in Oakland)
and later participated in the Women's Economic Agenda Project based in Oakland and tried to be a supporter/ally of
such organizations as the Women of Color Resource Center and Asian Immigrant Women Advocates. (By then I was
more of a Women's Studies academic than an activist, but one who kept up my ties to activist groups and encouraged
my students' activism.) I learned a lot by participating in these groups and tried to reflect this in the Sociology Ph.D.
dissertation I did in the early '80s, which was a comparative case study of two pioneering '60s WL groups in the NYC
area that differed in their racial/ethnic and class composition: the Mount Vernon/New Rochelle Black Women's
Liberation group (called in some contexts "Pat Robinson and Group) and New York Radical Women (plus some of its
"radical feminist" successor groups). I tried to analyze the differences in their approaches to women's liberation (i.e., in
their theories, strategies, and actions). I wasn't fully happy with what I produced and haven't yet revised it to my
satisfaction, but I did publish two articles derived from it (see my profile). As someone who participated in NYRW
and "radical feminist" circles, I was attempting, in part, to do a constructive, retrospective "criticism" (and self-
criticism) of how those groups approached race and class in the context of their women's liberation work. But I found
it difficult to avoid drifting into a mode of criticism of the predominantly white (and majority middle-class) groups that
seemed tinged with an ahistorical self-righteous-sounding hindsight and not that constructive. Also, I fell into the
tendency that Carol identified in her last post of focusing too much on divisions within the white WLM circles..
Posted by M. Rivka Polatnick at Jun 11, 2006
This is Chude Pam Allen. Can we still post to this discussion?

Chude, absolutely, we should continue. But we've moved this onto the open space of the site. Follow this link to go to
the new space for the discussion.
Posted by Judith Ezekiel at Jun 18, 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Alexander Street Press, LLC

Contradictions 2007

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SF Freedom Summer School

August 11th, 2007

Contradictions within the Movement—and

• The Personal Is Political by Carol Hanisch (1969) with 2006 Introduction

• Hanisch on "The Personal Is Political" an Internet Discussion

Recommended from SFFS media library:

SEX AND CASTE: A KIND OF MEMO

The Personal Is Political by Carol Hanisch

The Personal Is Political February, 1969

Hanisch on "The Personal Is Political"

[Excerpts from website]

Posted by Judith Ezekiel at May 27, 2006

Carol, Judith and others —

.......to be continued...... Ariel Dougherty

This is Chude Pam Allen. Can we still post to this discussion?

Copyright © 2006 by Alexander Street Press, LLC

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