EDITORIAL

If it is easy to think about the larger questions at the best of times, then these may not be the best of times. One of the larger questions is the present state/future/successes/failures of the Women's Libertion Movement. So it shouldn't be surprising that more than a few but less than enough feminists are attempting to analyze our own time, the second decade of the second wave of the struggle of American women to eliminate male domination in this century. It is true that, recently, more articles on the status of the WLM are appearing in feminist publications and

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elsewhere. However, many of the problems currently being discussed were raised four or more years ago.

In "Requiem for the Women's Movement" (Harper's Magazine, February, 1976), Veronica Geng cites some of the reasons feminists used to account for the turmoil within the WLM in the mid-1970's:

The movement had been taken over by liberals, by lesbians, by **crazies," by socialists; had been disrupted by government agents, by leftist provocateurs; had fallen prey to the economic crisis, to a "*cultural lurch to the right"; had disdained the needs and participation of the poor, working class, and minority women, had collided with the fears of "ordinary" women.

Many of those explanations were as plausible in the mid-1970's as they are today. But, taken together, they do not explain the failure of the WLM to generate a mass

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U.S. Aids Chilean Dictatorship.. Letters...

SWP Runs Woman for Vice President......

Commentary

Nuclear Industry Launches Propaganda Blitz.. Clara Fraser: Fighting City Hall..

Network..

Local

Clio's Musings.

Classified Ads....

Features

Find It Fastest...

back cover

Chilean Women in Resistance and Exile. Why Feminists Must Fight the KKK...

What's Happening.

Land Project Invites Women..

Cover Photo by M. B. Camp

What She Wants

14-15

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movement and move closer to its goal, the elimination of male domination. Geng suggests that the mid-1970's WLM became disoriented. It began to lose its grasp of the essential insight of feminism: men, in individual relations and as a group, oppress women. Conspicuous by its absence in the above list of reasons for the WLM's disarray is male domination, the root of feminism.

In a more recent article, Ellen Willis (The Village Voice, April 28, 1980) raised the bugaboo: How can women, as a group already divided by race, class and sexual preference and on other lines, converge into a mass women's liberation movement? Willis, drawing from a discussion of Michele Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, illustrates the fundamental problem. Many Black feminists are caught in the space between male domination and white oppression. To admit male domination is to disparage Black unity as to reject the feminist analysis of male domination is to negate the basis for a mass women's liberation movement. Willis concludes that in the current conservative climate feminists

...can't afford not to be radical. If we abandon the ideas that inspired women to organize in the first place, we will undermine our collective consciousness and destroy the basis for even a superficial unity. It would be a bitter irony if in trying to bury our differences we were to bury feminism itself.

Brooke, in "The State of Feminism" (off our backs, February, 1980) also recognizes that the WLM must reassert that male domination is the root of feminism, but from a different perspective. Brooke outlines the divisions within the current WLM. The split between Freidaninspired reformists and deBeauvoir-based radical feminists, who understand feminism as a method to restructure the relations between women and men, is a familiar one. There are other trends. Brooke cites the MS. theory of feminism-. by-self-improvement, "the idea that women are to blame * for our own oppression". Then there is cultural feminism, "the view that women can be freed by participating in an alternative women's culture". In addition, there is separatism by sexual preference lesbian and heterosexual. Is the extent to which we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in sectarian positions a measure of the tenuousness of our commitment to the elimination of male domination? Brooke raises the fundamental question: How are we to confront the real differences among us if our vision has become so blurred that we no longer recognize male domination as our common ground. Geng was as acutely aware of the abandonment of the first premise of feminism, the elimination of male domination and the restructuring of the relations between women and men, in 1976 as Willis and Brooke are four years later. This in itself is not damning; major problems require major efforts. But if we have let the dialogue lapse, we have chosen to dig deeper into the confusion of the mid-1970's rather than confront, as Geng and others in early consciousness-raising sessions put it, "the man in my bed, the man in my head, and the Man".

The WLM has changed. Consciousness-raising, once a powerful organizational tool, is probably rusting on a fire escape in Manhattan. Women are still organizing, but it's mostly "organizing around” a specific issue. Women continue to meet, but usually the occasion is a cultural-type event given for the benefit of feminists of similar persuasion, e.g., racial minorities' events, a number of lesbian separatist activities, a variety of spiritualist conferences, organizational-bureaucratic conventions.

If women's liberation were a simple thing to accomplish, the women active in the first two decades of the century wouldn't be known for just women's suffrage. Perhaps we are unable to admit that the work of women's liberation, undoing male domination, is as difficult and as threatening as it is. In Geng's words:

In the year 2000, most of these women will still be alive (unless they live in one of those rural areas where men get the first crack at the food.) They seem unable to imagine that they will persist, that they will still be feminists. They keep looking for something new, something to assure them that a revolutionary change in the relations between men and women need not, like every other revolution, be remade five, 1wenly, or a hundred times.

To confront the reality that girls continue to grow up under the Man's thumb is to admit that the depths of male domination have not yet been plumbed. Keeping faith is involving more women, women who never may have thought about male oppression in their own lives before. Whether it's consciousness-raising or some other organizational technique, the WLM will succeed to the extent that more women see the truth of male domination in their own lives. It is not enough to advance theory, make legislative inroads, or find warm, safe places.

Perceptually, difference is more readily discernible against a solid background. Loosely, suppose that feminists on some level share a recognition of male domination as the problem. Then shouldn't we be able to face the race, class, sexual preference, and cultural differences among us more evenly?

-Marycatherine Krause

May, 1980/What She Wants/Page 1