Dear 20th/21st Century Workshop,
The ink is very much still wet on this partial chapter draft, which ends in a cliffhanger so as
not to burden you with an overlong excerpt. I’m very grateful to you for reading it and
helping me think through what it’s doing well, which strands of argument are the most
compelling, and what else it might want to include as it goes down the road to completion.
My ambition for this chapter is that it will, by the end, have elucidated the role of
disappointment in structuring the forms and arguments of 1–2 works apiece in these three
areas: women of color feminism, pro-sex feminism, and nascent feminist theory in the
academy (with the discussion of the Spelman/Lugones as a major component of the latter). I
am also considering whether it will work to explore a shift from poetry to prose as privileged
literary genre of feminist thought that is roughly concomitant with the shift from voice to
visibility that I begin to sketch out in the attached pages.
My dissertation as a whole considers political disappointment both as a feeling and as
a temporal quality: both a felt experience of nonfulfillment in light of ongoing desire, and a
temporality of desire that persists beyond its window of possible fulfillment. I argue that this
disappointment is a paradigmatic mode of political desire in 20th-century American culture,
and that tracking it across the century’s cultural practices can help illuminate aesthetic and
conceptual continuities across periodizing divides. I also argue that political desires in their
disappointed mode are neither strictly melancholic, passive, nor self-sabotaging, but rather
that they perform real work in metabolizing political change and developing new concepts.
My four chapters together span the twentieth century, from 1900 to the Reagan era,
investigating cultural practices—including literature, music, and political theory—from four
key moments: 1) the wake of Reconstruction; 2) the pre– and post–World War II afterlives
of American communist organizing; 3) the turning points in 1960s antiwar and civil rights
movements; and 4) the late-1970s and early-1980s contestations of second-wave feminism.
I look forward to our discussion and welcome vigorous feedback.
Yours in proleptic gratitude,
Sara Marcus
[email protected]
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Chapter 4
Disappointment, Voice, and Feminist Politics, Late 1970s–Early 1980s
The late 1970s and early 1980s have always been a problem for feminist history, a
knotted node where multiple stories about the history of the movement and ideas associated
with women’s liberation entangle and clash. Coming on the heels of the fulsome 1970s and
well in advance of the 1990s heyday of theory, yet also coming before the 1980s antifeminist
backlash had risen to full strength, the few years surrounding Reagan’s election as president
constitute a multivoiced clamor of feminist tendencies—some ascendant, some thrown back
on the defensive, some attempting to shore up a countercultural milieu capable of sustaining
itself while the objective possibilities for larger scale cultural or political change dwindled
discouragingly.
This chapter attends to a border period, a time both astride and in-between. It looks
to cultural, literary, and internal movement texts to challenge the commonplace notion that
Reagan’s election or the defeat of the ERA constituted major turning points in the fortunes
of the feminist movement. Yet it also takes seriously the more complicated ways in which
disappointment was endemic to feminism during this time, and it argues that our readings of
feminist texts from this period need to take the role of this disappointment seriously in order
to arrive at a clearer sense of the way cultural and literary texts metabolize and work through
political realities that are, in historically contingent ways, sidelined from the realm of politics
as such. For feminism, a politics in which the precise borders between politics-as-such and
everywhere else have never been taken for granted, the shapes of these transits across
dubious borders becomes an even more crucial matter for concerted and critical thought.
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In most tellings of feminist history, the early 1980s are cast as the epitome of
disappointment, the time when the greatest momentum was stymied most dramatically by
the greatest obstacles, in the form of both external opposition and internal tensions that
hobbled the movement’s ability to respond sufficiently to an insurgent right-wing force.
Upon a closer look, the precise contours of this disappointment remain subject to debate.
Although the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982 is commonly cited as the nail
in the coffin for the women’s liberation movement,i the defeat itself was less a dramatic
smackdown than a trailing off. There was no countdown clock, no tense midnight session
when the amendment’s already extended ratification deadline came and went without even
one of the needed three additional state legislatures signing on. In fact, the National
Organization for Women conceded defeat six days in advance of the deadline, and some
commentators suggested that the defeat was relatively insignificant in the face of the real
progress women had made over the decade since the amendment was first approved in
Congress.ii As a defeat, this was more of a postscript than a landmark, but even the election
of Ronald Reagan two years earlier had been not so much a seismic alert to a changed
political landscape, at least in relation to feminism, as it was a confirmation of trends that
had already been evident for some time.
For those watching the shore, it was clear by 1977 that the tide had shifted. That year
saw the first Supreme Court ruling since Roe v. Wade to permit limitations on access to
abortion; it saw Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, which succeeded in forcing a
repeal of a pro-LGBT ordinance in Dade County, Florida; and it saw the beginning of a
ballot initiative in California to bar gays and lesbians from teaching school. The Briggs
Initiative would be defeated at the polls in November 1978, but its launch, coming on the
heels of the Dade County devastation, clearly demonstrated the strength and reach of the
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antifeminist and antigay backlash. This was also the year that the already slowed-down pace
of states ratifying the ERA rattled to a standstill: On January 18, 1977, Indiana became the
thirty-fifth and final state to vote in favor of the amendment, three states short of the
required total.
Thus by the first year of the Carter administration—essays, political writings, and
periodicals issuing from the women’s movement were already evincing a clear sense of a
movement embattled, thrown back on the defensive, bereft of the momentum and optimism
that had characterized the movement’s inaugural decade. The previous year, in 1976,
movement veterans Heather Booth and Naomi Weisstein could publish a pamphlet on the
question “Will the Women’s Movement Survive?” that answered its titular question with a
cautiously optimistic “Perhaps this time history will be kind.” By 1977, off our backs collective
member Carol Ann Douglas would write in that feminist newspaper, in a decidedly more
resigned tone, “Although we may have to learn that we won’t make it soon, that the day of
the ultimate revolution (if there is any one day) is not today, we also need to appreciate that
resistance in periods of reaction is perhaps even more difficult and important than
participating in the high points, the moments when revolution seems just around the
corner.”
While the many essays on movement strategy published in off our backs in 1976
analyzed the competition among the different factions within feminism (lesbian separatist,
women’s spirituality, socialist, etc.) and wrote of the necessity of renewing a movement-wide
strategy in order to build on feminism’s recent achievements, by 1977 a new emphasis on the
urgent crisis of external attacks could be detected. “The activities of the ‘new right’ had been
generally ignored up to a few months ago,” one news analysis in off our backs reported that
summer. “But since 1974, several intertwined groups have been working to build a national
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conservative alliance.” [Quest response, others TK.] Less than a year later, Adrienne Rich
would speak of what she called “the contemporary emergency”: “Sometimes referred to as
‘the backlash,’ this emergency is many-pronged, and I believe it is important to grasp it as
clearly and as realistically as we can.”iii
By 1977, then, the women’s movement was already in a defensive mode, obliged to
fend off attacks from the right, seeing the early cascade of policy victories slow to a trickle
and even reverse. Yet the late 1970s and early 80s are also a time of major developments in
feminist practice and theory that remain influential on, even definitive of, feminism to this
day. This period saw an upswell in feminist writing by women of color, the development of
increasingly robust and far-reaching theories of sexuality, and major advances in academic
feminist theory. All of these tendencies have proved durable, even as many of feminism’s
more ad hoc incarnations succumbed to external pushback and internal burnout. But though
these developments complicate a thesis of the era as marked by feminist disappointment,
they do not disprove it: Many of these tendencies positioned themselves as responses and
potential solutions to the disappointment that afflicted other sectors of the movement.
Cherrie Moraga wrote in her preface to This Bridge Called My Back of a “boredom setting in”
among white feminists, and of a dissatisfaction with the movement she herself was feeling as
well, one which presented itself in interracial discourse and as a longing for a different sort
of discourse: “I am involved in this book because more than anything else I need to feel
enlivened again in a movement that can, as my friend Amber Hollibaugh states, finally ask
the right questions and admit to not having all the answers.”iv [Examples from sex-wars
books and academic texts TK]
Historical debates over the significance and tenor of the late 1970s and early 1980s
for feminism have so far largely argued against each other: Either the period was a
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disappointing time for feminism, or else it was actually a fecund time for feminism, as
witnessed by the flourishing of women of color feminism—to which I would add, as well,
advances in sex-positive feminism and in the development of theoretical feminist thought
within the academy.v
If, instead of taking sides, we tarry with this seeming contrast—that women of color
feminism, pro-sex feminism, and what we would now recognize as feminist theory were
flourishing just as feminism was also supposedly being defeated—what can we learn from
this confluence? Recent analysis of this dynamic has been limited to pointing out the racial
myopia betrayed in narratives of feminism as foundering utterly in the early 1980s. But surely
there is more to the story than this. There have been few, if any, attempts to account directly
for the temporal convergence of these things—for the concurrence of, on the one hand, a
sense of stymied momentum, impasse, even defeat, in majority-white feminist milieus, and
simultaneously, on the other hand, nothing short of a renaissance of political thinking,
theorizing, and publishing by women of color; an intellectual revolution for sexual pluralism;
and a profound shift in feminist academic thought.
This failure to reckon directly and additively with the convergence has left thought
on feminism and feminist history vulnerable to a reflexive application of an analytic that has
long been endemic to the American left as a whole: the casting of structural change and
identity politics as mortal enemies of each other. According to this analytic as broadly
construed, the weakening of the labor-democratic left from its post–World War II peak to
its near-utter defeat in the ’80s (and periodic repetitions of that vanquishment, right up
through Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016) is the fault of the rise of identity
politics that fragmented the left’s traditional constituency, paid too much attention to culture
or symbols or sex (recall Ralph Nader’s sour dismissal of “gonadal politics”), and made
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impossible a focus on bread and butter issues—i.e., purely economic, with no complications
of color of the like. This narrative describes a putative replacement of a structural, economic
politics with something more amorphous, affective, culturally oriented, unorganizable.
Feminist history debates have frequently set up an analogous antinomy in which a socialistinfluenced, economically minded politics competes with a more culture- and identity-focused
politics for airtime, resources, and ideological primacy. This framing goes back at least as far
as Brooke Williams’s “The Retreat to Cultural Feminism,” published in the 1975
Redstockings-produced anthology Feminist Revolution, and it extends forward through Nancy
Fraser’s 2013 Fortunes of Feminism and Jessa Crispin’s 2016 manifesto Why I Am Not a
Feminist. Whenever cultural manifestations of feminism reach enough of a critical mass that
fretting about feminism’s overall slide into obscurity becomes temporarily unnecessary, some
version of socialist feminism is proposed, and previous iterations of feminism castigated for
a selfish or bourgeois or overly idealist failure to adequately oppose capitalism.
What would a narrative look like that took seriously the intertwining of these aspects
of Left politics, that took aim at the whole notion of their being diametrically opposed,
rather than eternally reprosecuting the dispute for one side or the other? Attention to the
multiple forms and practices of feminist disappointment in the late 1970s and 1980s can give
us a way out of the identity politics/structural politics binary. Rather than seeing the era as
either a time of defeat, structurally speaking, or a time of efflorescence, culturally speaking, we
can understand it as an instance of the two analyses, the two realities, being mutually
constitutive, rather than mutually exclusive.
Histories of feminism propose five basic narratives of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Perhaps the most well-known and oft-told of these stories goes like this: From a visionary,
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and size-limited vanguard active in the early 1970s, feminism then expanded by the middle
of the 1970s into a mass mobilization phase, which met an unceremonious end in 1982 with
the final defeat of the ERA and the triumph of a culturally conservative antiwoman ideology
of the Reagan years.vi
In a more precisely nuanced version of this narrative, one taken up by many feminist
historians, a distinctly radical women’s liberation movement born of 1960s Civil Rights and
New Left activism had by 1975 already torn apart into competing radical and cultural
factions, with radical feminism marked by a Marxist-inspired notion of sex as a class system,
and cultural feminism urging an embrace and celebration of ostensibly female practices and
values—which often entailed some degree of separatist ideology and practice. By 1975,
cultural feminism had already begun to overtake radical feminism as the more popular and
widespread tendency, and by the end of the 1970s, the socialist-inspired approach of radical
feminism had seriously dwindled. Cultural feminism—characterized by Ellen Willis, in
“Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism,” as “a reformist politics, a countercultural
community, and a network of self-help projects (rape crisis centers, battered women’s
shelters, women’s health clinics, etc.)”—had triumphed, reigning as the only significant
iteration of feminism in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Its style and values would survive even
into what the mainstream media proclaimed, beginning in the mid-1980s, as the “postfeminist era.” Indeed, cultural feminism would, however inadvertently, provide the
philosophical framework for a consumerist lifestyle feminism that proved exceedingly
cooptable by consumer capitalism and even more remarkably durable, visible today in the
feminism of Lena Dunham and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
As another narrative has it, after an imperfect but promising and productive period
running from the late 60s to the early 80s, feminism in both its academic and non-academic
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guises was rent asunder by a proliferation of identities and hyphenations that cast profoundly
into question the viability of “women” as a unified category of analysis with any real
purchase or of “feminism” as something that could even be talked about in the singular.
With women’s energies redirected from fighting the real enemy (patriarchy) toward pursuing
nitpicky fights with each other and engaging in detailed and solipsistic introspection, the
movement’s momentum slowed to a near halt. Perhaps ironically, but perhaps also not
accidentally, this inward turn occurred as the forces of patriarchal repression were growing
more destructive and seemingly more difficult to parry effectively—as if, when faced with
formidable opposition, feminists opted simply to give up the fight.vii
According to still another narrative, one whose stock in the contemporary academy
is perhaps the highest of the options presented so far, feminism until 1981 or so was
primarily a movement of white, middle-class, cisgendered women who, oblivious to the
particularities of their positioning, claimed to speak for all women via a smugly colonialist
“we.” In or around 1982, important writings by women of color—individual thinkers such
as Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith, as well as collectivities such as the writers anthologized
in This Bridge Called My Back and Home Girls and the members of the Combahee River
Collective (belatedly receiving their due respect for their intersectionalist avant la lettre
statement of 1977)—participated in the elaboration of a new and different form of
feminism, one that foregrounded the wide variety of experiences and positionings extant
beneath/within the designation women.
Another narrative, seeking to refine the one just sketched, points out that during the
very years that have become canonized as the years when “white feminism” reigned
uncontested, women of color were in fact active in agitating for their rights and articulating a
critique that encompassed sexism without being limited to it. These women, however, have
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been unfairly excluded from narratives of ’60s and ’70s feminist organizing.viii Thus, in a
grave irony, purportedly antiracist tellings of feminist history, in their zeal to decry second
wave blind spots, have overshot their mark to the point of (re)rendering invisible the actions
of women of color during this time. These tellings also give short shrift to the antiracist
activism of some white feminists, many of whom had received their initial political education
in the civil rights movement and who continued to place consciousness of and commitment
to resisting white supremacy and racism at the core of their political practice.
The existence of these five basic narratives indicates just how much of a problem to
late ’70s and early ’80s are for feminism. In this period, which when seen from the US
history perspective would seem to be defined by the clean break of Reagan’s election, a host
of antinomies vie and clash—radical feminism/cultural feminism, white feminism/Third
World (later “women of color”) feminism, movement feminism/lifestyle feminism—all of
them affected but never entirely determined by the electoral politics of the era. In fact, for
this reason this era in the history of the feminist movement provides a valuable object lesson
in the importance of attending to movement histories in constructing periodizing schemas
rather than relying solely on elections and wars to erect periodizing frameworks into which
movement histories are expected to then be smoothly slotted.
It also reveals limitations of the disciplinary siloing that afflicts even the ostensibly
interdisciplinary field of women’s/gender/sexuality studies. While sociologists and historians
working on this period have largely proceeded from an understanding of this period as one
of stalled momentum, even to the point of failing to fully acknowledge the intellectual and
theoretical innovations that took place, cultural- and literary-studies approaches have
typically pursued an inversion of this bias, giving the abovementioned innovations their due
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but without contextualizing these innovations within their historical moment of reaction and
impasse.
This chapter will look at the intellectual and theoretical innovations as a means of
complicating some useful but oversimplifying rubrics found in social-science-influenced
approaches to this period, and use these newly nuanced analytics to depict with greater
complexity and precision the context within which women of color feminism, sex-positive
feminism, and nascent feminist theory within the academy emerged, gathered discursive
power, and became, variously, canonical.
This chapter also tracks these emergences as playing out a movement-wide transition
in metaphor, from voice to visibility. While voice had been a central figure for political
participation and cultural validation throughout the first decade of the second wave, by the
early 1980s voice had been faded down, and visibility was becoming the primary figure.
Some social scientists have pushed back against the denigration of cultural feminism,
in the process arguing that activities such as alternative institution-building constitute sound
strategy during times of political backlash.ix Verta Taylor and Leila Rupp, for instance, have
argued for a revaluation of elements of this tendency—enshrinement of allegedly female
values, separatism, emphasis on the primacy of women’s relationships, and what Taylor and
Rupp call “feminist rituals”: “concerts, films, poetry readings, exhibitions, plays, and
conferences.” (48) Without directly refuting Willis’s charge that such activities amount to
counterculture or self-help, Taylor and Rupp assert a directly political function for these
practices as well: These practices “promote survival of the women’s movement during
periods of waning activity” and “provide…continuity from earlier stages of the women’s
movement to the future flowering of feminism” (34). The alliterative romance which the
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authors assert (here with a definite object carrying proleptic certainty) the resurgence to
come—but do not prove its inevitability—makes a striking contrast with the “apocalyptic”
invocations Robyn Weigman identifies in her 2000 essay “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures.”
But their vision of the future is no less dystopian than the warnings of those thinkers
Weigman writes of, who prophesy the possible absence of any future for feminism
whatsoever in the wake of the ostensible fracturings that marked the 1980s and ’90s. This is
because Taylor and Rupp’s future imagines a feminism that picks up right where it left off, as
if the intervening time of disappointment had never happened at all—a feminism that, even
worse than the linear line of maternal succession Weigman diagnoses, extends further into
the future only as a necessarily sterile clone of its past.
The authors conceptualize the “period of waning activity” as “abeyance”: “a holding
process by which activists sustain protest in a hostile political climate and provide continuity
from one stage of mobilization to another” (emphasis added) (36). This concept of abeyance
is first laid out in 1989, in an article by Taylor. “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s
Movement in Abeyance” suggests that the women’s movement entered a period of
“abeyance” in 1982, tied to the final defeat of the ERA. The problems with pegging such a
periodization to the failure of the ERA have been outlined above. But “Social Movement
Continuity”’s argument meets with the additional inconvenient problem that the major shift
in focus that she claims characterizes abeyance periods—the shift from the goals of
recruiting new members and pursuing change in the outside world which characterize active
periods in movements to, instead, engaging in “internally oriented activities to build a
structure through which [the movement] can maintain its identity, ideals, and political
vision”—was already in effect by the late 1970s, and Taylor only begins to get at the tenor
and function of this alteration. If characterizing a whole set of cultural practices as
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“internally oriented” seems to concede in advance the very point Taylor is trying to argue
against, it is even more inaccurate to characterize these practices—as Taylor variously does
throughout her oeuvre—as acts of simple “maintenance,” a sort of inert “hibernation,” or a
static “persistence” focused solely on “promoting the survival of activist networks,
sustaining a repertoire of goals and tactics, and promoting a collective identity that offers
participants a sense of mission and moral purpose.”x
Taylor’s research is most helpful in the parts where she identifies structural factors
that changed the playing field for feminist activists, such as the abrupt withdrawal of
opportunities for government funding and the resulting increased competition for limited
foundation support [Taylor/Whittier 553], in addition to the more commonly remarked
upon rise of the New Right and the adoption by the Republican Party of stances and policies
explicitly opposed to feminist gains. (Opposition to abortion, for instance, made its first
appearance in the Republican platform in 1976.) But the idea of abeyance as a “holding
pattern” gives remarkably short shrift to the entirely consequential discussions, practices,
debates, and theoretical work being done among feminist activists in the late 1970s and early
80s. In addition, Taylor’s focus on abeyance periods as being concerned largely with
particular people who were already involved, and with what these people undertook in the
absence of previously enabling movement structures, risks first of all reducing the question
of feminist history to a biographical and phenomenological one, as if the history of feminism
consisted of nothing more than the history of individuals and their specific engagements
with particular structures of belief and desire.xi Such an approach to the history of feminism
risks losing sight entirely of the nonbiographical ways in which concepts and political
realities develop and travel in excess of individual people’s narratives. By framing this
question as one of how “activists sustain protest” and “provide continuity,” Taylor and her
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various coauthors suggest a stagnation of tactics and ideology that can only be asserted if
one attends narrowly, as Taylor does in her book, to particular pre-existing organizations and
coteries. But this approach to feminist history begs its central question, taking as grounds the
very thing it purports to prove.
In addition, such a frame inevitably leads to an unjustifiable disregard of people who
did show up in the movement during this supposed “holding pattern” period, people who
either showed up truly anew or showed up differently than before. And it promises to miss
any relevant activity that takes place outside of the old arenas. It guarantees a story of
melancholy attachments and cannot help but ignore transcriptions of disappointed desires.
The concept of abeyance assigns significance to political activity in a period only in
terms of how well it perpetuates a past era and prepares for a new era that will be easily
recognizable as a repeated blooming (recall “future flowering”) of the previous one. In doing
so, it ensures that anything being done in a period that is new or different from what came
before will be counted out. Yet, conversely, a story about late-70s and early-80s feminism
that tells it only as a story of new ideas and new energies—what we might consider a torchpassing narrative, in which a now-moribund portion of a movement cedes ground to more
vibrant areas of emergent activity—can risk missing out on the important role
disappointment plays even in these emergent areas.
Disappointment is crucially different from abeyance. The concept of abeyance sees a
movement placed on ice, an organism in hibernation, a body paring down its slate of active
processes to only the essential activities necessary to preserve barest survival, capable of
being resuscitated at a later moment, when the altogether arrested development can pick up
again, like an awakening Rip van Winkle—or, perhaps more to the point, Sleeping Beauty.
At the same time, the notion of abeyance promulgated in Taylor and Rupp’s defense of
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cultural feminism profoundly begs the question of what counts as political activity by
claiming political significance, and even movement-historical significance, for activities that
other critics have viewed as countercultural rather than political, while conversely disqualifying
other activities.
Disappointment, by contrast, understands that the processes and procedures that
remain or become active during periods when the prospects for success with outwardly
focused movement activities alter and narrow are hardly inert ones, hardly holding patterns
or hibernations, and that the activities with the greatest lasting impact are those that continue
to metabolize the blockages and challenges that ushered in the present period, to think
through and feel through and work through the contradictions, difficulties, pieces of
unfinished business, failures, setbacks, and disagreements that were present in the movement
before, that perhaps even helped contribute to the movement’s present impasse, yet were
perhaps put off or ignored or drowned out by the more organized iterations of the
movement during its active phase.
Both the anti–cultural feminism and the pro–cultural feminism accounts of this
period do agree that the period represents a waning in certain areas of feminist activity, and a
diminution of feminist efficacy. They differ only on the question of whether the cultural
feminist activities and practices common during this time represent a compensatory or even
preservationist tendency or, conversely, additional evidence of this declining activity. And
disappointment is also implicit in, if not always on the surface of, the other historical
narratives of the period cited here, as the rest of this chapter will demonstrate.
There is indeed a qualitative difference between feminist activity from the late 1960s
through the mid-1970s, on the one hand, and activity in the late 1970s and early 80s, on the
other. To acknowledge that the feminist movement pursued outward-facing activism up
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through, say, 1977, to a degree that was unmatched in the ensuing half-decade, is not to
devalue the real and important innovations and achievements of women of color during this
time. To the contrary, recognizing that there is a difference is a prerequisite for thinking
more fully about the relationship between one and the other, rather than arguing for a
continuity or generational progression, on the one hand, or seeing only incommensurateness,
on the other.
How do we measure this difference? Becky Thompson argues that the early 1980s,
far from being a period of abeyance for feminism, instead constituted “the best days of
feminism,” at least for antiracist women. Yet she supports this claim not with a list of public
political actions (anything akin to the Miss America protest or the Ladies Home Journal sit-in
and takeover) or policy achievements (anything akin to Roe v. Wade) but with a list of
conferences and publications. [Names TK.] (The one exception Thompson offers is the
successful jailbreak of Assata Shakur, but this achievement is more commonly spoken of as
an accomplishment of antiracist and anti-imperialist radicals, rather than of feminists per se,
so its inclusion, even if justifiable, betrays a certain reaching on Thompson’s part, while also
raising the question of where intersectional feminist action crosses over and becomes
activism on other issues performed by women.) So if even an article that sets out to revise
periodization in histories of the feminist movement by making claims for the fulsomeness of
feminist accomplishments in the late 1970s and early ’80s speaks almost exclusively about
conferences and publications—about actions in the realm of discourse, written or spoken or
both—this does in fact suggest that a qualitative difference in the mode of feminist practice
did come about during this period. To conceptualize this difference as abeyance clearly gives
too little credit to these activities, but to downplay the difference in the interest of making an
argument for continuity, or to imagine a generational torch-passing, fails to adequately
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thematize the phase change (into discourse and ideas) that accounts at least partially for the
disagreement about how to characterize it.
If we attend to this period as inhabiting neither the static temporality of abeyance
nor the unruffled temporality of continuance but instead the hybrid temporality of the hold
and the intermission,xii we can begin to understand the full range of feminist practices in the
face of disappointments.
Many of scholarly accounts of feminist activity of this time date from its immediate
aftermath, the late 80s and early 90s, during which scholars sifted through the changes from
the past decade and mounted contesting interpretations of them. Carla Kaplan’s 1992 article
(which began as a 1990 talk) “The Language of Crisis in Feminist Theory” speaks of “the
widespread perception that proliferating feminisms threaten to destroy feminism.” Many
thinkers were referring to the situation as a “crisis” which feminism might not survive.
Kaplan argues in the article that difference among and even conflict between feminists do
not on their own constitute a crisis, though thinking and speaking as if a crisis did exist
tended to produce the very conditions of crisis one claimed to bemoan. Crisis, for Kaplan, is
a self-fulfilling prophecy in the present.
To Kaplan, “the impossibility of saying ‘we’ ”—we women, we feminists—in the
wake of early-1980s interrogations by women of color and other women of such “pronomial
politics” does not pose a foundational challenge to feminism but merely indexes how
difficult it is to speak about a collective politics without speaking, however rhetorically, in a
first-person plural, and how productively this linguistic convention forces the question of
collective subjectivity.xiii She suggests that feminists might (and indeed sometimes already do)
use we “as a proleptic term,” pointing toward a reality “which it tries to instantiate”—an
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argument about the power of language to shape subjectivity. Kaplan next turns to consider
recent works of feminist literary criticism that explore the possible merits of reticence, even
what she labels “silence,” as sources of female power deployable against patriarchal
discipline. “By keeping quiet,” Kaplan writes, women in literature from the past “pave…the
way for the eventual interlocutor who will seek to hear what it was she did not say.” Silence,
it would seem, can touch the future as surely as can avowedly inaccurate speech. In the
meantime, conflictual speech puts us in touch with outdated attachments to past desires: “we
can see the persistence of our desire for such evocation [of collectivity] even, perhaps
especially, where it is most vociferously rejected. The nostalgia underlying the language of
crisis in feminist theory expresses that longing for lost coherence.”
The dialectic of silence and voice—or, to be more precise, of the terms “silence” and
“voice”—has a history in second-wave feminist thought that spans the whole history of that
thought up through Kaplan’s article and beyond, beginning with the text that is most
commonly taken as the inaugural text of the second wave. We are accustomed to thinking of
The Feminine Mystique as granting language to a “problem that has no name,” but in truth
Friedan focuses not just on naming but on voicing. The obstacle she identifies, the culprit
standing in the way of certain women’s understanding their unhappiness, is not an absence
of language (the “no name” appellation notwithstanding) but the existence of other
language, other voices: “Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian
sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own
femininity.” The book opens with a characterization of housewives’ malaise as an “unspoken
problem” in which women are “afraid to voice, even to herself, the silent question—‘Is this
all?’ ” Yet, Friedan writes, many American women are now learning “to hear the strange,
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dissatisfied voice[s] stirring within [them].” In fact, the whole issue described in Friedan’s
groundbreaking book is repeatedly cast as a clash of voices: “[T]he time is at hand,” she
writes, “when the voices of the feminine mystique can no longer drown out the inner voice
that is driving women on to become complete.”
The Feminine Mystique was published in February 1963. Two years later, Tillie Olsen
would issue another defining early second-wave document, her Harper’s article “Silences:
When Writers Don’t Write.” This piece was based on a lecture Olsen had researched in 1962
and delivered in March 1963 while a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study,
the culmination of her intensive research on the history of major gaps in famous writers’
production. That lecture had been titled “Death of the Creative Process,” but by 1965, in the
post-Mystique world, it made sense to cast the issue in terms not of death but of silence.
“Literary history and the present are dark with silences,” Olsen’s article in Harper’s began,
signaling a synesthetic approach to the very notion of silence. “Silences” attempted to
taxonomize the varieties of failure to write, and the various causes. She drew on examples
including Thomas Hardy, who wrote no novels in the thirty years following Jude the Obscure,
and Herman Melville, who also abandoned prose for thirty years after the disappointing
reception of Pierre—but the most striking part of the essay was her description of the
struggles that affected women in particular, and that had long made writing difficult, often
impossible, for her. Much of the essay was a retread of A Room of One’s Own, focusing on the
importance of having household help and time to oneself in order to write. “[W]omen are
traditionally trained to place others’ needs first, to feel these needs as their own,” Olsen
wrote, and of herself: “In the twenty years I bore and raised my children, usually had to work
on a job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” Later in her life, she
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related, the pressures were economic and less gendered: “Then had to return to the world of
work, someone else’s work, nine hours, five days a week.”xiv
[TK further glossing of instances of “voice”/orality in feminist writing]
[“The first collections of poetry from the movement stressed genuineness of voice
above all…the phonocentric emphasis in American feminist criticism, the celebration of the
‘real woman’s voice,’ came partly out of the consciousness-raising process: we wanted to
speak, we constructed occasions to speak, we heard ourselves quavering out difficult
sentences, we waited to hear a supportive response. CR groups were de-repressive,
permission-granting structures that opened up a new oral medium.” Ann Rosalind Jones,
“Imaginary gardens/real frogs,” 69]
By the late 1970s, though, although “silence” remained a salient term in feminist
writing and thought, especially among poets who were turning to prose, it was less and less
cast as being in opposition to voice, per se. In 1977, Audre Lorde delivered her famous
MLA talk, published the following year in a Sinister Wisdom forum titled “The
Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” in which she announced that her
silence had not protected her from the fear of death or erasure, and others’ silence wouldn’t
protect them either. The title of the forum notwithstanding, Lorde’s piece cast silence as
being in opposition not so much to voice as to visibility, which emerges as a surer tactic
against destruction than even speech could be:
In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear—fear of contempt,
of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most
of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this
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country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision,
Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other
hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even
within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very
visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness….And that visibility
which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest
strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not
we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are
wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned;
we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.
In the same year, Adrienne Rich wrote of silence as a mode of dishonesty between
women. She opposed it to honesty, not voice or speech—implicitly untethering voice from
authentic expression of self, though never saying that outright.
This retreat from voice is directly thematized in a 1982 article, “Have We Got a
Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s
Voice.’” Coauthored by two philosophers, María C. Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, the
article is organized into different sections, most of which are designated as being in some
voice or another: “(In an Hispana voice),” “(In the voice of a white/Anglo woman who has been
teaching and writing about feminist theory).” The article’s last two sections are tagged as being,
respectively, “(Unproblematically in Maria’s & Vicky’s voice)” and “(Problematically in the voice of a
woman of color).” By tagging a singular voice that belongs to both “Maria” and “Vicky,” not as a
collective property (for that would be “Maria & Vicky’s voice”) nor as two voices together
(which would be “Maria’s & Vicky’s voices”), but as an amalgam of the two individual
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subjects into a unified voice emerging from both subjectivities—and by insisting that this
presents no problem—the authors further untether voice from subjectivity, an untethering
that necessarily remains in effect in the section designation that follows, “(Problematically in the
voice of a woman of color).”
In this essay, the notion of voice is described as being “central to feminist
methodology,” and “the demand that the woman’s voice be heard” is cast as having been
fundamental to feminist thought. The scare quotes around “The Woman’s Voice” in the
article’s title clearly promise a critique of the notion, yet the use of voice as a structuring
principle makes it clear that this article will deliberately participate—performatively,
problematically, even ludically—in the very thing it critiques. The essay begins by laying out
a remarkably sympathetic rationale for the demand that the woman’s voice be heard, a
rationale that subtly accounts for the roughly contemporary deconstructive and
poststructuralist critiques of voice as interiority, and of subjectivity as such, in a way that few
scholars writing in the avowed cause of feminist theory had yet begun to do. Although
Derrida’s critique, in Voice and Phenomenon, of the long-standing equation of voice with
unmediated interiority or subjectivity is never mentioned directly here, the article in its
opening paragraphs does render the demand for the voice and its rationale without any
recourse to this equation, arguing instead, with admirable anthropological groundedness, that
“part of human life, human living, is talking about it, and we can be sure that being silenced
in one’s own account of one’s life is a kind of amputation that signals oppression.” Thus
Lugones and Spelman establish voice as the commonplace act of talking about one’s life,
rather than as any possible interiority—in marked contrast to Friedan, where the “inner
voice” of women is presumed to equate with their true desires. Indeed, the authors here
explicitly rule out any guaranteed congruence between voice and authenticity, issuing only
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the mild prediction that more speech by women will “greatly increase the chances that true
accounts of women’s lives will be given.” Truth here, far from being a guarantee (cite “the
world split open”?), is merely actuarial. And this is not even the principal selling point of
voice as granted by the authors; that honor goes to the fact that “the articulation of
experience (in myriad ways) is among the hallmarks of a self-determining individual or
community.” That is, utterance has more to do less with truth or authenticity than it does
with a genre of human living.
These, then, are the theoretical foundations upon which the authors present their
main, pluralistic objection to the notion of “the woman’s voice”: “It is only possible for a
woman who does not feel highly vulnerable with respect to other parts of her identity, e.g.
race, class, ethnicity, religion, sexual alliance, etc., to conceive of her voice simply or
essentially as a ‘woman’s voice’ ” (574). The critique that the notion of a unified “woman’s
voice,” or woman’s anything, brackets significant differences among actual women would, of
course, account for a, perhaps the, primary shift in feminism’s self-conception between the
1970s and the 1990s. But while this shift is often seen as a triumph of an uncomplicated
notion of identity, where one’s multiple categorizations can determine an authentic
subjectivity, “Have We Got a Theory for You!” demonstrates the hybrid, performative, even
inauthentic potential of the anti-“woman” critique.
Equally notable, in a piece published nine years before Joan W. Scott’s 1991
“Evidence of Experience,” is this article’s equivocal, qualified concept of experience. Far
from the “Joan Scott QuoteTK,” experience here is something that is shaped by all sorts of
accounts of it, both by others and by the person whose experience it is: “[A]s humans our
experiences are deeply influenced by what is said about them, by ourselves or powerful (as
opposed to significant) others.” This statement is alluringly circular, constituting a mise-en-
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abyme in which there both does and does not appear to be any experience prior to its being
spoken of. In this short and beguiling sentence, the article sums up and acknowledges,
without anything approaching direct citation, contemporary thought about the relationship
between discourses and what confronts us as (our) reality.
Yet what is the “(as opposed to significant”) doing in that sentence? The
parenthetical gives us trouble. If the intention had been the expectable
Foucauldian/Althusserian move of pointing toward the discourses wielded by institutions
and ideologies, there would have been many clearer ways of indicating that: “ourselves or . . .
others” sets up a parallelism in which the easiest read is that “others” refers to individuals, as
“ourselves” does. Alternatively, though, if much more subtly, the possibility here lurks that
“ourselves” can itself be ideological and even institutional. Indeed, the article basically says as
much, later on; that’s at the heart of its critique of what Carla Kaplan would later call the
problem of saying “we.” Still, that word “significant” remains complicated. At first glance it
appears heretical for a feminist article to suggest that intimate partners (“significant others”
in the idiomatic sense) are never in positions of power vis-à-vis those that love them,
considering that the shape of and potential peril contained within that power was a
cornerstone of second wave thought since at least the first consciousness-raising meeting.
And surely it is also not intended to suggest that while one’s own speech about what she
understands to be her experience inevitably influences her experience, and while the speech
of “powerful others”—including, we might safely assume, teachers, doctors, best-selling
authors of pop psychology, and government officials—also exerts an influence, the speech
of her intimate partner has no effect whatsoever. Perhaps, though, in an unremarked way,
this line means to point out the culturally specific applicability of the sleeping-with-theenemy stance toward heterosexual partners that was such a hallmark of early second wave
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thought. As women of color frequently pointed out, male partners from marginalized
communities could not be easily dismissed as sheer paragons of patriarchal power; for
women of color feeling excluded or misunderstood by white feminists, male partners who
shared an othered cultural background could be a refuge.
Additionally, based on what follows in the rest of the article, it might make sense to
surmise that here, in the middle of what comes across as a cogent and sympathetic brief for
the validity of voice qua self-narration as a political demand, the authors are embedding a
critique of that demand, and specifically of a certain public/private split that they charge
inheres within the classical formulation of that demand, much in spite of its originating
context’s insistence on its own abrogration of that very divide. (The parenthetical must be a
critique, an arch ventriloquizing of an error discerned in the viewpoint here being
summarized, because otherwise it can only be simply sloppy, a failed attempt at a lame pun,
and the rest of the article is too good for this.) Later in the article, the authors will set forth
friendship as the only viable motivation for white/Anglo women to “do [feminist] theory
jointly” with women of color, rather than being motivated by a sense of obligation, duty, or
self-interest. So the jarring parenthetical here in fact foreshadows the critique to come: that
too many white feminists erect harmful dichotomies between systems of power and intimate
relationships.
On the ERA as epoch-defining defeat: Taylor and Whittier in Feminist Frontiers IV,
“NOW Concedes Defeat on ERA,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1982, A2. http://www.equalrights.org/equalrights-amendment/. Jon Margolis, “Bill failed as women succeeded: Women’s movement is planning a new
fight,” Chicago Tribune, June 27, 1982, A1.
iii Adrienne Rich, “Motherhood: The Contemporary Emergency and the Quantum Leap,” in On Lies, Secrets, and
Silence.
iv viii, xiv-xv.
v A minor strain of scholarship attends to small-scale, local survivals of feminist activity in this period, but only
as a nuancing addition to the narrative of an overall moribund movement, not as a facial challenge to that
i
ii
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narrative’s basic validity. See Nancy Whittier, Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s Movement
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
vi CitationsTK: Taylor and Whittier article from Feminist Frontiers, in pdf—also mainstream feminist histories.
vii CitationsTK. Referenced in “Being in Time with Feminism,” “What Has Happened Here”.
viii Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism; Becky Thompson, “Multiracial feminism: Recasting the chronology
of second wave feminism”; Sara Evans, “Re-Viewing the Second Wave.”
ix Key proponents of this narrative, in which radical feminism was superseded by a more complicit cultural
feminism, include Brooke [Williams], “The Retreat to Cultural Feminism,” in Feminist Revolution (1975); Ellen
Willis, “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism” (1984); and numerous works by feminist historian Alice
Echols, including two anthology contributions in the early 1980s, as well as her 1989 history of radical
feminism, the still unexcelled Daring to Be Bad.
x Taylor/Whittier article from Feminist Frontiers, Taylor’s 1995 book, and Taylor article 762, respectively.
xi See Robyn Wiegman, “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures,” which critiques the “paradigm for speaking
feminism through the subjective formation of individuals—and of equating feminism with individual
consciousness and perspectives” (813).
xii These are two temporal concepts introduced in earlier chapters and whose relevance here will be worked out
in more detail as the chapter develops. I’m also happy to answer questions about them during the workshop.
xiii Cut? She cites Hazel Carby, and Lugones/Spelman writing of the necessity of stipulating a multitude of
voices. (She does not cite, but could, Lorraine Bethel’s “What Chou Mean We, White Girl? Or, The Cullud
Lesbian Feminist Declaration of Independence,” which was published in the Black Women’s Issue of Conditions
in 1979.)
xiv “More than in any human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly
interruptible, responsive, responsible….It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption,
not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.” [This might be a helpful counter to Wiegman’s/Roof’s
antimaternal conception of mothering as relentlessly linear.]
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