Bring the Ruckus is at a point in which our feminist politics must advance. We have
tried to grapple with questions around our feminist politics. Questions that askedwhether or not we truly are a radically feminist organization? And how do we do
radically feminist work? Ultimately we have been trying to understand what feminist
praxis is for BtR. While we have gotten to a certain point in our feminist political
understanding, we have not been able to push forward in terms of our development for a
number of years. This coupled with a feeling of general indifference toward the issue by
the majority of the membership has left us unable to fully answer these questions or push
the discussions further both within our own organization as well as generally on the left.
This notebook seeks to push us to do just that. It is created to present us with interesting
questions about the nature of feminist praxis today. Where DO we go from here? What
are feminists of color saying about the nature of feminism today? How can we develop a
feminist praxis that pushes the notion of all women’s freedom to the forefront of the
discussion rather than simply rolling over for equality? What is the role of the state in
women’s lives and how are women challenging the state? What are the ways that
feminist praxis is being pushed and advanced on the left and where can we interject in
that conversation? Is there something to this concept of the ‘liberatory family”? And
finally, how do our feminist politics translate to a feminist praxis? These are the
questions that we need to grapple with now.
The feminist notebook II contains a number of pieces that we hope will help to further
our internal discussion as well as push us to examine our external work. The two pieces
by Patricia Hill Collins are theoretical examinations of the contradictions that take place
between mainstream feminism and women of color. She is critical of mainstream terms
and approaches like “Intersectionality” while still embracing the fact that multiple
identities exist for many women. We should examine these pieces and ask ourselves
what this perspective means for our own theoretical development. The Joy James piece
begins to meld theoretical understandings with practical problems. By looking at
violence against women we can begin to see the role of the state in perpetuating violence
against women. The Angela Davis and Nancy Rhodes pieces both look at the ways in
which women are challenging the state and seeking to redefine the ways that we
understand feminism. Both pieces address work that BtR is also involved in; anti-prison
and anti-cop work. As we look at these pieces we should examine how they may change
our own understandings of how we do this work. Finally, we have included two pieces by
BtR members. The first is Life After Roe, which looks at the inevitability of the
overturning of Roe v. Wade. This piece questions current paradigms of feminist thought
and the inadequate strategies of the feminist movement to deal with reproductive justice
issues. The second piece is The Liberatory Family draft that comes from our discussions
around feminist praxis at our national meeting in May of 2006. Both pieces present
questions and potential strategies for our future work and theoretical development in BtR.
Feminist Notebook Discussion Questions:
What is Intersectionality? What is Collins critique of it?
What does a feminist approach to anti police organizing look like? How does Rhodes’
article enable us to rethink our current work?
What is the role of the state in perpetuating violence against women?
What is family? What is the liberatory family?
Define feminist praxis. How the articles in this notebook relate to feminist praxis?
What does freedom actually look like for women?
Define gender. Define Justice. What is the relationship of gender to Justice? What is its
relationship to patriarchy?
Life After Roe
By Liz Samuels, Eesha Pandit, and Joel Olson
The end of Roe v. Wade
Roe v. Wade is dead.
Not yet, perhaps, but soon. When (not if) it is overturned, it could transform the political
landscape in the United States. As an organization, we need to think about what the overturning
of Roe could mean for the political landscape in the United States and for radical political
movements. About a year ago, the three of us began meeting to discuss this issue. Eesha, who
works at the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program in Massachusetts, and Joel were
introduced by Geert when Joel gave a book talk there in November 2004. We began to meet
with Liz to discuss the current state of the pro-choice movement, its limitations, the
consequences of the overturning of Roe, and what that could mean for the reproductive justice
movement in the future. What follows is a report on our conversations.
It is crucial to acknowledge that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will be significant. With
this in mind, the mainstream movement must realize that fighting for reproductive freedom must
move beyond abortion rights alone and the ideological and strategic problems of the “choice”
framework. One possible alternative we examine is the “women’s health” framework.
Ultimately, we find that we must look for an a new framework that incorporates the concerns of
poor women and women of color. In this effort we look to the “reproductive justice” framework
as a possible solution.
We believe that it is very likely that Roe is going to be overturned in the next five to
fifteen years. Bush’s new nominations to the Supreme Court make this extremely likely, as both
Chief Justice John Roberts and nominee Samuel Alito have reliably anti-choice records on the
bench.
Further, even before a challenge to Roe reaches the Supreme Court, it is being chipped
away at by restrictive legislation, which overtime could render abortion technically legal but
extremely difficult for most women to access. This has already started happening through the
passing of regulatory laws such as the ban on “partial-birth” abortion. The threat to abortion
right is imminent. Legislators in 12 states — Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana,
Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia — have
introduced bills this year to ban nearly all abortions. South Dakota has succeeded in passing its
ban on all abortions, with the only exception being situations where a woman’s life is at risk.
In addition to judicial and legislative attacks, party politics are also pushing to restrict
women’s access to abortions. The Republicans are reliably anti-choice as a party and prochoice voices within the party are steadily being marginalized. The Democrats, meanwhile, are
backpedaling to the “political center,” and using a “tougher” stand on abortion as a way to
appear more centrist. For example, in anticipation of running for president in 2008, Hilary
Clinton has begun to make mentions of God, faith, prayer and the need to be more tolerant of
people who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage because of their beliefs. This
backpedaling is a reflection not only the lack of commitment to abortion rights on the part of the
Democrats, but also in public opinion, which is increasingly supportive of restrictions on
abortion in public opinion polls. When asked (in a November 2005 Pew Research Survey)
whether Roe v. Wade should be overturned, 57% of Americans said no, 32% said yes and 11%
were unsure. Yet is important to note that a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll also taken in
November 2005 found that only 26% of Americans believed that abortion should always be
legal, 56% thought it should sometimes be legal and 20% thought it should be completely
illegal. This move toward placing restrictions on abortion is troubling and has been exacerbated
by increasing corporate media attention to the “partial birth abortion” ban and the Laci Peterson
case.
Once Roe is overturned, women’s constitutional right to an abortion will be eliminated,
but abortions won’t become illegal immediately. Instead, the legality of abortion will be
determined on a state-by-state basis. Many states will outlaw abortion outright, several will
basically maintain current access, and many others will severely restrict abortion access. All of
this will be determined through fierce political struggle. In other words, the battle over
reproductive freedom will begin with the overturning of Roe, not end. The question is, how will
the left respond and how will Ruckus respond in particular?
Abortion struggles: the old and the new
To frame this struggle in terms of abortion and the “choice” to have one is limiting and
white supremacist. As many feminists of color have argued, the ideology of the “pro-choice”
movement objectively focuses on white middle class interests. By focusing on abortion, the
movement ignores other issues critical to women’s reproductive health and freedom, especially
for poor women and women of color, for whom access to healthcare and economic justice are of
primary concern. Questions of “access” tend to be defined as access to abortion services, while
other needs of working class women and women of color are ignored. Further, the pro-choice
movement actively disregards the different ways in which the fertility of women of color is
perceived. Issues such as sterilization and coercive contraception are totally ignored by the
mainstream choice movement, yet these are crucial issues that women of color face when trying
to control their reproduction.
There is limited awareness that a movement for reproductive justice must value a
woman’s right to have and raise a healthy baby as well as the right not to become pregnant. As a
result, currently, we witness a movement that is focused on using the courts rather than mass
movements to protect women’s health needs and that remains overwhelmingly white even as
women of color, as a group, have more difficulties obtaining good reproductive health care than
white women. This movement also actively ignores the work of women of color groups and
organizations have done outside of the mainstream movement and often without its support.
These critiques of the current pro-choice movement for being white and middle class are
true and important, and fairly common on the radical left. However, they don’t go much further
than criticizing the existing movement. That is, they don’t tell us how to build a reproductive
freedom movement after Roe.
One of our goals in meeting was to sketch what such a movement could look like. In
discussing this, we have come to at least four conclusions:
1. Radicals need to realize that the overturning of Roe is significant. It’s easy to be
“ultra-radical” and dismiss Roe for being unimportant to the lives of most women, and therefore
to see its overturning as insignificant. But regardless of the racial and class privileged nature of
Roe and the lobby built around it, it is a serious mistake to dismiss Roe and the implications of its
overthrow. The overturning of Roe will remake the landscape of women’s movements and
therefore of radical movements as well. When fought for in the Supreme Court, the right to an
abortion was intended to serve as a harbinger for more progressive feminist legislation. Instead
of serving as the “floor” upon which to build a comprehensive feminist agenda, Roe has become
the “ceiling.” Feminists now are forced to re-establish the importance of this right.
For this reason, it is important for radicals and revolutionaries to pay attention to the
current crisis over Roe and to anticipate and work on a response to the end of Roe. What will
happen to the women’s movement when it is overturned? What forms of resistance will emerge?
What potential will there be to build a mass base? What will we do as revolutionaries?
2. Liberals need to realize that this not just about abortion. It never was and it can’t be
now. After Roe is gone, the liberal women’s movement could ask fundamental questions that it
hasn’t seriously considered in 35 years: Why is it primarily abortion that it defends rather than
women’s health? What went wrong with the movement built around Roe? How do we build a
post-Roe movement? How might such a movement protect abortion while not making it the
centerpiece of the movement? In other words, the end of Roe will cause some fundamental soulsearching among liberals, in which radical ideas might suddenly get a fresh look. As radicals,
we need to ask ourselves how we can inject our politics into this debate. How can we make sure
the issues we think are important don’t get dropped?
3. Our present surveillance society may make old tactics of radical resistance difficult or
impossible. Before Roe, underground houses around the country, like the Jane network, provided
needed health services for women who could seek them out. But let’s not forget that safe
services were extremely rare, even with the Jane collective. If abortion becomes illegal in much
of the United States, it raises the possibility that other such underground institutions could be
formed. However, it might be much more difficult to run them today than it was previously,
given that the state has much greater surveillance powers and technologies than it did in the
1960s. Can Jane houses be run safely in the internet and satellite communications era? If not,
then what kinds of underground institutions can? What models can we look to? Is an
underground approach even desirable, or should the movement stick to an above-ground,
political defense of reproductive freedom?
4. We need a new framework. “Choice” is an inadequate way to frame the struggle for
women’s reproductive freedom. We need to develop a new frame, one not steeped in white and
middle class privilege and one that won’t limit the radical potential of struggles for women’s
health and reproductive freedom. We believe that devising a new framework is crucial to a
successful struggle for life today as well as life after Roe.
Developing a new framework
One of the strengths of the anti-abortion movement is the way it frames the issue: “prolife.” The Right has successfully reframed public opinion about abortion and women’s health
through their framework of “Life.” After all, who could be opposed to life? How can “choice”
trump “life?” You need to live before you can make choices. The simplicity and universal
appeal of the “life” discourse resonates with many people. It has become a powerful force in the
national dialogue, which posits “choice” as the only other option. In this semantic battle,
“choice,” which is a vague and unwieldy tool in political conversation, falls far behind the
language of “life.” The “pro-life” framework frames the abortion debate in a way that gives an
important rhetorical advantage to anti-abortion forces.
We believe that one of the tasks of a new reproductive movement must be to develop a
framework that is as powerful and as simple as the “right to life” and that helps us to show that
the term “pro-life” is a misnomer. In working toward a new frame, we have come to two basic
conclusions so far.
1. The framework of “choice” is ineffective and ideologically wrong. It should be
abandoned. The ideal of “choice” rests on liberal ideas of individualism and the belief that the
essence of freedom is the ability to make choices among available alternatives. It is a onedimensional framework that has emerged from the interests of liberal, white, middle class
women, and continues to appeal primarily to this group. Given these limitations, the notion of
choice does not tend to resonate with people who are not white and middle class. Further, given
its focus on individual choices, it also fails to provide a more communal notion of liberation,
autonomy, and power that can relate to families and communities. It falls flat compared to “prolife” language and lends itself to fit cleanly into market economics. For example, recently
“choice” language has been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry, with new forms of unsafe
birth control being marketed as offering more “choices” to the modern woman. Recent research
has shown that the once-a-week Ortho Evra patch, for example, may have caused strokes in
women who used it. This language is also being used in the latest wave of new reproductive
technologies and genetic engineering, often obscuring the real medical and political dangers of
such technologies.
Further, the choice framework is unable to address critical issues such as the
criminalization of sexuality among women of color, who are targeted for having “crack babies,”
being “promiscuous,” and consistently making “bad choices.” Low-income and working- class
women, women of color and women in prison are constantly portrayed as unable to make good
reproductive decisions. This results in the perceived need to take away those choices through
forced birth control or sterilization. For example, Project Prevention, an organization formerly
known as CRACK (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity), pays women who have been
indicted for drug abuse to be sterilized. Such groups flourish under the common belief that poor
women and women of color are incapable of making good choices and need to be restrained at
all costs. Here also lies a fault-line within the pro-choice movement. By not tackling the
concerns of poor women and women of color regarding such issues of sterilization and social
control, the current movement has alienated them. The current mainstream pro-choice movement
only approves of “good” choices, ignoring the fact that many of these “choices” are made in a
racist, capitalist, and anti-feminist world.
Finally, the “choice” framework tends to lead movement activists to the courts rather than
the streets. The fight for choice is not taking place among a mass base but by lawyers, lobbyists,
and “professionals” in the courts and the legislatures and the media. The only thing that can
really protect women’s reproductive freedom, however, is a mass movement of people
demanding this freedom for themselves and others.
2. One alternative framework is that of “women’s health,” but this framework has
advantages and disadvantages.
The women’s health framework aims to connect politics and policies affecting women's
health with the goal of connecting otherwise disparate phenomena. Reproductive rights and
sexual health find their place among many other social and political issues. Basic questions arise
about the utility of this framework. How do we construe health? How is it framed in the U.S,
internationally, and specifically in the Third World? The “health” framework is useful because it
has a wider appeal, but it is less politicized than choice. It incorporates the value of community
alongside the value of individual autonomy to include women’s health and reproductive rights in
a way that has universal appeal. At the international level, many women’s reproductive rights
activists have used the “women’s health” framework effectively in a way that puts reproductive
health in a category alongside other women’s health issues. This approach characterizes abortion
as a health care service that women require in order to maintain bodily integrity.
There are certain key strengths of the framework. It places reproductive health and
abortion alongside many other women’s health concerns. In many Third World countries, tactics
are commonly devised to remove reproductive agency from women in the name of population
control. In such cases, abortions, sterilization and dangerous contraceptives are often forced on
women who do not want them. Thus, using the “health” frame enables activists to incorporate
the many facets of reproductive health by not simply focusing on the right to NOT have a child
and including a whole host of services that women need access to in order to fully and
effectively control their reproductive destinies. Another benefit of the “health” frame is that it
allows clearer links to other movements and in many places, fostering cross-issue activism.
Women’s health activists in third world countries often link with anti-globalization activists and
environmentalists because the health framework allows them to connect globalization, capitalism
and environmental horrors in the name of industrialization to declines in women’s health.
This framework does have problems, though. It does not really deal with the problem of
the criminalization of sexuality and women of color’s reproductive rights. In the U.S. we see an
increasing number of cases in which women are criminalized for their behavior during
pregnancy. Women who use drugs while pregnant are often incarcerated and not treated for their
dependency. We are recently even hearing of women prisoners who are shackled to their beds
while giving birth! Also, the health framework does not go far enough in addressing
organizations like Project Prevention, which claim to act in the name of babies’ health though
they make no effort to provide underserved women with quality prenatal care or adequate
nutrition while pregnant.
Also, the concept of “health” is not even as political as the concept of “choice.” It could
imply that this is not a “political” issue but a scientific or health issue. It could be difficult to
mobilize around “women’s health” because the framework could presume that, once again, the
“experts” (this time medical professionals) should determine what is good for women rather than
women themselves. Any new framework needs to have a political dimension that a) enables and
encourages mass mobilization and b) insists that women’s reproductive freedom is just that —a
form of freedom—that needs to be protected through the actions and ideas of ordinary people,
not just experts and lawyers.
So where to go from here? To Reproductive Justice?
We can minimally conclude that choice is definitely not powerful enough. It is likely that
health is not either. The task is to come up with a better framework. Of course, frameworks
themselves have problems. They oversimplify, essentialize, and obscure intricacies.” Perhaps
there is no single, catch-all framework. But given the urgency, if we cannot come up with a
useful framework, what do we do?
The task of coming up with a new framework must involve people working in other
arenas of social justice. One such example is the “reproductive justice” framework that the
organization Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice have formulated in collaboration with
the Sistersong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective. They have recently put forth a
report that discusses the differences in organizing approaches between reproductive health,
reproductive rights and reproductive justice. In it they claim, “the reproductive justice
framework is rooted in the recognition of histories of reproductive oppression and abuse in all
communities… This framework uses a model grounded in organizing women and girls to change
structural power inequalities.” The key component of this analysis is the active
acknowledgement that the control and exploitation of women’s bodies, sexuality and
reproduction is a key strategy in controlling communities, particularly communities of color.
Through linking social justice movements a stronger, more encompassing framework can
be created; one that includes not only bodily integrity and health, but housing, and employment;
a movement for comprehensive social and economic justice. This is a much larger, cross and
inter-movement conversation and needs to be considered as we move forward.
The Liberatory Family
This is a working document meant to express general thoughts brought up in recent
political conversation. This document does not represent a final view of thought on this
subject and is meant only to further our understanding.
Family is a central part of society. A free family, therefore, is a central part of a free
society. Bring the Ruckus proposes that to create a free society we must look to the
struggles to create a free family, a liberatory family.
The family, particularly in the feminist context, has come under considerable critique,
and justifiably so. For this reason we make it clear we are not talking about the
patriarchal family but the liberatory family. The liberatory family is the form taken by
those who, for strategic as well as moral reasons, recognize struggle against white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy as a totality. Simply put, the liberatory family is the
struggle of the oppressed to maintain close social relations and have those relations
recognized. The family cannot and should not be defined by the state. The struggle to
define oneself and one's relation to others against the pressures of capitalism is the
struggle for the liberatory family. These efforts often incorporate all the elements of a
liberatory family: non- patriarchal leadership, prison abolition, fights for a living wage, a
focus on health care, the call to recognize extended families as legitimate, and the
recognition that women are the one's who keep the family together. We propose this
struggle as the basis from which any movement for freedom and justice will develop its
most successful structures.
We see family struggles as feminist struggle even though mainstream feminists often
argue against the family unit. For example, attacks on reproductive freedom do not
simply affect those seeking abortion rights, but also those seeking to have families at all.
LGBT families, for example, are often engaged in struggles to have and maintain family
units. The attack on reproductive freedom does not only include the right to have a
pregnancy terminated, but also the right to create healthy families. To attack reproductive
freedom is to attack the liberatory family, especially those families who are not seen as
legitimate by the state or who have been living under state encroachment.
The United States is structured by race and class. Thus, it should be no surprise that we
often see this struggle to build a free family coming from women of color, who
frequently act as bulwarks against social control. Their struggles to keep families together
in the face of mass incarceration, invasive policing, or repressive immigration policies are
struggles for a liberatory family.
The idea of liberatory family is an idea we in Bring the Ruckus are still struggling to
flesh out. It came from observing and participating in two struggles: one working against
social control and one focused on workplace organizing. We hope in developing the
concept of the liberatory family we will help identify where radicals need to focus their
struggles for a free society.
Work, Social Control & the Family
Struggles around work and against social control are at the heart of the struggles for the
liberatory family. We recognize that women are key political agents for social change
because women have been and continue to be key targets of oppression.
Women are often at the centers of campaigns against social control because the state has
always had a gendered view of social control and it has always been aimed at containing
people of color. During chattel slavery, there were essentially no gender distinctions
between men and women of color. A Black woman could be whipped just as heinously as
a Black man because they weren't considered to be men or women- just property. After
abolition, systems of social control changed in order to keep the newly freed population
in line. These systems treated men and women of color differently. For example, prisons
were designed to lock up Black men in order to do two things. First, they "protected"
white women because it was believed that the newly freed Black man endangered white
women's "virtue." Thus things like miscegenation laws were enacted to prevent race
mixing while prisons and lynch laws were aimed at keeping Black men off the streets and
"in their place." However, these systems of social control recognized the usefulness of
Black female domestic labor even as they took many Black men out of the labor market.
States couldn't lock up Black women like Black men because they were doing all the
domestic labor. These systems of social control ultimately preserved Black domestic
labor while it systematically locked up 1/2 of the Black population. The legacies of these
systems of racialized social control continue today.
Social control systems have had a direct impact on wages, particularly for families of
color. The earning power of all women in the workplace has always been below men.
During the time of the welfare state, when social programs kept extreme poverty within
limits, this impact was somewhat muted. Today, neoliberalism has ended the family wage
pact. The result is that more women of color are now often forced into the workplace at
substandard wages while other family members are incarcerated. This has made entire
populations superfluous to society.
Since the days of chattel slavery, the role function of the family under capitalism in the
United States has not been the same for people of color as it has for white folks. While
white women have been struggling to emancipate themselves from a family system that
subordinated them to their fathers and husbands, women of color have been struggling to
be able to even have a family and have it recognized as legitimate. Whereas in the days of
slavery
Black women married men in secret and struggled to keep their families together as they
faced the prospect of having their partners or children being sold off, today women of
color are consumed with struggles to keep their families together as they face the
prospect of their partners or children being sent to prison and/or deported. As part of this
struggle, many women of color have in practice expanded the nuclear family to include
extended families and partnerships.
If we are going to do radically feminist work, we must begin by re-imagining and
reconstructing the family in the ways that women of color are already doing. We must
support the struggles of these women to redefine, legitimate, and keep their families
together. To challenge the structures of social control that break the family up leads to a
different type of radical feminist politics and in fact is a more radical form of politics than
is being done today.
A radical feminist praxis focused on the systems of social control can help to link the
struggles against prisons and police with struggles in the workplace. Rather than
competing areas of struggle they can be viewed as connected. For example, the activistscholar Ruthie Gilmore has done excellent work in showing how patriarchy is the
primary system used to determine who is a danger to society and who must be protected.
Focusing on women in the workplace and why they are there could lead to a greater and
more complete understanding of capitalism's pressures on the family.
What Needs to be Done
In discussing the liberatory family one thing becomes very apparent: we have a lot of
work to do. We must define and flesh out what the liberatory family is and how it
compares to our common understanding of family. We should further define "what is a
family" and "what is a liberatory family." We must also further define gender and how
the construction of gender is significant to the family and the liberatory family. In terms
of expanding our feminist praxis and family discussions we must also develop a new
framework that engenders the notion of freedom, not choice as most feminist literature
does. This new framework of freedom must include a discussion around families and
health as well as politics.
Studying the family and developing feminist praxis around the liberatory family must
look at and understand how communities are struggling to maintain their families in the
face of state intervention. It must also dive deeper into the connections of our work
around systems of social control (e.g. prisons, police & immigration) and the workplace
through the lens of feminist praxis. We must understand what women in the workforce
means for the perpetuation of capitalism. We must look at the different roles that women
of color have played in the workforce. After all, they have always been a part of the
working class. How does this historical fact change our understanding of workplace
organizing? How does this relate to our understanding of race and the workplace? How
does it change our examination of all our political work? Ultimately, what is the
relationship between the racial patriarchy and capitalism? These are only some of the
questions we must examine more closely.
But engaging in study is only half of our task. We must also engage in work. Because
systems of social control have been developed and refined in the South, Bring the Ruckus
feels the southern region of the US is vital to revolutionary change. Having first-hand
experience in the region will help in understanding the multitude of ways systems of
social control function. Furthermore, it will help us to understand and engage in the
already existing work around radical feminist praxis, and see how people are struggling
to establish forms of the liberatory family.
Revolutionaries must continue to examine current work through the lens of feminist
praxis. If we truly seek to build a free society, we must have a theory and engage in work
that fully incorporates a radical feminist praxis that ultimately struggles for the liberatory
family.
Key Questions:
1. What has it meant for capitalism to have women in the workforce? How has
women's racially differentiated experience in the workforce impacted capitalism?
2. What is the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism?
3. Is globalization changing the relationship between patriarchy & capitalism? If so,
how?
4. How do we define family? How do we define the liberatory family?
5. How might a theory of the liberatory family challenge existing constructions of
gender and sexuality?
9.27.06