Wiscon 37: Second Wave Feminism panel
At WisCon 36 younger women asked specifically for a discussion which focused on communication between their generation and former generations. Veterans of second-wave feminism talk about the historical context of that wave of feminism in relation to the Civil Rights, Free Speech, Black Power, Anti-Vietnam War and Gay Liberation movements.
laceblade has posted her notes from this panel, so there might be some repetition.
Also, it was easier for me to type on my ipad without hitting shift all the time, so it is mostly lower case. And this is not a full or exact transcript, just the best my feverish typing fingers could do. I've read through once for typoes, but I'm sureI didn't catch them all. Corrections welcome, especially if I misattributed anything. Trigger warning for discussions of rape.
susan simensky bietilia: last year at WisCon she met several graduate students who didn't know about second wave feminism, approached it only through academic texts. not informed by the context of activism that she had emerged into & gained a political awareness of oppression as woman.
she feels that activist history is missing in discussions of second wave & so wrote panel description.
roxanne samer: i am one of those graduate students. has been interested in second wave feminism personally & politically for a while. working on project returning to late 60s/early 70s with a generosity in criticality, as someone who was not there and deeply wants to know what it was like.
science fiction in conversation with political movements. what should we take away from that? what is most exciting for us who were not there and have returned?
debbie notkin: doesn't like term second wave. came to feminism through science fiction, jeanne gomoll, jan bogstad on panel (jan: we didn't know what we were doing), joanna russ. her history also informed by civil rights and pre-70s social justice movements. wants to hear as many perspectives as possible.
angeli primlani. i am generation x, the very beginnings of so called 3rd wave. actually there were feminists who were gen x. dialogues in the 80s didn't address their lives as immigrant women, queer women, women of color. pieces of dialogue left out, anti rape movement on campuses, tension between them and second wave feminists. as i get older i find there are a lot of angry young women who get in my face & i say 'baby i was out in the south in 1988...' gaining appreciation of what it was like for second wave people. intergenerational dialogue important. esp in threatened areas like womens rights given sinister stuff that is going on. we cannot be fighting among ourselves.
jackie gross. i feel like i straddle somewhere before gen x, i came out in 86. i started reading about feminism and gave sojourner truth's 'ain't i a woman' speech in catholic school. joined women's collective in New York. father gave me book 'when and where i enter: black women, race and sex in america': i didn't talk to white women for like a week after i read this book. when i hear women younger than me talk about 2nd wave it is like something i don't know. the academic canon vs things that were written that were more ephemeral, you could find these but they were in places like the lesbian herstory archives back when that was in joan nestle's house, people didn't get to see that ephemeral material. we didn't always do a good job of translating and passing on that knowledge. hoping we are at the beginnings of transmitting that and dovetailing diverse different experiences to one another.
janice bogstad: when i was a wee beastie growing up on a farm in wisconsin, everything a girl could do was nurse, mother, maid, secretary, teacher. none of which seemed suited to me. thought of myself as a wee beastie rather than those things because i started reading science fiction at 6 with book Janice in Tomorrowland. for a long time, protofeminist stage was science fiction. has heard this described as 'you're not like other girls' movement: vacillated in that dark space for a long time.
wiscon is a second wave phenomemon. when we started wiscon and wanted to talk about women writers, wanted to recover our voices from being told about our own incapacity, we weren't very conscious of the larger movement. somebody has to say this: we weren't reallly sure if we should be doing this. people kept telling us no one would come to our con, that we should only be part feminist not wholly feminist. a rumor that when feminist fanzine Janus was nominated for Hugo they wanted to take it off the ballot.
now she is 63. the second phase of the second wave. was reading betty friedan and old bad translation of second sex. looking for a sense of how to be both female and me. in northern wisconsin we were fighting to get whole wheat flour. came to madison at 18: a bit more contact. second wave had many things going on. wiscon came about bc no one talked to women sf writers in 70s except us.
in her current incarnation she teaches feminist theory, second wave, and understands that definitional categories are false. but you need them to start thinking about what ideas and problems dominated activity at give period of time. doesn't believe in first, second wave etc; people were doing different things at any period of time. definitions can be very dismissive.
third wave described as slutty feminism, mean feminism, you women of the second wave weren't interested in your sexuality (not how debbie remembers it). tries to cast head back in those times and understand... are we in 4th wave? probably not but what are the issues that dominate?
teaching women's studies, most students believe that all the problems have been solved, that they can do anything they want, with no barriers, that they can let guard down. it ain't true. doesn't mean we haven't made progress. talked to a woman the other day who was told to use her initials because nobody reads sf by wonem.
jackie: even worse when you are told to change your name because it doesn't sound white
jan: periodization is useful but is not the truth.
debbie: hearing a lot about context, understanding context. people who believe that problems have been solved -- passive construction where no one did anything, it just happened,people in power just realized that they were wrong. Like that happens.
can we each talk a little bit about context in which we became feminists. i do not believe everything has been solved, but i grew up in era of 'help wanted: male' and 'help wanted: female' which is now unimaginable.
jackie: i became a feminist because i went to all girls catholic schools. had nuns who were post vatican 2 franciscan nuns and played basketball. all female environment was awesome. parents sent me to school with 'you must be twice as good to be taken seriouslu because you are black' - a survival tactic that black parents teach their children because someone will question your right to exist, your right to be human. was one of 3 black kids at school. learned how to speak up. at public high school, was not used to sitting back and not raising hand, but met other girls who had not had same experience. knew things were out there because what women were doing was reported in news: eg first lineman job for phone company. ingrained was the hard work part that wasn't going to be given, you had to fight for it. dovetailed with late 60s-70s rise of a black middle class believing in looking back and lifting people up with you. no separation between feminism and race questions. learned much later that there was also a black feminism, a whole nother thing.
susan: was also not like other girls. growing up in brooklyn, dress codes for women. no trousers for women. no library access without dress and stockings - how handmaids tale can we get? couldn't call up a guy and ask him out socially, you had to wait to be asked, idea of doing these things made me vomit. in high school started getting clothes from army navy store, hair short; on New York subways at 2am no one would bother me. nobody ever asked me out because they assumed either really weird or not into men, but wasn't interested in playing games of flirtation and coyness and crap.
60s, 70s worked on antiwar newspaper, worked on Bridal Fair Action disrupting a bridal fair because of its enforcement of women as consumers and products: they auctioned off a woman on stage. debate for years after about whether it was anti woman to do that, but it ws the most empoewring thing for her. knowing that she wasn't alone and that there was something wrong with the way we were supposed to be.
debbie: let's hear from younger people
angeli: i attended u of north carolina. women raped on campus, estimates varied from 1 in 6 to 1 in 3. 85% by my count. an epidemic of sexual violence not discussed, not talked about by anyone -- including the second wave feminists on campus, bc for them it was such a big deal that women were on campus at all. students would say to women studies teachers that they wanted to talk abt date rape and the teacher would say no.
beginnings of what would become things like slutwalk: idea of sexual agency, sexual freedom, women's rights as a person with a body. people victimized & stories not told; women afraid that they had rocked the boat so far, tried not to be called dykes, why push further, why reclaim that word now.
when you think about how effective it is to disempower a person, a generation who hasn't talked about it. dept of education is now investigating UNC bc it has got so bad that a girl who went to honor court for restraining order they threatened to expel her for creating hostile environment for him.
jan: i remember that story
angeli: this was 3 months ago. there have been so many stories about UNC.
at freshman orientation older students would say 'don't go to frat parties, don't get raped'. duke was notorious. buy me a drink and i will tell you what i think about the duke lacrosse team story, about the way the system is rigged,
jackie: it's a D1 school.
angeli: if they had enough evidence to go to court given who those kids are, something must have happened.
so that's how i probably got into feminism, but also i've always been a feminist
debbie: idea of don't rock the boat any further. common in activist movements. and really scary. because the only way we ever make progress is if each generation rocks the last generation's boat. this may not be germane to the panel but it's gername to my mind and i am the moderator.
jan: thank god for wiscon where i get to talk about these things. where i am right now it is considered crazy.
we have to organize around issues. not lose what little protection for reproductive rights we have left. i'm getting angry now. the ways that people are eating away at the very right to access and knowledge of birth control, ownership of your own body.
on my campus, 2 conservative young men control the student senate. they had idea that they would outsource health services. most workers are women: threat to their jobs. we are between 65-68% female campus, liberal arts. women in health service are sympathetic to needs of young women from towns where they are taught abstinence only and nothing about their bodies, barely understand menstruation. senate are writing up request for proposal, looking at other options with sole reason that they can save students segregated fees -- meaning save the young male students money while the young female students bear the consequences. at bottom is inclination to cut off one more avenue of access to knowledge and ownership of body, a thing so fundamental to what happens on college campuses. date rape, drugs also important but this is a battle that has not been won yet. embedded in economics this time, but the women won't save money or have someone who understands their situation.
debbie: i don't understand why we can't call reprodutive rights AND rape protection ownership of the body.
jan: fragmented movement is difficult.
roxanne: a thread i want to add to idea of continually rocking the boat and to the criticism of definitions, delineations. the boat was always rocking. new generations complicate and challenge who came before. but in looking to second wave, there wasn't anything singular and united. return not only to the canonical texts but also the discussions around them at the time. making that history available to younger generations. Khatru edited by jeff smith, an issue discussing gender and science fiction through a mailed conversation,now available to buy. also janus, other magazines. knowing our history.
janics: also aurora, new moon, the witch and the chameleon, solaris in french
audience: the 'don't rock boat' argument is not that we don't want progress, but that we don't want a backlash that wll make us regress
angeli: the backlash was happening before this. we were the backlash. [edited per wild_irises's comment]
susan: the people not listening were obviously opportunists who had betrayed their original beliefs, who were clueless. women ignoring rape may have said they were second wave feminists but they weren't my kind of second wave feminists. look at occupy and movements still going on, dynamics of political discourse coming from second wave: developing theory collectively rather than as individual genius. i'm not in a feminist group because i have gone to look at all different oppression in society, going for where there are creative possibilities at the moment, but never go back on sticking for wht is right.
audience: the wedding auction was years ago, but women are now doing plastic surgery to be perfect on their wedding day; tv program to win plastic surgery; a monstrous idea. problems not solved, women themselves are so retrograde, so much the enemy of feminism, where do we combat this?
debbie: not going to try to answer that, but any conversation needs to involve commodification and effort to make money off all sides, feminist or not
audience: i taught women's studies and was rejected for many philosophy jobs, worked earning less than man with fewer degrees. one thing we have to be sure of is not to sell ourselves cheaply or short. don't take less for your job, don't do more than a man would for the same amount of money
jackie: book by susan brownmiller, Against Our Will. pushback by women of color against how she characterised black men. aspects that feed into americans' fear of color, that white men get away from stuff and black men are challenged for walking down the street; unsafe to go out at night bc police will think they are up to something.
hearing that there was no pushback against seminal feminist text: just not true. 4 hour long meetings for womanews and someone always cried by the end of it; hashing out feminist theory that was being published as active documents that were created. not just a case of buying a book. those discussions never made it into contemprary discussions about date rape, secual assault, women having right to wear what they want.
came of age in time of Central Park rape. New York 1982-1989, many stories were only told in their local area (more stuff i didn't catch)
angeli: quoting Catherine McKinnon [attribution given by wild_irises in comments]. rape in our society not illegal, merely regulated: seen as a property crime, and as a privilege for certain people.
victims are seen as being guilty of perjury
who is allowed to be taken seriously as perpetrator. can queer rape happen, can lesbians, can men rape men... then eg of Catholic Church, which would make me cry. not just a crime about power but also a way that all of us are kept in our place, whether we are victimised directly or not. also true of men in different ways: your lives are dictated and curtailed bc if you fall out of line, not masculine enough in right ways, don't fit gender police, then they get to do that to you too -- and it becomes even more of a joke. a social hierachy
audience: 3 brief points. 99% collegiality, cooperation, consensus, not only feminist: pacifist and quaker movements had a hand in that.
2 things saved my life as one of those strange girls. Girl Scout camp where women cut down trees, build furniture .
and suzy mckee charnas, joanna russ, a list of names we may need to say out loud to remind us that these folks were very important.
what i am seeing now in sf and on screen: the one exceptional woman surrounded by men
jankcie: hunger games
angeli: smurfette
aud: what the hell happened? i hope we can change that.
debbie: context, change, internal discussion. i will say and you can all kick me later that i remember when no one in my social circle questioned transexual empire by Janice Raymond, when it was the one true book about transsexuality, and it is a very nasty anti trans book. we shifted that by talking to the few people we knew who were transitioning. i remember watching that change in myself. in context of sexuality: two books Coming to Power, feminist pro sadomasochism book, and Against Sadomasochism was the response. very illuminating for how complicated and nuanced the second wave was; not all the essays in those book agree with one another.
jackie: pleasure and danger, edited by Carol Vance. remember most of us had those books side by sde on our shelves bcause we discussed them. deeply ironic when people namecheck audre lorde on uses of the erotic; do you realise she is in Against Sadomoasochism? you can have both those positions, these things exist at same time
janice: it's ok or not ok, people are always trying to validate themselves by devalidating someone else. second wave is important category to understand what ideas or concerns dominated for a ccertain period of tme. not meaning that everyone has to be social activist when there are other ways to move forward... where do we get that need to make others seem trivial to make ourselves feel important?
susan: in 1982, conference at barnard that resulted in pleasure and danger book. formative for her. major theoretical split in feminism between essentialists who were anti sex and those who said women have been oppressed for so long we don't know what our own sexuality is about and we need to be free to explore that, whatever it is.
janice: what was the other part?
jackie: you just taught it
janice: exploring your sexuality means you should take as much power for yourselves as men do... trying to think of theoretical stuff. who knows more theory?
susan: mckinnon and dworkin said heterosexual sex is always rape & that looking at sexual images is male practice
debbie: essentialists believe women don't get pleasure from images. would say that and women in the audience would be like 'really, that's very interesting...' and you get into the problem, as various people on this panel talk about, of being one of those weird women
in a very different way
angeli: third wave feminists were like fuck the theory, this is our lives. second wave were very much into ideas.
half of audience: uh-uh
aud: that's academia
janice: that's how you get tenure
angelie: we were very often hostile to idea of theory
debbie: and you encountered second wave feminists who were academics, not activists
aud: thank you for raymond comment. a thing hard to square re: dialogue between feminisms is that you hear it's about intersectionality, and all of you who are second wave talk about roots in civil rights movement, and that doesn't fit. if second wave feminism has roots in civil rights, how is it that the popular characterization of it is that intersectionality isa 3rd wave and not a 2nd wave thing?
jackie: ephemeral information. people would go to meetings, write ups in newspapers and pamphlets but not books. the victors got to decide what you read. you dont get to see the popular record unless you dig, go to libraries. or talk to people, ask for 20 minutes of their time to know what it was like. a friend, photographer and lesbian in San Francisco, a website has a letter written from her to her parents when she was jailed as a white civil rights activist in ths south
like any movement, we are imperfect in what we translate from one movement to another. especially when you left a movement very angry.
debbie: publishing is white, at that time was white male, what ended up in books was what publishers at that time could tolerate. not the deep questions we were asking ourselves about race and priveilge. and where were you -- in a place with interracial dialogue or in a place that was all white and all black and you didn't know how to diversify. you can't just go (leans across table) "jackie!"
jackie: organizations , conferences, got bad reputations for tokenising behavior. womens studies conference where all WOC walked out because one was tokenized.
intersectionality was just what my collective did. it meant living with the hurt. no matter what got said, be willing to come back to the table the next day or a week from now and try again.
janice: when poeple talk about feminism and civil rights movement, they also talk about women in civil rights who were not allowed to have a voice. other things going on: race and gender, race class and gender, multiple intersectionalities... reactions to being excluded. working for campaigns: why was i asked if i could type?
susan: why i organized this workshop. women in the new left who wanted to be full participants, we didn't disagree with goals of novenent
angeli: and then came the internet
susan: wait....
angeli: in 1980!
audience discusses entry time of internet briefly
angeli: for people under 30: suddently you had opportunity to have dialogue in real time, rather than a text and then a conversation in a private physical space, that might lead to publication or might not. we have opportunity now in feminist movement for pushback and conversation in real time. or it wasn't as easy.
debbie: a big missing piece: the antivietnam war movement gets elided by idea that feminism grew out of civil rights. that movement was very white after black power movement had split off. very white anti war movement did that tokenism thing we didn't know better than to do. all these things have to be learned. all movements make mistakes becase we don't know what we are dealing with
jackie: bringing up internet misses out feminist publishing and women in print movement. companeras, first latina lesbian anthology: we knew if we didn't keep buying these books no one would publish them, they were published by women.
debbie: what were you doing in that period?
jackie: i worked in a women's bookstore! discussed terrible cover of science fiction book, white character on front cover black character in novel, a friend talked to a publisher in NY about it and was told 1. black people don't read sf 2. white people won't buy with a black char on cover. book by carol davenport, i reviewed and encouraged people to mail cover back to publisher.
Seal Press, published first books about lesbian rape and lesbian relationships. Cleis Press. passed hand to hand and we worked to get the books into libraries
angeli: i was in north carolina. in New York, LA, Chicago you could access books but we didn't have a feminist bookstore.
aud: experience counters idea that second wave was about theory, third wave activism. worked with feminist underchurch of Catholic Church, womens ordination conference --- was archivist at seminary. someone did a dissertation and i was interviewed. student asked what books did you read? answer: no books, i was not allowed to be a priest. student insisted, what books? answered no books, lived experience.
wherever women found themselves noticing they were not allowed to be fully themselves, that was where feminism bubbled up all over the place
janice: and there were more of us, the baby boom generation
diantha sprouse from audience: i am hearing things that amaze me, that women on any campus would put up with conditions at UNC. at Ohio State 1985 we organized a group called Woman Against Rape (WAR) and dykes on bikes patrolled the campus, i was 185lb pure muscle and by the time police got there, that guy knew he wasn't going to mess with a woman like that. [here my ipad keyboard malfunctioned and i may have missed a part]
my grandmother told me: we are amreican indians. we have no rights in this world. what you have to do is stake your claim to your rights and defend it. publishment in american indian tribes for rape was death, because you are endagngering the future of the entire tribe. i have all my life banded together with working cass women who know nothing about theory, who haven't been to college, and we don't tolerate that shit. i grew up in appalachia in a log cabin and i figured out that if you're a woman, you have to band together with other women and defend yourselves because nobody else is gonna do it
angeli: that sounded very victim blaming. when more than half the student population is suffering from ptsd, when women's studies dept is shutting you down, it is difficult to mount concentrated organization of force. people did try, and improvement has happened incrementally, but it took 30 years to get federal govt involved. women make choice: do i make my whole life about this movement, my appearance and sexuality public, or do i just sit back quietly and try to graduate?
if i have bitterness about women in second wave it is bc of this but i understands where women were coming from. we found feminists not on campus but it took some doing... one feminist in student health would shut down women who came with stories of rape.
when everyone who is supposed to be your ally isn't with you, it is really hard to have a concentrated movement. especially when you are being told you are crazy.
debbie: out of time, not clear how to shut this down, everyone speaking from heart, but thank you.
Posted at Dreamwidth.
comments.
laceblade has posted her notes from this panel, so there might be some repetition.
Also, it was easier for me to type on my ipad without hitting shift all the time, so it is mostly lower case. And this is not a full or exact transcript, just the best my feverish typing fingers could do. I've read through once for typoes, but I'm sureI didn't catch them all. Corrections welcome, especially if I misattributed anything. Trigger warning for discussions of rape.
susan simensky bietilia: last year at WisCon she met several graduate students who didn't know about second wave feminism, approached it only through academic texts. not informed by the context of activism that she had emerged into & gained a political awareness of oppression as woman.
she feels that activist history is missing in discussions of second wave & so wrote panel description.
roxanne samer: i am one of those graduate students. has been interested in second wave feminism personally & politically for a while. working on project returning to late 60s/early 70s with a generosity in criticality, as someone who was not there and deeply wants to know what it was like.
science fiction in conversation with political movements. what should we take away from that? what is most exciting for us who were not there and have returned?
debbie notkin: doesn't like term second wave. came to feminism through science fiction, jeanne gomoll, jan bogstad on panel (jan: we didn't know what we were doing), joanna russ. her history also informed by civil rights and pre-70s social justice movements. wants to hear as many perspectives as possible.
angeli primlani. i am generation x, the very beginnings of so called 3rd wave. actually there were feminists who were gen x. dialogues in the 80s didn't address their lives as immigrant women, queer women, women of color. pieces of dialogue left out, anti rape movement on campuses, tension between them and second wave feminists. as i get older i find there are a lot of angry young women who get in my face & i say 'baby i was out in the south in 1988...' gaining appreciation of what it was like for second wave people. intergenerational dialogue important. esp in threatened areas like womens rights given sinister stuff that is going on. we cannot be fighting among ourselves.
jackie gross. i feel like i straddle somewhere before gen x, i came out in 86. i started reading about feminism and gave sojourner truth's 'ain't i a woman' speech in catholic school. joined women's collective in New York. father gave me book 'when and where i enter: black women, race and sex in america': i didn't talk to white women for like a week after i read this book. when i hear women younger than me talk about 2nd wave it is like something i don't know. the academic canon vs things that were written that were more ephemeral, you could find these but they were in places like the lesbian herstory archives back when that was in joan nestle's house, people didn't get to see that ephemeral material. we didn't always do a good job of translating and passing on that knowledge. hoping we are at the beginnings of transmitting that and dovetailing diverse different experiences to one another.
janice bogstad: when i was a wee beastie growing up on a farm in wisconsin, everything a girl could do was nurse, mother, maid, secretary, teacher. none of which seemed suited to me. thought of myself as a wee beastie rather than those things because i started reading science fiction at 6 with book Janice in Tomorrowland. for a long time, protofeminist stage was science fiction. has heard this described as 'you're not like other girls' movement: vacillated in that dark space for a long time.
wiscon is a second wave phenomemon. when we started wiscon and wanted to talk about women writers, wanted to recover our voices from being told about our own incapacity, we weren't very conscious of the larger movement. somebody has to say this: we weren't reallly sure if we should be doing this. people kept telling us no one would come to our con, that we should only be part feminist not wholly feminist. a rumor that when feminist fanzine Janus was nominated for Hugo they wanted to take it off the ballot.
now she is 63. the second phase of the second wave. was reading betty friedan and old bad translation of second sex. looking for a sense of how to be both female and me. in northern wisconsin we were fighting to get whole wheat flour. came to madison at 18: a bit more contact. second wave had many things going on. wiscon came about bc no one talked to women sf writers in 70s except us.
in her current incarnation she teaches feminist theory, second wave, and understands that definitional categories are false. but you need them to start thinking about what ideas and problems dominated activity at give period of time. doesn't believe in first, second wave etc; people were doing different things at any period of time. definitions can be very dismissive.
third wave described as slutty feminism, mean feminism, you women of the second wave weren't interested in your sexuality (not how debbie remembers it). tries to cast head back in those times and understand... are we in 4th wave? probably not but what are the issues that dominate?
teaching women's studies, most students believe that all the problems have been solved, that they can do anything they want, with no barriers, that they can let guard down. it ain't true. doesn't mean we haven't made progress. talked to a woman the other day who was told to use her initials because nobody reads sf by wonem.
jackie: even worse when you are told to change your name because it doesn't sound white
jan: periodization is useful but is not the truth.
debbie: hearing a lot about context, understanding context. people who believe that problems have been solved -- passive construction where no one did anything, it just happened,people in power just realized that they were wrong. Like that happens.
can we each talk a little bit about context in which we became feminists. i do not believe everything has been solved, but i grew up in era of 'help wanted: male' and 'help wanted: female' which is now unimaginable.
jackie: i became a feminist because i went to all girls catholic schools. had nuns who were post vatican 2 franciscan nuns and played basketball. all female environment was awesome. parents sent me to school with 'you must be twice as good to be taken seriouslu because you are black' - a survival tactic that black parents teach their children because someone will question your right to exist, your right to be human. was one of 3 black kids at school. learned how to speak up. at public high school, was not used to sitting back and not raising hand, but met other girls who had not had same experience. knew things were out there because what women were doing was reported in news: eg first lineman job for phone company. ingrained was the hard work part that wasn't going to be given, you had to fight for it. dovetailed with late 60s-70s rise of a black middle class believing in looking back and lifting people up with you. no separation between feminism and race questions. learned much later that there was also a black feminism, a whole nother thing.
susan: was also not like other girls. growing up in brooklyn, dress codes for women. no trousers for women. no library access without dress and stockings - how handmaids tale can we get? couldn't call up a guy and ask him out socially, you had to wait to be asked, idea of doing these things made me vomit. in high school started getting clothes from army navy store, hair short; on New York subways at 2am no one would bother me. nobody ever asked me out because they assumed either really weird or not into men, but wasn't interested in playing games of flirtation and coyness and crap.
60s, 70s worked on antiwar newspaper, worked on Bridal Fair Action disrupting a bridal fair because of its enforcement of women as consumers and products: they auctioned off a woman on stage. debate for years after about whether it was anti woman to do that, but it ws the most empoewring thing for her. knowing that she wasn't alone and that there was something wrong with the way we were supposed to be.
debbie: let's hear from younger people
angeli: i attended u of north carolina. women raped on campus, estimates varied from 1 in 6 to 1 in 3. 85% by my count. an epidemic of sexual violence not discussed, not talked about by anyone -- including the second wave feminists on campus, bc for them it was such a big deal that women were on campus at all. students would say to women studies teachers that they wanted to talk abt date rape and the teacher would say no.
beginnings of what would become things like slutwalk: idea of sexual agency, sexual freedom, women's rights as a person with a body. people victimized & stories not told; women afraid that they had rocked the boat so far, tried not to be called dykes, why push further, why reclaim that word now.
when you think about how effective it is to disempower a person, a generation who hasn't talked about it. dept of education is now investigating UNC bc it has got so bad that a girl who went to honor court for restraining order they threatened to expel her for creating hostile environment for him.
jan: i remember that story
angeli: this was 3 months ago. there have been so many stories about UNC.
at freshman orientation older students would say 'don't go to frat parties, don't get raped'. duke was notorious. buy me a drink and i will tell you what i think about the duke lacrosse team story, about the way the system is rigged,
jackie: it's a D1 school.
angeli: if they had enough evidence to go to court given who those kids are, something must have happened.
so that's how i probably got into feminism, but also i've always been a feminist
debbie: idea of don't rock the boat any further. common in activist movements. and really scary. because the only way we ever make progress is if each generation rocks the last generation's boat. this may not be germane to the panel but it's gername to my mind and i am the moderator.
jan: thank god for wiscon where i get to talk about these things. where i am right now it is considered crazy.
we have to organize around issues. not lose what little protection for reproductive rights we have left. i'm getting angry now. the ways that people are eating away at the very right to access and knowledge of birth control, ownership of your own body.
on my campus, 2 conservative young men control the student senate. they had idea that they would outsource health services. most workers are women: threat to their jobs. we are between 65-68% female campus, liberal arts. women in health service are sympathetic to needs of young women from towns where they are taught abstinence only and nothing about their bodies, barely understand menstruation. senate are writing up request for proposal, looking at other options with sole reason that they can save students segregated fees -- meaning save the young male students money while the young female students bear the consequences. at bottom is inclination to cut off one more avenue of access to knowledge and ownership of body, a thing so fundamental to what happens on college campuses. date rape, drugs also important but this is a battle that has not been won yet. embedded in economics this time, but the women won't save money or have someone who understands their situation.
debbie: i don't understand why we can't call reprodutive rights AND rape protection ownership of the body.
jan: fragmented movement is difficult.
roxanne: a thread i want to add to idea of continually rocking the boat and to the criticism of definitions, delineations. the boat was always rocking. new generations complicate and challenge who came before. but in looking to second wave, there wasn't anything singular and united. return not only to the canonical texts but also the discussions around them at the time. making that history available to younger generations. Khatru edited by jeff smith, an issue discussing gender and science fiction through a mailed conversation,now available to buy. also janus, other magazines. knowing our history.
janics: also aurora, new moon, the witch and the chameleon, solaris in french
audience: the 'don't rock boat' argument is not that we don't want progress, but that we don't want a backlash that wll make us regress
angeli: the backlash was happening before this. we were the backlash. [edited per wild_irises's comment]
susan: the people not listening were obviously opportunists who had betrayed their original beliefs, who were clueless. women ignoring rape may have said they were second wave feminists but they weren't my kind of second wave feminists. look at occupy and movements still going on, dynamics of political discourse coming from second wave: developing theory collectively rather than as individual genius. i'm not in a feminist group because i have gone to look at all different oppression in society, going for where there are creative possibilities at the moment, but never go back on sticking for wht is right.
audience: the wedding auction was years ago, but women are now doing plastic surgery to be perfect on their wedding day; tv program to win plastic surgery; a monstrous idea. problems not solved, women themselves are so retrograde, so much the enemy of feminism, where do we combat this?
debbie: not going to try to answer that, but any conversation needs to involve commodification and effort to make money off all sides, feminist or not
audience: i taught women's studies and was rejected for many philosophy jobs, worked earning less than man with fewer degrees. one thing we have to be sure of is not to sell ourselves cheaply or short. don't take less for your job, don't do more than a man would for the same amount of money
jackie: book by susan brownmiller, Against Our Will. pushback by women of color against how she characterised black men. aspects that feed into americans' fear of color, that white men get away from stuff and black men are challenged for walking down the street; unsafe to go out at night bc police will think they are up to something.
hearing that there was no pushback against seminal feminist text: just not true. 4 hour long meetings for womanews and someone always cried by the end of it; hashing out feminist theory that was being published as active documents that were created. not just a case of buying a book. those discussions never made it into contemprary discussions about date rape, secual assault, women having right to wear what they want.
came of age in time of Central Park rape. New York 1982-1989, many stories were only told in their local area (more stuff i didn't catch)
angeli: quoting Catherine McKinnon [attribution given by wild_irises in comments]. rape in our society not illegal, merely regulated: seen as a property crime, and as a privilege for certain people.
victims are seen as being guilty of perjury
who is allowed to be taken seriously as perpetrator. can queer rape happen, can lesbians, can men rape men... then eg of Catholic Church, which would make me cry. not just a crime about power but also a way that all of us are kept in our place, whether we are victimised directly or not. also true of men in different ways: your lives are dictated and curtailed bc if you fall out of line, not masculine enough in right ways, don't fit gender police, then they get to do that to you too -- and it becomes even more of a joke. a social hierachy
audience: 3 brief points. 99% collegiality, cooperation, consensus, not only feminist: pacifist and quaker movements had a hand in that.
2 things saved my life as one of those strange girls. Girl Scout camp where women cut down trees, build furniture .
and suzy mckee charnas, joanna russ, a list of names we may need to say out loud to remind us that these folks were very important.
what i am seeing now in sf and on screen: the one exceptional woman surrounded by men
jankcie: hunger games
angeli: smurfette
aud: what the hell happened? i hope we can change that.
debbie: context, change, internal discussion. i will say and you can all kick me later that i remember when no one in my social circle questioned transexual empire by Janice Raymond, when it was the one true book about transsexuality, and it is a very nasty anti trans book. we shifted that by talking to the few people we knew who were transitioning. i remember watching that change in myself. in context of sexuality: two books Coming to Power, feminist pro sadomasochism book, and Against Sadomasochism was the response. very illuminating for how complicated and nuanced the second wave was; not all the essays in those book agree with one another.
jackie: pleasure and danger, edited by Carol Vance. remember most of us had those books side by sde on our shelves bcause we discussed them. deeply ironic when people namecheck audre lorde on uses of the erotic; do you realise she is in Against Sadomoasochism? you can have both those positions, these things exist at same time
janice: it's ok or not ok, people are always trying to validate themselves by devalidating someone else. second wave is important category to understand what ideas or concerns dominated for a ccertain period of tme. not meaning that everyone has to be social activist when there are other ways to move forward... where do we get that need to make others seem trivial to make ourselves feel important?
susan: in 1982, conference at barnard that resulted in pleasure and danger book. formative for her. major theoretical split in feminism between essentialists who were anti sex and those who said women have been oppressed for so long we don't know what our own sexuality is about and we need to be free to explore that, whatever it is.
janice: what was the other part?
jackie: you just taught it
janice: exploring your sexuality means you should take as much power for yourselves as men do... trying to think of theoretical stuff. who knows more theory?
susan: mckinnon and dworkin said heterosexual sex is always rape & that looking at sexual images is male practice
debbie: essentialists believe women don't get pleasure from images. would say that and women in the audience would be like 'really, that's very interesting...' and you get into the problem, as various people on this panel talk about, of being one of those weird women
in a very different way
angeli: third wave feminists were like fuck the theory, this is our lives. second wave were very much into ideas.
half of audience: uh-uh
aud: that's academia
janice: that's how you get tenure
angelie: we were very often hostile to idea of theory
debbie: and you encountered second wave feminists who were academics, not activists
aud: thank you for raymond comment. a thing hard to square re: dialogue between feminisms is that you hear it's about intersectionality, and all of you who are second wave talk about roots in civil rights movement, and that doesn't fit. if second wave feminism has roots in civil rights, how is it that the popular characterization of it is that intersectionality isa 3rd wave and not a 2nd wave thing?
jackie: ephemeral information. people would go to meetings, write ups in newspapers and pamphlets but not books. the victors got to decide what you read. you dont get to see the popular record unless you dig, go to libraries. or talk to people, ask for 20 minutes of their time to know what it was like. a friend, photographer and lesbian in San Francisco, a website has a letter written from her to her parents when she was jailed as a white civil rights activist in ths south
like any movement, we are imperfect in what we translate from one movement to another. especially when you left a movement very angry.
debbie: publishing is white, at that time was white male, what ended up in books was what publishers at that time could tolerate. not the deep questions we were asking ourselves about race and priveilge. and where were you -- in a place with interracial dialogue or in a place that was all white and all black and you didn't know how to diversify. you can't just go (leans across table) "jackie!"
jackie: organizations , conferences, got bad reputations for tokenising behavior. womens studies conference where all WOC walked out because one was tokenized.
intersectionality was just what my collective did. it meant living with the hurt. no matter what got said, be willing to come back to the table the next day or a week from now and try again.
janice: when poeple talk about feminism and civil rights movement, they also talk about women in civil rights who were not allowed to have a voice. other things going on: race and gender, race class and gender, multiple intersectionalities... reactions to being excluded. working for campaigns: why was i asked if i could type?
susan: why i organized this workshop. women in the new left who wanted to be full participants, we didn't disagree with goals of novenent
angeli: and then came the internet
susan: wait....
angeli: in 1980!
audience discusses entry time of internet briefly
angeli: for people under 30: suddently you had opportunity to have dialogue in real time, rather than a text and then a conversation in a private physical space, that might lead to publication or might not. we have opportunity now in feminist movement for pushback and conversation in real time. or it wasn't as easy.
debbie: a big missing piece: the antivietnam war movement gets elided by idea that feminism grew out of civil rights. that movement was very white after black power movement had split off. very white anti war movement did that tokenism thing we didn't know better than to do. all these things have to be learned. all movements make mistakes becase we don't know what we are dealing with
jackie: bringing up internet misses out feminist publishing and women in print movement. companeras, first latina lesbian anthology: we knew if we didn't keep buying these books no one would publish them, they were published by women.
debbie: what were you doing in that period?
jackie: i worked in a women's bookstore! discussed terrible cover of science fiction book, white character on front cover black character in novel, a friend talked to a publisher in NY about it and was told 1. black people don't read sf 2. white people won't buy with a black char on cover. book by carol davenport, i reviewed and encouraged people to mail cover back to publisher.
Seal Press, published first books about lesbian rape and lesbian relationships. Cleis Press. passed hand to hand and we worked to get the books into libraries
angeli: i was in north carolina. in New York, LA, Chicago you could access books but we didn't have a feminist bookstore.
aud: experience counters idea that second wave was about theory, third wave activism. worked with feminist underchurch of Catholic Church, womens ordination conference --- was archivist at seminary. someone did a dissertation and i was interviewed. student asked what books did you read? answer: no books, i was not allowed to be a priest. student insisted, what books? answered no books, lived experience.
wherever women found themselves noticing they were not allowed to be fully themselves, that was where feminism bubbled up all over the place
janice: and there were more of us, the baby boom generation
diantha sprouse from audience: i am hearing things that amaze me, that women on any campus would put up with conditions at UNC. at Ohio State 1985 we organized a group called Woman Against Rape (WAR) and dykes on bikes patrolled the campus, i was 185lb pure muscle and by the time police got there, that guy knew he wasn't going to mess with a woman like that. [here my ipad keyboard malfunctioned and i may have missed a part]
my grandmother told me: we are amreican indians. we have no rights in this world. what you have to do is stake your claim to your rights and defend it. publishment in american indian tribes for rape was death, because you are endagngering the future of the entire tribe. i have all my life banded together with working cass women who know nothing about theory, who haven't been to college, and we don't tolerate that shit. i grew up in appalachia in a log cabin and i figured out that if you're a woman, you have to band together with other women and defend yourselves because nobody else is gonna do it
angeli: that sounded very victim blaming. when more than half the student population is suffering from ptsd, when women's studies dept is shutting you down, it is difficult to mount concentrated organization of force. people did try, and improvement has happened incrementally, but it took 30 years to get federal govt involved. women make choice: do i make my whole life about this movement, my appearance and sexuality public, or do i just sit back quietly and try to graduate?
if i have bitterness about women in second wave it is bc of this but i understands where women were coming from. we found feminists not on campus but it took some doing... one feminist in student health would shut down women who came with stories of rape.
when everyone who is supposed to be your ally isn't with you, it is really hard to have a concentrated movement. especially when you are being told you are crazy.
debbie: out of time, not clear how to shut this down, everyone speaking from heart, but thank you.
Posted at Dreamwidth.
comments.