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Radical Feminism As Social Arrest: a Kinetic Analysis Audrey Mcandrew Love Bucknell University, Aml035@Bucknell.Edu Bucknell University Bucknell Digital Commons Honors Theses Student Theses 2016 Radical Feminism as Social Arrest: a Kinetic Analysis Audrey McAndrew Love Bucknell University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/honors_theses Recommended Citation Love, Audrey McAndrew, "Radical Feminism as Social Arrest: a Kinetic Analysis" (2016). Honors Theses. 347. https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/honors_theses/347 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Theses at Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. iii RADICAL FEMINISM AS SOCIAL ARREST: A KINETIC ANALYSIS by Audrey M. Love An Honors Thesis Presented to the Honors Committee In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in History Bucknell University May 2016 Approved: ______________________________ Mehmet Dosemeci Thesis Advisor, Department of History, Bucknell University __________________________ John Enyeart Chair, Department of History, Bucknell University iv Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: The Effect of Revolution on Historical Narrative and the Implications for Radical Feminism…………………………………………………………………………6 Chapter Two: The Radical Contribution to Female Subjecthood…………………….….32 Chapter Three: Radical Feminism as Social Arrest……………………………………...74 Conclusion……………………………………………….....…………………………..116 1 Introduction On September 7, 1968, roughly 400 women activists arrived in Atlantic City to protest the annual Miss America pageant. Organized by New York Radical Women, the protest brought together feminists of various origins and groupings to chant and shout feminist slogans and display a “Women’s Liberation” banner during the procession of the pageant. On the boardwalk, women threw “instruments of female torture,” including cosmetic items and cleaning supplies, into a “freedom trashcan,” issuing a symbolic rejection of the oppressive social prescription that women function as beautiful objects and domestic servants. The protest was heavily publicized, leading Carol Hanisch, then a member of New York Radical Women, to claim that it was the event that put Women’s Liberation on the map.1 The growth of Women’s Liberation groups, which had been underway prior to the Miss America protest, accelerated greatly in the wake of the protest, and in the following years, New York City, Boston, D.C., and the West Coast became hubs of radical feminist activism.2 This incendiary protest, incidentally the source of the still-pervasive bra-burning myth (women did not actually burn anything placed in the freedom trashcan) and the stereotype of the angry feminist, played a crucial role in fueling the spread of feminist organizing and thinking across the United States. Historians typically recount that the radical feminism of the late 60’s and early 70’s was born from the organizational and ideational flourishing of the New Left in the United States. Many of the women who took action under the banner of radical feminism had earlier participated in the Civil Rights Movement, particularly Freedom Summer in 1964, leaving the comfort of their predominantly white northeastern universities to register black voters in the 1 Carol Hanisch, “Background and Introductory Thoughts,” Carolhanisch.org (July, 2003). 2 Ellen Willis, “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism,” in No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays by Ellen Willis (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), 118. 2 south. Others participated in the Student Movement, working within student organizations, particularly the various chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), to protest the draft, imperialism, and the authoritarian operations of University bureaucracy. The significance of women’s participation in both the Civil Rights and Student Movements was twofold. First, it radicalized women, challenged them to become more critical of the legitimacy and efficacy of the United States’ prevailing social and political systems and acquainted them with methods of grassroots organizing, and second, it made them acutely aware of their subjugation as women. Particularly in SDS and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), “the movement for change taught women activists about their own oppression. Politically, women were excluded from decision making. They typed, made leaflets, did the shitwork.”3 Anne Koedt remarked in “Women and the Radical Movement” that, in New Left organizations, women’s “roles ended up concentrating on food-making, typing, mimeographing, general assistance work, and as sexual supply for their male comrades after hours.”4 Women were silenced and ignored during important discussions, and some resorted to using their bodies as social currency, establishing sexual relationships with prominent movement men in order to earn concessions like the right to speak and be heard. In the words of Jones and Brown, the radical female “never really [got] in” to the movement.5 Coming to realize that the New Left was an inadequate venue for pursuing gender equality, many women withdrew from New Left organizations to participate in a political movement by and for women. Though liberal feminism had effectively fashioned women’s issues into public concerns, the women that relinquished the New Left did not tend to flock to liberal feminist organizations 3 Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open (New York: Penguin, 2000), 58. 4 Anne Koedt, “Women and the Radical Movement,” in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. Barbara A. Crow (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 26. 5 Beverly Jones and Judith Brown, “Toward a Female Liberation Movement,” in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. Barbara A. Crow (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 17-56. 3 to address their grievances. The women who were to become radical feminists did not believe that liberal feminists’ reformist objectives, their quest to win legal protections and equal access to participation in the workforce, would amount to the realization of complete equality. Many members of the National Organization for Women (NOW), formed in 1967, left the organization for radical feminist groups only a year after its creation because they felt that the professional, thirty-something, family6 women that comprised the organization were too invested in superficial changes. Indeed, Ti-Grace Atkinson, founder of the radical group The Feminists, left NOW because she believed it was insufficiently radical. For radical feminists, NOW’s struggle “to end sex discrimination in hiring, promotions and salaries; repeal abortion laws; establish comprehensive child care; and place women in policy-making posts”7 offered no promise for obliterating the institutional and ideational entrapments that bound women so tightly in their everyday lives. Radical feminists “were adamant about their overarching anti-establishment ethos, [viewing] themselves as part of a grassroots movement,”8 and they believed that the liberal quest for concessions from the United States’ hierarchically, bureaucratically organized political system merely confirmed the legitimacy and dominance of a political order comprised by men and sustained by male values. Radical feminists did struggle to win or amend legislation pertaining to abortion, rape, and other issues of female concern, yet by and large they rejected the legal system as an inadequate medium for procuring change that would be meaningfully impactful on women’s lives. Instead, radical feminists formed small, informally structured groups that embraced participatory democracy, consciousness-raising, media-directed actions, 6 Voichita Nachescu, “Radical Feminism and the Nation: History and Space in the Political Imagination of Second- Wave Feminism,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 3 No.1 (2009), 31. 7 Sarah Davidson, “An Oppressed Majority Demands Its Rights,” Life Magazine (1969). 8 Nachescu, “Radical Feminism and the Nation,” 31. 4 and support groups.9 Though radical feminist groups were divided along ideological lines in several ways, primarily concerning protective laws, abortion, and lesbianism, their rejection of what they deemed a hierarchical, patriarchal system and their emphasis on the importance of altering women’s consciousness were consistent across their various constituencies. Historians have heretofore analyzed radical feminism as a social movement, approaching radical feminism as a subcategory of the broader Women’s Movement. It is my objective in the chapters that follow to examine radical feminism through a kinetic lens--that is, to analyze the kinetic nature of the social field within which the radical feminist struggle took place. A kinetic analysis of radical feminism reveals that it operated within a moving social field, a society in constant circulation, teleologically progressing through time. Because radical feminists wished not to improve or advance the existing social order but rather to subvert it entirely, radical feminists leveraged tactics of arrest, methods of halting the constant circulation and progression characteristic of the modern state, as opposed to tactics of movement, which are only promising means of subversion in the context of a stagnant social field. I therefore arrive at an understanding of radical feminism not as a “movement,” or as an agent of historical progress,
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