Generations of feminism Lynne Segal Politics makes comics of us all. Or we would weep. being overlooked should we fail to keep abreast of new 1 Sheila Rowbotham theoretical fashions; or unable to admit the tensions and contradictions of past attachments. I have been thinking for some time now about political A small band of feminist historians, mostly in generations.2 Indeed, I began my last book, Straight the USA, who are trying to recapture the diversity Sex, with a reflection upon the enduring impact of of the movement in which they participated, declare those formative moments which first enable us to that they cannot recognize themselves, or others, in make some sense of the world, and our place within what they see as the distorting accounts of Womenʼs it – an unjust and shabby world, whatever our personal Liberation circulating in contemporary feminism. circumstances. Such moments remain all the more Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, for example, powerful if, like many of my own generation who are gathering material for a multi-volume collection became students in the 1960s, you have hoped – with of literature from the movement in the United States. whatever levels of scepticism and self-mockery – to They are joined by others interested in archiving participate in the making of history. They leave their the local histories of Womenʼs Liberation, such as mark, even as changing times cause one to rethink, Patricia Romney, documenting a group of fifty women perhaps even to renounce, oneʼs formative political of colour based in New York and Oakland, Califor- presumptions. Yet, what often leaves erstwhile political nia, who – with other Black activists in the sixties crusaders with little more than mournful and confus- and seventies – became the forgotten women who ing feelings of loss and regret – whatever our capacities ʻfell down the wellʼ (as Carolyn Heilbrun puts it) for irony – is the way in which new narratives emerge in subsequent rewritings of Womenʼs Liberation as as collective memories fade, writing over those that exclusively white.3 once incited our most passionate actions. These historians are aware of the dangers of their So it has been with Womenʼs Liberation, that second proximity to their own research, of how memories wave of feminism which arose out of the upsurge of are muted or reshaped by subsequent perspectives and radical and socialist politics in the late 1960s. It grew interests – whether oneʼs own, or those of younger rapidly as a mass social movement, peaking in the recorders. At a recent symposium on the history of mid-seventies before dissolving as a coherent organiza- Womenʼs Liberation in the United States, Margaret tion by the end of that decade. If only indirectly, it (Peg) Strobel recounted that even when rereading her affected the lives of millions of women. Now, however, own diaries and letters she is amazed at their failure a quarter of a century later, the sparse amount of to match her current recollections of the events she thoughtful scholarship analysing the distinctiveness of has recorded there.4 Reading our histories through that movement struggles for attention amidst a glut of texts delineating its contemporary academic progeny the interpretations of others can be more unsettling – largely scornful of its rougher parent, and the motley again. Contemporary texts reviewing recent feminist basements, living rooms, workplaces and community history provide sobering examples of how the past is centres in which it was hatched. This is not just a inevitably read through the concerns of the present, female Oedipal tale, as disobedient daughters distance often invalidating earlier meanings and projects and themselves from their mothersʼ passions, seeking rec- erasing their heterogeneity. The displacement of former ognition for themselves. It is also a sibling affair, as struggles and perspectives, however, is all the more feminists contend with each other: fearful, perhaps, of disconcerting when contemporary theorists start off 6 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) from a critical fascination with problems of ʻexperi- structuralism” indicates a field of critical practices that enceʼ, ʻmemoryʼ and the ʻsilencingʼ of other voices, cannot be totalized.ʼ8) Circumspect and equivocal as alongside a formal abhorrence of binary logics and Butler characteristically is, always preferring the inter- apparent scepticism about generalization of all kinds. rogative to the more vulnerable affirmative mode, her Yet, it is precisely the reckless generalization and false influential writing is always read as primarily decon- contrasts which astonish me when I read accounts of structive, privileging regulatory semiotic or semantic the distance self-proclaimed ʻninetiesʼ feminism has issues around ʻsubjectivityʼ, ʻidentityʼ and ʻagencyʼ, in travelled from Womenʼs Liberation, and what now insisting, as she does here, that: ʻTo recast the referent appears newly homogenized as ʻseventiesʼ feminism. as the signified, and to authorize or safeguard the category of women as a site of possible resignifications is to expand the possibilities of what it means to be Dubious contrasts a woman and in this sense to condition and enable A recent British collection, edited by Michèle Barrett an enhanced sense of agency.ʼ9 Butler is certainly and Anne Phillips, Destabilizing Theory, was put right to stress that ʻwhat women signify has been together to highlight what it refers to as ʻthe gulf taken for granted for too longʼ. But, in calling for between feminist theory of the 1970s and 1990sʼ. It ʻthe conditions to mobilize the signifier in the service opens with the conviction: ʻIn the past twenty years of an alternative productionʼ, she delineates a project the founding principles of contemporary western fem- that is distinctly distanced from the close attention to inism have been dramatically changed, with previously social structures, relations and practices which an shared assumptions and unquestioned orthodoxies rel- earlier feminist project prioritized in pursuit of politi- 5 egated almost to history.ʼ Perhaps so. But just what is cal-economic restructuring, and the transformation being dispatched here? Was it all of a piece? And is it of public life and welfare. Butler even suggests here: equally anachronistic for contemporary feminists? ʻParadoxically, it may be that only through releasing ʻSeventiesʼ feminism is criticized for its ʻfalse cer- the category of women from a fixed referent that taintiesʼ; its search for structural causes of womenʼs something like “agency” becomes possible.ʼ10 oppression (indeed for its very notion of ʻoppressionʼ); Only? However ʻfictitiousʼ or ʻfixedʼ the category its belief in womenʼs shared interests (and its very of women, feminists did once manage successfully to attachment to the notion of ʻwomenʼ or ʻwomanʼ); and mobilize them (and not just signifiers) onto the streets 6 so forth. ʻNinetiesʼ feminism, in contrast, has replaced and into campaigns in support of demands for nurser- what is seen as the naive search for the social causes ies, reproductive rights, education and skill training; of womenʼs oppression with abstract elaborations of the to assist women fighting discrimination at work, vio- discursively produced, hierarchical constitution of an lence at home, militarism world-wide; to work within array of key concepts: sexual difference in particular, Third World development projects; found the womenʼs binary oppositions in general, and the hetero/sexual- health movement, and so on and so forth: just as if ized mapping of the body as a whole. However, it does ʻsomething like “agency”ʼ – womenʼs agency – was tend to have a few generalizations of its own, not least there all along. A feminism that seeks primarily to its totalizing dismissal of ʻseventiesʼ feminism, and the re-theorize subjectivity is one that is incommensurate reduction of dissimilar projects to common ground. with, as well as distanced from, the perspectives and A somewhat similar tension can be found in a paral- practices of Womenʼs Liberation. It is simply not the lel American collection aiming ʻto call into question same project, however sympathetic to those earlier and problematize the presumptions of some feminist goals someone like Butler may be. As others have discourseʼ: Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by noticed, the commitment to heterogeneity, multiplicity Judith Butler and Joan Scott, which, like the British and difference underlying recent feminist theorizing 7 text, was published in 1992. Its introductory essay can anomalously disguise a hegemonizing dismissal shows greater caution in drawing comparisons between of theoretical frameworks not explicitly informed by different phases of feminism, and it is more aware poststructuralism.11 Joan Scott exemplifies this form that contrasting ʻpostmodernʼ feminism with an earlier of exclusion of theoretical diversity when attacking ʻmodernistʼ feminism buys into precisely the conceits ʻresistance to poststructuralist theoryʼ as resistance to of modernity itself, sharing all its enthusiasm for ʻtheoryʼ itself: ʻSince it is in the nature of feminism to identification with the ʻnewʼ and overconfident renun- disturb the ground it stands on, even its own ground, ciation of the ʻoldʼ. (Although it is surely a hostage the resistance to theory is a resistance to the most to fortune to insist, on the opening page, that ʻ“post- radical effects of feminism itself.ʼ12 Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997) 7 Here is the problem. Contemporary feminist theo- she depicts