In a message dated 8/28/02 9:40:18 AM, owner-lbo-talk-digest at lists.panix.com writes:
In a message dated 08/27/2002 4:04:16 PM Central Daylight Time, cbcox at ilstu.edu writes:
>> But there have been relatively few mass movements in u.s. history -- in
>> the last 80 years 3: the CIO, the Black Liberation Movement, the
>> Anti-War movement, maybe, almost, the women's movement of the '60s &
>> '70s would make a fourth.
Jacob Conrad writes:
>Why "maybe, almost" the women's movement? It seems to me that the deepest
>and most enduring change in American society coming out of the 60s has to do
>with the status of women...
Oh good, now I don't have to say it.
>I am struck as well by the parallels one finds in American history. First
>wave feminism came to focus almost exclusively on suffrage, but at its
origin
>was more radical. The issue of suffrage started as kind of a synecdoche for
>the broader question of women's equality, and became an end in itself.
>Abolitionism and first wave feminism were closely intertwined. Many people
>were active in both movements, and many later became active in early
>socialist organizations, e.g., the International Workingman's Association.
>Second wave feminism and the Black Liberation Movement can be seen as
>furthering "revolutions" begun more than a hundred years ealier--in the case
>of the latter, completing Reconstruction ...
The parallels go farther than that, the southern Civil Rights Movement was the cradle of the WLM in the U.S. Second Wave feminists, coming out of SNCC and CORE, drew explicit parallels to Black Power.
Getting back to Carrol's point about 'starting' a mass movement--the Women's Liberation Movement of the '60s is a very interesting example. It's portrayed by many academics as a spontaneous simultaneous springing up, but if you check out the early documents, specific people argued for specific programs (consciousness-raising, the pro-woman line) against very large opposition from the 'politicos' who felt socialism was sufficient to free women and we should all just fight for that. Particular women did, in fact, call for a separate mass movement of women for women's liberation and--not to argue causation but simply arranging things chronologically--after they argued for it and circulated papers arguing for it, it did actually burst forth on the scene along the lines they argued for.
Carrol, I get the feeling that you think that the 'left' is somehow not inherently of, by, for, or outta the 'movement.' The big breakthrough for feminists--described, for example, in a paper by Kathie Sarachild called "Civil Rights Movement: Lessons for Women's Liberation"--is that the women who called themselves feminists had to first realize they were not the smart ones who had all the answers, they started to see themselves among the oppressed--the dumb blondes, nagging housewives, welfare moms, castrating career women and beauty queens--and with a stake in building a movement for their own freedom. They came to see that the supposedly smart 'movement' women--themselves included--were actually much more clueless about the reality of their conditions than women on the street were.
>The received wisdom in the historical literature is that the history of the
>American "left" (boadly defined) is one of discontinuity, and that's
>certainly true if one looks only at organizations.
True in feminism, and not just organizationally. There was an almost total break with the first wave. Feminists were portrayed as dried-up old maids angrily waving a parasol at a world that had passed them by. It was a huge breakthrough for the second wave to find the History of Woman Suffrage (Stanton, Anthony, Gage et. al's multi-volume compilation of their organizing documents). Shulamith Firestone was I think the first to start to reforge those movement links, in '68.
>Yet the same issues keep
>coming up, and coming up together (note that the Seneca Falls Convention
>occurred at a time of excited agitation over the Mexican War, and amid the
>first stirrings of an American labor movement in the textile mills of New
>England).
Ah, more than that. 1848 was a big year for revolution, was it not--and the Communist Manifesto and the Declaration of Sentiments were written in that same year! (Pointed out by Carol Giardina in her 1970 Masters Thesis on Marx & the woman question.)
>I wonder if there isn't a deeper cultural continuity that's
>obscured by the turbulent organizational history? I wonder if ensuring a
>future for the American left (broadly defined) might not depend in part on
>reconstructing its pedigree?
Intriguing--you care to elaborate?
Jenny Brown