On Nov 10, 2006, at 12:33 PM, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
> Not noted in the obits I've seen so far she was co-author of the
> Redstockings Manifesto, as well as naming the group with Shulamith
> Firestone:
> Bluestockings, the pejorative term for intellectual and socialist
> women, with red for
> social revolution.
And she kept its spirit alive for decades, one of the many excellent things about her writing and agitation.
Redstockings is in Liza's piece: <http://www.thenation.com/blogs/ notion?pid=138811>.
> A founding member of Redstockings, Willis was an articulate
> champion of seventies radical feminism, but wrote equally well
> about the pleasure-hating eighties, with its drug wars, censorship
> and the rise of the "right to life" movement. She was deeply
> committed to a vision of love between free people, and through that
> lens, the social control decade took on a fresh desolation. She was
> eloquent about the extent to which fear of the libido not only
> energized the evangelical far right but had permeated feminism.
> Writing about feminist anti-porn crusades, she urged women not to
> "accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual
> pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for
> real power." Yet she admitted that the sexual radicals like herself
> didn't have all the answers, and had "failed to put forth a
> convincing analysis of sexual violence, exploitation and alienation."
Doug