Socialist Feminism: What Difference Did It Make to the History of Women's Studies?(Viewpoint essay)

IN RECENT WRITING ON THE HISTORY and potential of women's studies, socialist feminism is rarely mentioned, leading Judith Gardiner to ask: "What happened to socialist feminist women's studies programs" of the 1970s? (1) This question leads to two additional kinds of questions. First, what are the histories of these programs; what characterized them in the 1970s, and what happened to them in the 1980s and 1990s? What is their continuing impact if any? Second, how are these programs represented in current histories, analyses, or commentaries on women's studies? What difference does their invisibility make? I see both approaches as dialectically interrelated, and therefore my answers move back and forth between them.

In my mind I am participating in a struggle over whose version of the history of the 1970s women's movement, and in particular of women's studies, predominates. All social movements generate struggle over who gets to tell the story and how different positions are represented. A relevant example for the themes of this article is Ellen DuBois's argument that socialist feminism, which linked women's equality with other struggles for justice, has been written out of women's history of the 1920s in favor of a polarization between the equal rights and separate spheres feminisms. (2) In 1995, Lise Vogel explained why she agreed to write an encyclopedia article on socialist feminism:

 
  The popular reconstructions of the 1960s and 1970s made little sense 
  to me. Where I remembered an exciting jumble of organizations and 
  collectives working on behalf of women's liberation, the media 
  described white middle-class wives and daughters seeking individual 
  fulfillment. Collective struggle vanished from the screen, together 
  with voices of working-class women, women of color, lesbian women 
  and, of course, socialist-feminist women. (3) 

I begin this essay by defining and recovering socialist feminist praxis of the late 1960s and 1970s, Next, I argue that, since its first organizations in 1969, socialist feminist praxis developed theory and practice around race that influenced the agendas of women's liberation and women's studies. Third, I critically evaluate why these struggles around race have been consistently erased. Finally, I consider the contribution of women's liberation, in general, and socialist feminism, in particular, to the institutionalization of women's studies in order to gain fresh understanding about ways that women's studies can combine theory and practice, engage in institutional struggle, and foster participatory democracy. Equally important, but beyond the scope of this article, would be revisionist analyses of class and lesbianism in socialist feminist praxis.

The analysis draws on my own experience in founding women's studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo) in 1976 and my years as a faculty member and sometime administrator since then, my participation in the discussion group, Marxist Feminist Group 1 from the 1970s through the 1990s, and on recent scholarship on the women's liberation movement and women's studies. My overall goal is to explain why the history of socialist feminism in women's studies is important, challenging current trends in women's studies that implicitly devalue history and dismiss early women's studies as individualist, white, and middle class.