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.

DEFINING SOCIALIST FEMINIST PRAXIS

Most courses on feminist theory devote some time to socialist feminist theory, distinguishing it from other forms of feminist theory. (4) However, these analyses of theoretical concepts are not particularly useful for this article, which focuses on the theory and practice of socialist feminist movements and institution building, what I am calling socialist feminist praxis, in a specific period of history, the late 1960s through the 1970s. There is very little written on this topic; for instance, Ruth Rosen's history of the modern women's movement does not even mention socialist feminism in the index. Similarly, socialist feminist praxis remains obscured in The Politics of Women's Studies: Testimony from Thirty Founding Mothers. Of the nine references to socialist feminism in the index, only five are related to women's studies, two by me. Mary Jo Buhle's introduction never mentions the topic, despite the fact that she has herself written a book on U.S. women and socialism. Fortunately, there is a small, but growing, body of scholarship in history and sociology that begins to offer fuller documentation of women's liberation, in general, and socialist feminism, radical feminism, black feminism, and Chicana feminism, in particular, as political tendencies and as organized practice in the late 1960s and 1970s. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon make a good start by reprinting documents from all these tendencies within women's liberation. They emphasize the fluid interactions among different tendencies--particularly radical feminist and socialist feminist--in the late 1960s and early 1970s, suggesting that "most members of women's liberation did not identify with any of these tendencies and considered themselves simply feminists, unmodified." Their work helpfully conveys that this was a period of motion, openness, and invention, rather than of ideological exclusion. However, it is misleading in underplaying the organizational forms of these tendencies with which many women's liberationists identified. (5)