What happened to socialist feminist women's studies programs? A case history and some speculations.(Viewpoint essay)

I HELPED FOUND WHAT WE considered a socialist feminist women's studies program over thirty years ago at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). I'm still there, but I recently realized that my junior colleagues were not aware of our program's history. As we founders of women's studies are approaching retirement, it seems a good time to reassess what this history might mean in the very different context of women's studies today. In order to find out "what happened to socialist feminist women's studies programs?" I contacted sixty-eight people identified with socialist feminist women's studies. Thirty-six people responded, most of whom had built their careers in academic women's studies. (1)

My initial questions asked which programs my respondents thought identified as socialist feminist and what this meant; how socialist feminist affiliation affected institutional structures; how it was manifest in personnel, in program practices, in curriculum, in relationships with the community, university staff, and administration; how programs treated the topics of social class and U.S. imperialism; how socialist feminist approaches differed from other feminist perspectives; and what kind of conflicts developed and how they were resolved, I also asked whether respondents thought current women's studies programs incorporated the goals of earlier socialist feminist programs, and if so, whether these goals are now outmoded or transformed.

These interviews produced some apparently contradictory conclusions: socialist feminist women's studies does not now exist in U.S. universities; there were a few short-lived socialist feminist women's studies programs in the 1970s; socialist feminist practices and ideas were assimilated into mainstream women's studies in the 1970s--or the 1980s or 1990s; and virtually all women's studies programs today could he considered socialist feminist whether they know it or not. Some of these contradictions derive from differing definitions and some from respondents' differing institutional locations. All refer to the complex but still largely underground history of U.S. socialist feminism and of the changing contexts affecting academic feminism.

In order to understand these disparate views, I returned to the history of my own program at UIC. This case study helps me develop a more nuanced picture of one strand of women's studies within the evolving context described by my other sources. I revisit old statements of our courses, goals, and projects with current awareness of how our practices and theories were shaped by many factors, not all of which we realized at the time. The premise animating this inquiry is that socialist feminist women's studies was a discernible strand in U.S. academic feminism and played a significant role in shaping women's studies as a field. The interviews and case history presented here also help explain the rapid waning of explicitly socialist feminist women's studies programs despite some early successes. For this project, the defining characteristics of socialist feminist women's studies include antisexist, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and antiracist ideology; egalitarian pedagogical practices; and attempts to transform university structures as well as expand new areas of intellectual inquiry with the ultimate goal of creating a society of economic as well as gender justice in the United States. This socialist feminism emerged from a women's liberation movement that included multiple radical but often competing perspectives. These perspectives drew not only on Marxist and other anticapitalist views, but also an egalitarian practices derived from the social experiments of the 1960s and the identity politics that were inspired by the Black Power movement. The socialist feminist programs whose history I trace were influenced by all of these perspectives, but differed from other strains within the women's liberation movement in their insistence on the centrality of class and race oppression.

I conclude that the specific circumstances of public universities in the 1970s helped shape socialist feminist women's studies programs and their conflicts regarding social class; that the relationship of theory to practice differs in socialist feminism from that in poststructuralism or liberal feminism; and that the history of U.S. socialist feminist women's studies is only partly congruent with that of socialist feminism more generally. In addition, I speculate that the sudden demise of socialist feminist women's unions in 1975-1977 was more likely to have been due to government intervention than has previously been thought.

As feminist historians have well chronicled, academic women's studies formed as one offshoot of Second Wave U.S. feminism, itself a developing strand of "the movement" of progressive politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some young white women activists began to theorize their subordinated position as women in analogy with the African American civil rights movement and Third World liberation struggles. In 1965, Casey Hayden and Mary King circulated their document, "Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo," to other movement women, and some New Left women began to identify as feminists. (2) In 1966, the National Organization for Women was founded, and white people were told to leave the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and organize white people against racism. This emphasis on identity politics--that is, on organizing with and for the sake of groups with which one identified on the basis of ascribed characteristics like race and gender rather than on the basis of beliefs--helped Left activist women conceptualize "women" as a potential political group; and some predominantly white women's organizations combining New Left and feminist politics were formed, distinguishing themselves both from mass membership liberal feminist organizations like NOW and from the Old Left socialist and communist parties with their centralized leadership, covert action, and vanguardism. The Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU) was established in 1969 as a loose confederation of activist chapters. The CWLU's founding statement had a two-part structure, feminist and socialist, saying "we demand the right of all women to control all aspects of their lives," and "As radical women we demand the identification and elimination of all forms of oppression--class, caste, and colonial--and the formation of a socialist society in which all individuals have equal access to the material and experiential wealth of their world." (3)

In the fall of 1969 I moved to Chicago from Nashville, Tennessee, where I had been a low-key member of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (the white off-shoot of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), Students for a Democratic Society, and Nashville Women for Peace and Social Justice, and where I'd taught at Fisk University, a small, private, predominantly African American college, while completing my Ph.D. dissertation on Renaissance English poetry. (4) I came to what was then called the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle only a few years after it had begun its dramatic expansion from a two-year college for World War II veterans to a full-fledged university with a large new concrete campus near downtown Chicago. I was then married to a medical resident active in New Left organizations and had two daughters, one six weeks old and the other three years old. I promptly joined the New University Conference, a faculty organization with a socialist critique of universities as institutions for perpetuating ruling class power. At UIC, most students were the first of their families to attend college and worked an average of thirty hours per week for wages; many spoke a language other than English at home.