Speaking, silence, and shifting listening space: the NWSA Lesbian Caucus in the early years.(National Women's Studies Association)

The high point of the NWSA Lesbian Caucus may well have been its dramatic emergence at the 1977 NWSA founding convention in San Francisco. Student and faculty representatives mounted the podium to demonstrate to the assembly that lesbians, both those open and those forced into closets even within the women's liberation movement, defied stereotypes and deserved organizational representation in our diversity: we were women from all ranks and races, all professional and political persuasions. In the swelling ranks of women's studies activists, many lesbians were leaders, though too many--fearing for their jobs and reputation, for their housing, and for their children--found themselves, in the language of the day, doubly oppressed, and some were silenced. Would the newly forming NWSA condone strong lesbian advocacy? And would its members endorse strong lesbian constituency representation in the Coordinating Council (CC)? The call rang out: "To show this body the diversity of those living a lesbian lifestyle, we call on those who can to rise." (1)

In the hush that followed, silence grew loud. From my perspective on the podium I could look out at the whole room, crowded with women, their faces upturned, startled. Would anyone rise? One woman rose. Then another. We held our breaths. Then two more; one by one women rose in the room and stood, turning to see who else had dared to rise: you? Then more! They did not stop: they kept rising, a sea of women rising and standing. Moved and delighted, we burst into applause, clapping wildly to honor the courage, the commitment, and the promise of these women, a rising tide rejecting invisibility.

The resolution carried. Passing the torch a few years later, I wrote around 1980 to the next generation of lesbian caucus activists who were asking about our history and procedures: "We agreed to elect a variety of representatives to reflect the diversity of our membership, and to help NWSA ensure the committees, governance and material reflect these constituencies: lesbian Third World/Woman of Color; lesbian student; lesbian community (non-academic/institutionally based project or program); lesbian academic. We have said all elected representatives and spokeswomen should be out lesbians." (2)

As founders of NWSA, we envisioned an organization committed to feminist education in all educational settings and on all levels. The philosophy was consistent with, and the language reminiscent of, the New University Conference, the radical national organization in which many of us in academia on the left had been participating, especially after the demise of Students for a Democratic Society. As inheritors of the 1960s spirit of participatory democracy, we believed that the resources of the academy should be made more widely available to the people, and should serve them in a broader range of settings than they had historically done. This drive was important in building a broad-based, radical movement. As its arms became institutionalized, as was now beginning to happen with Women's Studies, that radical impetus was met with a need to prove legitimacy, a need that eventually overcame the early, exciting

days of cooperative Women's Studies where women from the communities and from the academies worked closely together in developing Women's Studies as the academic arm of the women's liberation movement.

NWSA must openly advocate for all women--in theory this goal was indisputable. But how to accomplish the goal? Given the realities of homophobia and racism within the movement, both women of color (then self-named Third World women) and, as it turned out, lesbians were vocal in pushing the new association into organizational responsibility by constituency as well as region, a structural model that lasted until the constitutional revisions of 1992 and 1999. (3) As we celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of NWSA, we might ask, have the caucuses functioned so effectively there is no further need for them? Have the contradictions of identity politics imploded? Has a national conservatism won a new foothold in feminism? Have new forms of advocacy and representation been developed? Are separate constituency structures unworkable ? How can we think about the past in ways that inform the present and help us toward the future? I expect there are many answers and many more questions concerning the viability of constituency representation in organizations that start in liberation movements and, when successful, begin to enter the mainstream. This piece is a piece only--an effort to say some unsaid things, (4) to contribute to the quilting of the history of NWSA.

Founding the Lesbian Caucus