Classless and clueless in NWSA: a history of the Poor and Working Class Caucus.(National Women's Studies Association)

At twenty-five, NWSA is upwardly mobile, having left behind its youth, its dazzling energies spinning off in all directions, its focus now instead on its career. The path the organization has taken is not unlike the path of many women currently active in it. Other women once shared the task of clearing the underbrush, but some used different tools, chose other thickets, made trails in different directions, and our paths diverged. What are the class and race losses of upward mobility? There is work to do everywhere, not only in academia, for the undergrowth of sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia intertwines all living beings and the structures we create. My insights into the history of the now defunct Poor and Working Class Caucus, class struggles in NWSA and Women's Studies, and my own upward mobility tangle together in random and not-so-random profusion.

In 1970, the year I first taught Women's Studies, I was 25, an activist in the grip of the-revolution-will-come-in-our-generation, we-would-change-Amerika politics. Politicized by the Civil Rights Movement, I taught black studies at Mary Holmes College in Mississippi before I taught Women's Studies. The one begat the other; the desperate necessity for both was clear to me. Feminism's debt to the Civil Rights Movement will never be repaid. At 55, veteran of 30 years of teaching antiracism and anti-sexism and twenty years of involvement in NWSA, I can see the underbrush we have cleared, the piles composted, recycled, and put out for trash. I also see ever more pernicious growth creeping into our tiny clearing and up our legs. As we labor to make the clearing larger, we have narrowed the circle of workers.

At 25, I could not see 30 years ahead, did not appreciate the contradictory constraints and opportunities of academia. I dreamed of a women's studies organization, but I could not foresee its trajectory. I could not foresee that many feminist intellectuals (the non-academics whose books we teach) would disappear from NWSA or that many famous feminist academics would never have a relationship with the women's studies professional organization. I didn't understand all the class ramifications of academia. I could never have dreamed in 1970 that in 2000 I could count on my fingers the tenure-track positions in Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies combined at San Jose State University, in "groovy" California, where there is no majority population among 27,000 students. I could not have dreamed how the institution would set Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies into competition for scarce resources, how little cooperation would exist between male-dominated Ethnic Studies and white-dominated Women's Studies, how much women of color would be told to make a choice.

By 1977 my fears that Women's Studies was becoming too academic, too professional, too removed from activism, kept me from attending the founding conference, sponsored by my campus, but in 1981, the first NWSA conference I attended (at the University of Connecticut at Storrs) was highly political. Participants were divided into racial, class, and sexuality groups to discuss racism, and I was in a group of white women (mostly or all lesbians) from working-class backgrounds. We had some of the best discussions about racism I had ever had in a group in my life. Too often, feminist discussions of race eliminated class and polarized racism and sexism. Here was a group of smart women who took all these issues seriously and shared some of the same histories! Other women have written that the conference was divisive, but we were a gang for our few days together. At the same time, at ad hoc meetings for fired lesbians, I gained strength from other women's stories, having just lost my job. I had been one of the founders of Women's Studies on my campus and had taught there eleven years, but as a lecturer I had no rights. A tenure-track faculty member who attended the conference consistently avoided eye contact until the last day, when she called to me from behind. I was taken by surprise as she politely inquired whether I was enjoying the conference, ignoring the loss of my job, a decision she had helped to engineer.

I also attended my first Berkshire Conference on Women's History that year, where I introduced myself to Chris Czernik after she had criticized the racist assumptions in a white historian's research. We began a conference friendship. Chris was an NWSA insider, a working-class Pole from Chicago, and like me, enthralled by the promises of education. One of hundreds of inventors of Women's Studies, she taught part-time at Boston institutions, but left this work as increasing professionalization and respect only for credentials, not for activism, overtook Women's Studies. She has not been involved in over fifteen years now. We came together around our anger and shared politics about class and race issues.