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Topics:
Families and Gender
Democracy
& Diversity in Feminist Organizations
Learning from Three Decades of Practice
Copyright
© 1995 by Carmen Sirianni
Index
Introduction
I. Feminist Process: the Emergence of an
Organizational Ideal
II. Internal Critique of Structureless Democracy
and Sisterly Virtue
III. Formalizing Structures: Dilemmas
of Empowerment
IV. Care, Commonality and Difference:
Dilemmas of a Feminist Postmodern Pluralism
V. Building Capacities for Grassroots
Empowerment, Democratic Pluralism and Civic Dialogue
VI. Notes
Contents
Introduction
I. Feminist Process: the Emergence of an
Organizational Ideal
Parts of
this Civic Perspectives essay first appeared in "Learning Pluralism:
Democracy and Diversity in Feminist Organizations," Democratic
Community: NOMOS XXXV, ed. Ian Shapiro and John Chapman (New
York: New York University Press, 1993), pages 283-312; and "Feminist
Pluralism and Demcratic Learning: The Politics of Citizenship
in the National Women's Studies Association," NWSA Journal
5:1 (fall 1993), 369-384. The latter essay was commissioned as
part of a symposium designed to foster learning within an organization
that had recently undergone serious crisis and restructuring in
response to the problems of multiculturalism, difference and democracy.
Carmen Sirianni
is editor-in-chief of CPN. Special thanks to Jane Mansbridge,
who is a member of the CPN Advisory Board, and long-time friend
and mentor on democratic theory; Andrea Walsh, who is a member
of the CPN Families, Gender and Children editorial team; Robin
Leidner and Karen Hansen for their insights on the dynamics of
democratic learning within the feminist movement; and to participants
in the Conference on Feminist Organizations, Washington, D.C.,
February 14-15, 1992, where an earlier version of this essay was
first presented.
Introduction
With the
beginning of its second wave, and especially its more radical
variants since the late 1960s, feminism has been concerned with
redifining democratic community on more participatory grounds.
To this end organizational processes, deliberative styles and
communicative ethics have been refashioned. Initially, little
was distinctively feminist in this, as young women's movement
leaders drew upon the model of the "beloved community" they had
been practicing in SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee),
or on the "participatory democracy" of SDS (Students for a Democratic
Society), the major black and white student movement organizations
respectively.
To be sure,
there was a feminist subtext from the beginning. Ella Baker, middle-aged
grandaughter of a rebellious slave minister and chief staffer
who had organized SCLC's (Southern Christian Leadership Conference)
central offices before being displaced by yet another male minister,
had articulated an approach to facilitative group leadership that
was an alternative to both the bureaucratic movement organizational
form of the NAACP and the charismatic form dominated by the male
preachers of SCLC. Baker argued that "you must let the oppressed
themselves define their own freedom," and nurtured in SNCC an
organizing style that recognized leadership inchoate in every
community and in every individual. Through her influence on SNCC
activists, and both directly and indirectly on SDS leaders, Baker
can be said to have been the midwife of participatory democracy
in the student movements of the 1960s. When Mary King and Casey
Hayden confronted both student organizations with their own strictures
on female leadership, and began to form a separate movement in
the process, it was to the teachings of Ella Baker that they turned,
as well as to the experience they had gained in facilitative leadership
among hundreds of indigenous "mamas" turned community activists
across the South.0
However,
despite this clear inspiration from an African American woman
with years of activist experience and an explicit critique of
male leadership, only with the development of a separate women's
liberation movement in the late 1960s did participatory democratic
community began to acquire explicitly feminist emphases. A feminist
ideal soon emerged that stressed egalitarian participation, democratization
of all leadership roles, elimination of all competitiveness in
organizational life, careful listening, respect for the experiences
of all women, self-transformation and autonomy through intimate
sharing and small group support. In short, what later came to
be called a distinctively, though not exclusively, female "ethic
of care" in feminist theory was grafted onto a radically egalitarian
version of participatory democracy and community.
Ironically,
at this very time participatory democracy in SDS was unravelling
through the pull of its own ambiguities and contradictions, not
the least between its civic republican and existential variants,
and beloved community in SNCC had given way to authoritarian and
dogmatic sectarianism as its redemptive ethos proved incapable
of accomodating a plurality of activist styles or democratic leadership
transitions.1 This would not
have been a surprise to competitive elite theorists of democracy,
who warned of the totalitarian potential of too much participation.2
But some
in the student movements were themselves beginning to develop
a coherent critique of the excesses and ambiguities of participatory
democracy. And by the end of the 1960s, a number of political
theorists had begun to articulate a pluralist version of participatory
democracy that valued participation and self-management in expanding
democracy, and yet recognized limits and decried excesses, arguing
instead for fundamentally plural democratic forms, decision criteria,
styles of citizenship and degrees of commitment. Robert Dahl and
Michael Walzer, in particular, affirmed important elements of
what I would call participatory pluralism, simultaneously broadening
pluralist theory to accomodate the participatory revolution of
the era, yet critiquing any pretense to singular democratic forms
or ideals of citizenship.3
This rethinking
of participatory democracy as the ideal and singular form of democratic
community had no discernible impact on the radical women's movement's
organizational development at the time. Few prominent women's
movement leaders seem to have been aware of it, and those that
may have been did not cite this literature, either because they
saw it as alien or feared that others in the movement would view
it as such.4 It is hardly a
surprise that the movement, far from transcending the problems
of participatory community that had plagued the student movements,
recapitulated many of them, and some in even more extreme forms
precisely because of the movement's distinctive feminist emphases.
Yet, if
one of the central justifications for participation in political
theory has been its educative impact on participants,5
the feminist movement might be said quickly to have generated
internal learning processes enabling it to refine the meanings
and forms of participatory community. After presenting the ideal
of democratic community and feminist process that emerged in radical
women's organizations, I will argue that this learning has pointed
predominantly, though not entirely or consistently, in the direction
of participatory pluralism. As a result of having to confront
issues of democratic representativeness, informal tyranny, imposed
sisterly virtue, distorted communication, forced consensus, democratic
accountability, and strategic efficacy, the movement was compelled
to rediscover and relearn many of the lessons of pluralist theory.
Not only did its own internal resources prove quite substantial
for this task, but distinctively feminist emphases on care and
difference more recently have enabled feminism to expand the range
of issues that a participatory pluralism must confront, even if
some of the movement's own innovations remain quite problematic
and theoretical issues yet unresolved.
I.
Feminist Process: the Emergence of an Organizational Ideal
Neither SNCC
nor SDS were able to respond effectively to the feminist critique
that emerged in 1964-1965. SNCC was rent by black/white sexual
tensions on staff, and by fierce conflict between the so-called
"freedom high" and "structure" factions. SDS's not inconsiderable
capacities for organizational learning and political debate about
the meanings and forms of democracy were overwhelmed by the massive
influx of new recruits with the escalation of the Vietnam war,
and the competitive male intellectual styles that alienated many
women in early SDS gave way to even more offensive macho styles
of the newly arrived anarchist "prairie dog" leaders.
Women's
leadership styles, which had begun to come into their own in community
organizing projects, were further marginalized by the antiwar
emphasis on large mobilizations and rallies, and draft resistance
accorded the male experiences of vulnerability and heroism a privileged
role in movement culture and personal politics. Campus SDS chapters,
which might have served better for sustaining and feminizing the
ideals of participatory democracy, were often dominated by male
cliques. As Sara Evans notes, "stardom was increasingly defined
by glamour and rhetorical verbal skills, and the talents that
could prove effective in small groups or in community organizing
had little place in the broader movement."6
As a consequence,
many women moved outside, and began to redefine participatory
group dynamics with distinctly feminist emphases. Consciousness
raising (CR) groups, and small collectives that combined CR with
political projects, were the primary forms for this in the late
sixties and early seventies, although city-wide women's liberation
unions often established a broader framework for feminist participation
on the bases of small groups. CR philosophy and techniques were
drawn from a variety of sources: the "speak bitterness" campaigns
of the Chinese revolution popularized by such books as Fanshen,
SDS "Guatamala Guerrilla" organizing, SNCC and ERAP personal discussion
styles, and experiential learning in the Mississippi freedom schools.
Kathie Sarachild, who is widely credited with developing specifically
feminist CR techniques and who had herself been a Freedom Summer
volunteer in 1964, urged women to scrap the old theories and build
feminist theory and politics on the basis of personal experience:
"In our groups, let's share our feelings and pool them. Let's
let ourselves go and see where our feelings lead us. Our feelings
will lead us to ideas and then to actions."7
Sharing
would help define common problems and dispel self-blame. Personal
revelation was especially appropriate when the oppressed were
in intimate relations with their oppressors.8
The authority of personal experience recognized that all women
had something to say about oppression, and so had the right in
women's groups to attentive listening and moral support. These
would not only yield insight, but transform the passive into self-confident
activists, even leaders. These early CR experiences were the practical
loci for feminist theorists' later insight that autonomous selves
are formed not in isolation but in supportive relations, in contrast
to liberal theory's view of the individual and his rights.9
Indeed, if every woman were seen as a potential leader, as Ella
Baker and Mary King would have it, then leadership roles should
be widely dispersed, skills shared, power diffused. Mutually supportive
participation at the small group level could have educative and
transformative effects, and prefigure a society based on non-hierarchical
relationships.
Hundreds
of thousands of women took part in these small groups in the late
sixties and early seventies, and many testify to the educative
and empowering effects they had on their lives. As Evans has noted,
"they provided a place, a `free space,' in which women could examine
the nature of their own oppression and share the growing knowledge
that they were not alone. The qualities of intimacy, support and
virtual structurelessness made the small group a brilliant tool
for spreading the movement. Anyone could form a group anywhere:
an SDS women's caucus, a secretarial pool, a friendship circle,
a college dorm, a coffee klatch." Their spontaneous and contagious
formation was later given an added boost when the National Organization
for Women (NOW), the major arm of the mainstream women's movement,
began officially propagating them, indeed becoming their primary
proponent, after initially feeling that they would divert women's
energies away from political action. Many chapters institutionalized
CR courses with specific topics, and the Los Angeles NOW Consciousness
Raising Committee distributed a 60-page CR Handbook.10
Small participatory
groups, often set up as collectives, have been particularly suited
to a variety of women's self-help, service and cultural projects.
Women's health collectives have aimed to disperse knowledge and
skills widely, and thus demystify medical expertise for both staff
and patients to enable women to gain greater control over their
own bodies. In this they have spearheaded a broader critique of
professional ideologies and practices that disempower those they
are supposed to serve. Perhaps the most famous of these is the
Boston Women's Health Book Collective, which published Our Bodies,
Ourselves in 1973 (and a subsequent 1984 edition), a book that
has had a profoundly democratizing impact on the constitution
of medical knowledge and the delivery of services in traditional
as well as alternative settings.
The shelter
movement for battered women has also frequently used the democratic
collective, and other participatory forms, because in the process
of establishing active engagement and equal respect among staff
and residents, the latter are provided with a living alternative
to the domination they have experienced and the passivity of mere
victim status. In one shelter studied by Noelie Maria Rodriguez,
all members of the staff had at one time been victims of battering
or incest, and most had themselves been residents of the shelter.
Although some board members have professional credentials, none
are required for regular staff. Current and past residents are
active in all aspects of decision-making, from hiring and administration
to program details, and communication among staff and residents
is continuous and open. Staff serve as role models of those who
have been able to redefine their lives without violence and victimization,
and residents support and empower each other through peer counseling.
Participation is meant to be empowering and therapeutic at the
same time, and to serve as an alternative to the professional
social service model.11
II.
Internal Critique of Structureless Democracy & Sisterly Virtue
The feminist movement's
acute attention to group process, however, quickly began to generate
a trenchant critique of small, relatively structureless groups.
Jo Freeman's 1972 essay, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," which
had been circulating earlier before its publication in several
places, was the most important document in triggering a process
of critical reflection that has been going on ever since.12
Diffuse participatory
methods, according to Freeman, often do little really to democratize
power, and can, in fact, make those who wield the most influence
in an organization even less responsible and less accountable
to members. The refusal to name leaders often means that the membership
is also unable to name the elites that emerge informally, and
in many cases constitute oligarchic enclaves. Informal dominance
is based on networks not all that different than old boys networks
in how they operate, a great irony for a movement that historically
has sought to democratize power by formalizing methods of selection
and decision-making. Entry into informal networks is often based
on friendship, marriage to New Left men with valued resources
(mailing lists, presses), or on appropriate class, race and educational
backgrounds and personally attractive styles. Some become de facto
leaders simply by their ability and willingness to invest the
most time, thereby creating the problem of representativeness
that had deeply concerned both Dahl and Walzer.
As Ann Popkin noted
in her study of the Bread and Roses collective in Boston, this
presented a real problem for women with full-time jobs, who often
felt marginalized from the inner circle of "heavies" (the word
members chose to describe the reality of power they felt proscribed
from naming directly), or for those who had multiple political
commitments. Formally democratic mechanisms were not available
to control the power cliques, and the informal norms of steep
time investment made it difficult for women with multiple commitments
to achieve recognition as serious feminists with a role to play
in formulating program and political direction.13
Communicative and
decision-making processes could also be distorted by certain egalitarian
procedures and personalized styles. Redstockings of New York,
for instance, devised a system of equalizing opportunities to
speak by distributing 12 disks to each member, one of which was
forfeited each time a person spoke. As Jane Mansbridge has pointed
out, this helped make women conscious of inequalities among themselves
and alerted the more aggressive to the limits on their speech.
But it did not reduce inequalities of influence, since the more
powerful still were able to mobilize support networks and command
through rhetoric when members interests came into conflict. When
interests tended to converge, it actually obstructed careful debate
on the most optimal solution by discouraging short helpful comments
by those with most to contribute. And it tended to orient people
to the frequency rather than the quality of speech.14
Expressive personal
styles, such as prefacing comments with "I feel" or "it freaks
me out that," often sowed confusion or concealed political direction
in the guise of openness. At mass meetings of women's unions,
such styles made it difficult to pursue orderly discussion or
get people to respond sequentially to another's arguments. Decisions
were often not carried out, because of free flowing discussion
or the absence of minutes, which were seen as distinctly bureaucratic.
Lack of formal structure
made some feel even more inadequate and disempowered, since it
appeared that all could speak and be listened to equally, and
hence fear of speaking or lack of persuasiveness was more easily
perceived as one's own personal failing. In many cases, egalitarian
styles bred conformity and stifled dissent by branding it "unsisterly"
to challenge another woman's ideas or to claim individual authorship
of an article. In denying a proper place for political and personal
competition, which were viewed as peculiarly male, suppressed
anger and hostility often came in through the back door in ways
that were destructive of democratic process and personally hurtful.
The result, as Karen Hansen has argued, was "an environment where
only the brave, the politically correct, or the thick-skinned
would speak. Many women described the mass meetings as almost
unbearable."15
Personal politics
in the small groups could become particularly oppressive, even
totalitarian, according to Freeman and others, on issues of sexual
preference. As many lesbians stepped out of the closet, lesbianism
came to be interpreted not only as a right of sexual preference,
but as a political choice and as a criterion of feminist trustworthiness.
Those who chose not to become a "woman-identified woman" and to
explore full sexual love and commitment were often seen as compromised
or, worse yet, as traitors to other women. This sisterly version
of Rousseauian virtue was often enforced through small group process
with particular vehemence, causing much personal trauma, even
nervous breakdowns, and leaving the feminist identities of many
committed activists shattered.
Even where sexual
preference was not at issue, politicizing the personal often meant
escalating the emotional risks one was expected to take and exposing
one's personal life to the continual scrutiny of the group. Just
as existential daring infused the student movement's interpretations
of participatory democracy, so did intense emotional risk taking
become a standard for participatory openness and sisterly virtue
in the radical women's movement. Many women recognized this to
be a "perversion of the `personal is political' argument," and
resisted the creeping notion that "a woman's life is the political
property of the women's movement," but not before many women's
groups were destroyed in the process of learning how to draw the
boundaries.16
The radically participatory
and egalitarian ethos entailed profound ambivalence about leadership,
and those who took initiative often received confused and contradictory
messages about their efforts. On the one hand, they felt that
the movement expected them to speak at local gatherings and national
conferences, since moral pressure to be available and preach the
gospel whenever needed was great. They were expected to provide
theoretical analysis and strategic guidance, and their essays
and books were enthusiastically welcomed and debated. On the other
hand, they were accused of being elitist when they did take initiative
or enter the limelight, of being manipulative when they did formulate
plans and develop strategies, of being on a "male trip" of rational
analysis when they did generate and debate theories.17
Ambivalence about
leadership was so deep, and egalitarian impulses so strong, that
many groups could not sustain a rational debate about what democratic
leaders should be like or how the movement might produce them.
If leadership potential was present in all women, many groups
reasoned, then any woman should be able to run a mass meeting,
every woman should be interested in theory, and no woman need
be trained to manage an organization. One faction among the Feminists
from New York tried to prescribe at the Second Congress to Unite
Women in early 1970 that "everyone in the movement must be in
groups which operate COLLECTIVELY (i.e. use the LOT SYSTEM),"
and that no woman could speak before the media unless chosen by
lot or could earn a living from writing or speaking about women's
liberation.
The results of these
attitudes were often quite debilitating. Organizational structurelessness
bred a peculiarly destructive psychodynamics of leadership trashing.
Since competitive impulses could not be recognized and legitimated,
they also could not be easily contained and channeled. Those who
felt guilty and self-hating for asserting themselves, fearful
of being accused of elitism, envious of others who achieved recognition,
or inadequate for being unable to live up to the ideal of all
women as leaders or theorists, could project their unwanted feelings
onto the "heavies" by caricaturing and trashing them, disempowering
them even as they expected to be empowered by them.
The result was a
dampening of initiative among many, as Linda Gordon has noted
of Bread and Roses, or complete, though usually temporary, withdrawal
from the women's movement, thus creating leadership vacuums and
depriving the movement of much needed talent. The first generation
of leaders, in particular, suffered so greatly from what they
called the "trashing" and "witchhunts" that they were almost completely
decimated. Naomi Weisstein, for instance, who had felt profoundly
empowered by her experience in supportive small groups in the
late 1960s, and who had successfully overcome her terror of speaking
before large audiences to become a brilliant orator, felt that,
by being trashed as an elitist star, the women's movement had
"given her a voice and then taken it away again."
And as in SDS and
SNCC, the inability of the movement to name leaders who could
be held accountable made it all that much easier for the media
to choose its own stars to put on the cover of Time magazine or
the CBS evening news, creating even more resentment towards them
and reinforcing their sense that they were "feminist refugees"
who should try to reach other women through the media and not
the movement. As Freeman has argued, "the movement's greatest
fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ideology of `structurelessness'
created the `star system' and the backlash to it encouraged the
very kind of individualistic nonresponsibility that it most condemned."18
Structurelessness
also left the larger feminist organizations vulnerable to control
by disciplined sectarian groups. With membership open and criteria
loose, leadership chosen according to who was willing to put in
the most time, and meetings run haphazardly without previously
circulated agendas or recorded attendance and minutes, cadre organizations
could assert disproportionate influence by packing the mass meetings
with women not previously active in chapters, volunteering a great
deal of time in the office, and propounding their own line as
if it were that of the feminist group as a whole. In some cases,
not only were the dominant sentiments of the group not well represented,
but views contrary to feminism itself were propagated.
These unwelcome results
of loose inclusiveness confronted feminists with severe challenges
to their innocent notions of sisterly solidarity and open participation,
and forced them to pose the question explicitly, "what demos?"
"Whose voice?" By what criteria is membership established and
the right to speak in the name of others bestowed? Is having one's
name on a list enough to qualify for membership, or does one have
to be active in a chapter, pay dues or subscribe to a particular
program or ideology? And how does one demonstrate committment
and belief? Practically, these questions presented women's groups
with the option of purging members of political sects, which was
an agonizing decision that many saw as inherently anti-feminist,
and which paralyzed various groups and exhausted their leaders.
Not a few dissolved shortly after such membership crises.19
The tension between
prefigurative and strategic orientations, which Wini Breines sees
as having been the key unresolved tension in the student movement,
thus manifested itself in the participatory politics of the women's
movement as well.20 Structureless
groups aiming to prefigure a utopia of radical equality in their
internal process had a difficult time setting priorities or following
through on decisions. Many socialist-feminist unions paralyzed
themselves in the elusive search for the ideal project. Internal
crises produced continual fragmentation. And the groups that resisted
formalizing structures for organizational maintenance were the
very ones that spent the most time and effort on revising their
structures and trying to maintain their organizations, time that
was drained from actual or planned projects and effective political
work.21
The tensions, however,
were not just between the prefigurative and the strategic, but
within those very processes imagined to prefigure the ideal. As
Naomi Weisstein and Heather Booth noted in 1975, "our organizations
and our alternate institutions die from internal bleeding long
before they succumb to external pressure."22
Informal dominance, expressive manipulation, leadership trashing,
false consensus, enforced sisterly virtue -- all these were problems
that, to a considerable degree, were generated by the very attempts
to prefigure an ideal of participatory openness and egalitarian
process.
And many were eventually
contained only by elevating strategic considerations to a higher
level of priority in women's organizations. The fault line between
the prefigurative and the strategic cannot serve metanarratively
to map the fundamental dilemmas of democratic participation, feminist
or otherwise, since faults crisscross each of these in many directions
and generate multiple tensions within and between them. And although
the prefigurative ideal continues to reappear in feminist theory
and feminist organizations, often in strikingly unitary form,
the critique generated within the movement itself has created
an increasingly profound capacity to manage, and imagine, a multiplicity
of tensions and a plurality of forms.
Index
Introduction
I. Feminist Process: the Emergence of an
Organizational Ideal
II. Internal Critique of Structureless Democracy
and Sisterly Virtue
III. Formalizing Structures: Dilemmas
of Empowerment
IV. Care, Commonality and Difference:
Dilemmas of a Feminist Postmodern Pluralism
V. Building Capacities for Grassroots
Empowerment, Democratic Pluralism and Civic Dialogue
VI. Notes
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