 | 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 Back to Family, Gender & Children Index |
