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Topics: Families and Gender

Democracy & Diversity in Feminist Organizations
Learning from Three Decades of Practice

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

III. Formalizing Structures: Dilemmas of Empowerment
IV. Care, Commonality and Difference: Dilemmas of a Feminist Postmodern Pluralism

III. Formalizing Structures: Dilemmas of Empowerment

Concerns with personal self-development and calculations of political efficacy, which have served as important justifications in political theory for increased participation,23 further anchored the emerging critique of structureless democracy in the women's movement. Since the radical women's movement of the late 'sixties and early 'seventies was largely a youth movement, it is not surprising that many activists, like those in SNCC and SDS, eventually began to formulate plans for lifetime commitment and to distance themselves from forms of organization that colonized so much time, excluded familial and career obligations, or exposed them to premature burnout.

The attrition rate in small collectives was always quite high, reflecting de facto strategies for self-development and efficacy via exit. But choices were increasingly made in good conscience once the time and wage costs of egalitarian work were framed within the broader critique of the feminine volunteer syndrome that would deny women independent careers. And such concerns were often shared by poor, working class and Third World women activists, who found the egalitarian rejection of formalized authority and professional status to serve well neither their own developmental needs nor the practical delivery of services to their communities. In fact, the structureless democratic ideal has often proven rather exclusivist for those who do not have white middle class privileges to fall back on, and making room for increased race and class diversity in the women's movement has meant revising what had appeared to be unambiguously egalitarian and prefigurative.24

As careers, political and otherwise, have opened up for women generally, feminist activism imagines itself less singularly within an egalitarian form of participatory democracy. Myra Marx Ferree's comparative study of the women's movements in the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany shows the more autonomist and collectivist women's movement in the latter to be revising its structures and outlook as careers and political opportunities begin to open up for women. And many of the more radical feminist proponents of egalitarian collectives in the U.S. have never been that interested in maintaining the organizations they set up; often they quickly move on to new projects as part of their own "careers" in innovation, albeit not without excoriating those who compromise the ideal in order to stabilize their achievements.25

The movements against domestic violence and rape are cases in point. In the early 1970s, shelters for battered women and rape crisis centers were frequently structured as democratic collectives heavily dependent on volunteer efforts and with little formalization of authority or division of labor. They developed critiques of male violence and practical methods of empowerment that eschewed the passivity of social service client models. But as demand increased, many were forced to close or cut back services. Staff were burning out and moving on, and volunteers had always been a relatively uncertain resource.

Those committed to stabilizing and even expanding services, and to utilizing the cumulative experience developed by the movement to empower women against violence, increasingly opted to formalize structures. Staff were paid, and increasingly well, as a way of securing long-term commitment and upgrading services, and more women of color and working class women were recruited and retained as a consequence. Board structures were formalized to provide broader skills and political influence, and fundraising activities were given new emphasis. Funding from state agencies came to be seen not just as a cooptative trap, but as an opportunity to expand services and transform the way various agencies defined battering and rape.

As Nancy Matthews has shown, state funding, as well as the support of more hierarchical organizations such as SCLC and the YWCA, were crucial in some instances to broadening the anti-rape movement to minority communities and to overcoming the exclusivist practices of collectives staffed by radical white feminists. The anti-rape movement in Los Angeles has become multiracial and multicultural with resources provided by the state and other organizations, yet it has creatively modified bureaucratic requirements to resist tendencies to parcellize and clientelize victim needs. Barbara Levy Simon shows how staff rebelled against the structureless democracy and the radical feminist director of a local rape crisis center, in order to check the informal tyrannies and exclusivist practices based on friendship cliques, racial identity and sexual preference, to stabilize and upgrade services, and to transform police practices and media coverage.

Institutionalization did not lead to modifying goals in a conservative direction, as Weber and Michels might have predicted, but to expanding goals and enhancing internal democracy, while maintaining a sense of community that allowed the center to resist cooptation. One broad survey of rape crisis centers finds much structural diversity, although the original collective model had become "virtually extinct" by the 1980s, without, however, leading to a decline in political activity and education concerning rape. The shelter movement has also increasingly moved away from the democratic collectivist form to create "modified collectives" and "modified hierarchies" that can reap the benefits of more formalized structure while still sharing information and decision-making broadly, and remaining committed to the feminist goals of empowering battered women.26

Choices to formalize and expand activities reflect the dilemma "empower whom?" Implicitly, if not always explicitly, shelter and anti-rape activists, have decided that empowering women who had been victims of violence was not served well by imagining that they could simultaneously empower all staff and volunteers equally in the running of the shelters and crisis centers. The two goals of empowering women were in tension, rather than in sisterly harmony, and the participatory ethos has come to be modified. Formalizing authority and tasks, stabilizing staff and services, modifying the collective form, and developing a politics for state funding and educating bureaucrats, have come to be seen as more effective ways of empowering the great number of victims of male violence.

Such tendencies in the women's movement, which became more prominent already by the mid-1970s, have not left it less democratic or more subject to oligarchical tendencies. In fact, formalized organizations have often resulted in greater internal democracy. Formal elections, priorities agreed upon and clearly delimited by vote, committee structures to ensure follow up, and other routine practices, have counteracted tendencies of informal leaders and nonelected activists to determine the agenda. As Staggenborg's comparison of the more formalized Chicago NOW chapter and the more radically egalitarian Chicago Women's Liberation Union, as well as her comparison of pro-choice organizations, have shown, institutionalization has not inevitably meant less radical goals, although it often entails narrowing to an organizationally manageable number of them.27 Formalized structures have also made possible the participation of a wider variety of women, including those who cannot afford the high time costs of engagement, hence pluralizing feminist citizenship styles in ways that have been of central concern to Dahl and Walzer.

Although in 1968 NOW resisted radical attempts to to have its officers chosen by lot and to rotate all positions frequently, the vast influx of younger members in the early 1970s and the rapid proliferation of chapters led it to incorporate much of the ethic of participatory democracy. Local chapters have a great deal of autonomy, engage in grassroots activism, and conduct much of their internal affairs according to informal and egalitarian norms. Consciousness raising became an important part of NOW activity in the 1970s, and shaped the communicative ethics of political work in chapters. Nonauthoritarian and supportive styles of empowerment and self-development, consensus seeking and mutual understanding, helpful and noncompetitive ways of expressing criticisms and of listening to others, have characterized chapter work to greater and lesser degrees. The National Consciousness Raising Committee advises the board at the national level, as well as national officers and the general membership, and currently conducts annual meetings to confront issues such as racism and homophobia within the organization. Much opportunity exists for lateral communication among chapters and committees, and information is widely dissseminated rather than monopolized by the central offices. Albeit a large national organization, with over 250,000 members and 700 chapters, NOW functions in a manner that is quite decentralized, open, mobilized at the grassroots and attentive to internal democratic and feminist process.28

Movement organizations with formalized structures have significantly greater capacities to sustain coalitions, since they can maintain more effective contact with delegated representatives from a variety of groups. Even simple things like being able to meet downtown at a convenient time in the middle of the day give paid staff a significant advantage over grassroots volunteers in coalition work. If alliances among diverse groups of women with multiple interests and identities are central to postmodern feminist politics, as Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicolson have argued, then we must pay increasing attention to those organizational features that facilitate and sustain coalitions. In this sense, formally democratic and representative structures seem to be as key to a postmodern feminism as to a democratic pluralism.29

IV. Care, Commonality and Difference: Dilemmas of a Feminist Postmodern Pluralism

The National Women's Studies Association is another organization that has developed national representative structures while continuing to innovate in ways that are responsive to feminist concerns with difference among women and to the practical meaning of an ethic of care in organizational life. It provides a nice case study of some of the recent attempts—and hazards—of recognizing rights of differentiated citizenship based on distinctive group identities in feminist organizations. Many other kinds of organizations are also grappling with these same issues, often amidst great controversy about balkanization and the erosion of common civic identities.

NWSA thus provides an instructive case, not least because it has self consciously begun a process of public self reflection and organizational learning based on confronting critically its own past, as well as the previous decades of practice within the women's movement. And some of the analyses below were developed in a conversation among scholars, activists, and the editors of the NWSA Journal.30

From its founding in 1976 until 1990, when a critical turning point occurred, NWSA had progressively formalized its structure and delineated its hierarchy, which consisted of an annual Delegate Assembly of 150, a Coordinating Council of 24 that meets semi-annually and can now initiate legislation, a Steering Committee of five that convenes between these semi-annnual meetings, and a National Coordinator.31 Greater hierarchy was a response to some of the usual problems of an effective executive and daily administration, as well as to the relatively chaotic yearly meetings of the Delagate Assembly that were vulnerable to disruption by small vocal minorities whose demands were perceived as coercive. But while creating greater formal hierarchy, the meetings at the various levels have tried to achieve consensus, wherever possible, and one-person-one-vote representation has been modified by a weighted voting system based on caucuses, such as women of color, lesbians and others.

Although NWSA is premised on a commonality among all women, it also recognizes basic differences in experiences and types of oppression, and special mechanisms necessary to achieve inclusiveness. Members of caucuses, and especially the women of color caucus, came to be overrepresented in the Delegate Assembly and the Coordinating Council, and this was justified in various ways: to ensure that all views are represented adequately, to lower the costs and increase the benefits of joining for previously underrepresented groups, and to provide the special access to insight that particularly oppressed groups possess.

As Robin Leidner points out, following Mansbridge's analysis in Beyond Adversary Democracy, these reasons draw upon both unitary and adversary democratic arguments: unitary, to the extent that airing all relevant perspectives and having access to special insight can serve the common interests of all women; and adversary, insofar as the aim is to represent all possible constituents, rather than just current members, by altering the cost/benefit structure of joining. But unitary processes, especially in face-to-face settings, also represent what Carol Gilligan calls an ethic of care. NWSA caucus processes are concerned not just with an ethic of justice or rights to formal equality and fairness, but with whether some individuals and groups feel hurt by decisions and ignored as distinctive constituencies. This ethic of care recognizes that all are diminished by the oppression of others, that all are responsible for one another and have a positive duty to give voice to those who are especially oppressed.32

This system of representation addressed the dual problem of commonality and difference among women in a creative way, and yet it was an unstable accomplishment, marked by continual conflict and revision. There remained multiple sources of tension, as Leidner's analysis so nicely demonstrates. First, no unambiguously clear criteria of special oppression exist, and in an organization where all members feel oppressed as women, caucuses began to proliferate as a way of giving voice to all those who feel the need for distinctive representation.

Thus women's studies program administrators and Jewish women formed caucuses, although others felt these groups were already well represented. Caucuses have also formed for Poor and Working Class Women, Community College, PreK-12 Educators, and others, with options for multiple caucus membership and hence multiple weighting of votes. Here the adversary logic of self-identified corporatist group representation competes with that of distinctive types and degrees of oppression whose special insight aims to produce unitary outcomes. And to the extent that some, such as program administrators, do not feel that the politicized criteria for representation have served the interests of academic programs, they have begun to hold separate conferences, and could conceivably shift the emphasis of their activity outside the perhaps functionally too inclusive NWSA structure.

Secondly, the unitary caring model can stifle dissent, since those who disagree are often made to feel morally inferior, especially if disagreement is with those designated as having distinctive oppression and special insight. Guilt serves as a powerful weapon, above and beyond the weighted voting, but it also has generated considerable resentment among those who do not have the same access to it, and who often see the views of the majority overridden by smaller groups who wield it at will. Furthermore, I would add, those who resist guilt and appeal to an ethic of rights and fairness of representation in NWSA may feel themselves to be just as motivated by care for the constituencies of women they serve and the important yet still fragile programs they nurture. Resentment over the asymmetrical uses of guilt causes some to exit, or to reduce their participation, thus adding yet another potential source of concern about democratic representativeness.

Thirdly, the meanings of equality that are invoked are varied and shifting, and in the heat of conflict often confused. Sometimes arguments are made for equal power of all individuals, and sometimes for all groups. At other times the emphasis shifts away from equal power to equal satisfaction or equal outcomes, which would entail much more radical concessions by majority to minority views about what constitutes feminist activity or what programs should receive priority. Equal satisfaction, as Leidner argues, is a radical expectation that strains to the limit a heterogeneous organization, and one premised on equality among individual women. The NWSA has yet to clarify when it beieves that such expectations might and might not be legitimate.

This case illustrates several general challenges of a feminist politics of participation. First, there are new, even postmodern, twists to the old problem of defining "what demos?" An organization that aspires to be inclusive in the face of obdurate exclusionary practices in the broader society must engage in various kinds of imaginary indexing of the missing voices. Who is missing and who should speak for them? Weighted group voting becomes one way of doing this. But the gap between the present and the absent provides a permanent source of tension, since imagining the missing citizens is at once a source of uncertainty and a claim to disproportionate power.

Furthermore, if we admit the logic of difference into systems of representation, can we legitimately limit it to certain groups agreed to be especially disadvantaged, or must we open it up to all who define themselves as groups in need of distinctive voices? And by what criteria can we limit it, especially if, as in feminist movement organizations, virtually all members feel oppressed and work in various other institutional settings where they experience disadvantages of voice? Feminists can draw upon certain resources to limit the logic of proliferating demands for group representation, e.g. distinctive critiques of racism and homophobia. But their own common identity as women who are oppressed, together with the very multiplicity of settings in which they work, point in the direction of unrestricted self-definitions of legitimate group voice. The latter might also occur as a method of regaining the relative weight of voice lost by some due to the initial modifications of one-person-one-vote principles, and so be driven by the logic of power balancing as much as identity, thereby introducing further ambiguity and tension into the logic of representation.

In addition, the various rationales for weighted group voice can have different implications for the norms of democratic discourse. Adversarial justifications for numerically privileging a group to lower the costs and increase the benefits of participation for current and future members of that group do not, of themselves, tend to privilege individual speakers. They are relatively compatible with universalist premises of democratic discourse, which guarantee no special insight to a particular individual's speech outside of a dialogue with others, and view truth as a function of the content of speech rather than the specific identity, racial or otherwise, of the speaker.

But unitary justifications that appeal to special access to insight in the interests of all, and buttress this with the weapon of guilt, are more likely in practice to conflate the privilege accorded the group with the privileged utterances of an individual who speaks in its name, generating a much more profound source of tension with the norms of open dialogue and fallible speech. And this is further exacerbated if the individual speaks in the name of a united and disciplined caucus.

This tension can be profoundly educative, to the extent that majority groups feel compelled to recognize insights of minority ones, and to accept them as being in the common interest, and to the extent that minority groups learn to admit fallibility without increasing their vunerability. But it can also be diseducative to the extent that some come to feel that controversial issues are determined by appeal to insight that is above challenge, thereby corrupting a key premise of democratic dialogue.

Controversy over the firing of a paid black staff member in the national office of NWSA reveals how precarious some of these representational strategies are.33 The Women of Color Caucus at the national convention in 1990, privileging the account of this staff person and arguing her right to fully self-determine her own conditions of work, escalated its demands for representation to 50 percent of positions on all bodies as the only way to overcome the racism alleged to dominate the entire organization, and others proposed to further remove any pretense to one-person-one-vote by adding to this self-designated majority the weighted votes of other oppressed groups.

Not all women of color agreed with this position, and some argued forcefully that limits on speech in personnel matters should be respected rather than dissolved in an open convention discussion. But such dissenters themselves felt silenced by the caucus, which made appeals to a fundamentalist analysis of racism as all-pervasive, thereby dismissing previous anti-racist work of NWSA and denigrating those women of color who had been elected to serve on its governing bodies as having been hand-picked and coopted by white women, who were in turn holding hands with white male power in the universities. The complex organizational structure, which had evolved partly as a response to the demands for distinctive group voice, was now condemned as having been designed to mystify women of color and impose hierarchy on grassroots activists. When substantial voting margins rejected the non-negotiable demands to reinstate the fired staffer, dismiss the entire leadership and ban them from future positions for five years, the Women of Color Caucus resigned.

While some, such as Iris Young, have made an important theoretical argument for differentiated citizenship and group representation, in contrast to traditional universalist conceptions that ignore or suppress difference, the dynamics in NWSA and other organizations attempting to accomodate muticultural claims alert us to the hazards of emphasizing difference, privileging particular voices, and modifying universalist principles of speech and representation, especially when attached to strong claims for weighted voting, veto power and the like. In fact, some of the lessons of participatory democratic pluralism learned in earlier years have now come into profound tension with the issues being raised by multicultural pluralism and differentiated citizenship, and no easy theoretical or practical resolution is yet apparent.

Admirably, the NWSA has confronted this crisis as an opportunity for further learning about the challenges of diversity and the forms of democracy. It continued a process of open, albeit very difficult, debate and organizational restructuring. In 1992, the editors of the NWSA Journal asked Robin Leidner to revisit and update her analysis, and invited me and several others to join her in a symposium that would help to frame their practical work. The discussion that follows represents a further elaboration of my own views, and draws considerably on the ongoing dialogue between Leidner and me, as well as on the dialogue that occurred in the feminist press and within the organization subsequent to the 1990 Akron conference.

Differentiated Citizenship

Attentiveness to difference has been nourished by feminist group process in varied settings, but only under a vigorous challenge by women of color, lesbians and others with distinct disadvantages vis a` vis dominant white middle class and heterosexual women, have feminist organizations made a concerted effort to figure out how to institutionalize the diverse voices of distinctly oppressed groups. This parallels broader processes of identity politics within contemporary social movements and within some mainstream institutions that have felt their impact. NWSA responded to these challenges with a caucus system of representation and weighted voting to complement its regional system of representation based on one-person-one-vote principles (Leidner, "Stretching the Boundaries"). For some feminist theorists, efforts such as these signal the necessity of recasting basic principles of democratic theory.

Perhaps the most compelling case along these lines has been made by Iris Young, who argues that universal conceptions of citizenship, including those from participatory and civic republican traditions (e.g. Barber), as well as critical theories of discursive democracy (e.g. Habermas), have excluded and suppressed difference in the interests of an unreconstructed hegemonic ideal. Young proposes instead a conception of differentiated citizenship, where each democratic public (political, workplace, social movement etc.)

provide mechanisms for the effective representation and recognition of the distinct voices and perspectives of those of its constituent groups that are oppressed and disadvantaged within it. Such group representation implies institutional mechanisms and public resources supporting three activities: (1) self-organization of group members so that they can gain a sense of collective empowerment and a reflective understanding of their collective experience and interests in the context of the society; (2) voicing a group's analysis of how social policy proposals affect them, and generating policy proposals themselves, in institutionalized contexts where decision makers are obliged to show that they have taken these perspectives into consideration; (3) having veto power regarding specific policies that affect a group directly...("Polity and Group Difference,"261-62).

While much of Young's analysis is convincing beyond what this brief summary can convey, it would be a mistake to accept it in its strongest normative version divorced from the pragmatic organizational contexts in which feminists (and others) must struggle with the limits, costs and constraints of such differentiated citizenship.2 The experience of NWSA provides an especially relevant case for understanding how feminists learn pluralism while struggling with the tensions between differentiated and universal citizenship.

Leidner's original essay on NWSA ("Stretching the Boundaries of Liberalism"), inspired partly by Mansbridge's pragmatic experimental approach, analyzes normative questions of democracy and equality, but only insofar as these reveal actors' own implicit or explicit conceptions in contexts where they must confront real tensions and paradoxes, costs and constraints. The most profound democratic contribution of this approach is that it privileges contextualized subjects as they act and learn, and uses the analytic tools of sociology and political theory to invite those very subjects to engage together in further reflective discourse and learning. It doesn't prescribe what such actors must do if they are to be true to ideals of feminist diversity and democracy. Nor does it draw definitive lessons even from the NWSA experience, since these are still somewhat indeterminate, and not all important voices, particularly those of women of color, have yet had the opportunity to enagage the normative and pragmatic organizational issues at enough of a distance from the particularly intense circumstances of the staff firing in 1990 that so distorted communication and democratic deliberation.

NWSA's rethinking of these issues is, I think, largely on the right track. The Austin conference of 1992 continued to recognize the most essential elements of differentiated citizenship, namely self-organization and voice for distinctly oppressed groups, as in Young's first two requirements, and access to leadership positions to help make these effective. Yet it modified or rejected strong versions of this, such as heavily weighted voting, guaranteed majorities and effective veto, as in Young's third prescription.

While NWSA had quite self-consciously attempted to manage the tensions between differentiated and universal citizenship in some very creative ways in the past, its recent decision to assign a post hoc balancing role to the constituency council to assure diversity on the governing board if universal principles of direct election of leaders based on one-person-one-vote fails to achieve this, recognizes the priority of the universal pole in this dialectical tension, and thus swings the pendulum back in the direction of universal citizenship.

This self-conscious shift seems wise in light of the kinds of issues that arise when attempting to institutionalize differentiated citizenship through group representation (GR), many of which NWSA members came to perceive. First of all, GR can create a system that is so complex and unwieldy that it confuses members, thus demoralizing them, decreasing their effective participation, and even generating suspicions that it was intentionally designed by elites to disempower the grassroots. The latter was a charge that was made in 1990 by some in the Women of Color Caucus, the very group that was intended to benefit most from GR. This may seem ironic, but others echoed these sentiments as well. This should alert us to the fact that democratic empowerment is better served by relatively simple and transparent representational schemes, rather than convoluted ones, and that large organizations and polities invariably require other kinds of complex functional systems of representation (subcommittees, administrative bodies) that can already stretch the bounds of democratic legitimacy.

Secondly, democratic organizations with significant participatory elements invariably find themselves confronting limits of time, energy, and other resources (Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy; Dahl). Additional requirements for GR can add considerably to demand overload in ways that discourage and unfairly bias participation, raise further questions about representativeness (Phillips), and channel energies and structure incentives towards specific group activities at the expense of common ones. It is not impossible theoretically to maintain a dynamic tension between the universal and the particular. But under conditions of relative scarcity that invariably pervade organizational life, and perhaps especially democratic organizational life (Sirianni, "Production and Power"), choices to encourage one form of participation and representation often come at the expense of others.

There is no ideal organizational form that can escape the issue of relative scarcity, and hence inevitable tensions and tradeoffs among values to be achieved. If anything, the commitment to diversity only increases the need to be sensitive to the complex nature of such tensions and tradeoffs. The relative ease with which some in the Women of Color Caucus, the Jewish Women's Caucus and others were willing to decisively subordinate universal principles of one-person-one-vote by demanding guaranteed caucus majority representation, and were ready to appeal to group-based standards of truth outside of a general and open dialogue, should certainly give pause to anyone concerned with maintaining the conditions of common democratic culture and organizational life.

Thirdly, defining which groups get specific kinds and amounts of GR privileges is often an inherently difficult procedure, given the ambiguities of determining identity boundaries, relative degrees of oppression and the like. It is much easier in theory than in practice to assign criteria, such as Young does, which limit GR privileges to groups with comprehensive identities and ways of life that constitute them as distinctly oppressed and disadvantaged. NWSA experience reveals, to the contrary, that once basic principles of GR are introduced, there can be a powerful dynamic towards proliferating claims on the basis of these very criteria, and secondarily as a way of restoring recognition and voice that can be lost if one doesn't get into the GR game.

This does not mean that there can never be relatively workable systems of GR privilege. But the choice to emphasize such at the expense of universal principles can introduce a dynamic of increasingly balkanized claims that generate continual conflict, resentment and suspicion over categorical boundaries, and that erode mutual trust and democratic culture. Conflict and differential interest, of course, are much of what democratic organization is about. But we have no reason to be sanguine about how many fault lines of differential identity and definitional conflict can be inscribed in the very representational system itself before organizations or polities begin to lose the capacity for managing conflict democratically or articulating common interests deliberatively.

Inclusive Constituency and Expansive Mission

The problem of inclusivity in NWSA is only partly about expanding the boundaries of the demos and recognizing its diversity. No feminist or democrat, whatever her stance on the pragmatic problems of differentiated citizenship, could rest comfortably with the normative implications of the fact that women of color are highly underrepresented in the organization and in academia, or that disabled women might not have opportunities for articulating their distinct concerns and perspectives. The normative issues of organizational membership at this level are not so different (albeit gendered) than those of inclusive citizenship in a multicultural polity.

But in defining the organizational mission itself so expansively as to include feminist education in all settings and to link activism with scholarship as inherent to such education, NWSA has taken upon itself a much grander and inevitably more difficult task of inclusion, for which there is—and should be—much greater room for normative disagreement. How much should people who define themselves primarily as activists, or activists in nonacademic settings, be on an equal organizational footing with those who define themselves primarily as academics? What are recognized as legitimate forms of activism? Would functional narrowing entail pragmatically acceptable member exclusion, or would this violate fundamental principles of feminist citizenship and/or feminist education?

Leidner is appropriately skeptical, I think, about whether such an inclusive mission is ultimately workable, and warns against framing the debate in terms of appeals to feminist virtue that emphasize true commitment and genuine activism, and that can so easily lead to impugning the motives of those who fall short ("Constituency, Accountability," 22ff.). Democratic deliberation has often been difficult or impossible when virtue trumps respect in a debate about realistic goals. The nearly universal commitment to activism as an essential component of women's studies, of course, means that such realism cannot be a lazy one. Exploring rich and creative linkages between scholarship, academic teaching and educative activism in community settings is essential to the identity of women's studies.

Yet, for the very reason that such a task does stretch the boundaries of the realistic so ambitiously, it is even more essential to develop pragmatic measures and tests by which members can hold each other and their elected leaders accountable for what they should attempt and what they can achieve.

Several things seem most important here. First, as Leidner points out ("Constituency, Accountability," 20), NWSA needs to have a realistic view of the differential incentive structures that motivate academics and activists to participate in the organization. Academics have relatively strong and distinct incentives, and activists relatively weak and diffuse ones. It seems very unlikely that this basic difference will change in any fundamental way, even if NWSA were to be very successful in its partnership projects with activist organizations, and if activism itself received new bursts of energy.4 Activists simply have too many demands on their time, energy and other resources to place a high priority on NWSA and women's studies programs, even if they appreciate the practical assistance they might receive and make legitimate claims to have a voice in determining the forms of such assistance. The assumption of common goals but autonomous organizational bases in the partnership projects reflects this. But these quite differential incentive structures entail differential citizenship within the organization, and while this is not exclusion, neither is it realistically equality. Nor necessarily should it be.

Secondly, debates on how to link academia and activism must always address relative costs and benefits. All projects have costs, if not actual financial costs of already stretched budgets, then costs in staff time and attention that could go to other worthy goals. And not all projects will yield the same marginal gains, given the difficulty of the problems addressed and the kinds of resources (including member commitment) that can realistically be mobilized. Democratic deliberation requires referencing these relative costs and benefits as specifically and honestly as possible when deciding to commit scarce resources, and developing workable priorities and pragmatic tests that serve to hold members and leaders accountable.

The language of relative costs and benefits may sound overly cold and calculating. But it can also be seen as a contextualizing discipline that shows respect and care for the real people and programs that gain and lose whenever resource decisions are made. In contrast, grand appeals to unifying theory and practice, academy and community, that do not reference costs and benefits with realistic specificity can too easily violate deliberative democracy and an ethic of care. Effective activist organizations, of course, make these kinds of calculations all the time when they choose to focus energies on some goals and not others, in some organizational arenas and not others. Indeed, one key reason why incentive structures within NWSA are differential is that activists are behaving rationally in view of costs, opportunities and divisions of labor.

An example here might help clarify what is at stake. A democratic decision within NWSA to commit resources to developing partnership projects with autonomous feminist community organizations in order to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and to become more inclusive of women of color, would seem to require a deliberative debate on the range of other practical options that might also address these worthy goals. Some of the relevant questions that come to mind are the following:

Has NWSA done a systematic evaluation of university women's studies internship and service learning programs, and calculated the benefits to shelters and rape crisis centers and many other grassroots feminist groups that have been served over the years?
Has it examined how important these experiences have been in shaping students' feminist identities, political commitments, and career choices, and thus provided them with educative opportunities that link theory and practice and that further enrich reciprocal intergenerational learning in the women's movement?
Has it analyzed the problems of such programs, and made concerted concerted efforts to diffuse the best and most empowering practices?
Might such internship and service learning models that build on existing women's studies programs and membership bases be better able to establish clearer goals, more measurable results, and greater accountability than partnerships that shift the weight to autonomous organizational bases?
Might they have a better chance of mobilizing support from the academics who are skeptical of emphases on other forms of activism, and thus help generate further resources and support (from women's studies programs themselves, from universities, foundations, and other community service programs), as well as help bridge some of the polarization around academy and activism that has developed within NWSA?
Would efforts to strengthen and refine internship and service learning models of proven potential not be, in any case, a necessary first step and complement to other kinds of partnership projects?
And, not least, would such partnerships be the most effective way to address the underrepresentation of women of color in academia, both faculty and students, whose specific needs do not neatly map onto the activism versus academy distinction?

I do not pretend to have all the answers to these questions (though clearly my perspective comes through here), nor even to suggest that NWSA has not perhaps already been raising many of them. The important point is to recognize that deliberative democracy within a particular organization requires specificity and calculation, and tends to be eroded when these are trumped by grand and virtuous appeals to the unity of feminist theory and practice, academy and community.

Inventing and refining workable forms for linking feminist scholarship, academic teaching and community practice are part of a pragmatic learning process for which there is no singular organizationally correct form. Commitment to an inclusive multicultural demos does not necessarily imply commitment to a functionally all-inclusive mission. NWSA might legitimately choose to narrow its mission and functions in certain ways without violating basic feminist values. Such a decision might be a responsibly feminist one if it enabled the organization to be more effective in the projects it could do best, if other effective organizational channels were available for those tasks it might decide not to do itself, and if it remained committed to assisting such organizations in the ways it best could.

The decision to be less functionally all-inclusive might be a wise one if it reduced the kinds of deliberative distortions and paralyzing emotions that result from an inability "to acknowledge the reality of its membership base while struggling to transcend its limits" (Leidner, "Constituency, Accountability," 21; see also Hansen). The commitment to inclusiveness and to linking theory and practice are central to feminism, to be sure. But an all-embracing functional inclusiveness seems to have a striking parallel to the all-embracing radical collectivism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The latter challenged boundaries and dissolved distinctions in important and radical ways, yet reflective feminist practitioners eventually found it necessary as well to learn how to delineate and protect boundaries and distinctions --and for some of the very same reasons that NWSA today confronts.

Plural Accountability

The complex relationships of accountability delineated by Leidner pose still another important challenge for a democratic and feminist pluralism. The problem of plural accountability is undertheorized in political theory and social movement literature, yet deserves much greater attention, since democratic practice today typically finds itself located at such complex intersections requiring interpretive work about the criteria and contexts that frame responsible action. Neither transformative movements nor mainstream institutions embody unitary logics that provide unambiguous guidance for action or resistance.

Several aspects of this problem seem particularly relevant at this stage of NWSA's own organizational learning process. The first is that NWSA finds itself answerable not only to its membership, but to a broader feminist movement and to academic institutions. Each of these relationships alone poses certain problems, but together they make the interpretive and justificatory tasks of accountability inherently prone to ambiguity and misunderstanding. The most important first step towards learning how to manage the inevitable conflicts in a way that reinforces democratic pluralism is simply to recognize such diverse and complex lines of acccountability and at least some core claims that each legitimately holds.

There may be much room for disagreement about the standards of academia, for instance, and in specific locations and on particular cases there is often much disagreement among people of good will and even similar political conviction (Keller and Moglen). But democratic deliberation becomes hard to sustain unless there is some common agreement within NWSA that there need to be academic standards that are not completely reducible to feminist activism, even if the latter provide a fruitful terrain from which to continue to interrogate such standards. Holding each other accountable to "standards of feminist virtue that treat all engagement with mainstream institutions as co-optive," as Leidner notes ("Constituency, Accountability," 23), will not sustain respectful deliberation any more than will accomodating unreflectively and opportunistically to such institutions produce feminist transformation.

The women's movement as a "discursive community" (Mansbridge, "What is the Feminist Movement?") provides a key reference point on values and goals in broader discussions of accountability, but as Leidner rightly notes, it is too "nebulous and multifaceted" ("Constituency, Accountability," 23) to provide clear guidance or workable mechanisms. Furthermore, I would add, as a discursive community the movement, for the most part, self-consciously acknowledges its diverse character, respects plural virtues and practical compromises, recognizes necessary divisions of labor, encourages strategic calculation and effective use of resources, and accepts the primacy of accountability to specifically constituted communities and organizations. It is not discursively constituted to preempt local judgement or impose general norms, even if it provides crucial resources to inform these.

Thus the more familiar problems of intraorganizational accountability remain central. NWSA seems to have taken several important steps forward here: direct election of officers, a conflict resolution committee, and questioning how caucus spokespersons can be said to be accountable to specific constituencies. There is more reason to be skeptical, however, about the replacement of the annual Delegate Assembly with an NWSA assembly of all present at the annual conference, although the clear need for an inclusive and healing experience at the sparsely attended conference in Austin makes this decision quite understandable. The bias this introduces in favor of members who are new, occasional or geographically proximate, who are not accountable to specific constituencies, and who are not expected to have participated in previous discussions or prepared extensively for issues on the current agenda, seems less likely to produce genuine deliberation, especially as attendance at conferences grows considerably beyond Austin's five hundred or so—a size generally seen as the maximum even for deliberative bodies that meet on a regular basis (Dahl; Fishkin).

Discussion under these circumstances is more likely to emphasize the expressive, and either specific strategic and cost/benefit analyses will tend to be neglected, or well placed individuals will be tempted to manipulate behind the scenes, thus concentrating effective power in fewer hands. Such an annual general assembly introduces disincentives to prepare or even attend for those whose commitments and insights might have gotten them elected to the Delegate Assembly, since their votes are considerably diluted and their actual chances of speaking are radically reduced. Clearly, there are also some benefits to this new design, though there seem to be alternative ways of welcoming new members and encouraging their participation without shifting away from an accountable, deliberative and representative assembly of elected delegates.

Given its considerable resiliency and capacity for reflective democratic learning, NWSA will no doubt confront these problems thoughtfully when and if they arise. It will be unfortunate, however, if the next debate about how to improve democratic deliberation and accountability is accompanied by another wrenching experience about the meaning of inclusion. Leidner's analyses provide NWSA with rich opportunities for democratic learning that are theoretically informed and contextually sensitive. And while neither she nor I would privilege the NWSA experience, her analyses provide many insights for other feminists and democrats struggling to create effective forms of multicultural citizenship. Would that all of our organizations were so well served.

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