 | 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 V. Building Capacities for Grassroots Empowerment, Democratic Pluralism and Civic Dialogue
VI. Notes V. Building Capacities for Grassroots Empowerment, Democratic Pluralism and Civic Dialogue Historical Learning and the Challenges Ahead Over the past quarter of a century, the women's movement has been engaged in complex learning processes about the meanings and forms of participation. This has involved rediscovering and relearning many of the lessons of pluralist theory, while at the same time expanding its limits and providing the basis for a distinctively feminist participatory pluralism. Striking is how quickly the feminist movement began to articulate issues at the heart of pluralist theory, and yet how little guidance it sought in the writings of Dahl, Walzer or Kaufman, whose critical appreciations of participatory democracy appeared just at the point when the radical women's groups were beginning to wrestle with their own internal dynamics. Although Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" first appeared in late 1972, many of its themes were actively discussed at conferences and in women's groups at least as early as the spring of 1970. Undoubtedly some of the soul searching within the remnants of SDS, as represented in Richard Rothstein's compelling critique of participatory democracy that had emerged from Chicago activist circles overlapping Freeman's, had some influence here, and vice versa. But it was largely on the basis of their own experiences that radical women's groups discovered the problems of informal tyranny and cadre control in the absence of formal representation and accountability. They came to recognize the legitimacy of plural citizenship styles among women with varied commitments, rather than excluding as less committed those who could not make similarly intensive time investments. They questioned whether unstructured expressiveness was more confusing than clarifying for democratic discourse. They resisted the enforcement of new forms of sisterly civic virtue and false consensus. They learned how to nurture leadership among distinctive individuals rather than trashing it in the name of the diffuse leadership of all. As they grew older and began to confront the possibilities of feminist commitment over the life course, they began to appreciate the tensions between egalitarian democracy and their own self-development and political efficacy. These learning processes in the younger and more radical wing of the women's movement drew upon resources in feminist group dynamics built up over several years. They were facilitated by the existence of organizations like NOW that were staffed by women with more established careers and experience in a variety of democratic political organizations, and that simultaneously resisted the extreme anti-organizational tendencies in the radical branch and yet rather quickly made room for participatory styles, consciousness raising and feminist process. Some activists were members of NOW and various radical groups simultaneously. The organizational conditions for intergenerational learning about democratic participation were considerably more favorable than they were for SNCC or SDS. In addition, by the early 1980s, theoretical contributions, such as Mansbridge's Beyond Adversary Democracy and her subsequent essay, "Feminism and the Forms of Freedom," while recognizing the strengths of unitary democracy, offered feminism, and other movements for face-to-face democracy, a bridge to political theory that was deeply pluralist in spirit.34 Of course, in a movement as diverse and innovative as the women's movement, we see no single learning trajectory, no set of common lessons that all have recognized equally or common problems that all have resolved fully. By the early 1970s, as Freeman has argued, both NOW and many in the radical groups were beginning to recognize that different styles, perspectives and forms of organization were not weaknesses but strengthes that allowed the movement to reach different constituencies and serve different functions. Staggenborg's recent analyses show that successful social movements are likely to include a variety of types of organizational structures, each making different kinds of contributions. Formalized and centralized movement organizations, like the Chicago NOW chapter, are more likely to maintain themselves and the movement over a number of years and to bring about specific policy changes in institutional arenas. Decentralized and non-bureaucratic organizations, like the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, on the other hand, are more likely to develop innovative tactics and alternative institutions that in turn provide cultural resources for future mobilizations.35 The latter have also provided the most vibrant settings for learning to participate, even when some of the lessons women learned resulted from painfully negative experiences, and when they subsequently left to work in more established organizations or to form new ones with more formalized structures. Difficult to imagine are the distinctive emphases on listening, empathy, empowerment and attentiveness to difference, even in these formal settings, had it not been for the early and, in some sectors of the movement, repeated attempts to prefigure egalitarian participation. Prefigurative democracy is perhaps educative for the very reason that it is a double-edged sword, with the energy and vision of utopianism, as well as its pitfalls and illusions. In a democratic culture, which has broadly framed the historical context of participatory learning and has provided multiple options for engagement and few restrictions on exit, the repressive aspects of participatory utopianism that have so worried some competitive elite theorists appear relatively minor. But feminist theory and organizational practice have not simply rediscovered and recast problems central to pluralism, they have enriched and expanded our understanding of them considerably. Feminists have increasingly come to question forms of organization, such as the small democratic collective, if these can only be reproduced through processes of homogeneous recruitment, and thus exclude those of different cultural and sexual orientations, or disadvantaged racial and economic backgrounds. What initially was, in many parts of the movement, the unitary and hegemonic ideal, has been dislodged in favor of a multiplicity of forms aimed at ensuring inclusiveness and not presuming resources that might make that ideal work. Furthermore, a politics of diversity can no longer be presumed to result simply from the free flowering of democratically decentralized units, but must concern itself with how to form and maintain coalitions among women with different identities, perspectives and interests. In this, formalized and sometimes centralized, albeit democratically representative, organizations generally prove superior. Feminists have increasingly attempted to incorporate a recognition of difference into the heart of the communicative process itself, avoiding a lazy, even relativist accomodation of adversarial interests and striving to make this recognition serve common interests in women's, and human, liberation. Group representation, weighted voting, and strong claims to special insight, and hence special obligation to listen and question majority perspectives, have become important ways of pluralizing democracy, challenging privilege and compelling genuine deliberation. A distinctively feminist argument for multivocality has emerged, and this now needs to be linked to organizational analyses that recognize the multiplicity of structural forms and participatory arenas necessary for articulating different voices. And "a different voice" of care has also enriched a pluralist conception of process by theorizing the submerged practices and discourses of nurturance, relatedness and empathy often associated with women. But where these are linked in a privileged fashion with the unitary ideal of the democratic collective, the pluralist impulses of feminism are themselves in danger of becoming submerged and flattened. Kathy Ferguson's global critique of bureaucracy in favor of anarcho-feminist collectives that embrace the whole person, embody unambiguous caring and trust, and emphasize process over outcome, is the most striking example of this tendency to translate Gilligan into narrow organizational terms. As Patricia Yancey Martin has argued, we need much more nuanced and dimensional concepts of bureaucracy, as well as of feminist organizations, than Ferguson provides, including a renewed emphasis on feminist outcomes rather than such exclusive focus on internal structures.36 An ethic of care can at best provide ambiguous and often contradictory guidance for organizational process and structure. Those rape crisis centers and battered women's shelters that choose to formalize authority and limit unstructured participation do so in the name of providing effective care. Those in NWSA who resist overpoliticizing decision-making processes and modes of representation do so in order to be able to nurture often fragile women's studies programs that serve the needs of many. Care, in short, is subject to multiple and conflicting interpretations, and provides no unambiguous guidance for democratic process or organizational goals. And we cannot imagine equity and autonomy in complex societies without utilizing universalistic ethics of justice and rights. As Mansbridge notes, "it is too easy in some feminist visions to mistake the corrective for the whole story, or to mistake the stress on nurturance or empathy for the conclusion that all human relations can be encompassed in nurturance."37 Metanarratives elaborated from Gilligan's important distinctions, and grafted onto those of anarchist or radical democratic theory, do not help further the project of providing effective capacities for plural voice, but threaten to constrict them and to truncate the educative processes that have been going on for several decades. A feminist theory of participation is confronted with its own set of perhaps irreducible paradoxes and permanent tensions. Illusions of the singular ideal of fully egalitarian, diffuse, nurturant and transparent relations are unable to sustain themselves, even as they often prove educative and provide resources for further democratization. Managing commonality and difference is an unstable achievement open to pragmatic solutions that themselves generate new conflicts and problems. Key questions admit no unambiguous answers: what (missing) demos? Empower whom? Care how? Weight voice how much? Delimit difference where? The innovativeness of feminist practice is to pose these and other questions in ways that pluralize more profoundly the ways in which we imagine citizens in a participatory democracy. But perhaps the biggest challenge that democratic feminist practice faces today is how to translate grassroots empowerment and rights-based strategies into deliberative and collaborative approaches that engage a broader public, including those with whom there exist deeply divisive differences. Issues like abortion, or gay and lesbian representation in school curricula, mark a deep cultural divide that has been tearing apart the fabric of civil discourse, as well as practical collaboration on many concerns that people share in common, such as prenatal health care, adoption services, and school reform. We will examine promising new approaches and case studies on CPN in the coming months. Let it simply be said here that an increasing number of feminists have begun to recognize that new forms of public dialogue and civic collaboration are becoming necessary, and that these are a further extension of their commitments to democracy and diversity, respectful listening and empathy, which have characterized much of feminist practice. Dialogue and common ground projects on abortion, such as the Common Ground Network for Life and Choice, and the Public Conversations Project, or the Common Enterprise project on values in school curricula in Tuscon, cannot be understood without recognizing the contributions of feminist practice. Meeting this challenge will not be any easier than previous ones. Indeed, it may be the most difficult one of all. The feminist language for this broader conception is very underdeveloped, and too frequently trumped by the language of rights, group differences, and victim identities. As one pro-choice activist who attended a Public Conversations Project meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts in early 1995 put it, she found the experience of dialogue with a pro-life partner profound and eye-opening. Yet the very act of such dialogue threatened her deepest identity. Others nodded knowingly, and offered psychological insight. But no one suggested that perhaps there was a broader civic identity upon which she might draw in sustaining similar efforts in the future. VI. Notes 0 Ella Baker, "Developing Community Leadership: An Interview," in Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York, Vintage, 1973), 345-352; Mary King, Freedom Song (New York: Morrow, 1987), chapters 12-13. 1 James Miller, "Democracy is in the Streets" (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Emily Stoper, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (New York: Carlson, 1989). 2 Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), chapter 1. 3 Robert Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970); Michael Walzer, "A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen," in Radical Principles (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp.128-138; see also Arnold Kaufman, "Participatory Democracy: Ten Years Later," in William Connolly, ed., The Bias of Pluralism (New York: Atherton, 1969), pp. 201-212; and Carmen Sirianni, Participation and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming). 4 Jo Freeman is the most likely feminist leader to have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Dahl, Walzer and others, as will become apparent below, but even she fails to cite their work. 5 Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory. 6 Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York: Vintage, 1979), 176, passim. 7 Quoted in Evans, Personal Politics, 214. 8 Jane Mansbridge, "Feminism and the Forms of Freedom," in Frank Fischer and Carmen Sirianni, eds., Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1984), p.474. 9 Jennifer Nedelsky, "Reconceiving Autonomy: Sources, Thoughts and Possibilities," Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 1 (1989), 7-36; and Jane Mansbridge, "Feminism and Democratic Community," in Fischer and Sirianni,eds., Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy, revised and Expanded Edition (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1993) . 10 Evans, Personal Politics, 215; Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation (New York: McKay, 1975), p.86; and Anita Shreve, Women Together, Women Alone (New York: Viking, 1989). 11 Noelie Maria Rodriguez, "Transcending Bureaucracy: Feminist Politics at a Shelter for Battered Women," Gender and Society 2:2 (1988), 214-227. 12 Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation, chapter 4. This is an expansion of "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," which appeared in Ms., The Berkeley Journal of Sociology, and at least one collection on radical feminism in the early 1970s. 13 Ann Popkin, "Bread and Roses," unpublished Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1978, chapters 4-5; "The Social Experience of Bread and Roses: Building a Community and Creating a Culture," in Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination, eds., Karen Hansen and Ilene Philipson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 182-212. 14 Mansbridge, "Feminism and the Forms of Freedom," pp. 478-479. 15 Karen Hansen, "Women's Unions and the Search for Political Identity," in Hansen and Philipson, p.227; Popkin, "Bread and Roses." 16 Anne Koedt, quoted in Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation, 134ff.; Miller, "Democracy is in the Streets." 17 Hansen, "Women's Unions," p. 223; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), p. 156. 18 Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation, p. 121; Naomi Weisstein, cited in Evans, Personal Politics, p. 223; Linda Gordon, untitled history of Bread and Roses, quoted in Popkin, "Bread and Roses," p. 156; Maren Lockwood Carden, The New Feminist Movement (New York: Russell Sage, 1974), 87ff; Alice Echols, Daring to Be BAD (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 204-210. 19 Suzanne Staggenborg, "Stability and Innovation in the Women's Movement: A Comparison of Two Movement Organizations," Social Problems 36:1 (February 1989), 75-92; and Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation, 129ff. 20 Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, second edition (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988). 21 Staggenborg, "Stability and Innovation;" Hansen, "Women's Unions," 219ff. 22 Naomi Weisstein and Heather Booth, "Will the Women's Movement Survive?" Sister 4 (1975), 1-6. 23 Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory; Carol Gould, Rethinking Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988). 24 See Susan Schechter, Women and Male Violence (Boston: South End Press, 1982), pp. 108, 249; Stephanie Riger, "Vehicles for Empowerment: The Case of Feminist Movement Organizations," in Studies in Empowerment, eds., Julian Rappaport, Carolyn Swift and Robert Hess (New York: Hayworth, 1984), pp. 99-117. 25 Myra Marx Ferree, "Equality and Autonomy: Feminist Politics in the United States and West Germany," in Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Carol McClurg Mueller, eds., The Women's Movement in the United States and Western Europe (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1987), 172-195. 26 Nancy Matthews, "Surmounting a Legacy: The Expansion of Racial Diversity in a Local Anti-Rape Movement," Gender and Society 3:4 (December 1989), 518-532; Elizabethann O'Sullivan, "What Has Happened to Rape Crisis Centers? A Look a Their Structures, Members and Funding," Victimology 3:1-2 (1978), 45-62; Barbara Levy Simon, "In Defense of Institutionalization: A Rape Crisis Center as a Case Study," Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 9 (1982), 485-502; Janet Gornick, Martha Burt and Karen Pittman, "Structure and Activities of Rape Crisis Centers in the Early 1980s," Crime and Delinquincy 31 (1985), 247-268; Susan Schechter, Women and Male Violence, 98ff.; and Claire Reinelt, "Moving onto the Terrain of the State: the Battered Women's Movement and the Politics of Contradictory Locations," forthcoming in Signs, for a particularly interesting anlaysis of a statewide movement to transform official practices while maintaining significant shelter autonomy at the local level. 27 Staggenborg, "Stability and Innovation in the Women's Movement;" and "The Consequences of Professionalization and Formalization in the Pro-Choice Movement," American Sociological Review 53 (August 1988), 585-606. 28 Maren Lockwood Carden, The New Feminist Movement (New York: Russell Sage, 1974), chapter 9; Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation, chapter 3. 29 Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicolson, "Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism," in Linda Nicolson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990), 35. 30 For a general argument along these lines, though one with somewhat different organizational requirements than those of NWSA, see Iris Young, "Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship," Ethics 99:2 (January 1989), 250-274; an explicitly postmodern reading is more apparent in her "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference," Social Theory and Practice 12:1 (Spring 1986), 1-26, reprinted in Nicolson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism. 31 Robin Leidner, "Stretching the Boundaries of Liberalism: Democratic Innovation in a Feminist Organization," Signs, 16:2 (1991): 263-289. Leidner does not consider the most recent changes, but the logic of her argument is equally relevant here. 32 Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1980); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Harvard Univ. Press, 1982). 33 See the accounts in Sojourner:the Women's Forum, August 1990, 8-9; October 1990, 9-12; and off our backs, August-September 1990, 1, 10-25. 34 Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Demcoracy (1980); "Feminism and the Forms of Freedom," in Fischer and Sirianni, eds., Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy (1984). 35 Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation, 83; Staggenborg, "Stability and Innovation," 90. 36 Kathy Ferguson, The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Patricia Yancey Martin, "A Commentary on The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy by Kathy Ferguson," Women's Studies International Forum 10:5 (543-548; and "Rethinking Feminist Organizations," Gender and Society 4 (1990), 182-206. 37 Jane Mansbridge, "Feminism and Democracy," The American Prospect, no.1 (Spring 1990), 132. 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 |
