The Feminine Mystique at 50

Originally Posted on 04.12.13 at http://www.dsausa.org/the_feminine_mystique_at_50

The Feminine Mystique was written 50 years ago. If you surf the internet, you’ll find plenty of articles expounding on this anniversary. Over the years, there have been a lot of opinions written about the book and its author, Betty Friedan. This year, of course, there are even more opinions, but all of them note that, as Real Clear Politics, says, “[The Feminine Mystique is a] book both hailed and reviled for launching the modern revolution in women’s roles.”

I’ve been re-reading parts of the book recently, but I first read it when it was published in 1963. For my 17^th birthday, my best friend gave me The Feminine Mystique. I was about to start my senior year of high school. It was my first real introduction to the idea of women's rights and women’s liberation, and I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I grew up in the Midwest (Wauwatosa, Wisconsin) in the 1950s. It was middle America, suburban, white, middle class. In the early 1950s I found the two great interests of my life – politics and science. I loved watching the political conventions on our new TV and participating in mock elections at school. But I also dreamed about becoming an astronomer and going into space.

I was determined to go to college, and my parents taught me and my younger sister how important education was. But the opportunities for girls seemed very limited. When I was around twelve, I remember some of the girls in junior high school talking about getting their “MRS” degrees. I had heard of a B.A. and a Ph.D., but that was a new one--until I realized that MRS simply meant that they planned to go to college to find a husband. I wanted none of that and decided that if my only choices were to get married and have kids or to be an old-maid schoolteacher, then schoolteacher it was.

The Feminine Mystique made me realize that perhaps there could be other choices for me and for other women of my generation. But in 1963 there was no organized women's movement that I was aware of. So I went off to college in Minnesota, carried on with my science studies and continued my interest in politics.

By the time I finished college, women’s organizations had started in many places. I joined the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union and spent the next decade fighting for women’s liberation and later LGBT liberation. In many respects my activist and socialist “career” is due to that first reading of The Feminine Mystique.

From its initial publication, however, The Feminine Mystique has been subject to many criticisms. Chief among them is that the book’s audience is only the white, suburban housewife. The concerns of poor women, African American women, lesbians do not appear. That’s true; in fact, in the first paragraph Friedan acknowledges this: “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone.”

In fact, by looking at this group, Friedan discovered something that would form the basis for many women’s liberation groups. The suburban housewives she interviewed were often in therapy or taking drugs because they were unhappy in their lives, lives that were supposed to be the epitome of the American dream. But therapy only told them that what was wrong was wrong with them. In the decades that followed, consciousness-raising groups provided a space for women to realize that what was wrong was not wrong with them, but rather with the place and roles of women in society. Out of that knowledge came efforts to change the world.

Flawed and dated though it may be, The Feminine Mystique is a touchstone for assessing the status of women’s rights. The 50^th anniversary provides an opportunity to look back and see what has changed and what hasn’t.

Before The Feminine Mystique, job ads in newspapers were divided into “Help Wanted Male” and “Help Wanted Female.” Those no longer exist, but women still earn a fraction of what men do for the same jobs. Before The Feminine Mystique, there were few women doctors or lawyers, construction workers or bus drivers. Today women fill many slots in those positions, but job segregation continues. Pink-collar jobs, among the lowest paid, are most often filled by women. Before The Feminine Mystique, abortion was only available in back alleys or, for wealthy Americans, in foreign countries. Today, abortion is more readily available, but the right wing has for the last 30 years made it more and more difficult to get access, not only to abortion but to birth control as well. Before The Feminine Mystique, there were no rights for lesbians and gay men and, in fact, only one state had decriminalized sodomy. Today, there is majority support for marriage equality, but young lesbians and gay men are still bullied in school.

The changes we’ve seen have been tremendous. They are by no means all attributable to The Feminine Mystique. The book started the ball rolling, however, and the years after showed us what activism can accomplish. A pamphlet from the early days of 1960s feminism said, “I don’t want to change my lifestyle, I want to change my life.”

The first socialist feminist organization I joined was the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU). (The second was the New American Movement, one of the two founding organizations of DSA.) The CWLU was organized by women who had been involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements. We understood the need for changes to both the economy and society so that they are run democratically to meet human needs. Our experience in other movements taught us that those changes had to explicitly incorporate the needs of women. We also saw that there were several trends in the women’s movement, each of which might lead to positive changes for women, but by themselves would not result in true women’s liberation.

In 1972, we adopted a position paper entitled “Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Movement.” In the introduction it said in part:

We choose to identify ourselves with the heritage and future of feminism and socialism in our struggle for revolution. From feminism we have learned the fullness of our own potential as women, the strength of women. We have seen our common self-interest with other women and our common oppression. . . .

From feminism we have come to understand an institutionalized system of oppression based on the domination of men over women: sexism. . . .

But we share a particular conception of feminism that is socialist. It is one that focuses on how power has been denied women because of their class position. . . .

We share the socialist vision of a humanist world made possible through a redistribution of wealth and an end to the distinction between the ruling class and those who are ruled.

As socialist feminists, we not only wanted to change our lives, we wanted to change the world. We understand that the place of women in societies around the world is determined through the intersection of the forces of gender, class, race, sexuality, country of origin, immigration status, disability, and other factors. Many of the issues we work on – the budget/debt situation, tax cuts for the rich and budget cuts for the middle class, unemployment and underemployment – are not only class issues, but gender issues as well. The fight for a fair economy is a fight for women’s rights. In the aftermath of The Feminine Mystique, women banded together to change the world. In many ways we did. And we can do it again.

Christine R. Riddiough serves as a Vice Chair of DSA.

Marriage Equality and Beyond

Originally Posted on 06.27.13 at http://www.dsausa.org/marriage_equality_and_beyond_june26

Today the US Supreme Court ruled in two cases related to marriage equality, Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenge to California’s Proposition 8, and Windsor v. United States, the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

In a 5-4 ruling on DOMA, the court found that DOMA is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons protected by the Fifth Amendment.[1] The decision in Hollingsworth[2] that the plaintiffs had no standing is also a step forward, but does not go so far as to ensure that marriage equality is available everywhere in the United States.

Arguments in the case were heard in March, less than a year after President Obama announced his support for marriage equality and amidst what seemed like a tsunami of declarations of support from (mostly) Democratic senators and a swift reversal of public opinion. To someone who has been involved in the struggle for LGBT rights for 40 years, the speed of this recent change is astounding.

But despite what some LGBT folks and authors like Linda Hirschman (Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution) might say, I’m not ready to declare victory quite yet. That’s not to say that I don’t see this as a victory – striking down DOMA is a step forward, but the dissents by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Scalia and Thomas, while not unexpected, suggest that we still have a ways to go. In addition, the decisions earlier this week on affirmative action, workers’ rights and voting rights clearly indicate that civil rights are far from universally accepted either on the Court or in the United States.  For gay men and lesbians some real gains have been made. Just five years ago no presidential candidate would support gay marriage; commentators now say that no Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 can afford not to support it.

How have things changed and what remains to be changed? Twenty years ago my partner, Judith Nedrow, was chair of the Domestic Partner Commission in Washington, DC. The task of the commission, appointed by the mayor, was to design legislation allowing public employees in same-sex relationships, and in other non-traditional relationships, to register as domestic partners. That legislation, and subsequent, more inclusive legislation, passed, but Judy and I didn't race down to the courthouse to register. We believed that the state shouldn't have a place in our relationship.

Fast forward 20 years and past a couple of health challenges. We decided it was time to have our lawyer rewrite our wills and other critical documents. At our first meeting, our lawyer said, "Well, you really should get married." Her reasons were two-fold: We were getting older and needed to ensure that our relationship was protected and, as she put it, getting married was now “the revolutionary thing to do."

Is marriage equality revolutionary? Well, the answer, as in so many things, is “it depends.” To some activists marriage equality is the be-all and end-all of LGBT rights, but perceiving this fight in this way ignores the other issues facing people who identify as LGBT. If only on the civil rights front, there remain many barriers to equality: job discrimination, immigration reform, adoption issues. And, of course, marriage equality doesn't really address issues related to transgender discrimination.

Marriage equality does impact society’s view of gender: 40 years ago one of the arguments used against the Equal Rights Amendment was that it would force gay marriage to be legal and thus remove any distinctions between men and women. Today the situation is almost reversed. Although gender is not directly debated in much of the discussion of marriage equality, indirectly it is central to it.

Marriage equality, however, is limited in its critique of the family and community. It still assumes a two-parent household with children, but the reality for many in the United States is far different from that. In All in the Family, Robert O. Self describes the idealized American family of the ‘50s and ‘60s as "[t]he white middle-class nuclear family headed by a patriotic and heterosexual male. . . ."[3]

The women's and gay and lesbian liberation movements challenged that supposed norm. Marriage equality by itself does challenge the norm, but only up to a point. As Scot Nakagawa points out, "Marriage is a conservative institution."[4] Nakagawa is one of many signers of a statement on Beyond Same-Sex Marriage[5] that says in part:  

The struggle for same-sex marriage rights is only one part of a larger effort to strengthen the security and stability of diverse households and families. LGBT communities have ample reason to recognize that families and relationships know no borders and will never slot narrowly into a single existing template. All families, relationships, and households struggling for stability and economic security will be helped by separating basic forms of legal and economic recognition from the requirement of marital and conjugal relationship.

This critique gets at the heart of what is most problematic about marriage equality: it doesn't really acknowledge the diversity of families that has always existed. Sort of like the “breadwinner liberalism” of the ‘50s described by Self, marriage equality, by itself, makes assumptions about what constitutes a family and ignores community altogether.

I recall Vicki Starr, one of the women featured in the movie “Union Maids” under the pseudonym Stella Nowicki, describing rent parties during the Great Depression. People would gather together to help one another pay the rent. It wasn't a matter of family, but of community. My family/community is not just my blood relatives and Judy's, but my friend and her son and her “adopted” grandchildren, Judy's coworker (who thinks of Judy as her “other mother”) and the neighbor down the block who drove us and our sick cat to the vet in a blizzard.

Unless we acknowledge these kinds of relationships as important, we fall into the trap of “breadwinner liberalism” even though the breadwinners may now be women as well as men. So I encourage readers of this blog post to sign on to the Beyond Marriage statement: http://beyondmarriage.org/.

But . . . I find myself disturbed by some of the rhetoric in both the Nakagawa article and the Beyond Marriage statement and by what is not addressed in them. For example, the full Beyond Marriage statement says, "LGBT movement strategies must never secure privilege for some while at the same time foreclosing options for many. Our strategies should expand the current terms of debate, not reinforce them." And Nakagawa says, "Also troubling is . . . that we are arguing to be able to use marriage as a shield against wrongs that no one, regardless of sexual orientation or marital status, should suffer."

Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with either statement, but in context they seem to ignore several things: the first is that marriage equality is a real step forward for LGBT folks and is a real change in American and global perceptions of non-heterosexual sexualities. This is no small thing.

The second problem is that there seems to be a failure to understand marriage equality as part of a strategy for expanding our understanding of family and community. What exactly are the next steps in redefining those terms to be more inclusive? It is not simply saying we need to be more inclusive, but rather identifying and planning for and working for concrete gains.

Nakagawa goes farther, almost suggesting that marriage equality is a backward step for the rights of some. That changing the law so that lesbian and gay couples can marry diminishes the rights of others who can't get the protection of marriage. He comments, "And when we argue that being able to wield this shield is a right we deserve because we conform with the values of good people, that shield can become a weapon against those who are still excluded." With that statement he comes close to saying that we should not support marriage equality because it may be used against the rights of others. But by that logic, the interracial marriage case of Loving v. Virginia should not have been brought because it might have been used to diminish the rights of gay and lesbian couples. Nakagawa certainly supports same-sex marriage, but arguments in his blog post are troubling.

What is missing from both of these articles and from much of the debate more broadly is gender. How can one talk about marriage equality without talking about gender? Tiffany K. Wayne[6] says "Marriage equality is a threat to those who do not believe in EQUALITY between the sexes in general. . . . Same-sex marriage makes a lie of the very foundation of traditional gender roles."  We have to infuse our work on family and community with a socialist feminist perspective. Without it, we will ultimately revert to some form of that breadwinner liberalism, where women are the caretakers of the family/community however it is defined.

Think, for example, of what marriage equality means in terms of the responsibility in families for taking care of children. When both parents are men, there is no woman to assume that caretaking role. What does that mean in terms of childcare in a country without universal childcare provision? Or if marriage can no longer be defined as being primarily for procreation, then what are the implications for reproductive rights? This, admittedly, is fodder for a longer post, but all of our work on issues needs to be infused with an understanding of their gender implications.

As Wisconsin Senator (and first openly LGBT Senator) Tammy Baldwin said after the decisions, "While this is a huge step forward for our country, the fight to make America more equal does not end with a Supreme Court decision. There is more work to be done to fulfill the promise of freedom and equality for all – in which America becomes a place where every family’s love and commitment can be recognized and respected under the law."[7]

Christine R. Riddiough serves as a Vice Chair of DSA.

---

[1]http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-307_g2bh.pdf - Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion for himself, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan.

[2]http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-144_8ok0.pdf - Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion for himself Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan.

[3] All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, Robert O. Self, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2013), p. 8.

[4]http://www.changelabinfo.com/2013/03/25/why-i-support-same-sex-marriage-as-a-civil-right-but-not-as-a-strategy-to-achieve-structural-change/

[5]http://beyondmarriage.org/full_statement.html

[6]http://nursingclio.org/2013/04/02/same-sex-marriage-does-threaten-traditional-marriage/

[7]http://www.baldwin.senate.gov/press-releases/us-senator-tammy-baldwins-statement-in-response-to-supreme-court-decisions-on-marriage-equality-cases

Breadwinner Feminism

Originally Posted on 09.27.13 at http://www.dsausa.org/breadwinner_feminism

Meet Mrs. Jones, my neighbor up the block. She's 75 and lives with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Then there's my friend Ellen who's a single mother. Her son is an adult now, but while he was growing up she had to juggle several jobs and childcare. And there's my wife and I – we've been together for 30 years – and married for almost one year.

Each of these families has one thing in common – they're all headed by women. And that's not that unusual. The American family is no longer like 1950s TV shows "Father Knows Best" or "Leave It To Beaver." Nor is it much like the families of “Family Ties,” “Boy Meets World” or “Everybody Loves Raymond” – shows from the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s. The families with a working father, stay-at-home mother and 2.5 children are a rarity these days. On May 29, the Pew Research Center released a report showing that:

“A record 40 percent of all households with children under the age of 18 include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family. . . .  The share was just 11 percent in 1960.”[1]

Then on July 2, a second report from the Pew Research Center found that:

“A record 8 percent of households with minor children in the United States are headed by a single father, up from just over one percent in 1960. . . .”[2]

And on June 26, the Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional.[3]

So why, when clearly the family is very different from what it was 60 years ago, is American politics driven by the "Father Knows Best" vision of the family?

It got me to thinking about the book All in the Family by Robert O. Self, which both Bill Barclay and I have referenced in previous posts. Self describes

The white middle-class nuclear family headed by a patriotic and heterosexual male . . .  The idea of that family conveyed such power it is best thought of as a national mythology. Thus who controlled that mythology mattered. In the 1960s, New Frontier and Great Society liberals . . . crafted social and economic policies they believed would make this idealized nuclear family, which had been the object of liberal concern since the New Deal, attainable for more Americans than ever before. They hoped to assist families economically, and I call their collective efforts “breadwinner liberalism.”[4]

He then notes

By 2004, the nuclear family was a conservative emblem, . . . conservatives endeavored to defend families from what they cast as moral threats. They sought to protect idealized families from moral harm, and I call their collective efforts “breadwinner conservatism.”[5]

"Breadwinner conservatism," as practiced by the House of Representatives, has resulted in deletion of the food stamp program from the farm bill, doubling of interest rates for college loans, and increasing restrictions on abortion. Unfortunately, in the decades since the Reagan revolution started us on this path, liberals and progressives have had little response beyond either “bring back the New Deal/Great Society” or “let's compromise” (resulting in things like the "welfare reform" of the Clinton administration).

Is this really what we need, a return to breadwinner liberalism? Even 50 years ago it was inadequate. Remember, the 1965 Moynihan report argued that black matriarchal culture undercut the role of black men. It was one of the bases on which the War on Poverty was built. But its assumption that, to eradicate poverty, programs should strengthen the role of male breadwinners at the expense of women is both racist and sexist. Important as were the gains made by liberal programs such as the War on Poverty, their failures are also evident.

Yet while a return to breadwinner liberalism will not fix what ails us, neither will compromise with the already outrageous breadwinner conservatism of the Right. No, what we need now is a new approach – what I call "breadwinner feminism."

Breadwinner feminism is a view of the world that recognizes the many different families in our society and the variety of roles played by both women and men. Breadwinner feminism is an approach that puts women forward – forward in policy, forward in how we discuss those policies, forward in the images we display of those policies. But breadwinner feminism is more than that. It’s a recognition that by putting women forward, we’re also addressing the needs of those men who are single fathers. And we understand that the work generally done by women and taken for granted – work like taking care of children or elderly parents – is important both for those individuals and for society as a whole. It’s a recognition that granting a right is not meaningful unless people have the means to take advantage of that right, so that the right to choose an abortion, for example, goes hand-in-hand with the ability to exercise that right.

How often has the Democratic Party or the AFL-CIO or any one of the many liberal/progressive think tanks and organizations simply addressed the needs of women by adding an equal rights plank into their platform, an equal pay line to their agenda? What image does the phrase "worker" invoke – is it the traditional man in a hard hat? We have to envision a Latina secretary, a white waitress. And what about "overburdened student" – a young man with mountains of debt or a middle-aged African American woman going back to school so she can better support her family?

Breadwinner feminism starts with the recognition that women are almost half the workforce, but earn only 77 percent of what men do. The pay gap for African-American women and Latinas is even greater. Although women outnumber men in college enrollment,[6] and girls graduate from high school at a higher rates than boys,[7] women still earn less than men and tend to have jobs that pay less than men. For example, while women outnumber men in professional positions, the positions they hold are more likely to be in lower-paying education and health care fields, while male professionals tend to be in higher-paying computer and engineering positions.[8] And, of course, many women remain in pink-collar jobs. For example, servers (such as waitresses) are 71 percent female; they rely on tips for income and thus often have to also rely on food stamps.[9]

Breadwinner feminism recognizes that equal pay is only the starting point. Affirmative action is another essential plank in this platform. And job equality requires measures to stop sexual harassment on the job and in any public space. Fighting violence against women is a requirement, as is access to all public spaces.

But breadwinner feminism also acknowledges that family life can't be separated from work life. Child care, elder care, family and medical leave are all essential. And, while Obamacare is a step forward, real equality and reproductive justice means that access to reproductive services shouldn't depend on the ability to pay.

Some of us might say that breadwinner feminism is really socialist feminism, but it's socialist feminism that is more than just an adjunct to our world view, it is our world view, one with women and "women's work" at the center.

Christine Riddiough is an honorary vice-chair of DSA.

[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/29/breadwinner-moms/

[2] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/07/02/the-rise-of-single-fathers/

[3] http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-307_6j37.pdf

[4] http://us.macmillan.com/allinthefamily/RobertSelf

[5] Ibid.

[6] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2012/02/16/the-male-female-ratio-in-college/

[7] http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-22/local/36472838_1_graduation-rate-dropout-rate-asian-students

[8] http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2011.pdf

[9] http://womenemployed.org/sites/default/files/resources/FactsAboutWorkingWomen2012_0.pdf

A Revolutionary Moment -- Then, and Now?

Originally Posted by Chris Riddiough 04.29.14 at http://www.dsausa.org/a_revolutionary_moment_then_and_now

More than 600 people gathered at Boston University at the end of March for a conference on “A Revolutionary Moment: The Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Hosted by the university’s Women’s and Gender Studies program, the conference was exhilarating and exciting. It provided an opportunity to discuss the many issues that face feminists today and to reflect on the work that was done decades ago.
Many of the conference panels focussed on radical and socialist feminism, a part of the history of the women’s movement that has generally been neglected both by scholars and the popular media. Representatives from socialist feminist organizations like the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, Bread and Roses in Boston and the Combahee River Collective discussed the organizing efforts and achievements of their organizations. Many people there had been involved in the New American Movement (one of DSA’s predecessor organizations), including filmmaker Julia Reichert.
In her opening keynote, Sara Evans, author of Personal Politics and University of Minnesota professor, described the origins of the women’s liberation movement in the New Left, anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. She noted that historians of the 1980s and 1990s are caught up in theorizing about the feminism of the ‘60s and ‘70s and describe it as a mainly white women’s movement that was superseded at the end of the century by an ‘“intersectional” wave of feminism in the ‘80s and later. She stated, however, that the women’s liberation movement was multi-racial from the outset. Its name owes much to the Vietnamese and was part of a worldwide eruption of women’s activism. Radical women thought that revolution was possible and imminent. This vision led to a willingness to experiment and to rethink root issues like the idea of gender.
Linda Gordon, professor at New York University and former editor of Radical America, in her closing keynote described the many progressive feminisms, from the 1930s to the present. In the 1930s the Communist Party was the only predominantly white group to critique racism and sexism. In the 1960s the women’s movement grew out of the New Left with a shared utopian courage to dream of something completely different. Gordon described women’s liberation as the largest social movement in the history of the U.S. She added that women’s liberation added two perspectives to radical thinking that are important in the current political debate:

• First, gender is not a characteristic of individual people but is rather the overall system that we live in. Thinking about gender in this way has implications for our overall political analysis.
• Second, the idea that the personal is political was a key concept for women’s liberation. It implies that power invades all aspects of our lives. 

Gordon concluded that women’s liberation is not fundamentally about equality but about transformation.
These presentations raised important questions for us as socialist feminists, as did the conference overall. The attendees were a mix of academics and activists who tended to come at the issues from different perspectives. What are the roles of academics and activists vis-à-vis feminism today? How can they communicate more effectively? This is one of the first gatherings that I’ve been to that included both groups. Many of the older academics were and remain, in fact, activists, but many of the younger academics are coming to the topic from a purely academic point of view.
How can those of us who became activists in the 1960s and 1970s work more effectively with younger women? For many of us attending the conference who had been involved 40 years ago, the conference was a chance to reconnect with old friends and comrades. But there were instances where some of the younger women felt excluded. How can we bridge that gap?
The conference focused on the interaction of the New Left, civil rights and women’s liberation, but what about addressing other connections/intersections such as the connection to liberal feminism, often represented by NOW, and the relationship to the LGBTQ movement?
Papers from the conference will be available in the near future at the conference website: http://www.bu.edu/wgs/conference2014/.
Additional reports on the conference are available:

• Vivian Rothstein has written an excellent summary.
• CWLU Herstory website has another report.
• An article in the Boston University student paper describes the conference.

Christine R. Riddiough serves as a vice chair of DSA.

Thinking About Gender - Part 1

Originally Posted on 08.25.14 at http://www.dsausa.org/thinking_about_gender_part_1

Wikimedia

By Christine R. Riddiough 

Editors' note:

We scheduled this post and the next in celebration (perhaps ironic celebration) of Women's Equality Day, which commemorates U.S. women achieving the right to vote by the ratification in 1920 of the 19th amendment to the Constitution. Since then, notions of female and male continue to evolve, and new contestations emerged.

In its October 15, 2013, issue, the New York Times asked the question, "Are ‘Trans Rights’ and ‘Gay Rights’ Still Allies?" Two things in that debate (and in other similar discussions on the Internet and at conferences) stood out for me as a socialist feminist:

• the fact that the question was asked at all
• the fact that, in talking about these gender-related issues, there is no mention of the fight for women's rights/liberation

From a socialist feminist perspective the response to the title question has to be a resounding "Yes." But the failure of the article (and to a large extent the LGBTQ movement) to really address the second point shows the limits of the question.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore describes her support for "a movement that fights for universal access to basic needs" and her interest in "gender, sexual, social and political self-determination." She has the most radical perspective of the authors in the Times article, and yet even she neglects to mention women. This is not unique to many of the debates I’ve seen recently. It suggests that while the Republicans are waging a "War on Women" many in the liberal/left/LGBTQ movement are just surrendering on that front. That’s not good for women, nor is it good for LGBTQ people.

Let’s take a hard look at how gender shapes our lives. We are first introduced to the idea of gender when we’re born. Usually gender is viewed as two things:

• It is binary – you are defined as either female or male when you’re born – when the doctor, nurse or midwife wraps the baby in a pink or blue blanket.
• It is a personal characteristic – everybody has one gender, the one they’re born with and that defines who they are and how they should act throughout their lives.

In this first part of a two-part blog, I will address the first point – that of the gender binary. In part two, I’ll look at gender as a personal characteristic.

As we’ve learned more in the last few decades, we recognize that gender is more complicated than that. A pamphlet from the Illinois Caucus on Adolescent Health (ICAH) defines four dimensions of gender. It seems to me to be a good place to start thinking about that first point – that gender is binary. The four dimensions they define are:

• Biological sex
• Gender Identity
• Gender Expression
• Sexual orientation

The first two categories – biological sex and gender identity – are most interrelated. Biological sex is generally assigned at birth based on the external sex organs. But it also is related to dominant hormones and chromosomes. For most people identifying biological sex is straightforward, but there are some people who are intersex and others for whom the outward sex organs don’t match the internal organs. While biological sex is, by definition, based on physical characteristics, gender Identity, according to the ICAH pamphlet, should be thought of as the internal sense of gender. It ranges from woman to genderqueer to man. People whose gender identity matches their biological sex are cisgender, while those for whom these two attributes don’t match are transgender. Some people may not identify with either gender and others may be genderqueer or gender non-conforming. At a recent Boston conference on women’s liberation, in feminist blogs, on Facebook the debate on gender, and particularly on a feminist view of transgender issues, rages. Kathie Scarborough presented a paper at that conference, Women’s Liberation Is Based on Sex not Gender, in which she states (emphasis hers):

I take the position that our focus as feminists should be on SEX and not on GENDER…. As a feminist and a trained neuroscientist I don’t believe in an endogenous “gender identity.”

This is a position taken by some feminists, and it’s a controversy that has been around for a long time. In Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement, Marcia Gallo describes a DOB conference in 1973 at which folksinger Beth Elliott, a DOB member who was a transwoman and lesbian, was invited to sing. Many of the lesbians at the conference objected, saying she was not a real woman, while others rallied to her support.

The other two categories ICAH defines are gender expression and sexual orientation. Gender expression ranges from feminine to androgynous to masculine; it reflects how gender is communicated in the clothes one wears, how one speaks and acts. Finally, sexual orientation reflects sexual and/or romantic attraction. People identify as lesbian, gay, heterosexual, bisexual, pansexual or asexual.

The relationship between gender expression and sexual orientation is also often subject to debate. For example, at a meeting in the early 1970s between owners of a lesbian bar in Chicago and women from the Lesbian Feminist Center, one of the owners described the butch/femme roles her generation of lesbians (who came out in the 1950s and '60s) adopted as "our way of rebelling." But, she added, "your way of rebelling [as feminists] is better." And Esther Newton, in 1972 in Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America," described the drag queen culture as contradicting, and opposing, mainstream culture when it comes to gender. She writes:

And when I first recorded that impersonators believed the major and most fundamental division of the social world to be male/female I thought I knew better. Now I agree with them. … Perhaps what needed to be explained is why I was blind where they could see.

At the same DOB conference mentioned above, Robin Morgan, living at the time in a heterosexual relationship, encountered objections when said she was a lesbian. A popular 1970s pamphlet, Woman-Identified Woman, asked the question, "What is a lesbian?" and responded with this: “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” And in The Furies, a Lesbian/Feminist Monthly, Ginny Berson writes in 1972:

The base of our ideological thought is: Sexism is the root of all oppressions, and Lesbian and woman oppression will not end by smashing capitalism, racism, and imperialism. Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.      

Going back to the mid-20th century, the assumption was that all these gender dimensions – identity, biology, expression, orientation – should be aligned. Women are biological females who dress and act femininely and who are attracted to and have relationships with men.

In my next post I’ll look at the political implications of the current expanded view of gender.

This post was written in May and June of 2014. Since then there continues to be extensive debate on Facebook and around the Internet on the relationship of feminism and transgender rights. On August 4, The New Yorker published “What Is a Woman? The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism,” which discusses some of the issues raised by radical feminists in regard to "women-only space" and transwomen. The article has generated some controversy, but it is worth reading to get a sense of how this debate is playing out in the feminist community.

Christine R. Riddiough serves as an Honorary Vice Chair of DSA.

Thinking About Gender - Part 2

Originally Posted on 08.26.14 at http://www.dsausa.org/thinking_about_gender_part_2

We scheduled this post and Part 1 in celebration of today, Women's Equality Day, which commemorates U.S. women achieving the right to vote by the ratification in 1920 of the 19th amendment to the Constitution. Since then, notions of female and male continue to evolve, and new contestations emerged. -- Ed.

By Christine R. Riddiough

 

Gender shapes our lives from their very beginning. In part 1 of this blog post, I described two characteristics of gender as defined in the mid-20^th century:

• It is binary – you are defined as either female or male when you’re born - when the doctor, nurse or midwife wraps the baby in a pink or blue blanket.
• It is a personal characteristic – everybody has one gender, the one they’re born with and that defines who they are and how they should act throughout their lives.

In discussing the gender binary in part 1, I defined four dimensions of gender: biology, identity, expression, orientation. The assumption most people have had is that each of these dimensions should be aligned. Biological females are women, who dress and act femininely and who are attracted to and have relationships with men.

But the last 50 years have seen those traditions squashed, largely because the women’s liberation and the LGBTQ movements have exposed sexism as an underlying basis for those traditions.

Rejecting such a gender binary raises important questions for us as socialist feminists.

How is this fight a part of our fight as socialists? As socialists we have supported and been part of these movement simply because we support human rights and social justice. Albert Einstein addressed this perspective in "Why am I a socialist?" almost 70 years ago. He said, in part, “This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism.” While Einstein wasn’t thinking about gender, what he says applies here as well – gender, in our society, is used to cripple individuals, and, as socialists, and in particular socialist feminists, we can only eliminate the oppression based on gender by building a socialist feminist society.

How does the oppression of women through gender relate to the issue of gender identity? How do we support transgender people and oppose transphobia and still build a gender neutral society? Biology is not and should not be destiny nor should identity. Is the idea of transgender/cisgender simply adding a layer to that original gender binary and thus reinforcing sex role stereotypes? How do the oppressions of women, lesbians, gay men, transgender people intersect?

How can we support transgender children while acknowledging that as children they need guidance from adults? Children today have a much earlier understanding of sex and gender than did people of my generation (Baby Boomers). Nonetheless, we must recognize that people who are six or ten are still not mature and need guidance on many fronts.

The best way to address these questions may be by looking at gender not as an individual characteristic, but as a system or a structure that has, as its purpose, enforcing the oppression of women, gays, lesbians, transpeople and others. This notion brings us to the second characteristic long held by many: that gender is a personal characteristic.

Early socialist feminists from the second wave recognized that that view was too narrow and that we needed to understand gender as a system that plays a central role in maintaining the status quo. Linda Gordon writing “On ‘Second Wave’ Socialist Feminism” says:

The distinctive mark of socialist feminism was its view that autonomous structures of gender, race and class all participated in constructing inequality and exploitation. Socialist feminists expanded the Marxist notion of exploitation to include other relations in which some benefited from the labor of others, as, for example, in household and child‐raising labor.

As socialist feminists we must understand gender as a system that is designed to control behavior – keep people in line. Not only is it used to control behavior, it used in a way that people believe that the gender system is just common sense. For example, until the women’s movement of the 1970s took hold, most people believed that it was unnatural for people to be attracted to others of their own sex and that "a woman’s place is in the home."

In the 1920s, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci wrote in the Modern Prince:

…there is no abstract “human nature”, fixed and immutable (a concept which certainly derives from religious and transcendentalist thought), but that human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations….

Gender is part of this human nature that is historically determined. As a system, gender can be viewed as essential to the cultural/social hegemony that Gramsci describes as how the ruling class rules. The State/political society uses force or command to ensure that people are controlled. But for many societies the direct use of force is not necessary, since the ideological hegemony of civil society defines what makes sense and thus maintains control.

Sometimes people resist that hegemony in individual ways. For gay/lesbian working class people and people of color in '50s and '60s, gender was expressed in non-conforming ways – butch/femme roles and drag queens – as a way of rebelling against the gender system.

The binary perspective on gender is one of those common sense notions that has kept women and LGBTQ people in line. And, we must add, it also has kept men and heterosexual people from speaking out for fear of losing what limited status and power they might have.

Speaking at the Boston conference on women’s liberation, Linda Gordon noted that the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s added two very important perspectives to that of the new left:

Gender is not a characteristic of individual people…. Gender is an overall system…, it is a system we all live in. [And] the personal is political and that power invades all parts of life.

These two concepts can help us put the question of the gender binary in the context of gender as a system. Gender is a system that is used to control people, especially women and people who are LGBTQ, but its effects are played out at the individual, personal level.

Some of that control is now breaking down, as evidenced by the recent dramatic turn-around in support for same-sex marriage. But the “War on Women” and the Tea Party attacks on LGBTQ people demonstrate that there is still much that needs to be done to really tear down that wall of gender. Central to that effort is recognizing that while individual gains – such as freedom to marry – might be achieved, they must be part of a larger strategy that addresses the position of women and LGBTQ people in society.

Christine R. Riddiough serves as an Honorary Vice Chair of DSA.

Looking Back, Leaning In, Moving Forward

Originally Posted on 11.18.14 at http://www.dsausa.org/looking_back_leaning_in_moving_forward

Wikipedia

A confluence of events has got me thinking about Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In and how we define the women’s movement. I’ve been reading her book for a while – it’s a fairly easy read, but not very gripping. At the same time I’ve been reading Dorothy Sue Cobble’s book, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America. Sandberg’s book, of course, has been on the New York Times best seller lists, spawned many "Lean In  groups" – including, of course, on Facebook, while Cobble’s book is aimed at a narrower audience, largely academics.
Let’s consider Cobble’s book first. Her aim is to explore the class differences among women, to see how they are reflected in what she calls "the other women’s movement," that of women in labor. As she states, "[C]lass has always been a salient political divide in American culture. ...Yet the prevalent cultural tendency is to operate as if class makes little or no difference." She depicts the efforts of women in the labor movement to advance the situation of women in blue-collar and pink-collar jobs. She describes those women as spearheading a social feminist movement in the 1930s to the 1970s that focused on wage justice, the "double day" and women’s job rights. She concludes that there is now an opportunity to reshape modern feminism by learning from the experience of labor feminists in the twentieth century, to create a class-conscious feminism that "would define itself as about the removal of class and race injustice as well as gender." She adds that "most women do not have sufficient power as individuals to effectuate change in employer practices; they must rely on collective power."
Which brings us to Sandberg’s book. The impression one gets from reviews and discussions of it, and, frankly, from the book itself, is that it is oriented toward advancing individual women to positions of power in government and the corporate world. It focuses on the need for individual women to lean in, to take on more leadership. Yet, Sandberg clearly knows the individual approach is too simplistic. She says that "women face real obstacles in the professional world, including blatant and subtle sexism, discrimination, and sexual harassment." She goes on to describe how the lack of childcare and similar resources hold women back. Her focus, however, is on how women have internal barriers to leadership: "We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in."
The two books present what seem like diametrically opposed perspectives on feminism. Cobble argues for collective action and Sandberg, for individuals leaning in; Cobble focuses on women in blue- and pink-collar jobs, Sandberg, on those in management.
Cobble’s emphasis on working-class women within the women’s movement was shared by others at the recent conference on women and labor sponsored by Veteran Feminists of America. Keynoter Alice Kessler Harris discussed how what she called "social justice feminism" focused on envisioning a more just society, a broader perspective reflected in recent labor organizing efforts. Kessler Harris and the other conference speakers, including Karen Nussbaum of 9 to 5 and the AFL-CIO, emphasized the importance of organizing women in the workplace, as well as taking collective action on broader social issues. Speakers expressed hope that we might see a return to a social or social justice perspective in American politics, one informed by feminism. Kessler-Harris presented an important addition to Cobble’s analysis: while Cobble seems to suggest that class and race were not addressed by the women’s movement of the 1970s, Kessler-Harris points out that feminism has always had a broader agenda than the ERA. Social justice feminism, as represented by women’s liberation groups, has long seen class and race as central to its agenda.
Though Sandberg doesn’t directly address these issues, here’s where I think Sandberg can actually lend a hand. In order to revive not only the feminist movement, but the broader progressive/social justice/Left, women have to play a leading role. Whether or not we women are in management positions, we are or should be in the leadership of progressive organizations, groups like DSA. And the internalized barriers to women’s leadership exist not only in corporate America, but in radical/social/social justice/socialist groups as well.
Developing women's leadership within progressive organizations can include following some of Sandberg’s suggestions: Women need to speak out more and more forcefully and to encourage other women to do the same. Sandberg notes that "from an early age, boys are encouraged to take charge and offer their opinions." And she describes the imposter syndrome, the "phenomenon of capable people being plagued by self-doubt." As she notes, women are more likely to view themselves as frauds than are men: "We consistently underestimate ourselves." One does not have to have read all the volumes of Capital or every word in The Prison Notebooks to have something important to say in a political discussion about the state of the economy or electoral politics.
As we move forward with our agenda of social justice, fighting against oppression based on race, class or gender, we should take the lessons provided by both Cobble and Sandberg to heart.

Christine R. Riddiough serves as an Honorary Vice Chair of DSA.

Review: Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space

(Lynn Sherr, Simon and Schuster, 2014)

By Christine R. Riddiough

In 1970 I was a graduate student in astrophysics at Northwestern University. Like many women of my generation in the 'hard sciences' I was a 'Sally Ride wannabee' - although at that point we had never heard of Sally Ride. One day I was heading to class in the Technological Institute and spotted a flyer advertising a special program on 'Male-Female Crews on Long-Range Space Flights.'  I went, of course. The leaders of the program - all male engineering and physics students - started by saying that certainly there would have to be mixed crews on flights to Mars or other distant planets. After all over the course of the hundreds of days of the flight, the male astronauts would have to satisfy their needs. God forbid, they should either do it themselves or with the other men; thus women were a necessity. They continued by saying that at least the women on the crew would also be able to cook and possibly take notes on the scientific experiments carried out during the flight. The downside was the extra weight due to the hair dryers and Kotex that would be required.

This was the world of women in the post-World War II baby boom generation. A world where the Feminine Mystique held sway, where middle-class girls often went to college not to get a BA, but to get an MRS. Help wanted ads were labeled ‘Male’ and ‘Female.’ Often girls were required to take home economics and were generally discouraged from studying science and math.

The 1950s and 60s were also the time when Senator Joe McCarthy held hearings to root out any communists in the federal government and the only thing worse than being a commie was being a commie queer. In 1957 Frank Kameny was fired from his government job for being gay; raids on gay bars were commonplace and most gay men and lesbians led extremely closeted lives. If anyone knew they were gay, they could lose their jobs, their families and sometimes much more. Their social lives were constricted and, for lesbians in particular, there were often few places to meet one another.

This was the world that Sally Ride and the other five female astronauts selected in 1978 inhabited. In her book Sally Ride: First American Woman in Space, Lynn Sherr does an admirable job of describing that world, particularly as regards the situation of women.  Her years as a journalist covering the space program and her perspective as a feminist serve her well. They provide an entree into the world of NASA. Both her own experience over the last three decades and her access to interviews with many of Sally Ride's colleagues, provide a rich canvas on which she paints a striking picture of Ride the astronaut. Her access to Tam O'Shaughnessy, who commissioned the book, and the rest of Ride's family, adds a layer of color to that canvas.

The book follows Ride's life from her childhood through her death in 2012 from pancreatic cancer. It tells the story of her liberal-minded parents who encouraged Ride and her sister Bear to be whatever they wanted at a time when most girls were only encouraged to get married and have children. It also describes a family which was, at best, not very demonstrative emotionally. Her sister has been oft-quoted as describing Ride as '"... a profoundly private person. It was just part of who she was. We chalk that up to being Norwegian."  (I can testify to that Scandinavian bent toward non-communication - my mother's family is Swedish and we'd often joke about how  you know you've been in Sweden too long when you think silence is a conversational gambit.)

Ride's first love was physics. She started at Swarthmore in the late 1960s and later transferred to Stanford where she got her Bachelor's degree and her PhD in Physics. It was not an easy time to be a woman in physics. As Sherr points out 'When it came to physics, the operative word was "him." In 1970, only 6% of all US bachelor's degrees in physics were awarded to women; the percentage of female doctoral candidates was half that.'

After Ride was selected as an astronaut, she had to contend with the male/military environment at NASA. It was, as Sherr says, 'a world still hung up on 1950s notions of femininity...' Only about one-tenth of one percent of technical employees at NASA were women. NASA was not only barely ready to deal with women astronauts, but, as Sherr puts it, 'a notoriously homophobic agency. Long before "Don't ask, don't tell” gave the US military permission to stick its head in the sand, NASA sent out vibes that sounded more like, "Don't be."' Even as recently as 1990 NASA was looking for ways to actively exclude homosexuals from the astronaut corps.

Sherr describes Ride's post-NASA days and her lasting commitment to encouraging girls to learn and enjoy science. Her final project was Sally Ride Science (SRS), which for over a decade has sponsored science fairs and camps and provided programs for teachers to enhance science education. Ride was committed to feminism and spent her life fighting for both her own opportunities to advance as a woman and those of other girls and women. 

And yet.... Winston Churchill's famous description of Russia - "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma..." could equally apply to Sally Ride, who, for all her celebrity, remained unknown and, perhaps, unknowable even to close friends. Sherr's chapter entitled 'The Secret' describes the very closeted life that Ride led with her partner of 27 years, Tam O'Shaughnessy. It is ineffably sad to read of how the couple spent holiday celebrations at Ride's mother home without saying anything about their relationship.  Her friend from high school, Susan Okie says "It haunts me that she was so closed-mouth, and it hurts." One day at lunch Ride’s colleague at UC San Diego, Paula Levin asked what they (Ride and O’Shaughnessy) were going to be doing over the summer and was met with dead silence. Even this simple question came to close to saying they were a couple. Sherr says that at SRS the truth was widely known but totally unspoken. And friends like Sherr, who had known Ride for decades, did not find out about their relationship until reading of it in Ride's obituary. Sherr does a pretty good job of describing the relationship between Ride and O'Shaughnessy (and Ride's earlier relationship with Molly Tyson), although this is clearly not familiar territory for her. She does candidly discuss the '"internalized homophobia" that led [Ride and O'Shaughnessy] to keep their relationship largely to themselves.'

Sherr does hint at the basis for the restrictions that Ride placed on her conversations and interactions with friends, coworkers and acquaintances. The combination of the Scandinavian background reinforced by an early childhood home life where there was little open display of affection and her masculine-based/nerdy science field where everything is based supposedly on logic and reason certainly resulted in a personality disinclined to share much of her personal life. One also gets a sense from Sherr’s book that her celebrity reinforced the need to preserve her privacy. Coupled with her innate reserve it resulted in an unwillingness to share her personal life. In reading about the demands placed on her by individuals, organizations and corporations, one gains sympathy for her. In addition, her interest in working with girls and encouraging them to pursue science most likely reinforced that unwillingness. But Ride seems to have gone further in this regard than many others. Not only did she never come out publicly – a decision that was certainly hers to make – but she did not share her relationship with many friends. As friend and psychologist Kay Loveland says, "I think it's one thing to be private, but not to tell a friend that you're in a relationship that is meaningful to you - there's something very sad about that."

Sherr describes the firestorm of responses on social media when people read Ride’s obituary. There were those in the LGBT community who felt that Ride should have come out during her life in order to be a role model to young people. And she quotes others who thought that coming out was just about sex. For example, “'Not everything should about sex,' wrote [one blogger.] 'There really are important accomplishments that people make without needing to bring sex into the picture.'”

Yet here Sherr falters a little because coming out – being gay – is not just about sex, it’s about the whole spectrum of human relationships. Sherr fails to recognize that and in doing so misses part of the story. There was another group in that debate that, while perhaps disappointed that Ride had not come out during her life, understood that it was her decision to make.

Sherr also quotes O’Shaughnessy as describing their relationship as ‘private’ not ‘secret.’ O'Shaughnessy says that they didn’t like labels. But labels of one sort or another are a part of life – those labels might be ‘female’ or ‘physicist’ or ‘astronaut’ or ‘lesbian’ but they are ways that we know people. Some of the labels are disparaging – while many young people use the label ‘queer’ as a point of pride for many older lesbians and gay men it is still a slur. '"The word lesbian still brings back those memories [of the stigma of lesbianism on the tennis circuit]," O'Shaughnessy says.  But she goes on to say "I don't even want to be called gay. And Sally thought the same way - you know, straight people don't have to say, 'I'm heterosexual.' so why should we have to.”

Except, of course, heterosexuals proclaim it every day in many ways - with weddings and wedding announcements, with pictures of their children on their desks, in casual conversation with neighbors and coworkers. Forty or fifty years ago any indication that one didn't fit into that nice, neat heterosexual box might have resulted in losing one's job, one's family or even one's life. There are still those threats today and not nearly the protections there should be. Times have changed, but there are too many older lesbians and gay men (and even some not so old) who live constricted lives, unable to fully participate in the world around them because of the fear and the internalized homophobia resulting from years of oppression. Perhaps we now need not only 'It Gets Better'(http://www.itgetsbetter.org/) to reach out to LGBT youth, but 'It's Gotten Better' to reach out to those gay and lesbian seniors who are still living in the 20th century.

Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution

A review by Chris Riddiough Originally Posted on 09.28.12 at http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/Victory-Less-than-the-whole/39747.html Reading Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution by Linda Hirshman is a lot like going to the fun house at a carnival. You see yourself in the mirrors but it doesn't really look like you. From the title to the epilogue you can see the LGBT movement in this book, but it doesn't really look like the movement I've experienced over the last 40 years. The vignettes of gay life in the early part of the 20th century are fascinating to read. The descriptions of Harry Hay's efforts to form the Mattachine Society and how much he took from his Communist Party activism are quite striking. But where is the description of Henry Gerber's attempt in Chicago in the 1920s to start the first known American gay rights organization—the Society for Human Rights? Hirshman's description of Harvey Milk's extraordinary role in the gay movement is stirring, but what of the elections of Kathy Kozachenko, the first openly LGBT elected official in the United States and Elaine Noble, the first openly LGBT state legislator, both elected in 1974? Perhaps these omissions and others like them would not be so egregious if Hirshman were writing only about the gay movement in New York and California, but a book that purports to tell the story of the 'Triumphant Gay Revolution' should not leave out these and many other key elements. In fact her focus throughout the book on New York and California is disturbing. While she gives a nod to the efforts in Washington, D.C. (after all one can hardly write a history of the LGBT movement without mentioning Frank Kameny) and to a few other non-coastal locations, her single-minded attention to the activities on either coast results in the omission of many key players and events over the last century. That's not the only problem with this book, however. Her fawning portrayal of the gay men she interviews is disquieting. Combined with her apparent disregard for lesbians it results in an unbalanced portrayal of life and activism in the LGBT community. She only briefly mentions Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the founders of the Daughters of Bilitis. Barbara Gittings gets even less of a nod in the book and others from those early days (like Barbara Grier of the Ladder) are not even mentioned. This disdain for lesbians and women more generally is well reflected in her comments on feminism. Her perspective on the feminist movement and the civil-rights movement (which she persists in calling the 'racial civil-rights movement') reflects a complete lack of understanding of those movements and their relationship to the LGBT movement. She says, for example, that "At the end of the day, both these modern movements got most of their traction from maximizing their similarity to dominant political and social hierarchies. By definition, people involved in the gay revolution could not replicate majority behavior." Hirshman wants to distinguish (and perhaps elevate) the gay movement from the civil-rights and feminist movements. And there certainly are distinctions, but not the ones she makes. In many respects gay men have been much better able to replicate the majority behavior, politically and socially, of their heterosexual counterparts than have women. And while, as Hirshman points out, morality in America is generally sexual morality, to suggest as she does that 'few would have argued that skin color reflected character' is simply not true. Though not as explicit as the moral indignation of the right when it comes to the LGBT community, it is clear that even today in our 'enlightened' 21st century, it is an offense to the morals of some simply to be black. Later she states, "The women of the feminist movement differed more dramatically from the politically and socially dominant males [than did those from the civil rights movement] if only by virtue of their tie to childbearing. They, too, however, had a path to integration by virtue of their value as sexual companions and mothers." To suggest that integrating women into political and civil society is achieved by virtue of sex and childbearing is a complete misunderstanding of the aims of the women's movement. Rather, they have been part of the basis for women's 'special status' (read oppression) in our society. In addition, those roles, particularly that of sexual companion, offer no path to integration for lesbians. In fact it is the very idea of women's sexuality that most strongly links feminism to the LGBT movement. Years ago I had a conversation with someone from Integrity, the gay Episcopalian organization. He was forcefully in favor of ordaining gay priests but just as forcefully opposed to women priests. History has passed him by in both cases, but one can look back and see that those two positions, common to all too many gay men, were simply contradictory, just as is the position of feminists who believe that support for women's rights does not include support for LGBT rights. Hirshman's willingness to sustain this perspective results in her leaving out of her analysis a significant segment of the LGBT movement—the 'L' part. Lesbian feminism is almost completely missing from Hirshman's discussion of the gay movement. Perhaps it is no accident that the subtitle of the book references the 'gay' revolution. For indeed it is focused on the efforts of gay men. A mention of RadicaLesbians, of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, of lesbian involvement in the AIDS crisis is not a substitute for a more thoroughgoing discussion of lesbian feminism. In the '70s and later there was a vibrant lesbian feminist movement around the U.S. It was not embodied in one large national organization nor in a few individuals but in many local organizations ranging from lesbian feminist separatists to lesbian socialist feminists to lesbian feminists in NOW. But Hirshman seems more intent on denigrating the women's movement, stating, for example—"By 1969, the poisonous feminist slogan, 'The personal is the political,' characterized a strong movement of younger, Sixties-influenced women's liberationists."—rather than truly exploring the vital role that lesbian feminism has played in both the LGBT and women's movements. In fact, that 'poisonous' slogan pertains at least as much to the struggle for LGBT rights as that for women's rights. What could be more personal than the intimate relationships we have. At the same time, for lesbians and gay men those personal relationships underlie the political and social oppression we have faced. Her failure to understand the links between the women's movement and the LGBT movement underlies her devaluing of the role of lesbians in the movement. Certainly there were elements in the women's movement who would prefer to ignore or dismiss the involvement of lesbians (just as this was true in the gay movement), but neither movement would have become what it did without the efforts of lesbians. Most lesbian activists recognize that our liberation has to involve both women's rights and gay rights. One final note related to this topic—Hirshman feels it necessary within the first few pages of the book, even before the introduction, to proclaim her heterosexuality. This need is at best irritating and could have been left to the acknowledgments (in which she does, in fact, acknowledge the support of her husband). It does suggest that the author is at least uncomfortable with the idea that she might be taken for a lesbian. Yet another problem with the book is her characterization of what constitutes the movement and her failure to understand basic organizing principles. She says, for example, "Unlike the other major civil rights movements, the gay movement was still saddled with free riders, people passing as heterosexual while the out activists labored to make the world a better place." This completely misunderstands what revolutions are about. Anyone who has been an activist in any movement knows that no movement has included in its ranks every member of the group it is fighting for. My goal when I became an activist for feminism and LGBT rights was not to just change things for myself and others in the movement but to change things for women and all members of the LGBT community. I never expected that all women or all LGBT people would be involved. While I would have liked every woman to be active in the women's movement, I knew that there were often reasons that women, even supportive women, couldn't or wouldn't get involved. The same is true for the LGBT movement. Hirshman emphasizes the role of lawyers and the legal system in the recent victories on Don't Ask, Don't Tell and marriage equality, but neglects the role of grassroots activism and political activism. Over the last 40 years one of the critical strategies for LGBT activists has been coming out. Hirshman acknowledges this in other places, but doesn't really discuss the small, everyday acts carried out by many local activists. In Chicago, for example, teams of gay men and lesbians from at least the 1970s on acted as a speakers' bureau, participating in high school and college class discussions, in police academy training programs and community group events, just talking about what it meant to be gay. Many others would go to different Chicago neighborhoods and circulate petitions for a bill for gay and lesbian rights, while others lobbied the mayor and members of the city council day-in and day-out. And this happened not just in Chicago, but in cities and towns across the country. All of this, not just the efforts of lawyers in New York and California, ultimately resulted in the dramatic attitude changes that we see today. Forty years ago I would not have thought it possible that the president of the United States would support marriage equality for lesbians and gay men. Twenty years ago it would not have been conceivable that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would support gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military. These changes, which reflect changes in the views and attitudes of the majority of Americans, were not made possible by only by 'the exquisitely careful planning of the long-sighted, obsessive gay legal establishment' nor by the ability of 'lawyers to see through the easy appeal, so powerful in other realms, to the "natural" or the traditional.' Years of grassroots activism, of coming out, of speaking openly about what it means to be gay, of lobbying elected officials, of electing openly gay men and lesbians to public office made it possible to get where we are today. Perhaps not 'Victory', but closer to victory than might have seemed possible a few short years ago. Hirshman's description of the pre-Stonewall gay community, her discussion of ACT UP and the AIDS crisis, and her description of the legal proceedings that have culminated in recent changes in on military and marriage issues were all interesting and thought-provoking. They might have each made a useful contribution to the compendium of works on LGBT history and politics. Unfortunately this is not that book.