Norman the Consciousness Raising Document

8/12/2019 Norman the Consciousness Raising Document

1/28

The Consciousness-Raising Document,

Feminist Anthologies, and Black Women inSisterhood Is Powerful

brian norman

When Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with television executives in, the New York Times described it as a curious consciousness-raising

session. That same week, Kathie Sarachild, Redstockings member and prob-able originator of the phrase sisterhood is powerful , outlined the weapon ofconsciousness-raising (CR) to the Conference of Stewardesses for WomensRights. Sarachild cited the Timess remark as testimony to the successes andpitfalls of the womens liberation movement (c. )1 as its CR modelentered national parlance and the highest pantheons of male-dominated insti-tutions. 2 Indeed, the CR group is a hallmark in the rise of the modern feministmovement. Social historians now recognize the widespread inuence of CR inAmerican society and political theory, and CR was a central tool for fosteringwomens collectivity during the Second Wave. CR groups generated an impor-tant body of writingoften in the form of the CR documentthat played akey role in the movements print culture, which in turn contributed to its goalof sisterhood.

This article examines one CR document by the Black Womens LiberationGroup of Mount Vernon and its placement in a key womens liberation anthol-ogy, Sisterhood Is Powerful ( ), to illustrate two crucial aspects of womens liberation. First, I will demonstrate that some black feminists demandedrace-conscious sisterhood in the Second Wave, and this group drew on theCR document as a tool to articulate that demand. 3 Second, considering thedocuments appearance in Sisterhood , I examine the implications for race-con-sciousness in the movement at large and what womens liberation antholo-gies and print culture could and could not do for race-conscious collectivity.CR documents joined other ephemeral forms such as position statements,manifestoes, and eld reports and more literary forms such as personal es-says, short stories, and poems in inuential anthologies like Notes from the


2/28

First Year ( ),4 Notes from the Second Year( ),5 The Black Woman ( ),6 Voices from Womens Liberation( ),7 and Woman in Sexist Society( ),8 inaddition to Sisterhood .9 These collections testify to how anthologies create aprint-based collective space. As CR documents circulated, womens liberation

groups reported to each other, thereby enacting the collectivity for which theycalled. My thesis is that black feminists used the CR document to positiontheir call for race-conscious collectivity in dialogue with the universalist proj-ect of sisterhood but without necessarily excluding other groupsincludingblack menengaged in anti-racist projects; in turn, the feminist anthologySisterhood Is Powerful aspired to heed their call but was only partially success-ful in doing so.

This article joins efforts to re-conceive or re-view the Second Wave, espe-

cially regarding race-consciousness.

Veteran activists and feminist historiansare recognizing more fully the presence and impact of women of color in theearly Second Wave. They are rewriting its history with documentary and mem-oir collections that better capture the spirit, internal debates, and importanceof womens liberation. 10 The dominant story of womens liberation has beenthat the movement fostered womens collectivity by erasing, deemphasizing,or in some way abnegating difference into a sisterhood that inevitably placedwhite women and their experiences at the center. In this vein, the CR group is

painted as a phenomenon largely exclusive to small groups of privileged wom-en who may not be interested in addressing difference. For instance, to intro-duce young women to feminism in Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner and AmyRichards note that the CR group was a revolutionary new model to connectpolitics to womens experiences and to show that women had more in commonthan not, but over time CR became marginalized; these exchanges amongwomen happened mostly in their own homes and women-only spaces. 11 Thisdominant vision constructs CR as a space of safety and refuge, andmost

problematic for later feminists who emphasize difference and race-conscious-nessanchored hopelessly in homogeneity. Or, in polemical terms from themovement itself, Ti-Grace Atkinson famously declared, Sisterhood is power-ful: It kills sisters. Race-consciousness and womens collectivity are often seen,to borrow from Benita Roth, to be separate roads to feminism. 12 While this isgenerally true, the black feminist CR document I examine speaks to what WiniBreines aptly describes in her study of black and white women in the feministmovement as the trouble between us. 13 My study conrms a key insight ofthese re-vision efforts: by examining black feminist writing in Sisterhood , wecan see that the goals of sisterhood and race-consciousness, while in tension,are not necessarily in opposition


3/28

the black womens liberation group of mount vernon andthe cr document in sisterhood is powerful

We regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that experience,

as the basis for an analysis of our common situation. . . . We question ev-ery generalization and accept none that are not conrmed by our experi-ence. . . . Consciousness-raising is not therapy, which implies the existenceof individual solutions and falsely assumes that the male-female relation-ship is purely personal, but the only method by which we can ensure thatour program for liberation is based on the concrete realities of our lives.

Redstockings Manifesto ( )14

If women were suddenly to achieve equality with men tomor row, black wom-

en would continue to carry the entire array of utterly oppressive handicapsassociated with race.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, For Sadie and Maude ( )15

When I rst began studying the exciting world of womens liberation print cul-ture, I lived in the historically black, working-class city of Mount Vernon, NewYork, just north of the Bronx. So, I was excited to nd an entry in Sisterhoodby a black womens liberation group stationed in my adopted hometown.

The Black Womens Liberation Group of Mount Vernon was an early blackfeminist organization, active in the late s and early s, and it consistedof working-class women, women on welfare, and a middle-class leader, PatRobinson. Roth chronicles the work of these black feminists, especially its vet-eran activist leaders, to show how the group inuenced a nascent womensliberation movement, whereas dominant narratives of the Second Wave mightpresuppose the inverse. 16 What does it mean that black women speak to usfrom a central text of a movement often seen as predominantly white? I have

come to recognize how the group creates a space for race-conscious collectiv-ity that addresses differences within the project of sisterhood, as well as callsfor collectivity outside womens liberation.

In , at the movements height, the Mount Vernon group espoused theself-determination ideologies of Black Power and womens liberation in theirStatement on Birth Control. From the pages of Sisterhood , the group statesunconditionally, Poor black sisters decide for themselves whether to have ababy or not to have a baby. 17 For the group, reproduction is neither solely awhite womens issue of freedom not to bear children nor solely a problem ofeugenics for a male-dominated Black Power movement. 18 They state their po-sition as simple declarative fact; it is not open to negotiation Engaging a strat


4/28

egy similar to those of black women in the suffragist movement, 19 the MountVernon group uses the touchstone issue of birth control as a platform for acollective speaking voicepoor black sisterswho determine the frame forblack female reproduction. Speaking within two seemingly incommensurable

movements, the document might dramatize the limits of womens liberationto deal adequately with race and, conversely, of Black Power to deal adequatelywith gender. But we can say something more: The group uses the CR docu-ment to demand an interracial project of sisterhood.

The Mount Vernon groups statement occupies two-and-a-half pages ofthe -page anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful , and is one of only three en-tries by black-identied women in a collection of fty-seven entries, fteenhistorical documents, and two introductory essays. All texts by black womenare grouped together: The Statement joins Eleanor Holmes Nortons ForSadie and Maude and Frances Beals Double Jeopardy in a group of textson women in black liberation within a larger section on changing conscious-ness. Nortons, Beals, and the Mount Vernon groups writings also appearedin other venues, including collections explicitly skeptical of alliances betweenblack and white women such as The Black Womans Manifesto 20 and Cades TheBlack Woman.21 The Statement joins several position statementsa staple ofAmerican social movementsalong with personal essays, poems, political es-says, and historical overviews. Position statements and manifestoes dominatethe Historical Documents section and hot-button issues span the collection,such as marriage in a section on The Oppressed Majority and the femaleorgasm in a section on Psychological and Sexual Repression.

When reading the Statement, it is important that we attend to the imag-ined future life of the we for which the document calls. To do that, we mustdiscuss how the group works within the conventions of the CR document toaddress simultaneously the particular and the collective. The CR document isa key but underdened genre in womens liberation. Primarily, the CR docu-

ment generates a we based in personal experience narratives, usually aroundshared experiences. The Mount Vernon groups statement comes from com-mon personal experiences: When Whitey put out the pill, and poor blacksisters spread the word, we saw how simple it was not to be a fool for men anymore. 22 The CR document privileges experiential knowledge over ideology orpolitical philosophy. Shared experiences provide access to a provisional speak-ing we that will weigh in on key issues. In this way, the narratives articulatehow group members are personally shaped by and respond to the multiple de-

mands of race, gender, nationality, and classespecially classin an analysisthat presages theories of intersectionality. 23

S d th CR d t t f d id l i l iti k


5/28

cial issue or question for a specically addressed audience. In this way, the CRdocument is closely aligned with the manifesto, which, as Janet Lyon argues,paradoxically joins utopian desires for a just future to urgent protests of theimmediate moment. 24 In their statement, the Mount Vernon group analyzes

its experiences of oppression as poor black women who are offered the pillby a white, middle-class industry. Yet the group identies a double standard inblack militant mens calls to cease birth control because it carries out Whiteyseugenics. The group contends, Well, true enough, but it takes two to practicegenocide and black women are able to decide for themselves, like poor peopleall over the world, whether they will submit to genocide. 25 The group presentsthemes of double standards, self-determination, and sexism that cross racialand class lines. Though placement in a womens liberation anthology with thestated aim of sisterhood would seem to construct the groups audience as exclu-sive to women, they in fact address their statement to Dear Brothers. In do-ing so, the Mount Vernon group determines its own audience, but also invokesa double audience by addressing men in black liberation within the statementand allowing womens liberationists to overhear the Statementand learnfrom the groups dual afliations. Addressing their Dear Brothers, the groupwrites, We dont think youre going to understand us because you are a bunchof middle-class people and we are poor black women. 26 So, middle-class whitewomen readers must see themselves through the eyes of black women, and inthe position of black men. This is an important reversal of typical charges ofwhite hegemony in womens liberation, and it underscores the way in whichthe Mount Vernon group makes use of the generic ability of the CR documentto address a specic audience, and the generic ability of the anthology to con-vene another audience.

Third, to negotiate the space between recounted experience and addressedaudience(s), CR documents often chronicle how the collective speaking voicecame into existence or to consensus around an issue. The group makes visible

its own formation across lines of difference because the Statement is signedanonymously by two welfare recipients, two housewives, a domestic, a grand-mother, a psychotherapist, and others who read, agreed, but did not help tocompose. 27 The collective, anonymous signature itself performs an impor-tant ability of the CR document to bring together the diverse members of thegroup. 28 In the main sections of Sisterhood , only two other entries are collec-tively authored and one poem is anonymous. The we of the statement enactsan inclusive collective of women at the same time that it underscores difference

within the printed we. Further, the collective product of the CR we resultsfrom a process of bringing together individual narratives of personal experi-i il t th th l h l F i t th t th


6/28

effect of the invention of the pill and its possibilities for poor black womensself-determination, which they portray as a collective conversion narrative inwhich That was the rst step of our waking up! 29 With print-based collec-tive voices, CR documents are replete with conversion narratives where the

newly enlightened author describes her entrance into feminist consciousness(a radicalizing experience) and offers a path for her to-be-liberated sistersreading the document. 30

Finally, in addition to experiential narratives and position statements, CRdocuments from womens liberation often offer analogies between the personalexperience reported and that of other groups, especially those with which themovement seeks alliance. That is, experience-based analyses are often couchedin what I have called imperfect analogies to other oppressions. 31 For exam-ples outside womens liberation, I might cite how Martin Luther King, Jr.sfamous Letter from Birmingham City Jail ( ) compares African Americansstruggling for freedom and American ideals to American revolutionists; or,many feminist thinkers from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Shulamith Firestoneto Simone de Beauvoir compare womens subordination to systems of slavery,especially as practiced in the United States. 32 These analogies purposefully hewaway important differences between political and historical contexts in orderto clarify a point about oppression, but also to seek alliance with another groupwho might be sympathetic to the example accessed through noticeably imper-fect analogy. In the Statement, the group uses subordinate clauses to connectits members personal struggles to struggles they read about, such as whenthey gesture toward a connection between their experiences and the strugglesof poor people all over the world. 33 The Statement enters an imagined collec-tive by articulating the potential successes of their struggle within the gains ofmovements typically placed outside the connes of womens liberation: Like,the Vietnamese have decided to ght genocide, the South American poor arebeginning to ght back, and the African poor will ght back, too. Poor black

women in the United States have to ght back, too. 34 The additive natureof struggle (the toos and the like) does not render the struggle of poorblack women secondary. Instead, for group members, their struggle gains bothmeaning and momentum in the layers of collectives chronicled within, andimagined outside of, the Statement.

The Mount Vernon groups Statement helps us to understand how the CRdocument can work in service of antiracist projects in line with the collective-minded goal of sisterhood. The group draws specically from the CR model

because members speak as a womens collective (we) anchored in personalexperience; but the members articulate their position in the context of strug-l t id th i i Th f i f t l i d


7/28

not evidence a gap in the groups analysis or inattention to cross-group differ-ence. Instead, the persistent analogizing to others struggles signals a desire tomove beyond ones social location to enter collectivity with other oppressedgroups. The recitation of personal experience, or even shared experience

among the speaking we, is the rst step in a process of social transforma-tion that addresses difference through imperfect analogy. Sarachild explainsthat the second and third steps of CR are: ( ) CR actions; and ( ) organizingnew groups or interaction with other groups. 35 Because the Mount Vernongroup insists on imperfect analogies, other groups to be organized need notbe exclusive to womens liberation. Without the strategy of imperfect analo-gies, balkanization would result and collectives could only mirror preexistingsocial divisions. Whereas womens liberation is often dismissed for its erasure

of difference in its search for common oppression, the Mount Vernon groupat leastand perhaps CR documents generallyimagine personal experienceas a starting point in generating true collectivity.

Like the Mount Vernon groups CR document, the CR model draws on othersocial movements, especially since many womens liberationists connectedtheir CR work to their image of the Chinese practice of speaking bitterness.In the U.S. context, Sarachilds tripartite program of CR reects the blueprintof nonviolent resistance outlined by Martin Luther King, Jr. In Letter from

Birmingham City Jail, King instructs, In any nonviolent campaign thereare four basic steps: ( ) collection of the facts to determine whether injus-tices are alive, ( ) negotiation, ( ) self-purication, and ( ) direct action. 36 For womens liberation, the facts to be collected are rooted in experienceso as to insure that those involved are at the center of both the evidence andthe theorizing. Kings push outward from acknowledging specic oppressionstoward interacting with the interrelatedness of all communities is under-stood by womens liberationists in their reporting of shared experience ofoppression outside and across specic collectives. 37 Further, Kings self-pu-rication, ridding oneself of the internalized hate and oppressive thinkingagainst which one protests, becomes a group process in CR. What womensliberation crystallizes in Kings doctrine, then, is a realization that self-puri-cation and direct action may be part of the same step. Indeed, Sarachildstressed, What really counts in consciousness-raising are not methods, butresults. 38 For womens liberationists, to self-purify by naming and refutingwomens oppression was a form of direct action: organize women around theoppression of women. Sarachild further rooted CR and womens liberation inan afnity toward black self-determination by quoting not King, but a Malcolm X speech: When the people create a program you get action 39


8/28

Womens liberation CR did not seek personal experienceor even sharedexperienceas an endpoint. Sarachild explained,

The decision to emphasize our own feelings and experiences as womenand to test all generalizations and reading we did by our own experi-ence was actually the scientic method of research. . . . [CR]studyingthe whole gamut of womens lives, starting with the full reality of onesownwould also be a way of keeping the movement radical by prevent-ing it from getting sidetracked into single issue reforms and single issueorganizing.

When Gainesville Womens Liberation explained the model of women-onlyCR groups in , they contended, We can, of course, ask men to join in spe-cial discussions or actions if WE decide WE want to. But we must have unityamong ourselves FIRST. 41 And when Pamela Parker Allen outlined the smallgroup process in , she insisted, The group is a rst step in transcendingisolation. 42 When cultural feminism began to use CR models and slogans tobolster separatism as an end, earlier womens liberationists were at great painsto intervene by underscoring the temporariness of the all-women CR group.Barbara Leon, for instance, addressed Black Power leader Stokely Carmichaeland her call to Separate to Integrate. Leon argued for separatism as a strate-gic means of organizing and building womens power, but Womens groupsare progressive only if they exist for the purpose of making themselves unnec-essary.43 For womens liberation, the collective we of women is something towork toward vigorously, as well as something to move beyond once that wematerializes.

Though the project of sisterhood carries the goal of unity, it is importantto underscore CRs emphasis on making connections that address differenceamong women to fully understand the Mount Vernon groups use of CR toforge race-conscious collectivity. In her inuential construction of a feminist

theory that arises from CR groups, cultural feminist Catharine MacKinnonillustrates well the tension between shared experiences that may cross identitylines and the project of sisterhood. MacKinnon explains that through shar-ing lived experience in a CR group, women noticed patterns and deducedsystems of oppression. She states, More than their content, it is the relationto lived experience which is new about these insights. 44 MacKinnons radicalfeminist project uncovers the common oppression of women as a politicalclass so that abstract political theory arises out of shared everyday experience,

or what Linda Nicholson refers to as aha experiences. Nicholson notes, Thisgeneral orientation, however, suffered from one serious weakness: it tended todeny difference among women 45 Though MacKinnon is roundly critiqued for


9/28

deemphasizing difference, her insight is key: collectivity among women arisesfrom interrogation of that which is seen as the everyday, the pedestrian, thegiven.46 In their CR document, members of the Mount Vernon group addressa Black Power movement, other black women, and womens liberation. The

collectivity produced by their CR document is not necessarily limited to theboundaries of sisterhood, especially if the everyday experiences of CR groupmembers do not fall along those boundaries.

In an outward-moving direction, the Mount Vernon group accumulates acollective we incrementally, across not only identity, geography, and poli-tics, but also time. Sarachild recently reconsidered the collectives imagined bywomens liberation as ongoing, incomplete projects that rely heavily on simplepersistence and circulation amongst a variety of women. In a interview,she reects,

I think the women who have been drawn to the Redstockings traditionin the last couple of decades have a consciousness, or, we gained a con-sciousness, about how important it is to persist. In the beginning of themovement we would talk about women of the world unite, womenhave to unite. But we thought of that as kind of an instant revolution. Wedidnt realize that persisting, the power of persisting, was actually part ofthe power of unity. 47

Given Sarachilds insight that a we forms by persistence, the time frameand scope of the Mount Vernon groups we exceeds the immediate momentchronicled in their CR document, and serve as starting points in the project ofsocial transformation.

The Mount Vernon groups Statement on Birth Control is only one possibleavenue toward the goal of race-conscious sisterhood, which includes alliancewith, and liberation of, those who may not fall under any single conception ofwomen. This is why we must notice which experience gets anthologized and

within which social movements. In her address to the stewardesses, Sarachildexplained the importance of understanding ones own oppression by

making connections between the oppression of women and other systemsof oppression and exploitation. Analyzing our experience in our personallives and in the movement, reading about the experience of other peoplesstruggles, and connecting these through [CR] will keep us on the track,moving as fast as possible toward womens liberation. 48

Though Sarachilds slippage between plural pronouns and singular experienceis vulnerable to familiar charges that the term women is a homogenizing politi-cal category actual CR documents like that of the Mount Vernon group un


10/28

derscore the uses and limits of a collective we. The ght against forced birthcontrol or forced reproduction is like class struggle in post-colonial Africa. Ifthe analogy is noticeably imperfect and the we cannot speak for all womensstruggles, the imagined collective within and without the banner women is

strengthened by the slippageor exibilitycreated by such imperfections.We can more fully understand the possibilities and limits of this slippage byplacing CR documents into the heterogeneous concerns of the womens liber-ation and its connections to proximate social movements, especially by look-ing at the anthologies in which such documents circulate.

dear brothers: reading cr documents inside andoutside womens liberation

We call on all our sisters to unite with us in struggle.We call on all men to give up their male privileges and support womens

liberation in the interest of our humanity and their own.Redstockings Manifesto ( )49

Womens liberation has generally left the minorities to deal with their particu-lar problems themselves. This, then, is the explanation of why there are fewminority women in feminism.

Celestine Ware, original member of NY Radical Feminists, The Relationship ofBlack Women to the Womens Liberation Movement ( )50

In her study of white, black, and Chicana womens separate roads to femi-nism, Roth demonstrates how groups may have participated in differentsocial movements, but had in fact read each others work in the Second Wave(or, preferably, Second Wave feminisms) 51 even before coalition became aprincipal organizing strategy in the late s.52 This key insight underscores

the importance of the Mount Vernon groups decision to address their state-ment to Dear Brothers, whereas some of their other position statements wereaddressed to Dear Sisters. Within an anthology invested in the project ofsisterhood and a CR document that calls for race-conscious collectivity acrossidentitarian lines, the Mount Vernon group addresses an audience bothwithin and outside womens liberation, a move not unlike the RedstockingsManifestos call for all men to become womens liberation allies. This is impor-tant because womens liberation marks a point when the experience of sexualdifference became a platform for organizing and social change. Put in succinctterms, the New York Radical Women proclaim in their widely distributed

if t W t k th id i thi g 53 Thi i li t i it


11/28


12/28


13/28

for the rst time at the printers, that industry being of the many which areall but completely closed to women.*) *I have just learned that the bookis being set by a computer, keypunched by women. Breakthrough! 61

Writing, production, and distribution represent acts of womens self-determi-nation. The act of putting together an anthology works against the isolationimposed on women by dominant culture, and the male-dominated machin-ery of cultural production. Though she elides the crucial act of editing andselecting entries, Morgan stages the production and circulation process of theanthology as an enactment of sisterhood.

If the production of a print-mediated sisterhood explicitly attempts to ad-dress difference and make room for all women in its universalist project, howdid these womens liberation anthologies come to be seen as lacking race-

consciousness? The answer to this question may lie in part in the way thatanthologies are only partly able to translate the CR process into print form.In their important recovery work, historians and feminists Rosalyn Baxandalland Linda Gordon note, [CR] was the major new organizational form, the-ory of knowledge, and research tool of the womens liberation movement. 62 Since womens liberation arose in response to other social movements render-ing secondary women and womens experience, CR comes to be perceived asa unique way of theorizing womens experience, which risks deemphasizing

connections to other groups and social movements regardless of CRs em-phasis on imperfect analogies. Further exacerbating this risk, anthologiesconvene different texts and the groups and experiences they represent as al-ready constituted connections (that is, all these documents are in the samecollection, so they must belong together) outside the step-by-step processes ofCR and political organizing that generated connections across the imperfectanalogies in the rst place.

Morgan, also from Mount Vernon, included the Statement to demonstratethe wide net of sisterhood. This net of sisterhood in early womens liberationhas fallen under scrutinyas intense as it is necessarythat the women ofwomens liberation are either racially homogeneous or only secondarily con-cerned with antiracism. 63 Many women of color, like Ti-Grace Atkinson, sawthe wide net of sisterhood as entrapping as much as liberating. Yet a closelook at Sisterhood reveals a very pained and complex understanding of powerdifferences among the women in the collection, women who are from differ-ent social groups and often separated accordingly. Recognizing the specicityof her own position, Morgan reects on the privileged standpoint of whitewomen like her on the Left who were

doing Lady Bountiful actions about other peoples oppression This left


14/28

me conveniently on top, and in a seat of relative power, because it isntuntil you begin to ght in your own cause that you a) become really com-mitted to winning, and b) become a genuine ally of other people strug-gling for their freedom. 64

Further, Morgan identies her relation to women of color: she speaks as aruling-class woman who has no real power herself and as a not-starv-ing white American woman living in the very belly of the beast. 65 Morganand womens liberation are necessarily subject to the often-true criticism thatwomen of color were imagined as some homogeneous Other. But it is alsoimportant to acknowledge that Morgan at least understands the challenge offorging a womens collectivity that is able to attend to different socioeconomicpositions within racial, class, and national allies grouped under the banner of

sisterhood.Morgan couches the project of sisterhood as difcult, but possible: We

share a common root as women, much more natural to both groups thanthe very machismo style of male-dominated organizations, black, brown and white.66 Though Morgans theorization of race may be thin in her emphasison common denominators, racial difference is not merely incidental, and sheattempts in earnest to respond to the Statements call for race-conscious sis-terhood. She explains, There are three articles by black sisters in this book

written specically about the oppression of black women; it was important tohave more than one or two voices speak for so many sisters, and in differingways.67 Though vulnerable to charges that this is an anemic gesture of inclu-sion or an afterthought, Morgan brings to her project an awareness of differ-ences among women, though her point of reference for difference centers onher own experience. 68 Nicholson notes that identity politics arose in the sin part as a response to white feminists who sought a multiracial movement bymaking the world better for others, without necessary input from those others

themselves.69

If Morgans understanding of race in sisterhood remains un-satisfying, it is important to note that she does not construct her personal Ias an endpoint. In Sisterhood , at least, Morgan and the Mount Vernon groupprovide a model of textually brokered conversation that belies any simpliedportrait of womens liberation as failing totally to recognize the specicity ofthose within or outside the speaking we.

If Morgan was so pained about and conscious of her race privilege, whyare there so few documents from women of color in Sisterhood , and many

similar anthologies? Though I will consider other avenues of print-based blackwomens organizing in the concluding section, for now this question gets atk li it f th th l g t tt d t th di it f i d


15/28

concerns of women as it gathers texts into one common project. Though theanthologists desire to attend to the particular within their universalist project,they are also vulnerable to charges that it failed to do so. In Sisterhood , entriesare organized thematically, including by issue (e.g., changing consciousness),

identity (e.g., high school women, Chicana women), or genre (e.g., poetry asprotest). In this way, Sisterhood reaches far with inclusive aspirations to covera diverse array of womens issues and identities, though its categories may re-inforce as much as protest lines between women. When she labels the sectionon black women Women in the Black Liberation Movement: Three Views,Morgan seems to recognize the danger that the thematic sections promisemore diversity than the anthology delivers. Is three enough? Why not two?Why not seven? At pages, the anthology seeks comprehensive coverage,but paradoxically the more it includes particular concerns or identities, themore it risks charges that its coverage of an issue is thin. We can ask questionsabout depth of coverage for all identities and themes, almost as if the anthol-ogy form goads us to do so. We can also tally which kinds of women are ableto speak across themes to see why the Mount Vernon group can only speak ina section on black liberation and not, say, in a section on birth control or EastCoast women. Morgan continued to tinker with the coverage model in sub-sequent manifestations, with Sisterhood Is Global ( )70 organized by nationand Sisterhood Is Forever ( )71 organized by feminist strategies and debates,but questions about exclusions and charges of white Western bias persistedwith each universalist version, even multiplying as the terrain of the sister-hood project increases. 72 These ever-expanding projects evidence Morgansevolving understanding of the challenges of attending to the particular in auniversalist vision of sisterhood, especially in her choice to use a text by RaynaGreen, a Native American scholar-activist, as the representative document forthe United States section in Sisterhood Is Global .73

In the universalist design of thematic representation in Sisterhood Is

Powerful , individual entries speak largely to particular themes; the reader mustlook within individual documents to see connections across thematic sections,or differences within documents of the same section. As discussed above, theCR model is specically designed to seek out and address connections amongwomen and other groups across identitarian lines, but reading an anthologymay not enact the same process of making connections. Morgan bills the an-thology as writings from the womens liberation movement, but the reader isnot necessarily in the movement. In fact, if a stated aim is to bring more wom-

en into the movement, many of these targeted readers would not have access tothe group process of CR. The anthology comes to stand in forand possiblydi l th t l CR f b i i ith i d


16/28


17/28

forming abortions. 75 The position statement clearly responds to challengesby womens liberation that antibirth-control stances of other liberation move-ments are contrary to womens empowerment. In these moments, we can locatea moment of dialogue where men of color directly respond toand enter

womens liberation projects. Womens collectives and the Dear Brothers theysometimes address point to a print-based multiracial network of overlappingsocial movements attempting to balance self-determination stances and uni-versalist impulses.

The idea of womens collectivity itself often met skepticism or outrighthostility from the Dear Brothers addressed by the Mount Vernon group.Not too long before Morgan included the Statement in her anthology, twoMount Vernon women penned a letter to the editor of Liberator , an increas-ingly militant and male-dominated forum on black liberation borne out offrustration with the integration politics of Civil Rights. The womens letter re-sponds to another black woman, Mrs. Moore, who wrote that she was wrongto attack the Blackman, and that we Black women and Blackmen should sticktogether. 76 In their letter, the women present their combined voices as bothspecic and representative by signing as Two Black Sisters. They argue, MostBlack women dont feel the way [Mrs. Moore] does, but most of them are[too] damned scared to say how they really feel, especially since you cant getthe Black man to understand that we are human beings too. 77 By presentingtheir collective voice as representing in public that which is shared in private,the Two Black Sisters position themselves as speaking to a Black Power move-ment from a womens liberation perspective, while professing total allegianceto neither. They conclude, I thank God I was not born a man Black or white.To tell you the truth because the Black man is only following in whiteys foot-steps.78 The Two Black Sisters enter Black Power discourse (they use the termBlackman and the rhetoric of Whitey); they also draw on womens liberationideas about male dominance to achieve a self-determinative stance. The letter

directly addresses black (male) liberation from a womens collective that solic-its a response: recognize gender equity under the banner of humanism.

These two black womens dual address without total allegiance reects thestance of the Mount Vernon group and its challenge within Sisterhood . ThoughMorgan perpetuated the widespread practice of white bias by segregating theStatement in a thematic section, both the document and the anthology nev-ertheless seek a collectivity initially based in shared experiences, but one thatmoves outward deliberately and persistently across different social move-

ments. Becky Thompson contends that retrospective narratives of the rise ofhegemonic feminism might expunge black women and multiracial femi-i b th ft f il t i l d iti b f l h d


18/28

not explicitly use the term feminism but who nonetheless do gender-con-scious, justice work. According to Thompson, The tendency not to includegender-conscious activism by women of color in dominant versions of SecondWave history unless the women used the term feminist fails to account for the

multiple terms women of color have historically used to designate activismthat keeps women at the center of analysis and attends to interlocking op-pressions. 79 This characterization is generally accurate, but we must not alsoneglect the contribution of the Mount Vernon group in the most inuentialwomens liberation anthology speaking also to black liberation.

Inside and outside womens liberation, the Mount Vernon groups CR docu-ment imagines a race-conscious collective we that may not t with somememories of the Second Wave as hopelessly steeped in nave visions of sis-terhood. In The Feminist Memoir Project , an important collection of memo-ries of and reections upon womens liberation, Ann Snitow and Rachel BlauDuPlessis note, The category women, so fresh and surprising on that ctivebut provocative Day One of the Second Wave, is familiar now, to some anoversimplication, to others a banality. 80 Snitow and DuPlessis recover thedifculty and historical necessity of the project of sisterhood, but in the brightlight of second thoughts in contemporary feminism on intersectionality andthe salience of identity and difference. In their documentary collection ofwomens liberation texts, Baxandall and Gordon also convene a diverse, wideranging, and cacophonous vision of the movement as they aspire to demon-strate what Snitow and DuPlessis describe as a polyphonic movement, butwithout the racially segregated organization that remains so problematic inSisterhood . Evans notes that they effectively challenge the notion that wom-ens liberation was a racist, white movement by including voices of womenof color in every section at the same time that they do not deny feminists ofcolors testimonials of marginalization and racism. 81 Many feminists of colorwho were there also testify toand demandmultiracial histories of wom-

ens liberation. Often they do not cater to a younger generation by passing thetorch. Instead, they remind new generations of what is lost if we see the SecondWave as dead, irrelevant, or, more insidiously, homogeneously white. 82

race and the eclipse of womens liberation in early sfeminist anthologies

Within the dominant narrative of feminism, critical race theory and womensliberation are pitted against one another when the Second Wave is depicted astardy in its race-consciousness; this ties the arrival of race-consciousness towhat Evans calls the eclipse of womens liberation 83 CR remains a ash point


19/28

in debates about race-consciousness in the Second Wave when it is simultane-ously remembered as the central organizing mode of womens liberation andas an exclusively white enterprise. 84 Thompson re-views the Second Wave fromthe vantage of multiracial feminism 85 in light of her claim that what have

been understood as doldrums in feminism actually mark groundswells in an-tiracist feminist activism. 86 She argues, Although the late s and early smight have been the heyday for white radical feminists in CR groups, fromthe perspective of white antiracists, the early s were a low point of femi-nisma time when many women who were committed to an antiracist analy-sis had to put their feminism on the back burner in order to work with womenand men of color and against racism. 87 Revisionist and archival studies ofwomens liberation, however, can turn up important exceptions. Members of

the black feminist group from Mount Vernon, at least, position their collectivevoice within womens liberation and Black Power to suggest that race-con-scious feminism forms at least a part of the early project of sisterhood, and theanthologies that sought to demonstrate and mobilize sisterhood.

Many early s anthologies following Sisterhood modeled the CR processof making connections as they sought print-based collectivity, among wom-en of color in particular. The most celebrated examples include This BridgeCalled My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color ( ), All the Women Are

White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Womens Studies ( ), and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology ( ).88 These ground-breaking anthologies convened many voices of women of color to examinethe often contradictory demands of race, class, nationality, and more that in-tersected the seemingly monolithic category woman. The positive inuenceof these early s anthologies cannot be overestimated, for they carved outa politics of identity instead of a politics of sisterhood. In her analysis of theSecond Wave and the subsequent questioning of its collective-minded orien-

tation,89

Elisabeth Armstrong notes that Third Wave anthologies primarilycontain rst-person accounts, 90 whereas Second Wave anthologies often ven-ture into the collective we. With their emphasis on experiential rst-personnarratives coupled with a distrust of the collective we, these anthologies re-spond to the problems of Sisterhood , where attention to the particular can getburied in a universalist title project. These anthologies seek print-based collec-tivity in new ways. For instance, they contain entries that specically respondto other writers and texts, such as a conversation between Tania Abulahad,Gwendolyn Rogers, Barbara Smith, and Jameelah Waheed in Home Girls orGloria Anzaldas inuential essay, Speaking in Tongues, in This Bridge. Inthis way conversational documents modeled the CR process of making con


20/28


21/28

Womens Liberation Group of Mount Vernons CR document helps us ques-tion the specic project of sisterhood, but not necessarily the general projectof print-based collectivity.

notes

I thank Jessica Winston, Jennifer Attebery, Marianne DeKoven, Hillary Chute, andmembers of the Works-in-Progress series in the Department of English and Philosophyat Idaho State University for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this piece. Iam also grateful for the insightful and careful suggestions of the anonymous readers atFrontiers and coeditors Gayle Gullett and Susan Gray.

. I follow Alice Echolss approximate dates in Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).

. Kathie Sarachild, Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon, in FeministRevolution (New York: Random House, ), .

. Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from theWomens Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage, ).

. Shulamith Firestone, ed., Notes from the First Year (New York: Radical Feminism,).. Shulamith Firestone, ed., Notes from the Second Year: Womens Liberation; Major

Writings of the Radical Feminists (New York: Radical Feminism, ).

. Toni Cade, ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology (Signet: New York, ).

. Leslie B. Tanner, ed., Voices from Womens Liberation (New York: New AmericanLibrary, ).

. Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran, eds., Woman in Sexist Society: Studies inPower and Powerlessness (New York: New American Library, ).

. In addition to anthologies from the time, CR documents can be found in somecontemporary documentary histories. See Barbara A. Crow, Radical Feminism: ADocumentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, ) and Rosalyn

Baxandall and Linda Gordon, Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Womens Liberation Movement (New York: Perseus Books, ). Sarachilds writings in particular are no-table for providing how-tos or methodologies of CR to a national audience.

. For a selection of these re-visions, see Elisabeth Armstrong, The Retreat fromOrganization: U.S. Feminism Reconceptualized (Albany: State University of New YorkPress, ); Rosalyn Baxandall, Re-visioning the Womens Liberation MovementsNarrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists, Feminist Studies , no. ( ): ; Wini Breines, review of Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement , by Debra L. Schultz, and Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in theFreedom Movement , by Constance Curry et al., Signs , no. ( ): ; RachelBlau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow eds The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Womens


22/28

Liberation (New York: Three Rivers Press, ); Jean Curthoys, Feminist Amnesia: TheWake of Womens Liberation (New York: Routledge, ); Sara Evans, Re-Viewing theSecond Wave, Feminist Studies , no. ( ): ; Sara Evans, Tidal Wave (NewYork: The Free Press, ); Christina Greene, Whats Sex Got to Do with It: Gender

and the New Black Freedom Movement Scholarship, Feminist Studies , no. ( ): ; Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (NewYork: New York University Press, ); Ellen Messer-Davidow, Disciplining Feminism:How Womens Studies Transformed the Academy and Was Transformed By It (Durham:Duke University Press, ); Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: BlackFeminist Organizations (Durham: Duke University Press, ); Kimberly Springer,Third Wave Black Feminism? Signs , no. ( ): ; Becky Thompson,Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,Feminist Studies , no. ( ): . Evans praises the varied and widespreadwork to rewrite the history of the massive, dynamic, thrilling, angry, and incrediblydiverse movement (Re-viewing, ) and notes that the problem of writing anyhistory of the Second Wave is that the movement is simply too complex to bear asingle tellingor even several ( ). This work is important because, as ElisabethArmstrong notes, The Second Wave movement in the United States has reached anage of memory: it is now old enough to be forgotten, distorted, or both simultane-ously (The Retreat from Organization , ). This work responds to earlier historianswork, like Evans foundational social history of womens liberation, Personal Politics:

The Roots of Womens Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (NewYork: Alfred Knopf, ).

. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism,and the Future (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, ), .

. Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in Americas Second Wave (New York: Cambridge University Press, ).

. Winifred Breines, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and BlackWomen in the Feminist Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, ).

. Redstockings, Manifesto, mimeographed position paper, in Baxandall andGordon, Dear Sisters, .

. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Women in Black Liberation, in Morgan, Sisterhood , .

. Roth, Separate Roads, esp. . Roth discusses the group within both MountVernon and neighboring New Rochelle, but I follow the groups listing in Sisterhood ,which only mentions Mount Vernon.

. Black Womens Liberation Group of Mount Vernon, Statement on Birth

Control, in Morgan, Sisterhood , .. For a history of black feminist struggles for the right to bear children, notil th i ht t b ti D th R b t Killi th Bl k B d R


23/28


24/28

. Ibid., .. Ibid., , emphasis mine.. Gainesville Womens Liberation Group, What We Do at Meetings, in Baxandall

and Gordon, Dear Sisters, .

. Pamela Parker Allen, The Small Group Process, in Baxandall and Gordon, DearSisters, , emphasis mine.

. Barbara Leon, Separate to Integrate, in Feminist Revolution (New York: RandomHouse, ), .

. Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, ), .

. Linda Nicholson, introduction to Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, ), .

. Further, T. V. Reed argues, [CR] was especially important in that key feministtheoretical act of challenging the boundaries of what counted as political by rethink-ing the border between public and private life. See his The Art of Protest: Cultureand Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, ), . Rethinking the border between public andprivate life allowed seemingly private experience to form the basis of a political theoryof feminism.

. Kathie Sarachild and Amy Coenen, Two Redstockings Interviewed, interviewby Doug Henwood, WAVI, New York, January , , http://www.leftbusinessob-

server.co/Redstockings.html (accessed January , ).. Sarachild, Radical Weapon, .. Baxandall and Gordon, Dear Sisters, .. Celestine Ware, The Relationship of Black Women to the Womens Liberation

Movement, in Crow, Radical Feminism, .. Roth argues, When the second wave of feminism is seen as feminisms, the au-

dacity of all feminists who challenged the status quo from wherever they were situatedis recaptured and highlighted, and we are forced to recognize the power of feminist

visions ( ).. See Roth, Separate Roads, .. New York Radical Women, Principles, in Morgan, Sisterhood , . Morgan

places the New York Radical Women position statement in the appendix HistoricalDocuments.

. For Reed, the poetry in these anthologies is a key strand of the movement be-cause poetry is uniquely able to invent a new language to characterize the experiencesof oppression and liberation that had no name ( ). Reed, The Art of Protest , .

. See, for example, Bonnie J. Gunzenhauser,

Historicizing Communities ofReading in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Report from the Classroom, CollegeLit t ( )


25/28

. See, for example, Paul Lauter, Taking Anthologies Seriously, MELUS , nos. ( ): ; Andrea McCormic, Theorizing Difference in Asian American PoetryAnthologies, MELUS , nos. ( ): .

. See, for example, Barbara M. Benedict, The Paradox of the Anthology: Collecting

and Diffrence in Eighteenth-Century Britain, NLH , no. ( ): ; Jeffrey R.Di Leo, ed., On Anthologies: Politics and Pedagogy (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, ); Jeffrey J. Williams, Anthology Disdain, College English , no. ( ):

.. Priscilla Coit Murphy, What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of

Silent Spring (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ), . Murphy ar-gues, Studying books as news makers or as instigators of media-borne public debatenonetheless still requires accounting for books as part of a media system, which printculture scholarship has tended to sidestep despite its umbrella interest in all printed

communication ( ).. For a foundational example, see Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women,

Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,).. Tanner, Voices from Womens Liberation.. Morgan, Sisterhood , xii.. Baxandall and Gordon, Dear Sisters, .. Most foundational womens liberation texts use of woman has fallen under such

scrutiny, perhaps most notably the work of radical feminists Gornick in Woman in SexistSociety and Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (NewYork: William Morrow, ). For an inuential early critique from critical race studiessee Angela Davis,Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, ), esp. .

. Morgan, Sisterhood , xiv.. Ibid., xvii, xxxv.. Ibid., xxvi, emphasis in original.. Ibid., xxiv.. Norma Alarcn provides an inuential analysis of the tendency to place white

women at the center of ideas about difference in her study of different responsesby white women and women of color to This Bridge Called My Back. See her TheTheoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Backand Anglo-American Feminism,in Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color , ed. GloriaAnzalda (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, ), .

. Nicholson, introduction to Second Wave, .

. Morgan, Sisterhood Is Global(New York: Feminist Press, ). Morgan, Sisterhood Is Forever(New York: Washington Square Press, ).

. Reecting on her increasing awareness of the difculty of a transnational scopein Sisterhood Is Global , Morgan writes, Perhaps that was just as well: our navet servedh g h f il d ( iii)


26/28

. Rayna Green, The United States: Honoring the Vision of Changing Woman,in Morgan, Sisterhood Is Global , . Green is an American Indian member of theCherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

. Baumgardner and Richards, Manifesto, .

. Young Lords, Position Paper on Women, in Baxandall and Gordon, Dear Sisters,.. Two Black Sisters, letter in Liberator , October , .. Ibid., .. Ibid.. Thompson, Multiracial Feminism, n. .. DuPlessis and Snitow, The Feminist Memoir Project , .. Evans, Re-viewing, .. For responses to Springers focus on a new generation of black feminism, see

Wini Breines, Whats Love Got to Do with It? White Women, Black Women, andFeminism in the Movement Years, Signs , no. ( ): ; Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Response from a Second Waver to Kimberly Springers Third Wave BlackFeminism? Signs , no. ( ): ; Sheila Radford-Hill, Keepin It Real: AGenerational Commentary on Kimberly Springers Third Wave Black Feminism?Signs , no. ( ): .

. Evans, Re-viewing, .. For a rich but succinct trajectory of the CR groups contingent, evolving models

in feminism, see Lisa Marie Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Womens Liberation Movement (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, ), esp. . For a brief overview of CRs role in womensliberation, see Reed, The Art of Protest , and n. .

. Thompson borrows this term from Maxine Baca Sinn and Bonnie ThorntonDill. Thompson also relies heavily on Chela Sandovals excoriation of early SecondWave feminism as hegemonic feminism, which is white because it undertheorizes itsown racial grounding.

. I borrow this term from Linda Keller Kerber, No Constitutional Right to BeLadies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, );Thompson, Multiracial Feminism, .

. Ibid., . Womens liberationists also often equate the CR group model withunied (read white) sisterhood. Echols writes of the CR group, By circumvent-ing the experts on women and going to women themselves, [womens liberationists]would be able not only to construct a theory of womens oppression but to formulatestrategy as well. Thus womens liberationists struggled to nd the commonalities in

womens experience in order to generate generalizations about womens oppression.See Nothing Distant about It: Womens Liberation and Sixties Radicalism, in herSh k G d Th Si ti d It Aft h k (N Y k C l bi U i it P


27/28

), . This portrait echoes Daring to Be Bad : With the assertion of differencewithin the womens movement in the eighties, the notion that women constitute aunitary category has been problematized ( ).

. Cherre Moraga and Gloria Anzalda, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings

by Radical Women of Color (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, );Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, Allthe Men Are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave: Womens Studies (New York: The FeministPress, ); Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Latham, N.Y.:Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, ).

. Armstrong paints the rise of identity politics as a retreat from organization.

. Ibid., .. Cade, The Black Woman, .. Evans, Re-viewing, .. Sometimes writers identities are held up as evidence of multiracial feminism.

For instance, Evans writes, Baxandall and Gordon challenge the notion that womensliberation was a racist, white movement by including voices of women of color in everysection (Re-viewing, ).


28/28