Feminism
July 31, 2006[So summer just turns my writing ability to shit. That’s the only excuse I can muster for not having posted anything since early June. Nonetheless, I’m back, with some thoughts on the area of STO’s politics with which I probably have the greatest disagreement. Hopefully this will get me back on track writing more frequently.]
Feminism was never STO’s strong suit. From the inception of the organization there was significant membership of and leadership by women in the group, but just as it rejected the student-centered orientation of much of the new left, so too did it turn its back on the rising tide of second wave feminism in North America. This is not to say the group had no concern for women or women’s issues: STO’s first ever publication [Bread and Roses; anyone out there with a copy of this obscure publication is encouraged to get in touch; I would love to get a look at it] was apparently a newspaper aimed at working class women, and at least one early pamphlet focused on issues specific to women working in factories.
But throughout the seventies, STO took a rather dim view of the feminist movement, as distinct from what it perceived to be the concerns of working class women. Sensing early on the trajectory of feminism as a cross-class movement that emphasized the needs and desires of middle-class white women, STO largely wrote off the movement as a whole. One prominent female former member of STO told me that she and other women in the group were more interested in poking fun at feminists than in working with them.
This view was by no means universal, of course. By the late seventies a handful of women had joined STO after having been politicized by radical feminism earlier in the decade. In some cases, these were women who had become disillusioned with the very same problems that had kept STO away in the first place – the increasing focus on white, middle class women, and the predictably reformist strategies that flowed from this emphasis. At the same time, these new members were politically more at home with the most radical insights of the second wave: the personal as political, an awareness of the need for prefigurative politics, a concern with autonomy and democracy in political practice, and a sensitivity to the external factors that limited women’s participation in the male dominated world of revolutionary politics. They fought an uphill battle for several years within STO, attempting to find a place for these insights in a milieu that was alternately indifferent and hostile.Female members were not the critics who were concerned that STO might be throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. An unpublished letter from Ted Allen in 1978 made the same general point, but couched it in terms more familiar (and thus potentially more challenging) to the dominant thinking inside STO. Comparing the experiences of white supremacy and male supremacy in North America, Allen argued convincingly that the insights of radical feminism were compatible with the analysis of white skin privilege that he had helped pioneer in the years preceding the founding of STO.
An instructive comparison can be made between STO’s complicated and frustrating relationship to feminism, and the more welcoming embrace given by the group Big Flame in Britain. STO and Big Flame considered themselves to be a part of the same international political tendency in the late seventies and early eighties (along with like minded groups in Ireland, France, Italy, and elsewhere), but this did not mean that their politics were mirror images of each other. In fact, by 1980 Big Flame considered itself to be a socialist-feminist organization, a self-description that the majority of STO would almost certainly have rejected. A then-member of Big Flame, Lynne Segal, was the co-author of the book Beyond the Fragments, which attempted to build on the insights of radical feminism over the course of the seventies, and integrate them into a vision of revolution and socialism for the 1980’s. Needless to say, this effort didn’t exactly succeed, but the effort itself is remarkable, at least in comparison to the general disinterest in the same politics shown by STO during the same period.I do not mean to imply that STO was somehow anti-feminist, much less anti-woman or pro-patriarchy. By comparison to the politics then espoused by much of the Marxist left in the United States, STO was still in pretty good shape on this front. But this arena does seem to me a weak spot within the otherwise compelling politics articulated by STO. That alone makes it a topic worth further investigation.
