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Second-Wave Feminism: A Dialog Between Participants and the Younger Generation
Panel Description: At WisCon 36 younger women asked specifically for a discussion which focused on communication between their generation and former generations. Veterans of second-wave feminism talk about the historical context of that wave of feminism in relation to the Civil Rights, Free Speech, Black Power, Anti-Vietnam War and Gay Liberation movements.
Saturday, 4-5:15
Panelists: Debbie Notkin (moderator), Susan Simensky Bietila, Dr. Janice M. Bogstad, Jackie Gross, Angeli Primlani, Roxanne Samer
I arrived late and this is incomplete! When people focused on individual stories, I often lost threads.
PS I WILL EDIT THIS MORE LATER.
JG: Want to make sure we record and transmit knowledge and dovetail experiences.
Diverse voices WERE voiced and we need to remember that.
Bogstad: Wanted to recover our voices b/c we were being told bad things about our capacity.
We weren't very conscious of the larger movement.
We also sort of - somebody has to say this - we weren't sure if we should be doing this. People kept telling us no one should come to our convention. We should be part feminist, or feminist-oriented.
When Janus nommed for Hugo, rumor was in Britain they didn't want to put us on the ballot because we were edited by two young women and thus couldn't be that important.
I'm not as old as Betty Friedan. I was reading her & the Second Sex and that sort of thing. Trying to achieve some sense of how I could be both female and me.
In Northern Wisconsin, we were fighting to get whole wheat flour.
I came down to Madison when I was 18 and so there was a bit more contact. The second wave had many different things going on. WisCon was a second-wave thing. Came about b/c nobody was talking to women SF authors except for us.
In my current incarnation, I teach feminist theory & second wave & yet I understand that those rules of thumb, those definitional categories, whatever, are really false but have to have them for people to start to think about what ideas or problems dominated the activity at a certain period of time. I don't really believe in 2nd/3rd wave, that stuff.
you can find people doing all sorts of things bettween what we like to call 1st & 2nd wave. Without conceptual core, however, it's hard to teach people.
Offended by definitions of 3rd-wave feminism b/c it's very offensive.
"Slutty feminism," "you 2nd wave women were apologetic about your sexuality & we're not - OH REALLY"
/laughter/
What really scares me is so many of the young people I teach, most of the females, believe that all the problems have been solved and that they can do anything they want, aren't going to be any barriers, and they can let their guard down. Ain't true. Doesn't mean we haven't made progress, just not true.
Young woman has been told consistently to use her initials if she wants to write science fiction.
How many tens of thousands of women read science fiction? And it's still perceived as male.
JG: Or to make your name sound white.
DN: One of the things I'm hearing from panelists is convesration about context and understanding the context. The people who believe that all the problems have been solved - "been solved" construction -no one solved the problems, no one did anything. Somehow the problems just got solved (passive voice). People in power just realized that they were wrong. Like that happens - like a lot.
I think a good fruitful question would be for each of us to talk about context - the context in which we becamse feminists because it has changed so much.
One example - I grew up in help wanted male & "help wanted female." A lot of people 20 years younger than me have never heard of that.
JG: When I really thought of it, I becamse a feminist b/c I went to all-female Catholic school.
All-female environments were awesome. Post-Vatican nuns - Franciscan - were awesome.
Never a feeling from them that I couldn't do something.
At the same time, with my parents, we went to school - you'll have to be better or twice as good, because you're black. My white friends said that's limiting & horrible. But that's a survival tactic that black parents do for kids.
I was one of the few black kids in my entire school. Changed by the time I left, but I learned how to speak up - that was a given, you were expected.
When I went to public high school, it was hard to sit back.
I met other girls who didn't have that experience. I would tell them it's okay to do that sort of thing. I knew things were being reported on news, that women were doing. First lineman job for phone company, things like that. Possibilities, but you had to work hard to get it.
Somthing always kind of ingrained.
It wasn't going to be given to you, but you had to fight for it.
Dovetail late 1960s/1970s. Rise of war of black middle class, looking back and lifting people with you.
Of course I would show other people what we did. Yes, my parents were good race parents, that's what they did. It was like, of course I'm a feminist. It wasn't until later that I realized there was black feminism.
SSB: Not like other girls. In Brooklyn, going to high school of music & art & then Brooklyn College, there were dress codes for women. No trousers. There was a guard in front of the library. If no dress/stockings, you couldn't go into the library. How Handmaid's Tale should we get about this?
At social events, couldn't call up a guy and ask him out socially if you went to a dance, you had to wait to be asked. The idea of doing any of these things made me vomit.
Stockings, girdles, etc. My mom standing over me saying I couldn't dress like X.
Used HS allowance to buy clothes at second-hand army store.
That was my reality.
AP: When I attended Uni of N Carolina. # of women raped on campus was something like 1/3 or 1/6. When you actually counted, it was something like 85%. Epidemic of sexual violence not being discussed or dealt with by anyone at all. Especially by second-wave feminism. It was a big deal to them that women could be on campus at all.
We wanted to talk about date rape & they would say they didn't want to talk about that.
Phenomenons like slut walk - we weren't doing anything nearly that radical. The idea of sexual agency and sexual freedom - it goes not just to women's rights but human rights, a person with a body.
So many victims, not enough stories being told. People saying we've rocked the boat this far - you want to reclaim the word "dykes?" You want to push it further? But we needed to.
When you think about how effective it is - there's an entire generation of women out there not talking about it.
Recently, the Department of Education is investigating Uni of N Carolina b/c it's gotten so far that a girl went to [?] to report this to try & get a restraining order, they threatened to expel her for creating a hostile environment for HIM to study in.
Duke was notorious. Affluent - less likely to be taken seriously. Their frats were notorious.
LaCrosse team will just make me cry. That system is so rigged.
JG: It's a D-1 school.
AP: Enough evidence that it even got to court is shocking and indicates to me that something had to have happened, given who those kids are. I was probably always a feminist but I wasn't really conscious of it until college.
DN: Really struck by business of don't rock the boat any further. I think that's really common in activist movements - race, class, sexual orientation, etc. Really common, really scary.
Only make progress if each next generation rocks the next generation's boat.
JB: We have to organize around the issues. In order for issues to be solved, - controlling reproductive rights, let's not use what little we have left. We have to organize or we will lose it. The ways that people are eating away at the right to birth control and ownership of your own body.
All these directions in which these things which we sort of take for granted are being attacked constantly. One thing after another.
DN: I don't understand why you can't organize around birth control & (something else).
JB: If we say we have to solve all the problems today, that makes it difficult.
DN: You can't ask people to move to back of the bus because something else takes priority.
RS: Discussions being had at the time about - making history available to younger generations. Capture (Jeff Smith) - ongoing symposium conducted through correspondence, pre-Internet. Recently been republished and available out there. Janus is being made available digitally. Helps lessen us-them dichotomy.
JB: Aurora, New Moon, Solarus, Witch and the New Moon. There were lots of things going on.
JL (audience): Comment on your don't rock the boat: POV that's coming from isn't so much of not wanting to make further progress but to prevent backlash.
AP: We WERE the backlash.
SBB: People not listening were opportunists who betrayed their original beliefs who were clueless. The people who were ignoring the fact that rapes were going on could have said they were 2nd wave feminists, but they certainly weren't my kind. You have to look at things like the Occupy movement and the dynamics of political discourse that go on in groups like that came out of second wave feminism.
Idea of everyone having a chance to talk, developing theory collectively - out of experience of people's lives/etc. - all comes out of second wave feminism. I love 99%, other movements, that learn from this democratization.
Reason why I'm not in a feminist group is because you identify with more & see more creative possibilities right in the moment.
AUD: Regressed if women now doing plastic surgery to be perfect on their wedding day. Just the thought of it. It's not solved and in many ways, many women themselves are so retrograde, so much the enemy of feminism - how do you combat this in science fiction or in reality?
DN: Any of these conversations that don't include conversations about commoditization and capitalization of making money off of feminists or those scared of feminism - there are always people there with their cash register open.
AUD: idk which wave I am, taught feminism, rejected for Philosophy jobs b/c of being a woman, I'm 80...many ways for women to talk about being abused. Have to make sure not to sell ourselves cheaply or short. Don't take less for your work, less for your job, don't do more than a man would do for the same amount of money.
JG: Want to circle back to rape question. Book by Susan Brown Miller called "[?] & Rape" - there was a push-back by WOC about that book and how she characterized black men. WOC were like, look - there's a racial aspect of this, about how they are perceived, feeds into Americans' view of POC. Scary black man walking down the street.
Black people have to be home by 7.
Feminists younger than myself say there was never any push-back about feminist seminal texts. That's completely not true. We had raging arguments.
We had 4-hour long meeting once a year. We'd do business and then talk about everything else. People constantly hashing out feminist theory being published. Those were active documents. Weren't on the library shelf. We had to buy a copy, then talk about it, may have a whole program about it with childcare. I'm sad that those discussions never made it into contemporary discussions about date-rape, women wearing what they want, etc.
I came of age in Central Park Rape. Those men were doing bad things, but not that rape.
Lots of things from 1982-1989 only in that area, but then bigger issues.
AP: Judith Herman says rape in this society isn't illegal, merely regulated. Because rape is seen as a property crime. Certain people for whom it is a privilege.
Women assumed to be guilty of perjury before proven guilty of perjury. Unprosecutable crime. All of the assumptions about who gets to be a victim, who is taken seriously as a perpetrator, then we get into queer rape, etc.
Not just a crime about power, but the way all of us are kept in our place. Your lives, your movements - are dictated and curtailed because if you fall out of line, if you aren't masculine enough in the right ways - if you don't fit the gender policing, then - if you go to jail, they get to do that to you, too.
This is a tool of maintaining and entire social hierarchy.
AUD: 3 points: 99% collegiality didn't only come from feminists. Also [?] and Quakers. Much as I would love to claim that.
2: Two things that saved my life was Girl Scout camp - staffed & oriented for women where we did amazing things, and Suzy McKee Charnas. Joanna Russ has been mentioned.
3: What I'm seeing now in speculative fiction is the one exceptional woman surrounded by men. Where are the rest of us? What the hell happened? I hope we can change that.
DN: Thanks, great points. Business of context and change and internal discussion. I will say that I remember when nobody in my social circle challenged Transsexual Empire. It's a very nasty anti-trans book. And I remember that we shifted that through talking to each other. I remember watching that change in myself and also wanted to bring up in context of whether 2nd wave was about sexuality. Other book: about sadomachism.
Very complicated and nuanced. Essays in those books don't agree with each other.
JG: Pleasure and Danger by Carol Vance. Most of us had a lot of those books all side-by-side. People were deeply anti-SM. I find it deeply ironic when I have people who name-check Audre Lorde - she's in against SM, right? Those things can exist at the same time. People forget that.
JB: Idea that it's okay or not okay - all around me, people constantly try to validate themselves by de-validating someone else. I say second wave is an important category to get others to understand what ideas dominated for a certain period of time. Saying it's not alright to be concerned about something else is not what I meant to suggest, or that everyone has to be a social activist out on the streets when there are other ways to move forward.
Where do we get that condemnation or need to make others feel trivial in order for us to feel important?
SBB: 1982, Conference at Barnard. Very validating move for me. Split in feminism between essentialists and anti-sex, and people who said women have been---(lost recording this)
JB: Should explore your sexuality, should take as much power as men do. Remember teaching about this split. This was the other side of the split.
SSB: Dworkin. Heterosexual sex is always rape. Pornography - women should never be involved in looking at the images, that's a male practice.
DN: Essentialists believe that women DON'T look at images and don't get pleasure from it. People in the audience would be like, "Really? That's very interesting..." And then get into problem of being one of those weird women in a very weird context.
AP: Third wave feminists - don't care about theory, this is life or death, this is our lives. Second waves very much into ideas ---
AUD: NO.
AP: That was my experience. When third wave trying to come up with a way of dealing with things, we were very hostile to the idea of theory.
DN: And the second-wave feminists you encountered were academics and not activists.
Aud: Hard to see in dialogue: you hear that part of dialogue is about intersectionality. Then I heard you 2nd wave talk about roots in civil rights movements in 1960s and that doesn't fit if second wave feminism has its roots in the civil rights movement then how is it that the popular characterization of that dialogue is that intersectionality is a 3rd-wave feminism thing?
JG: People would got to meetings and write things up that appeared in articles and etc. but not books. You get what people remember versus what [??]. You have to dig a lot in libraries - if people are willing to talk, asking 5-10-20 minutes to ask you what this was like. My friend who's a photographer, veteran of civil rights movement - a letter written from her to her parents when she went to jail in the South. It's like any movement - very imperfect in what we translate from one movement to another, especially when one group is very, very angry.
DN: Publishing is white. Publishing at that time was male. White men who controlled publishing could tolerate = what was published.
JG: What people call intersectionality now - my collective was like that. It grew into that. Willingness to live with the hurt that we weren't always going to do this right. If willingness to come back to the table next day/week, that was how you got to those places to get to the next stage of talking.
JB: When people talk about feminism growing out of civil rights, also mean that women in civil rights not allowed to have a voice. There was another thing going on. Race and gender. If you don't know the history, you don't know that's what people are often talking about. That reaction to being excluded. In campaigns - why was I asked if I could type?
AP: Now we can push back in real time - not as easy before.
DN: When you say feminism grew out of civil rights movement, my own history: anti-Vietnam war movement - my own story gets elided by that. Anti-Veitnam War movement was really white. We did token thing. All of these things have to be learned. We all make mistakes because we don't know what we're dealing with.
JG: I get what you're saying about the Internet, but missing chunk about feminist publishing & women in print movement. Best example I know is Companeras - we know people who wrote in it. Book called Larissa - page 10 - I said wow, that character's black but not on the front cover. Friend was going to New York. Talked to publisher. They said black people don't read SF, white people won't buy it with a black person on the cover. I encouraged everyone to rip cover off and send it back to the publisher. I was in an environment where the books about lesbian rape and abuse came from Seal. Lesbian weddings, Considering Parenthood, all this information...That big chunk passed hand to hand.
AP: I was in North Carolina. If you were in NY or Chicago or LA, you had access to books. Couldn't get them in rural North Carolina. That's what made such a huge difference with the Internet. People can access these conversations.
AUD: Second wave being theory/3rd wave being experience. I am of second wave. [didn't record]
AUD Diantha: The idea that women on any campus would put up with things happening in North Carolina...in Ohio, we had 15 rapes on our campus. We organized Women Against Rape - WAR - dykes on bikes. We patrolled the campus. We made sure of it. I cannot for the life of me understand why women put up with that crap. When I was five years old my grandmother told me we are American Indians, we have no rights, what you have to do is stake your claim to your life and defend it.
In American Indian tribes, men who raped were put to death.
I have always banded together with working class women who don't care about theory, and we don't tolerate that shit.
I grew up in Appalachia. I lived in a log cabin with no electricity and I figured out women have to band together with other women because no one else will do it.
DN: Thank you.
AP: That sounded very rape victim-blaming. When 85% of a student population has been raped, have PTSD, when women studies department on campus is shutting you down, it's very difficult to have a concentrated response. It took 30 years, feds involved. Don't give me "I don't know why these women put up with it" because there were women who had to make choices between being out about sexuality/everything else, or just quietly graduating. If there's bitterness from second wave coming from me, that's what that was about. I understood their anxiety.
When your allies aren't with you, when you're afraid of rocking the boat, it's really hard to have a movement when every person is being told, "This is only happening to you and you're crazy."
DN: Everyone is speaking from their heart and that's what we wanted. Thanks for participating.
Saturday, 4-5:15
Panelists: Debbie Notkin (moderator), Susan Simensky Bietila, Dr. Janice M. Bogstad, Jackie Gross, Angeli Primlani, Roxanne Samer
I arrived late and this is incomplete! When people focused on individual stories, I often lost threads.
PS I WILL EDIT THIS MORE LATER.
JG: Want to make sure we record and transmit knowledge and dovetail experiences.
Diverse voices WERE voiced and we need to remember that.
Bogstad: Wanted to recover our voices b/c we were being told bad things about our capacity.
We weren't very conscious of the larger movement.
We also sort of - somebody has to say this - we weren't sure if we should be doing this. People kept telling us no one should come to our convention. We should be part feminist, or feminist-oriented.
When Janus nommed for Hugo, rumor was in Britain they didn't want to put us on the ballot because we were edited by two young women and thus couldn't be that important.
I'm not as old as Betty Friedan. I was reading her & the Second Sex and that sort of thing. Trying to achieve some sense of how I could be both female and me.
In Northern Wisconsin, we were fighting to get whole wheat flour.
I came down to Madison when I was 18 and so there was a bit more contact. The second wave had many different things going on. WisCon was a second-wave thing. Came about b/c nobody was talking to women SF authors except for us.
In my current incarnation, I teach feminist theory & second wave & yet I understand that those rules of thumb, those definitional categories, whatever, are really false but have to have them for people to start to think about what ideas or problems dominated the activity at a certain period of time. I don't really believe in 2nd/3rd wave, that stuff.
you can find people doing all sorts of things bettween what we like to call 1st & 2nd wave. Without conceptual core, however, it's hard to teach people.
Offended by definitions of 3rd-wave feminism b/c it's very offensive.
"Slutty feminism," "you 2nd wave women were apologetic about your sexuality & we're not - OH REALLY"
/laughter/
What really scares me is so many of the young people I teach, most of the females, believe that all the problems have been solved and that they can do anything they want, aren't going to be any barriers, and they can let their guard down. Ain't true. Doesn't mean we haven't made progress, just not true.
Young woman has been told consistently to use her initials if she wants to write science fiction.
How many tens of thousands of women read science fiction? And it's still perceived as male.
JG: Or to make your name sound white.
DN: One of the things I'm hearing from panelists is convesration about context and understanding the context. The people who believe that all the problems have been solved - "been solved" construction -no one solved the problems, no one did anything. Somehow the problems just got solved (passive voice). People in power just realized that they were wrong. Like that happens - like a lot.
I think a good fruitful question would be for each of us to talk about context - the context in which we becamse feminists because it has changed so much.
One example - I grew up in help wanted male & "help wanted female." A lot of people 20 years younger than me have never heard of that.
JG: When I really thought of it, I becamse a feminist b/c I went to all-female Catholic school.
All-female environments were awesome. Post-Vatican nuns - Franciscan - were awesome.
Never a feeling from them that I couldn't do something.
At the same time, with my parents, we went to school - you'll have to be better or twice as good, because you're black. My white friends said that's limiting & horrible. But that's a survival tactic that black parents do for kids.
I was one of the few black kids in my entire school. Changed by the time I left, but I learned how to speak up - that was a given, you were expected.
When I went to public high school, it was hard to sit back.
I met other girls who didn't have that experience. I would tell them it's okay to do that sort of thing. I knew things were being reported on news, that women were doing. First lineman job for phone company, things like that. Possibilities, but you had to work hard to get it.
Somthing always kind of ingrained.
It wasn't going to be given to you, but you had to fight for it.
Dovetail late 1960s/1970s. Rise of war of black middle class, looking back and lifting people with you.
Of course I would show other people what we did. Yes, my parents were good race parents, that's what they did. It was like, of course I'm a feminist. It wasn't until later that I realized there was black feminism.
SSB: Not like other girls. In Brooklyn, going to high school of music & art & then Brooklyn College, there were dress codes for women. No trousers. There was a guard in front of the library. If no dress/stockings, you couldn't go into the library. How Handmaid's Tale should we get about this?
At social events, couldn't call up a guy and ask him out socially if you went to a dance, you had to wait to be asked. The idea of doing any of these things made me vomit.
Stockings, girdles, etc. My mom standing over me saying I couldn't dress like X.
Used HS allowance to buy clothes at second-hand army store.
That was my reality.
AP: When I attended Uni of N Carolina. # of women raped on campus was something like 1/3 or 1/6. When you actually counted, it was something like 85%. Epidemic of sexual violence not being discussed or dealt with by anyone at all. Especially by second-wave feminism. It was a big deal to them that women could be on campus at all.
We wanted to talk about date rape & they would say they didn't want to talk about that.
Phenomenons like slut walk - we weren't doing anything nearly that radical. The idea of sexual agency and sexual freedom - it goes not just to women's rights but human rights, a person with a body.
So many victims, not enough stories being told. People saying we've rocked the boat this far - you want to reclaim the word "dykes?" You want to push it further? But we needed to.
When you think about how effective it is - there's an entire generation of women out there not talking about it.
Recently, the Department of Education is investigating Uni of N Carolina b/c it's gotten so far that a girl went to [?] to report this to try & get a restraining order, they threatened to expel her for creating a hostile environment for HIM to study in.
Duke was notorious. Affluent - less likely to be taken seriously. Their frats were notorious.
LaCrosse team will just make me cry. That system is so rigged.
JG: It's a D-1 school.
AP: Enough evidence that it even got to court is shocking and indicates to me that something had to have happened, given who those kids are. I was probably always a feminist but I wasn't really conscious of it until college.
DN: Really struck by business of don't rock the boat any further. I think that's really common in activist movements - race, class, sexual orientation, etc. Really common, really scary.
Only make progress if each next generation rocks the next generation's boat.
JB: We have to organize around the issues. In order for issues to be solved, - controlling reproductive rights, let's not use what little we have left. We have to organize or we will lose it. The ways that people are eating away at the right to birth control and ownership of your own body.
All these directions in which these things which we sort of take for granted are being attacked constantly. One thing after another.
DN: I don't understand why you can't organize around birth control & (something else).
JB: If we say we have to solve all the problems today, that makes it difficult.
DN: You can't ask people to move to back of the bus because something else takes priority.
RS: Discussions being had at the time about - making history available to younger generations. Capture (Jeff Smith) - ongoing symposium conducted through correspondence, pre-Internet. Recently been republished and available out there. Janus is being made available digitally. Helps lessen us-them dichotomy.
JB: Aurora, New Moon, Solarus, Witch and the New Moon. There were lots of things going on.
JL (audience): Comment on your don't rock the boat: POV that's coming from isn't so much of not wanting to make further progress but to prevent backlash.
AP: We WERE the backlash.
SBB: People not listening were opportunists who betrayed their original beliefs who were clueless. The people who were ignoring the fact that rapes were going on could have said they were 2nd wave feminists, but they certainly weren't my kind. You have to look at things like the Occupy movement and the dynamics of political discourse that go on in groups like that came out of second wave feminism.
Idea of everyone having a chance to talk, developing theory collectively - out of experience of people's lives/etc. - all comes out of second wave feminism. I love 99%, other movements, that learn from this democratization.
Reason why I'm not in a feminist group is because you identify with more & see more creative possibilities right in the moment.
AUD: Regressed if women now doing plastic surgery to be perfect on their wedding day. Just the thought of it. It's not solved and in many ways, many women themselves are so retrograde, so much the enemy of feminism - how do you combat this in science fiction or in reality?
DN: Any of these conversations that don't include conversations about commoditization and capitalization of making money off of feminists or those scared of feminism - there are always people there with their cash register open.
AUD: idk which wave I am, taught feminism, rejected for Philosophy jobs b/c of being a woman, I'm 80...many ways for women to talk about being abused. Have to make sure not to sell ourselves cheaply or short. Don't take less for your work, less for your job, don't do more than a man would do for the same amount of money.
JG: Want to circle back to rape question. Book by Susan Brown Miller called "[?] & Rape" - there was a push-back by WOC about that book and how she characterized black men. WOC were like, look - there's a racial aspect of this, about how they are perceived, feeds into Americans' view of POC. Scary black man walking down the street.
Black people have to be home by 7.
Feminists younger than myself say there was never any push-back about feminist seminal texts. That's completely not true. We had raging arguments.
We had 4-hour long meeting once a year. We'd do business and then talk about everything else. People constantly hashing out feminist theory being published. Those were active documents. Weren't on the library shelf. We had to buy a copy, then talk about it, may have a whole program about it with childcare. I'm sad that those discussions never made it into contemporary discussions about date-rape, women wearing what they want, etc.
I came of age in Central Park Rape. Those men were doing bad things, but not that rape.
Lots of things from 1982-1989 only in that area, but then bigger issues.
AP: Judith Herman says rape in this society isn't illegal, merely regulated. Because rape is seen as a property crime. Certain people for whom it is a privilege.
Women assumed to be guilty of perjury before proven guilty of perjury. Unprosecutable crime. All of the assumptions about who gets to be a victim, who is taken seriously as a perpetrator, then we get into queer rape, etc.
Not just a crime about power, but the way all of us are kept in our place. Your lives, your movements - are dictated and curtailed because if you fall out of line, if you aren't masculine enough in the right ways - if you don't fit the gender policing, then - if you go to jail, they get to do that to you, too.
This is a tool of maintaining and entire social hierarchy.
AUD: 3 points: 99% collegiality didn't only come from feminists. Also [?] and Quakers. Much as I would love to claim that.
2: Two things that saved my life was Girl Scout camp - staffed & oriented for women where we did amazing things, and Suzy McKee Charnas. Joanna Russ has been mentioned.
3: What I'm seeing now in speculative fiction is the one exceptional woman surrounded by men. Where are the rest of us? What the hell happened? I hope we can change that.
DN: Thanks, great points. Business of context and change and internal discussion. I will say that I remember when nobody in my social circle challenged Transsexual Empire. It's a very nasty anti-trans book. And I remember that we shifted that through talking to each other. I remember watching that change in myself and also wanted to bring up in context of whether 2nd wave was about sexuality. Other book: about sadomachism.
Very complicated and nuanced. Essays in those books don't agree with each other.
JG: Pleasure and Danger by Carol Vance. Most of us had a lot of those books all side-by-side. People were deeply anti-SM. I find it deeply ironic when I have people who name-check Audre Lorde - she's in against SM, right? Those things can exist at the same time. People forget that.
JB: Idea that it's okay or not okay - all around me, people constantly try to validate themselves by de-validating someone else. I say second wave is an important category to get others to understand what ideas dominated for a certain period of time. Saying it's not alright to be concerned about something else is not what I meant to suggest, or that everyone has to be a social activist out on the streets when there are other ways to move forward.
Where do we get that condemnation or need to make others feel trivial in order for us to feel important?
SBB: 1982, Conference at Barnard. Very validating move for me. Split in feminism between essentialists and anti-sex, and people who said women have been---(lost recording this)
JB: Should explore your sexuality, should take as much power as men do. Remember teaching about this split. This was the other side of the split.
SSB: Dworkin. Heterosexual sex is always rape. Pornography - women should never be involved in looking at the images, that's a male practice.
DN: Essentialists believe that women DON'T look at images and don't get pleasure from it. People in the audience would be like, "Really? That's very interesting..." And then get into problem of being one of those weird women in a very weird context.
AP: Third wave feminists - don't care about theory, this is life or death, this is our lives. Second waves very much into ideas ---
AUD: NO.
AP: That was my experience. When third wave trying to come up with a way of dealing with things, we were very hostile to the idea of theory.
DN: And the second-wave feminists you encountered were academics and not activists.
Aud: Hard to see in dialogue: you hear that part of dialogue is about intersectionality. Then I heard you 2nd wave talk about roots in civil rights movements in 1960s and that doesn't fit if second wave feminism has its roots in the civil rights movement then how is it that the popular characterization of that dialogue is that intersectionality is a 3rd-wave feminism thing?
JG: People would got to meetings and write things up that appeared in articles and etc. but not books. You get what people remember versus what [??]. You have to dig a lot in libraries - if people are willing to talk, asking 5-10-20 minutes to ask you what this was like. My friend who's a photographer, veteran of civil rights movement - a letter written from her to her parents when she went to jail in the South. It's like any movement - very imperfect in what we translate from one movement to another, especially when one group is very, very angry.
DN: Publishing is white. Publishing at that time was male. White men who controlled publishing could tolerate = what was published.
JG: What people call intersectionality now - my collective was like that. It grew into that. Willingness to live with the hurt that we weren't always going to do this right. If willingness to come back to the table next day/week, that was how you got to those places to get to the next stage of talking.
JB: When people talk about feminism growing out of civil rights, also mean that women in civil rights not allowed to have a voice. There was another thing going on. Race and gender. If you don't know the history, you don't know that's what people are often talking about. That reaction to being excluded. In campaigns - why was I asked if I could type?
AP: Now we can push back in real time - not as easy before.
DN: When you say feminism grew out of civil rights movement, my own history: anti-Vietnam war movement - my own story gets elided by that. Anti-Veitnam War movement was really white. We did token thing. All of these things have to be learned. We all make mistakes because we don't know what we're dealing with.
JG: I get what you're saying about the Internet, but missing chunk about feminist publishing & women in print movement. Best example I know is Companeras - we know people who wrote in it. Book called Larissa - page 10 - I said wow, that character's black but not on the front cover. Friend was going to New York. Talked to publisher. They said black people don't read SF, white people won't buy it with a black person on the cover. I encouraged everyone to rip cover off and send it back to the publisher. I was in an environment where the books about lesbian rape and abuse came from Seal. Lesbian weddings, Considering Parenthood, all this information...That big chunk passed hand to hand.
AP: I was in North Carolina. If you were in NY or Chicago or LA, you had access to books. Couldn't get them in rural North Carolina. That's what made such a huge difference with the Internet. People can access these conversations.
AUD: Second wave being theory/3rd wave being experience. I am of second wave. [didn't record]
AUD Diantha: The idea that women on any campus would put up with things happening in North Carolina...in Ohio, we had 15 rapes on our campus. We organized Women Against Rape - WAR - dykes on bikes. We patrolled the campus. We made sure of it. I cannot for the life of me understand why women put up with that crap. When I was five years old my grandmother told me we are American Indians, we have no rights, what you have to do is stake your claim to your life and defend it.
In American Indian tribes, men who raped were put to death.
I have always banded together with working class women who don't care about theory, and we don't tolerate that shit.
I grew up in Appalachia. I lived in a log cabin with no electricity and I figured out women have to band together with other women because no one else will do it.
DN: Thank you.
AP: That sounded very rape victim-blaming. When 85% of a student population has been raped, have PTSD, when women studies department on campus is shutting you down, it's very difficult to have a concentrated response. It took 30 years, feds involved. Don't give me "I don't know why these women put up with it" because there were women who had to make choices between being out about sexuality/everything else, or just quietly graduating. If there's bitterness from second wave coming from me, that's what that was about. I understood their anxiety.
When your allies aren't with you, when you're afraid of rocking the boat, it's really hard to have a movement when every person is being told, "This is only happening to you and you're crazy."
DN: Everyone is speaking from their heart and that's what we wanted. Thanks for participating.