The Feminist Standpoint Revisited, And Other Essays

Nancy C.m. Hartsock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000301410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Nancy C. M. Hartsock offers her current thinking about the development of feminist political economy, focusing on the relationships between feminist theory and activism, feminism and Marxism, and postmodernism and feminist politics.

Part One
Political Movements and Political Theories

Over the course of 1973, a group of feminists in Washington, D.C., came together to try to overcome some of the fragmentation of the D.C. women’s movement after a bitter split between lesbian and heterosexual women. By the time I arrived in Washington and became involved with the group in the fall of 1973, that group had decided to begin publication of a journal that was to be more than a journal, really an organizing tool. As Charlotte Bunch put it, the story of Quest’s early years consists of several stories:¹ It is a story of feminist theory and its evolution in the women’s movement, of tensions between theory and action and between intellectual and activist demands. It is the story of a feminist group determined to create a nonauthoritarian work process based on feminist principles of cooperation and sharing of skills, a process that would also meet the rigorous demands of publishing. Finally, it is a story about the effort to build a feminist institution with an independent economic base controlled by women. We saw producing the journal not as an end in itself but as one part of a series of strategies. Most important, we saw the journal as a way to debate issues and develop ideas that could be the basis for a new national organization or (with the ambition characteristic of the 1970s) a new political party.

As Karen Kollias wrote in the introduction to the first issue:

Our goal is to promote a continuing, active search for ideologies and strategies that will bring about the most comprehensive change by the most effective and humane methods Quest wishes to explore differences and similarities in ideologies and strategies among the various segments of the women’s movement. We are about strategies. Quest wishes to contribute to the evolution of better strategy and tactics, to be a process for evaluating previous theory and practice. … We are about change. We assume that the women’s movement, and those involved in it, consider complete and fundamental change as a primary goal. We are about ideology,… The time has come to expand feminist ideology. Differences in geographical location, race, class, sex preference, religion, age and other factors must be included for a broader, more realistic ideology that moves toward a workable base for unity.²

We shared the conviction that political action relied on political theory and that political theory was central to the success of activism. We aimed our journal at activists and worked hard to get activists to write about their experiences, their ideas for the future, and what they had learned about successful and unsuccessful strategies. Quest, as both an organization and a journal, was attempting to be politically relevant to current issues and intellectually rigorous in developing the long-term implications of theory. We saw questions of class, race, and sexual oppression as central to our movement. Many of us had worked in the civil rights movement, and others had been active in the D.C. Statehood Party.

Our living in a majority Black city made race a prominent and unavoidable issue for us. Issues of class in the women’s movement were usually not addressed but had been raised by the Furies, and that group had done some of the most fruitful thinking and writing about class at the time. The Furies was a lesbian-feminist separatist collective that split from the rest of the D.C. women’s liberation movement in 1971. Its members decided that they would not only work together but also live together. In a matter of days, class issues became a difficult problem. The group, however, avoided further splits and began a series of analyses of how class functioned in the women’s movement.

Several of the Quest staff members had been part of the Furies and others had been close to that group.³ This background was important in the kinds of issues and analyses Quest sought out and published. The focus on class was also a result of the fact that over half of the original staff grew up in lower- or working-class circumstances, and most of the staff had experienced the strains that class differences had produced in the women’s movement. This too became an important concern in the kinds of analyses Quest sought out and published. The issue of oppression on the basis of sexuality was also an issue that had roots in the activist histories of a number of staff members. Quest came to articulate the position that lesbian feminism was not a matter of identity but a useful political perspective that could guide feminist analysis, whether produced by lesbians or not.⁴ This represented an important early critique of identity politics.

In the manner of many feminist groups, we wanted to use our organization to prefigure the society we wanted. Therefore, we thought carefully about how to organize our work, how to assign responsibility, how to allow for power differences, and so on. Quest for some years was run out of Charlotte Bunch’s office while she was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Left think tank in Washington, D.C. We usually had three full-time staff people, who sometimes had to exist on unemployment insurance, and ten or so part-time staff people, and later we developed other kinds of relationships to the journal/organization, depending on the time and effort people could contribute. We were very conscious that we needed to recognize the specific work that staff members did and not to insist that we were all equal or all, in a sense, alike. We wanted to recognize and develop our different skills. Unlike Off Our Backs, the other national feminist publication that came out of Washington, D.C. (and is still publishing), we did not all do layout. Indeed, after my own first (lengthy) attempt to add a letter to a laid-out page, I was banned from all further layout activities and became instead the subscription department.

All this sounds very simple and easy from the perspective of 1997, but in fact none of it was. We were inventing our politics, our organizations, and ourselves, all at the same time. During my first years of working on and with Quest, I sometimes found my situation problematic: I was the only academic (an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University) and, perhaps more important, the only practicing heterosexual in a group and in a city that had very recently experienced one of the more bitter “gay-straight” splits.

Developing our ideas about political change took first priority, and we made it a point to have dinner before our regular weekly meetings where we planned special issues, decided on new directions, and worked through the politics of the articles we were going to publish or wanted to find. The editing process was very much a part of what I now refer to as collective writing. The group as a whole discussed each piece and the political directions we believed it was important to stress. Then the work was assigned to a committee of two that aggressively edited the work. Although some authors from outside the group were able to keep their own article titles, titles were more often than not collectively invented during our weekly meetings. The products, especially those written by group members, could not be attributed in any clear way to the original author. The questions we wanted to address were very large ones. How involved should we be in the efforts to gain statehood for D.C.? What should we say about prostitution? Where should we look for money to publish? How should we relate to the United Nations Decade of Women? What kind of society do we want? How do we get what we want?

This is the general context in which the essays in this section were written. Chapter 1, “Political Change: Two Perspectives on Power,” originally published in summer 1974, was my first effort to write about feminism in a theoretical way. As it happened, the “famous feminist” we had asked to write an essay on political change was too busy. And so I volunteered to do it. Until I wrote this essay, I had seen my feminism as separate from my academic work. But I began to see how some of what I had learned in graduate school could be of use in the nonacademic, political work I was doing. This piece, published in the first volume of Quest: A Feminist Quarterly, as we were learning how to write, edit, and publish, went through many drafts and many editors. I recall seeing one with corrections and changes in three different colors of pencil, from three different staff members.⁵

“Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective” (Chapter 2) proved to be a similar experience. It was very much a product of a group discussion about what we wanted to say as a journal and a political entity about the 1975 Socialist Feminist Conference. Those of us on the staff who had attended found ourselves profoundly dissatisfied with and angered by the speakers’ tone and the agenda of the conference. We agreed on the points to be made, but I was the only one of us with a background in Marxist theory, as opposed to our shared backgrounds in Left and feminist activism. And so after a group discussion I wrote the article “Staying Alive” (Chapter 3—almost the only thing I have ever written without a colon in the title), which was a part of our special issue, titled Work, Work, Work, published in winter 1976–1977. This issue was a natural topic of concern for me, given the centrality of work in the Marxist theory, which has so influenced my own work. In this essay, as well as in “Fundamental Feminism,” the freedom I had as an academic to explore different theories, the time to read, and to teach what I was reading contributed in a significant way to what I was able to bring to Quest.

By 1979–1980, it had become evident to a number of us that without institutional support of entities like IPS the demands of publishing a journal with few resources other than our subscription income precluded work on our more activist goals, and it was also becoming evident that our hopes for a national organization with more radical goals than NOW (the National Organization for Women) were futile. A number of us moved in different directions. I had by then divorced and moved closer to my job in Baltimore, and I became a part of a group of women who wanted to revive and expand the Women’s Union of Baltimore, one of the socialist feminist organizations established in a number of cities in the seventies. We had a series of discussions about how socialist feminists in particular could contribute to feminist politics more generally, and about which issues might allow for more-inclusive feminist politics. We decided on a focus of violence against women and developed a series of speak-outs and workshops for community organizations.

By this time, of course, women’s studies was a presence on many other campuses. Chapter 4, “Difference and Domination in the Women’s Movement,” began as a contribution to a conference on scholarship and feminism held at Barnard in 1980. Taken together, these writings represent for me the kind of work that can be done in the context of a movement: The essays were part of a series of ongoing and almost daily discussions about how work should be organized, how to make political change, and how to understand what we were doing on an everyday basis.

I should also stress, however, that despite the number of notes, neither I nor my political science colleagues at Johns Hopkins saw these articles as academic work. Although women’s studies had begun in some places as early as 1969 or 1970, the program was inaugurated at Johns Hopkins only in 1988. In fact, when I began to teach there in 1974, the graduating class was the first ever to include women and the student body was 65 percent male. Feminist theory was for me then clearly something I could not do in my “day job.” These essays bear the marks of the time in which they were written, and I have, with the exception of putting back some material edited out of the published version of “Difference and Domination in the Women’s Movement,” left them in their published forms. They carry the sense of very large goals and the sense of hope and possibility that was then available. They also represent a kind of melding of the works of scholarship and political activism that may have been unique to the time but may also suggest some new possibilities for exchanges and common activities among academics and activists.

Notes

1. The account of Quest’s history is from Charlotte Bunch’s Introduction in Building Feminist Theory: Essays from Quest: A Feminist Quarterly (New York: Longman, 1981). She wrote the introduction to the collection of essays, which was then collectively edited (probably far more than she would have wished) by the other editors of the volume: Jane Flax, Alexa Freeman, Mary-Helen Mautner, and me. With the author’s permission, I have reproduced much of pp. xv-xviii. See also Charlotte Bunch, Introduction, Passionate Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).

2. Karen Kollias, “Spiral of Change: Introduction to Quest,’ Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 1, 1 (Summer 1974), 7–9.

3. This section significantly draws on the rest of Bunch’s Introduction. The initial organizing group for Quest included Dolores Bargowski, Rita Mae Brown, Charlotte Bunch, Jane Dolkart, Beverly Fisher-Manick, Alexa Freeman, Nancy Hartsock, Karen Kollias, Mary-Helen Mautner, Emily Medvec, Gerry Traina, and Juanita Weaver.

4. See Charlotte Bunch, “Not for Lesbians Only,” Building Feminist Theory, pp. 67–73. (Originally a speech she delivered to the first socialist feminist conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Summer 1975, it was reprinted in Passionate Politics, pp. 174–181). It should be read as a companion piece to my “Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective,” Chapter 2 in this volume. Both pieces represent instances of what I will call “collective writing.” As Bunch noted in her Introduction, many of the articles grew out of discussions among the staff and with other movement organizers who were interviewed, cajoled, and encouraged to put their insights on paper (p. xviii).

5. This was all precomputer, so we tried to keep retyping to a minimum.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE: Political Movements and Political Theories
• PART TWO: Reoccupying Marxism as Feminism
• PART THREE: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Politics
• Afterword
• Index