the feminism of uncertainty by ann snitow

8/20/2019 The Feminism of Uncertainty by Ann Snitow

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A Gender Diary A N N S N I T O W

The Feminism of Uncertainty


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THE FEMINISM

OF UNCERTAINTY

A Gender Diary

Ann Snitow

Durham and London, 2015


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THE FEMINISM

OF UNCERTAINTY

A Gender Diary

Ann Snitow

Durham and London, 2015


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© 2015 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper ∞

Designed by Kristina Kachele

Typeset in Quadraat Pro by Copperline

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Snitow, Ann Barr, 1943–

The eminism o uncertainty : a gender diary / Ann Snitow.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

978-0-8223-5860-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-5874-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7567-8 (e-book)

1. Feminism—United States. 2. Feminism. 3. Snitow,

Ann Barr, 1943– 4. Feminists—United States—Biography.

I. Title.

1426.S615 2015

305.420973—dc23

2015006353

Cover art: Nancy Spero, The Race, 1988. © The Nancy Spero

and Leon Golub Foundation or the Arts. Licensed by ,

New York, NY. Photo courtesy the collection o Francie

Bishop Good and David Horvitz.


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to the past and future feminists


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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The Feminism o Uncertainty: I 1

Part I CONT INUI NG A GENDE R DIA RY

1 A Gender Diary 21

2 Critiquing a Gender Diary 59

Part II MOT HER S/LO VER S

3 Introduction to Mothers/Lovers 71

4 Dorothy Dinnerstein: Creative Unknowing 80

5 From the Gender Diary: Living with Dorothy Dinnerstein

(1923 – 1992) 93

6 Changing Our Minds about Motherhood: 1963 – 1990 97

7 The Sex Wars in Feminism: Retrenchment versus

Transormation 123

8 The Poet o Bad Girls: Angela Carter (1940 – 1992) 139

9 Inside the Circus Tent: Excerpts rom an Interview withAngela Carter, 1988 148

10 The Beast Within: Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo,

by David Garnett 153

Part III THE FEM INI ST PIC AR ESQ UE

11 Introduction to the Feminist Picaresque 159

12 Occupying Greenham Common 163

13 Feminist Futures in the Former East Bloc 19114 Feminism Travels: Cautionar y Tales 204

15 Who are the Polish Feminists? (Slawka) 216

16 “Should I Marry Him?” Questions rom Students 228


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17 The Peripatetic Feminist Activist/Proessor Spends One Day

in a Small City in Albania 238

18 Certainty and Doubt in the Classroom: Teaching Film in

Prison 241

Part IV REF UGE ES FROM UT OPI A

19 Introduction to Reugees rom Utopia 273

20 Remembering, Forgetting, and the Making o

The Feminist Memoir Project 275

21 The Politics o Passion: Ellen Willis (1941 – 2006) 293

22 Returning to the Well: Revisiting Shulamith Firestone’s

The Dialectic o Sex 297

Part V THE FEMIN ISM OF UNC ERTAINT Y

23 Introduction to the Feminism o Uncertainty 307

24 Lie Sentence: My Uncertainty Principle 310

25 Doubt’s Visionary: Doris Lessing 316

26 Utopia, Downsized: A Farrago 328

27 The Feminism o Uncertainty: II 330

Appendix: Publication History 335

Bibliography 339

Index 355

A photo gallery appears afer page 264.


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the acknowledgments afer each piece collected here, I’ve named the

many who helped me in so many ways, over so many years. I thank them all

again or a lietime o intense conversations, actions taken together, and

then rethought. How exciting it’s been — and continues to be.

This collection could never have come together without Katie Detwiler,

whose technical skills and warm intellectual company have made this project

delightul rather than onerous. A number o riends have been marvelous

critical readers. They have helped me, encouraged me, rescued me. I thank,

or their good ear, brilliant edits, and long empathy with my doings: Cynthia

Carr, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Faludi, Evelyn Frankord, Daniel Goode,

Karen Hopenwasser, Judith Levine, Henry Shapiro, Meredith Tax, Leonore

Tieer, and Carole Vance. I thank, too, or their support and skill, my editors

at Dissent : Michael Walzer, Judy Walzer, Michael Kazin, and Maxine Phillips.Alan Snitow and Deborah Kauman have been ellow travelers or years.

Discussions with them have enriched all I do.

I thank Nanette Rainone, creator o the radio show “Womankind,” on

- New York, or being the best and most helpul boss I have ever

had and or giving me the opportunity to talk about eminism or hours and

hours on the radio, 1970 – 1979.

No one who writes personal essays today should omit a thank you to Phil-

lip Lopate, champion o the orm, inspiring practitioner, generous reader.These are the members o my first consciousness-raising group, 1969 –

1970, the ounding group o New York Radical Feminists called the Stanton-

Anthony Brigade: Minda Bickman, Diane Crothers, Shulamith Firestone,


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Martha Gershun, Anne Koedt, Cellestine Ware, and o my long-term

group (1974 – ca. 1992), called The Sex Fools or the Third Street Circle, de-

pending on our mood: Ros Baxandall, Bonnie Bellow, Cynthia Carr, Judy

Coburn, Shaelagh Doyle, Karen Durbin, Deirdre English, Sally George, Brett

Harvey, M. Mark, Irene Peslikis, Alix Kates Shulman, Katie Taylor, Ellen Wil-lis. What superb company you have been. Our rich conversations and your

loyal riendship over all these years have been pure gold.

To the many women active in the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskorce

() and the writers, editors, and designers o Caught Looking: Feminism,

Pornography, and Censorship: How would I have gotten through the perilous

eminist sex wars without you? Thank you. And thank you, too, or the buoy-

ant company o all those who banded together in No More Nice Girls; we

dressed up and marched our eet off trying to protect the right to abortionor all women.

Elzbieta Matynia, director o The New School’s summer program in Po-

land, “Democracy and Diversity” (1992 – present), created a teaching and

learning environment more effective than any I have known; I thank her or

my precious time in Krakow and Wroclaw, twenty summers which have been

the wellspring o some o the essays here. I thank, too, Hana Cervinkova,

who warmly supported the school with tactical brilliance.

The members o the Network o East- West Women are a constant support

and inspiration to my ongoing writing and activism. I can name only a ew

here rom East Central Europe whom I met early on and whose inspiration

sealed my love or eminist work in the region: Sonja Licht, Slawka Walczew-

ska, Malgorzata Fuszara, Malgorzata Tarasiewicz (Director o ), Lepa

Mladjenovic, Roma Ciesla, Beata Kozak, Barbara Limanowska, Wanda No-

wicka, Bozena Jawien. Thank you, too, to the many students rom the region

who are now riends and colleagues. To the many U.S.-based members othe Network: You were its mainstay rom the start, and I am in the process

o writing about you and will thank you one by one. What a wild ride we had

together in the years right afer 1989.

To Cynthia Carr, Amber Hollibaugh, and Gayle Rubin, thank you or ex-

cellent advice about what an essay collection can be. To Aviva Goode, Bill

Eis, and Bruce Kennedy: Thank you or helping me sort out the details o

publishing. To Alice Gavin and Stephanie Damoff: Thank you or careul and

thoughtul editorial assistance. To Julienne Obadia and Beth Weiman: Thank you or wonderully rescuing me rom reeall post-Katie.

To all who joined together in Take Back the Future (2002 – 2006) during

the dreadul George W. Bush years: Thank you or your heartening company


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in those dark times, and thanks particularly to Drucilla Cornell, who helped

ound the group, and to Judith Levine, who partnered in keeping it going.

Your ideas about activism are a constant resource.

I thank Eugene Lang College and The New School or giving me a sup-

portive, ascinating, university home since 1986. I’ve learned much rom mycolleagues there and want particularly to acknowledge all those who helped

me bring Gender Studies back to the university (twice). You are so many I can

only mention here those who were there at the beginning in 1986: the late

Janet Abu-Lughod, Seyla Benhabib, Louise Tilley, Vera Zolberg — and, later,

Rayna Rapp, our first Gender Studies and Feminist Theory director (1994).

You have all been magnificent colleagues, with just the right mixture o ded-

ication and humor to sustain us or what turned out to be a long haul. I’ve

had the good ortune to co-teach several courses — about eminism, race,the 1960s, and the Lef — with my colleague, Victoria Hattam. Thank you

or how much I learned and or the lovely structures we built in our efforts

to understand civil rights and women’s liberation. I’ve had an extraordinary

reader in my colleague, Kate Eichhorn. Thank you or hours o exchanges

about modern women’s movements; your questions have inspired (more and

more) work.

Thank you to the New York Institute or the Humanities, who gave a home

to the seminar I ran there rom 1982 to 1994, “Sex, Gender, and Consumer

Culture.” This group generated an extraordinary amount o creative work

during the years we talked together.

I am grateul to the Institut ur die Wissenschafen vom Menschen in Vi-

enna, where I was in residence or an interesting semester, 1999 – 2000, and

to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which made me a Ful-

bright Specialist and supported one o my trips to Albania.

I am so grateul to my colleagues in Gender Studies at the JagiellonianUniversity in Krakow (Beata Kowalska), at the Central European University

in Budapest (Nancy Stepan, Joanna Regulska, and Jasmina Lukic), at the Bel-

grade Women’s Studies Center (Dasa Duhacek), at Babes-Bolyai University in

Cluj (Eniko Magyari-Vince), at the University o Bucharest (Mihaela Miroiu),

at Masaryk University in Brno (Iva Smidova), at Maria Curie-Skłodowska Uni-

versity in Lublin (Tomek Kitlinski), at Warsaw University (Agnieszka Graff),

at the European University o Tirana (Ermira Danaj), and many others or

inviting me to talk to your students. These visits have been landmarks in myeminist teaching in East Central Europe. We all share a sense o surprise:

No one expected that the Gender Studies programs you developed would

ever exist.


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I thank Laura Micham and the Sallie Bingham Center or Women’s History

and Culture at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library or offering my papers

and audio tapes a place in their extraordinary archive o eminist activism.

With her dedication and kindness, Laura raised my valuation o the piles o

material generated in a messy activist lie.At Duke University press I thank the amazing Ken Wissoker, the kind and

ever-helpul Elizabeth Ault, Amy Ruth Buchanan, Kristina Kachele, and Sara

Leone. Thank you to the two anonymous readers who warmly supported this

book and helped to make it better. My wonderul indexer, Julienne Obadia,

has turned the categories in this book into poetry. Thank you.

At Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital, I thank Dr. Jason Konner; his di-

rectness, brilliance, and warm support made so many things possible. Dr.

Phillip Bukberg has also been my without whom nothing. And nothing at all would be possible without Susan Hener.

I have written a number o these pieces where the phone and domestic

distractions couldn’t reach me, in caés. These secret hideouts can only work

when the staff welcomes writers who sit drinking coffee or hours. So thank

you to Dominique Ansel and his staff, to Rosa at the Caé Dante, and to

everyone at Hiroko’s.

Finally, my love and deep gratitude to Daniel Goode — composer and clar-

inetist. I eel so lucky: “She shall have music wherever she goes. . . .” Thank

you or the delights o our busy, crazy, happy lie together.

November 2014


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INTRODUCTION

The Feminism o Uncertainty: I

Utopia, Activism, Uncertainty

To my initial surprise, I have been able to make a short list o preoccupa-

tions that have marked the thirty-five years o writing gathered here. First,

as I reread these essays, now clustered together to orm new patterns, every-

where I find the belie in the importance o imagining a better world — call

it utopian yearning. But also everywhere here, this hopeulness collapses

into utopia’s common twin, ironic skepticism. This combination is wonder-

ully recorded in a typical remark o my parents’ generation: “A new world is

coming” — their dream o socialism — words ollowed over the years with

ever-darkening laughter: “We should live so long.” Next, running through-

out, I find the assumption that, or me, eminist activism is necessary. (No

doubt this is a choice, but it hasn’t elt like one.) Finally, also all through, I

hear a thrumming, inescapable, and sometimes much valued tone o uncer-

tainty, an acceptance o the blundering in the dark that is part o all activism.Everyone who engages in the tragicomedy o activism will negotiate the

stretch between speculative desire and the shortall o action in her or his

own way. Happy endings require that one set sail toward a near enough hori-

zon and keep one’s eyes off the inevitable: ailure, conusion, and the alling

out o comrades. There is no right way to balance these things, and this book

is not meant to be exemplary. What it does offer is a variety o descriptions

o how one person has tried to locate eminism in her lie — in situations

that keep changing.I have acted (and written) with passionate conviction while constantly

wondering where such actions lie in larger schemes o things. Like Doris

Lessing, a novelist whom I have treasured in all her phases, I am subject to


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disconcerting shifs in my perception o scale. Today we marched against

recent homophobic violence in Greenwich Village; tomorrow New York City

is under water and men and women (i they are still so identified) are travel-

ling over our momentary Bohemia in boats, gazing down with incomprehen-

sion at our ragged neighborhood through thirty eet o water. Does anythingeminist activists once did shape what these travelers o the uture are saying

and doing?

As my riend V. says, who cares? For her, the only thing that matters is to

be vital in one’s own moment. The afer-lives o our thoughts or acts are o

no consequence. Since our being and intentions cannot be remembered or

retrieved, what we do can never confidently be assigned a long-term value,

pernicious or benign. Forget the uture, V. says, as the uture will orget us.

But, then, V. is not an activist.

I became a eminist activist in 1969. My first consciousness- raising meeting

in the all o that year — quite by chance and thanks to the urgings o my

riend Cellestine Ware — turned out to be the ounding o New York Radi-

cal Feminists. There’s no counting the number o meetings that ollowed.

(Once, a riend going in the other direction on the street called out to me in

alarm: “Oh, dear. Am I missing a meeting?”) Many have recorded what that

time elt like: a love affair, a revelation, a little click o the lens that reocused

everything. So now I was a eminist or lie. But what would this mean? The

particular rush I experienced in those first months couldn’t maintain itsel

or two breaths. Sisterhood crumbled at a touch, weakened by differences

o race, class, and political traditions, and also by damaged selves and the

“tears o things.” Our astonishing and bracing rage at patriarchy was neces-

sary but insufficient or the long haul.

From 1969 onward, polemics and reviews poured rom me, but all that isabsent rom this collection because it was champagne with a fizz that soon

went. Though I didn’t know it then, behind all that renzy I was searching or

ways to do eminist writing, teaching, and activism that would be resilient

enough to sustain this love I elt or the women’s liberation movement into a

uture I might happily inhabit. This book includes a sampling o my writing

between 1978 and 2014. These pieces seem to me to explore a eminism I

hope can endure yet be flexible enough to turn and turn about, through the

shape-shifing o history, while remaining linked to my early utopian emi-nist desires, desires which linger even when they seem ar to seek.

It would be easy to say that some ineluctable logic and beauty I discovered

in my early encounters with eminism cured primal wounds and ueled my


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continuous engagement. And, to be sure, that would be one piece o the

story — though one can’t help remarking that many women, even some who

desperately need change, have seemed impervious to this allure. I suspect,

rather, that to understand such a relentless commitment, I would need a

longer narrative, a trip urther back to my girlhood, when I had no consciouseminist ideas whatsoever — though perhaps I already had what I might rec-

ognize now as eminist eelings.

The amily breakast table: My mother and ather are sitting at the head and

oot o this small table, I and my younger brother between them, say 10 and

5 years old. Our parents are both reading The New York Times, my ather

placid, enjoying his usual burnt toast with marmalade, my mother, increas-

ingly agitated. She reads out something — probably about the evil o racismor the injustice o poverty or the stupidity o the government — and here is

her ofen-repeated remark, which has mattered so much: “Something must be

done!”

Something must be done? Such a call to action requires quite a lot o un-

packing. For a (newly) middle-class woman, the child o restless, unulfilled,

and socially powerless immigrants, a woman who observed with longing her

ather’s exits rom home to meet other men at the Working Men’s Circle while

her gifed mother stewed at home, a woman who became a communist in 1933

and passed in the late 1940s into anxious post-McCarthy retreat, a woman

who then reinvented radical politics or hersel hidden in this solid suburban

scene, such words have many, layered meanings. What could this still-hungry

mother o mine have imagined we at that table should or could do?

My ather, also the child o struggling immigrants, and with progressive

values himsel, had no expectation that he could change the world; he was

delighted to be part o it and, starting rom scratch, to succeed on its terms.But on my mother’s side the inheritance is clear: Changing the world is an

absolute duty; and — though this part was never voiced — such work is also

a deep pleasure, offering a path into a significant lie. Looking back at this

primal scene, the ounding scene o “politics” or both my brother and me,

I see how essential the Lef- wing utopian dreams o my parents’ generation

were to us both. But the source o my eminism also makes an appearance at

that breakast table. Creative as my mother was in finding ways “to do some-

thing,” she was also constantly balked in her efforts to be an active, publicbeing. She was, alas, merely a woman. When, finally, Women’s Liberation

took wing in all directions, her anger used with mine; eminism was simply

it or both o us, the best salve or our wounded hearts.


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Guilt was an element in our activism too, o course. Afer all, how could

we be sitting at this well-stocked table while so many we read about were su-

ering? But such guilt is well-trodden ground. And even in extremis, activism is

not inevitable; some do, some do not. Let me return to amily states o mind

that were more productive than guilt in my activist lie — and perhaps in thelives o others — the naïveté o utopian wishes and the vaunting desire or a

lie o consequence.

No activism is possible without naïveté, some aith in action in spite o

rational assessments o what can actually be done. And, also, no activism

without some grandiosity, some earnest belie in the value o making an

unseemly display. It’s easy to see activism as a ool’s game, a piece o sel-

expressive insistence with no clear promise o bringing change — though a

move to activism is always, itsel, change. I think o the many years I workedto bring Gender Studies into ull reality in a hostile or indifferent university

environment, where eminism was seen as the height o unsophistication; I

think o the early days o my work in postcommunist Eastern Europe where

fine people (or example, the great Polish dissident Adam Michnik) laughed

when they heard I was a eminist organizer. So silly was eminism that hos-

tility wasn’t even necessary. One had to be willing to seem ridiculous, ex-

treme, grotesque. One had to be naïve enough to imagine that something

could — and must — be done in this obviously impossible environment.

One way to make sense o this story o unwavering engagement, and to

give it a meaningul arc, would be to assume that one moves rom the in-

nocent belie that one can direct change and the grand certainty that one

is right, to critique, to knowledge o complexity, and to humility. But, or

me at least, that is not how it has been at all. O course one hopes to bene-

fit rom second thoughts, more experience, critical analysis — even rom

growing wisdom. One strives to understand scale, to recognize that eventhe most successul organizing is but a piece, o a piece, o a piece o larger

events one can seek (but rarely expect) to shape — events that break apart

into an infinite diversity o narratives. But all my years o activism have also

been shot through with moments when I denied impotence and indulged

in gormless hope, states o mind that sustained me through actions that

came to little (like our theory/action group Take Back The Future’s endless

marches against the U.S. attack on Iraq, 2002 – 2006), and actions that may

well have contributed in some solid way to valuable political shifs (like abunch o riends sitting in the rain at Zuccotti Park trying to add “eminism”

to the mix in the first astonishing weeks o the massive uprising known as

Occupy Wall Street, 2011).


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Recently, a riend told me, “Occupy is finished.” But how can she know?

Occupy aspires to be everywhere; look or it under your boot soles. Occupy’s

inventive, dispersed actions brought back into open, loud expression both

rage at injustice and utopian hopeulness, eelings that had long been sup-

pressed in public lie. The energy that came rom this return is incalculable.Skepticism about Occupy Wall Street is easy to justiy, but rising expecta-

tions have a long reach.

My entry into eminist organizing in East Central Europe, described in

several essays in this collection, depended on the entirely mistaken idea that

the shock o postcommunism would awaken an idealism and political inten-

sity similar to that o 1968 in the United States, a time o revelation I longed

to revisit. This ignorance gave way to knowledge and disillusion at once, but

it was too late. I was hooked by the entirely different desires and ears arisingor new riends in actually existing postcommunism; I stayed to slog along

with them in the messy vrai. But no move to a linear narrative is intended

here, no direct line rom wishul antasy to sober truth. Recognizing limita-

tion is sensible but it is also inadequate. Embarrassing as I sometimes find it,

I don’t want to dismiss the value o the initial thrilling illusion; my ignorant

excitement was determinative, and its ghost lingers in the work I continue

to do in my activist travels in East Central Europe.

Uncertainty. Embracing uncertainty — since I can never get ar beyond it — is

both my temperament and the political aesthetic I can still sustain without

tasting ashes. My field is literature, and the orm I’ve been using or many

years is the personal essay. What Doris Lessing has called “the small per-

sonal voice” is both a way o knowing and o exposing how little one knows.

In these essays I have tried to offer unsettling details to mess up big stories

with smaller ones.At the end o her lie, and in her most pained, apocalyptic mood, the em-

inist psychologist I have written about in this collection repeatedly, Dorothy

Dinnerstein, saw uncertainty as our species’ only hope. Human beings can’t

know i we can or will choose to save ourselves rom ourselves. Uncertainty

on this point is our best goad, both or acting, and or imagining a uture.

Like many activists I know, I have written episodically, and I eel some con-

sternation about the gaps. Why did I never write about my fifeen years in asmall, consciousness-raising group; or about the smashing initial success

o the Abortion Project that helped bring that right to New York in 1970 and

the total ailure o raising the same issue fifeen years later in Nicaragua; or


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about helping to start Gender Studies programs in various U.S. universities

and, later, in Budapest, Krakow, and Kyrgyzstan? It’s easier to understand

why I never reflected in print about my premovement choice to work on the

Edwardians — my subject or years as a PhD student o literature — the end

product a (horribly lengthy) study o modern irony: Ford Madox Ford and theVoice o Uncertainty. (How unconsciously, comically revealing to use the word

“uncertainty” in the title o two seemingly unrelated — but at some depth

perhaps connected? — books.)

What can I offer now to get back the texture o those early, unrecorded

days o eminist organizing? Here’s a flash o memory:

I’ve been dispatched to organize a consciousness-raising group — the politi-

cal orm common to eminist action then — on New York’s Upper West side.The twelve or so women in the room are nervous, but, in the wild zeitgeist o

1970, they intuit that they want this — whatever it is. I explain what these

weekly discussions might do: encourage separation rom the daily pressure

to conorm; suggest startlingly new subjects or thought and action; con-

nect women to each other in entirely new ways; support new identities

like lesbian, or divorced woman, or woman mad as hell — undermining

shame.

One woman is by ar the most voluble and challenging. She asks mequestion afer question, throwing doubt on eminism as possibly absurd,

hopeless, divisive. At first, I keep answering as best I can. Afer all, these

worries have some hef. But suddenly I realize that the boyriend she keeps

mentioning is in the room; these questions are his mean jabs at her nascent

eminist eelings. Desperately, she is asking me to put words in her mouth to

take home. I stop offering answers, dropping a claim to authority that eels

alse. Instead, I turn mysel into her collaborator, analyzing and criticizing

the world rom which these phantom questions come. I am handing her a

tray o destabilizing ideas she might be able to serve up to her disparaging

lover.

The meeting changes, becomes a discussion o the hostility they all ex-

pect to encounter beyond this room. The group is now established, and I

move on to something else — at a speed that is urgency, but also youth.

I find I want to add in retrospect: Youth, and the ofen-oolish certainties

o youth. Our rising expectations were, as the boyriend said, absurd — butalso creative. The baby boom generation’s dreams o total change, ostered

by the careening growth o the postwar years in the United States, ofen

led to success, which then some misread as the usual pace o victory. The


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brilliance and daring o the civil rights movement showed the way, and other

movements joined in the expansion o hope.

The revival o eminism in the United States was a zone o invention.

When we started, the books we needed to read were out o print — and most

had yet to be written, and are still being written now. Any historical record o women’s past resistance to prejudice, insult, and invisibility was absent rom

public memory. Women’s suffering — o violence, o humiliation — was un-

remarked and unremarkable. An aspiring woman’s ambitions were risible.

One had to discover confidence without supporting evidence. Congress was

virtually an all-male space, and so was the newspaper, the doctor’s office, the

union; leaders were almost always — and expected to be — male, including

those in radical movements. The first job was to denaturalize this enveloping

reality, to bring it back into history — and into struggle.

From the beginning I could see that eminism was a polyglot undertaking. In

the early 1980s when I did my first international eminist actions, the multi-

plicity o eminist ideas and projects became even more obvious. Movements

or gender justice offered wildly divergent accounts o themselves. But this

instability added to the ascination. And, or me, at that point, maintaining

such excitement was key. The loss o momentum in U.S. eminist activism in

the 1980s threatened me with sadness and loss. I had committed mysel and

had to rethink the possible during those acute backlash years.

So, like many other eminists o that time, I lef town. I went to the wom-

en’s peace camp on Greenham Common in England (1983, 1984) and sat

in the dirt with eminists o very different traditions. As we huddled in our

plastic tents and around our campfires, eminists visited us rom all over the

world. Wandering rom gate to gate o a huge missile installation, we were

like a peripatetic philosophy school, arguing constantly. The undamentaldifferences among women couldn’t have been made more obvious. But un-

likely alliances kept orming. At Greenham, differences in identity, ideas,

and political aesthetics could sometimes be productive.

Back home in New York, I was very active in what became known as the

eminist sex wars o the 1980s. The powerul outburst o eminist rage

against pornography in those years struck me as an overheated reaction to

the obvious news that sexism would be around or a very long time. Male

violence hadn’t significantly changed, but now we had brought it out intothe open or all to see. Antipornography eminists were expressing their

shock at male resistance to women’s liberation: Men are violent! Their sex-

ual antasies are disgusting! Sex is violence! These constructions o male


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sexuality struck me as the outcries o deeply disappointed people, who had

hoped or so much more rom eminist revolution. I worked or a number

o years to counter what might almost be called a eminist sex panic: by par-

ticipating in the planning group, convened by Carole Vance, o the Barnard

Conerence IX on sexuality (1982); by editing, with Christine Stansell andSharon Thompson, Powers o Desire: The Politics o Sexuality (1983); by running

a seminar at the New York Institute or the Humanities, “Sexuality and Con-

sumer Culture” (1982 – 1994); and by working in the activist group, the Fem-

inist Anti-Censorship Taskorce, (, 1982 – 1986). Also in these years, I

was writing about what core eminist problems and possible strategies were

being obscured by a monolithic analysis o male sexuality. In a number o

my reviews and articles rom this period (I’ve included a typical one here,

“The Beast Within,” and several studies o Angela Carter), I was trying toexplore in literary criticism the sensibility we were developing at the Barnard

Conerence and in . We were discussing the variety and the common

unreadability o desire in both men and women and calling or more explo-

ration, less censure.

It elt particularly thankless to have to criticize other eminists as com-

mitted as onesel or taking the eminist movement in what I saw as a moral-

istic and sel-deeating direction. Antipornography activists seemed to have

no such qualms; they proclaimed the eminist groups that criticized them as

not eminist by definition; in one conrontation, I was heckled as a Nazi. One

can’t help remarking that internecine fights are ofen the hottest — because

o the tearing apart o what is also — in some ways — connected, and because

other more powerul enemies are urther off, indifferent, even harder to

imagine as subject to change. Though we did angrily deconstruct the words

o Ronald Reagan, we couldn’t make much o a dent in what he was doing.

For us, his victory in 1980 ushered in decades o reaction. The antipornog-raphy position seemed to us to recapitulate and uel a growing repressive and

sel-righteous atmosphere.

For better and worse, the sex wars seem to have been unavoidable. They

revealed some o the deep differences among eminists and clarified the

limitations o eminist discourse on sexuality. They pointed to the need or

greater reedom o inquiry in what Freud called the most ragged aspect o

human personality. But important as I think our quest was or less repression

in those dark times and or a more exploratory and open eminist conversa-tion about sexuality, the internal rif had its costs.

Luckily or me during this period o difficult and repetitive discourse war

among eminists, I was also carrying on a continuous conversation with the


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9

psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein. I had interviewed her about her book,

The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise, in 1977.

From then until her death in 1992, our endless talk branched and branched.

Talking to Dorothy was, like Greenham, an ambulatory school. Her riends

and students walked and talked with her along the palisades near her houseand around the military installation at Seneca Falls in upstate New York, tak-

ing part in the ongoing women’s peace camp there. Along the beaches o a

Caribbean island, we walked, we talked, and she taught me to put on a mask

and gaze or hours at lie under the sea, a world I revisit whenever I can. How

to see more and more — and differently — this is what the luminous Dorothy

Dinnerstein had to teach.

Exchanges with Dorothy were ree and speculative. She had a little loose

love or all the world. When we went to see one o the early anti-Vietnam Warmovies, Platoon, I lef the theater bubbling with outrage: That wasn’t really an

antiwar film as promised at all! The final images are all about male heroism —

which only comes rom being damaged and enlightened by war. The hero

has come through, chastened but a Man. It’s war that makes real men, etc.,

etc. Afer my ulminations were exhausted, Dorothy said, “Poor men.” I said,

“Poor men!?” “Yes,” she said, “because they’re so obedient.” I was nonplussed.

Why this o all the possible critical reactions afer seeing this irritating film?

“Well, in order to satisy their athers and each other they eel that they have

to line up, armor themselves, and march off with their brothers to kill or be

killed. Very ew say no, though more have begun resisting in recent years,

perhaps a symptom o a breakdown in gender rigidity.” This train o thought

seems obvious to me now. But back then, thinking about male insecurity,

compliance, and passivity (traits on which women supposedly had a monop-

oly) opened up new questions, leading to an imaginative shif. Censoring

pornography in order to discipline men seemed more and more off the mark.And the term “sexual deviance” became meaningless, an expression o ear

about all sexuality.

On yet another track in these years, and very late in the game, I was con-

sidering having a baby, possibly influenced by a new pronatalism in my aging

eminist generation, a shif in atmosphere that disturbed me and was sud-

denly everywhere — not only outside eminism’s reach but also within. Doro-

thy had written about “the chagrins o the nursery” and here I was — my part-

ner and I as ambivalent as ever — trying or motherhood, ultimately withoutsuccess. This mixture o desire and doubts about that desire, oddly joined

with the sex war struggles o the same period, gave rise to the section o this

book, “Mothers/Lovers.”


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10

The years and years that eminists o my generation spent trying to get,

then trying to keep, the right to abortion isn’t recorded in the essays here.

This demand had originally been a mere gateway to our wishes, and it was

enraging, but also stupeying, to have to ask or something so basically and

obviously just as, or example, unding or Medicaid abortions, which waslost in 1976, only three years afer our Supreme Court victory in Roe vs. Wade.

Much later, there I was again in our zap street theater group, No More Nice

Girls, still asking or abortion — this time using satire and costumes to keep

ourselves going. The pain, boredom, and humiliation o such repetitions

seem to me to be largely unrecorded in eminist writing, though in 1923

Carrie Chapman Catt amously expressed the horror o such redundancy

when she described efforts to get women the vote:

To get the word male . . . out o the Constitution cost the women o the

country fify-two years o pauseless campaign. During that time they

were orced to conduct fify-six campaigns o reerenda to male voters;

480 campaigns to urge Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to

voters; orty-seven campaigns to induce state constitutional conventions

to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to per-

suade state party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; thirty

campaigns to urge presidential party conventions to adopt woman su-rage planks in party platorms, and nineteen campaigns with nineteen

successive Congresses.

By the end o the 1980s, I recall: Exhaustion.

Then, in 1989, came the days o wonder. Whole populations were reeing

themselves rom totalitarian rule with hardly a shot fired. The excitement in-

vaded politics worldwide and, on the Lef, a political location in which I stillsecurely i combatively reside, shock ruled. The end o Western communism

broke apart the Lef thinking o over a century. We were all in disarray, writ-

ing books with titles like Afer the Fall. My reaction was to go right over there.

This move, made as I’ve said in ignorance, in a antasy o new beginnings

(but there are no new beginnings — cancel that absurd, redundant phrase)

began an important new phase o my activist lie. In 1991, I coounded the

nongovernmental organization, the Network o East- West Women (),

and in 1992 I began teaching a graduate course about “gender” every sum-mer in Poland in Elzbieta Matynia’s brilliant school, “Democracy and Di-

versity.” We set out to educate — and learn rom — a whole new kind o per-

son, one living, suddenly, amazingly, in postcommunism. What, we were


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11

all curious to know, was “postcommunism” going to look like — globally

and day-to-day? Nothing has been more difficult or more intense than work-

ing with the brave and inventive — and the sometimes isolated or openly in-

sulted — eminist activists o East Central Europe. Stoned by skinheads on

gay pride marches, viciously attacked by the Catholic Church, ofen viewedas monsters in their own communities, these riends continue to propose a

eminism to me both amiliar and constantly new.

During all these years o activism, I’ve been a college proessor — o liter-

ature and o gender studies. Why “gender studies,” a controversial term?

Some have eared that this newer name will once again make “women” dis-

appear, a reasonable worry given the long history o such erasures. I have

been a part o a number o collectives struggling to define and establish“Women’s Studies” or “Women’s and Gender Studies” or “Gender and Sex-

uality Studies” or, to include in this account an unusual effort at refinement,

a “Gender Studies and Feminist Theory” program at The New School. (This

program was canceled; some proessors criticized eminist theory as

bourgeois.) I preer the term “Gender Studies” because, with Myra Jehlen, I

am particularly interested in thinking about the line-drawing and blurring

that goes on among various gender positions. Feminists have a positive stake

in conronting the anxieties gender crossings arouse. In the ace o backlash,

using the word “gender” signals the possible value o this indeterminacy.

Has teaching students about gender been another orm o eminist activ-

ism? I would like to maintain a distinction. There’s nothing to be gained ei-

ther by using theory and practice or by putting them in competition. At the

same time, in repeating, loaded eminist debates, I hear a recurring glitch,

a recalcitrant something that reminds me o the enduring divides I describe

in “A Gender Diary.” A constant wrangling about theory versus practice isendemic to our current social/political/institutional situations. We might

as well embrace the complexity in current tensions between thought and

action, and the ways in which we are ofen motivated — or orced — to move

back and orth. Feminists in the university ace a special dilemma. We have

to trim to ast shifs in the shape o our schools, institutions which are, these

days, endlessly stressed and over-stretched, constantly reorganizing them-

selves to sell their intangible wares and survive. The eminist proessor must

claim to have created resh and innovative new turns o thought or eachreview period. She bites the hand that eeds her by critiquing the prevail-

ing structures o knowledge, but she also knows she mustn’t bite too hard.

Given the difficulty o the stance “Gender Studies” in the university — who,


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12

afer all, are its subjects, who its objects? — eminist proessors are travelers

between their roots in a great social movement and their equally important

role as critics able to stand outside that ray, to create room or contempla-

tion. In our insecure identity as both insiders and outsiders, at our best, we

are among the most brilliant survivors in a tottering academic system.I have navigated these dangerous waters with various personal solutions.

(Activists once too idealistically said there are no personal solutions in a col-

lective struggle.) It took years to get gender included as a category o study in

my university. Balancing in air, I had to do this work while still insisting that

any static concept o “eminist knowledge” offered no solid place to stand. In

response to this dilemma, I have had a scattered academic lie — only one oot

in the academy, and the other — well, who can say where, given my picaresque

activist career? Meanwhile, some o my colleagues in the university worry:Can teaching students and writing brilliantly about gender and race, as they

do, count as politics? Is intellectual work and teaching enough? My response is:

Why not? There’s no authority to define “enough,” and no one can determine

the multiplier effect o our different locations. For now, no current utopian

dream o synthesis (my usual temptation) can collapse what I see as a creative

and uneven prolieration o eminist actions and theoretical speculations.

When the activist and the theorist are the same person, as they ofen are,

these differences abide within. And, o course, these individual subjectivi-

ties are not stable or unitary — a common insight among theorists, but one

that doesn’t always carry over into the space they (we) give each other or

ambivalence or sel-contradiction.

Finally, writing, imagining, theorizing, doing — all are, at some level, prac-

tice. Nonetheless, granting them their differences widens the space or em-

inism to thrive. Though the activist spectacle is itsel a thought experiment,

the theorist knows all the ways in which the activist may be naïve, choosing wrong targets, chanting misleading words, oolishly imagining changes

that are undertheorized or ill-conceived. (I shudder at the memory o cer-

tain signs I’ve carried at demonstrations. Note to sel: Irony doesn’t work

on placards.) As the theorist knows, i wishes were horses, the poor would

ride. There’s that gap the theorist thinks about all the time, between wishes

and horses, while the activist rushes on with no time to write it all down or

to correct direction.

Over the years, in the gender studies classroom, I’ve come to worryabout our graduate students’ encounter with the theory/practice debates.

Feminism is their legacy, but their brilliant education is constituting them


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13

as infinitely skeptical subjects. How can one be a eminist, they wonder,

when one has learned about the movement’s past and present gross over-

simplifications, about all the blinkered eminist moments — o racism, o

positivism, o collusion with neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism? Should

eminism be outgrown as a flawed artiact o bourgeois culture? Afer allthis piercing, relevant critique, how can they do intellectual work intended

to have an impact on women’s lot without seeming to regress, to abandon

knowledge o eminism’s checkered history? How can eminism, the move-

ment, the commitment, survive so much thoughtul deconstruction, so

much knowing?

I offer students an example o how different modes can coexist and how

historical opportunities or change may not line up with what one thinks

one ideally should be doing. I have both coounded an international non-governmental organization and written a savagely critical article about such

international s, pointing out the many limitations o these cross-border

projects, and the on-the-ground reasons why one is ofen stuck with this

flawed orm. The analytic work o eminism continues at an ever-changing

angle to the buoyancy o activist projects.

I try to reassure these serious eminist students that it can all be inside one

lie: One acts and is unavoidably disappointed. One sees the pitalls and tries —

and ofen ails — to avoid them. Out o my particular temperament comes

this small suggestion: “Don’t ear the lack o a good fit between thought and

action. The distance between what you should do and what you can always

yawns wide. Why assume a monolithic, coherent model or your own sub-

jectivity when you are becoming so sophisticated about the patchwork o all

consciousness?”

In recent years, eminism in the academy has taken many important and

suggestive turns. These critiques have meant much to me, particularly the work on intersectionality, on queer theory, on the importance o affect to

politics, on eco-politics and posthumanism, on the rich possible uses o

our history, ofen to be reencountered in archives. In response, I have ofen

changed my thinking about what and how to teach and about what orga-

nizing should — or can — be done. The essays collected here reflect different

moments in this constant reassessment. Because eminism is a portman-

teau term, describing varied long-term collective enterprises in which the

building blocks — subjectivity, experience, nature, culture — are always beingrethought and reengaged in daily living, a flat identity “eminist” can only be

a general marker o changing interests and desires.


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14

Dear Students, I would say, people who imagine change are o divided

mind. Since there is no leader, no credentialing authority, no gatekeeper

to say “No entry here; you’re not a real eminist,” ortunately and unor-

tunately, eminism can’t maintain a fixed stance and must always struggle

or always-shifing affiliations and aesthetics. So — criticize away. Feministsneed and will always have agonistic relationships not only with the world

but among themselves. Don’t swamp with paralyzing doubt what might be

your small piece o the larger, evolving project. Feminism is a sensibility,

subject to constant revision, but very portable. Even as you change, you can

take it with you.

To The Archive

Utopianism is always addressed to the uture, so when

eminists wrote those revolutionary words in 1970, surely

they were meant or us, the later generations.

– Kate Eichhorn

Take my lie. But don’t take the meaning o my lie. – Joanna Russ

. . . time makes what was mute talk. –Henry Shapiro

The living and the dead can move back and orth as they like.

–Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald

. . . The will to remember . . .

– Joan Nestle describing the moving orce and multiple

powers o the Lesbian Herstory Archives

A ew years ago, a university bought my papers. Twenty-two boxes lef the

house — tapes o radio shows (now, amazingly, digitized), meeting notes,

handwritten talks, women’s movement ephemera — rom the U.S. in the 70s

and onward, and rom the first independent women’s movements in East

Central Europe since 1989. There’s easily as much again still sitting in my

apartment, all o it promised in the years ahead.

The difference this has made to me is remarkable. A deep shif: I eel rescued.

Urgent group email. F.R. has died, and her books and papers are sitting on a

curb in Greenwich Village, waiting or the garbage truck. Hurry, someone, to

pick up this stuff. But it turns out we all continue to be desperately busy. No

one comes.

Beore all those dusty files went to the archive, I eared collecting essays writ-

ten over thirty-five years. The danger, I thought, would lie in melancholy —


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15

both mine and the reader’s. The voices o earlier selves would put me to

shame and eager enthusiasms rozen on the page would remind me o pos-

sibly jejune passions that motivated me rom my first political action, a ban-

the-bomb vigil on the Cornell quadrangle in 1961 — and onward or five de-

cades. Could the essays I chose — published in such disparate and sometimesobscure places, at such different times, with such different motives — add to

each other, travel, change their meaning in new combinations? Or would

time prove a thie and rob them o all resonance in the now? Though oth-

ers will have to answer such questions, the process o selection has taught

me much. The way this book has been organized ollows a train o thought

about what categories have remained salient or me in the ups and downs o

a long eminist history.

A Gender Studies meeting in the mid-nineties: I’ve just been introduced to one

o our new graduate students. When she hears my name, she gasps and blurts

out “You’re history!” O course she immediately hears hersel and rushes to

apologize since, whether a specter rom the past or not, I am still sitting there,

one o the proessors in her program. The concept “generations” may be mislead-

ing. In act we are in this undertaking, call it eminism, together — changeable

as it will no doubt prove to be.

Teaching over decades, I have noticed the truth o Doris Lessing’s observa-

tion that ideas move through societies like tides. There was the time in the

early 1970s when I could disparage romantic antasies to flocks o young

students who greeted my skepticism with eager delight. Then, suddenly, as

i a gong had sounded and hopes or new orms o antasy had evaporated,

my irony at the expense o romance ell dead in the theater o the classroom.

Students looked uncomprehending, or anxious, or rejecting. To my shock,

my tone o only a year beore had turned out to be the language o anothercountry, a bygone era. Expectations were closing down and it was becoming

harder or young women to imagine autonomy as a source o pleasure rather

than o shame or loneliness.

Afer some years o this sometimes-galling eclipse, again the times turned.

Journalists and researchers started calling me because “I was history,” and

this new attention heartened me, however little, I told mysel, that I actually

cared about it. The glitterati came, and asked me questions that touched me

deeply: “How did you make demonstrations happen?” I thought it odd thatthey had no idea o this, and then realized their brilliant machines and devices

gave them means o assembling their large networks in ways that are entirely


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16

different rom the movement-building structures o the 1970s. To their won-

derment, we had made an extremely durable social revolution beore the in-

vention o the Internet.

Because I have sustained a political passion like eminism through chang-

ing landscapes at home, through ar-flung travels, through quite differentstages o my lie, I have taken a particular tour through the vagaries o time.

But beore the beautiul mess o the archive, all this material seemed trapped

in a flattened seam o history. I elt pegged: “Second Wave Feminist,” “So-

cialist Feminist,” “Peace Movement Feminist,” “Anti-Antipornography Femi-

nist” otherwise known to journalists as the “Pro-Sex Faction” (what hilarious

nomenclature). I now think that the depression I was eeling was symptom-

atic o an actively regressive construction o time and history: the zeitgeist

at the height o backlash was obliterating what had earlier elt thrillinglydiverse. Backlash sought to impose linearity on stories that were never lin-

ear — so that eminism could be given an end. I elt superannuated and sor-

rowul and, as the eminist affect theorists so wittily say, such depression

should sometimes be recognized as a political, not a private, eeling. (I want

one o those wonderul buttons these eminists wear at demonstrations:

“Depressed? Maybe it’s political.”)

When Rachel Blau DuPlessis and I sent out our call or activist memoirs

around 1992, a collection that became The Feminist Memoir Project , we were

trying to save a generation rom an oblivion that seemed to be swifly over-

taking us, and at the same time, to take apart the idea that eminist activists

in the United States in the 60s and 70s were in any sense a “generation” at

all. They were never a single, coherent group or engaged on a central proj-

ect. Feminist activists who had invented an astonishing variety o antisexist

acts when such rebellions seemed new, were being shoveled together into

a single group, the Second Wave, then criticized or movement exclusions,then slated — all together — to be conveniently orgotten. This narrowing o

narratives deeply upset us, and we sought accounts o activist lie rom those

early days — across differences o race, class, sexualities, local contexts, and

diversities o both survival needs and utopian wishes. “Take my lie. But don’t

take the meaning o my lie.” Which I would amend: Dear Young Feminists, in-

terpret “the meaning” o our lives as you will, and as you need.

It helped that I had a young colleague, Kate Eichhorn, who wanted to

hear such memories, with their eelings and contexts attached, and withoutapology. She was studying the inormal creation o zines made by young

Riot Grrrls in the 90s, and she ound earlier eminist texts collaged there — a

connection, a recognition, an appropriation, sometimes perhaps a turn or


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17

return. The curiosity she and many others have shown in what her book calls

“the archival turn in eminism” has brought water to what I eared would

become a desert. No one can know what seeds uture eminists will want

to nurture or transplant rom this garden. But my earlier dead-end eeling?

Gone. Thank you.

The essays collected here are time-marked. Beyond some cutting o redun-

dancies and some line editing, I haven’t revised them; they are not meant to

offer an end point o accumulated eminist understanding. Because o their

specificity, they are (somewhat) sae rom certain crimes o anachronism,

and reveal particular patterns and emphases in discourse that are otherwise

nearly irretrievable. (Foucault’s “law o the sayable.”) Gradually, while choos-

ing and arranging these essays, and inspired by conversations with youngeminists who are already poking around in my archive, I began to eel that

the concept “dated” was dated.

The essays represent (relatively) still points in a steady flow o activity,

while the archive has no raming devices, no conscious pattern. Ofen, I

suspect, the archive registers what one has chosen to orget and what must

thereore be assembled by others (those fizzy, early polemics are no doubt

in there in various drafs!). I eel both dismembered and connected to an

unreadable uture. There’s a sort o reedom in having no idea what is in

those boxes o air checks, agendas, rough drafs. The essays are mine, but

the archive is, ultimately, or others to mull over. The material to be discov-

ered there is potentially new; these bits and pieces await. . . . Well, I can’t

imagine who you will be.

Having my papers in the archives is a state o fluidity in time that I never

dreamed o — and I eel all the anxieties and hopes that accompany stories

without endings. I’m happy to have managed whatever distillation I couldin the essays here. But I value, too, the flowing water not contained in jars.

2014


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© 2015 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

Designed by Kristina Kachele

Typeset in Quadraat Pro by Copperline

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Snitow, Ann Barr, 1943–

The feminism of uncertainty : a gender diary / Ann Snitow.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

978-0-8223-5860-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-5874-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7567-8 (e-book)

1. Feminism—United States. 2. Feminism. 3. Snitow,

Ann Barr, 1943– 4. Feminists—United States—Biography.

I. Title.

1426.S615 2015

305.420973—dc23

2015006353

Cover art: Nancy Spero, The Race, 1988. © The Nancy Spero

and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Licensed by ,

New York, NY. Photo courtesy the collection of Francie

Bishop Good and David Horvitz.


30/53

to the past and future feminists


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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The Feminism of Uncertainty: I 1

Part I CONT INUI NG A GENDE R DIA RY

1 A Gender Diary 21

2 Critiquing a Gender Diary 59

Part II MOT HER S/LO VER S

3 Introduction to Mothers/Lovers 71

4 Dorothy Dinnerstein: Creative Unknowing 80

5 From the Gender Diary: Living with Dorothy Dinnerstein

(1923 – 1992) 93

6 Changing Our Minds about Motherhood: 1963 – 1990 97

7 The Sex Wars in Feminism: Retrenchment versus

Transformation 123

8 The Poet of Bad Girls: Angela Carter (1940 – 1992) 139

9 Inside the Circus Tent: Excerpts from an Interview withAngela Carter, 1988 148

10 The Beast Within: Lady into Fox and A Man in the Zoo,

by David Garnett 153

Part III THE FEM INI ST PIC AR ESQ UE

11 Introduction to the Feminist Picaresque 159

12 Occupying Greenham Common 163

13 Feminist Futures in the Former East Bloc 19114 Feminism Travels: Cautionary Tales 204

15 Who are the Polish Feminists? (Slawka) 216

16 “Should I Marry Him?” Questions from Students 228


32/53

17 The Peripatetic Feminist Activist/Professor Spends One Day

in a Small City in Albania 238

18 Certainty and Doubt in the Classroom: Teaching Film in

Prison 241

Part IV REF UGE ES FROM UT OPI A

19 Introduction to Refugees from Utopia 273

20 Remembering, Forgetting, and the Making of

The Feminist Memoir Project 275

21 The Politics of Passion: Ellen Willis (1941 – 2006) 293

22 Returning to the Well: Revisiting Shulamith Firestone’s

The Dialectic of Sex 297

Part V THE FEMIN ISM OF UNC ERTAINT Y

23 Introduction to the Feminism of Uncertainty 307

24 Life Sentence: My Uncertainty Principle 310

25 Doubt’s Visionary: Doris Lessing 316

26 Utopia, Downsized: A Farrago 328

27 The Feminism of Uncertainty: II 330

Appendix: Publication History 335

Bibliography 339

Index 355

A photo gallery appears aer page 264.


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the acknowledgments aer each piece collected here, I’ve named the

many who helped me in so many ways, over so many years. I thank them all

again for a lifetime of intense conversations, actions taken together, and

then rethought. How exciting it’s been — and continues to be.

This collection could never have come together without Katie Detwiler,

whose technical skills and warm intellectual company have made this project

delightful rather than onerous. A number of friends have been marvelous

critical readers. They have helped me, encouraged me, rescued me. I thank,

for their good ear, brilliant edits, and long empathy with my doings: Cynthia

Carr, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Faludi, Evelyn Frankford, Daniel Goode,

Karen Hopenwasser, Judith Levine, Henry Shapiro, Meredith Tax, Leonore

Tiefer, and Carole Vance. I thank, too, for their support and skill, my editors

at Dissent : Michael Walzer, Judy Walzer, Michael Kazin, and Maxine Phillips.Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman have been fellow travelers for years.

Discussions with them have enriched all I do.

I thank Nanette Rainone, creator of the radio show “Womankind,” on

- New York, for being the best and most helpful boss I have ever

had and for giving me the opportunity to talk about feminism for hours and

hours on the radio, 1970 – 1979.

No one who writes personal essays today should omit a thank you to Phil-

lip Lopate, champion of the form, inspiring practitioner, generous reader.These are the members of my first consciousness-raising group, 1969 –

1970, the founding group of New York Radical Feminists called the Stanton-

Anthony Brigade: Minda Bickman, Diane Crothers, Shulamith Firestone,


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x

Martha Gershun, Anne Koedt, Cellestine Ware, and of my long-term

group (1974 – ca. 1992), called The Sex Fools or the Third Street Circle, de-

pending on our mood: Ros Baxandall, Bonnie Bellow, Cynthia Carr, Judy

Coburn, Shaelagh Doyle, Karen Durbin, Deirdre English, Sally George, Brett

Harvey, M. Mark, Irene Peslikis, Alix Kates Shulman, Katie Taylor, Ellen Wil-lis. What superb company you have been. Our rich conversations and your

loyal friendship over all these years have been pure gold.

To the many women active in the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce

() and the writers, editors, and designers of Caught Looking: Feminism,

Pornography, and Censorship: How would I have gotten through the perilous

feminist sex wars without you? Thank you. And thank you, too, for the buoy-

ant company of all those who banded together in No More Nice Girls; we

dressed up and marched our feet off trying to protect the right to abortionfor all women.

Elzbieta Matynia, director of The New School’s summer program in Po-

land, “Democracy and Diversity” (1992 – present), created a teaching and

learning environment more effective than any I have known; I thank her for

my precious time in Krakow and Wroclaw, twenty summers which have been

the wellspring of some of the essays here. I thank, too, Hana Cervinkova,

who warmly supported the school with tactical brilliance.

The members of the Network of East- West Women are a constant support

and inspiration to my ongoing writing and activism. I can name only a few

here from East Central Europe whom I met early on and whose inspiration

sealed my love for feminist work in the region: Sonja Licht, Slawka Walczew-

ska, Malgorzata Fuszara, Malgorzata Tarasiewicz (Director of ), Lepa

Mladjenovic, Roma Ciesla, Beata Kozak, Barbara Limanowska, Wanda No-

wicka, Bozena Jawien. Thank you, too, to the many students from the region

who are now friends and colleagues. To the many U.S.-based members ofthe Network: You were its mainstay from the start, and I am in the process

of writing about you and will thank you one by one. What a wild ride we had

together in the years right aer 1989.

To Cynthia Carr, Amber Hollibaugh, and Gayle Rubin, thank you for ex-

cellent advice about what an essay collection can be. To Aviva Goode, Bill

Eis, and Bruce Kennedy: Thank you for helping me sort out the details of

publishing. To Alice Gavin and Stephanie Damoff: Thank you for careful and

thoughtful editorial assistance. To Julienne Obadia and Beth Weiman: Thank you for wonderfully rescuing me from freefall post-Katie.

To all who joined together in Take Back the Future (2002 – 2006) during

the dreadful George W. Bush years: Thank you for your heartening company


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in those dark times, and thanks particularly to Drucilla Cornell, who helped

found the group, and to Judith Levine, who partnered in keeping it going.

Your ideas about activism are a constant resource.

I thank Eugene Lang College and The New School for giving me a sup-

portive, fascinating, university home since 1986. I’ve learned much from mycolleagues there and want particularly to acknowledge all those who helped

me bring Gender Studies back to the university (twice). You are so many I can

only mention here those who were there at the beginning in 1986: the late

Janet Abu-Lughod, Seyla Benhabib, Louise Tilley, Vera Zolberg — and, later,

Rayna Rapp, our first Gender Studies and Feminist Theory director (1994).

You have all been magnificent colleagues, with just the right mixture of ded-

ication and humor to sustain us for what turned out to be a long haul. I’ve

had the good fortune to co-teach several courses — about feminism, race,the 1960s, and the Le — with my colleague, Victoria Hattam. Thank you

for how much I learned and for the lovely structures we built in our efforts

to understand civil rights and women’s liberation. I’ve had an extraordinary

reader in my colleague, Kate Eichhorn. Thank you for hours of exchanges

about modern women’s movements; your questions have inspired (more and

more) work.

Thank you to the New York Institute for the Humanities, who gave a home

to the seminar I ran there from 1982 to 1994, “Sex, Gender, and Consumer

Culture.” This group generated an extraordinary amount of creative work

during the years we talked together.

I am grateful to the Institut fur die Wissenschaen vom Menschen in Vi-

enna, where I was in residence for an interesting semester, 1999 – 2000, and

to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which made me a Ful-

bright Specialist and supported one of my trips to Albania.

I am so grateful to my colleagues in Gender Studies at the JagiellonianUniversity in Krakow (Beata Kowalska), at the Central European University

in Budapest (Nancy Stepan, Joanna Regulska, and Jasmina Lukic), at the Bel-

grade Women’s Studies Center (Dasa Duhacek), at Babes-Bolyai University in

Cluj (Eniko Magyari-Vince), at the University of Bucharest (Mihaela Miroiu),

at Masaryk University in Brno (Iva Smidova), at Maria Curie-Skłodowska Uni-

versity in Lublin (Tomek Kitlinski), at Warsaw University (Agnieszka Graff),

at the European University of Tirana (Ermira Danaj), and many others for

inviting me to talk to your students. These visits have been landmarks in myfeminist teaching in East Central Europe. We all share a sense of surprise:

No one expected that the Gender Studies programs you developed would

ever exist.


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I thank Laura Micham and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History

and Culture at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library for offering my papers

and audio tapes a place in their extraordinary archive of feminist activism.

With her dedication and kindness, Laura raised my valuation of the piles of

material generated in a messy activist life.At Duke University press I thank the amazing Ken Wissoker, the kind and

ever-helpful Elizabeth Ault, Amy Ruth Buchanan, Kristina Kachele, and Sara

Leone. Thank you to the two anonymous readers who warmly supported this

book and helped to make it better. My wonderful indexer, Julienne Obadia,

has turned the categories in this book into poetry. Thank you.

At Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital, I thank Dr. Jason Konner; his di-

rectness, brilliance, and warm support made so many things possible. Dr.

Phillip Bukberg has also been my without whom nothing. And nothing at all would be possible without Susan Hefner.

I have written a number of these pieces where the phone and domestic

distractions couldn’t reach me, in cafés. These secret hideouts can only work

when the staff welcomes writers who sit drinking coffee for hours. So thank

you to Dominique Ansel and his staff, to Rosa at the Café Dante, and to

everyone at Hiroko’s.

Finally, my love and deep gratitude to Daniel Goode — composer and clar-

inetist. I feel so lucky: “She shall have music wherever she goes. . . .” Thank

you for the delights of our busy, crazy, happy life together.

November 2014


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INTRODUCTION

The Feminism of Uncertainty: I

Utopia, Activism, Uncertainty

To my initial surprise, I have been able to make a short list of preoccupa-

tions that have marked the thirty-five years of writing gathered here. First,

as I reread these essays, now clustered together to form new patterns, every-

where I find the belief in the importance of imagining a better world — call

it utopian yearning. But also everywhere here, this hopefulness collapses

into utopia’s common twin, ironic skepticism. This combination is wonder-

fully recorded in a typical remark of my parents’ generation: “A new world is

coming” — their dream of socialism — words followed over the years with

ever-darkening laughter: “We should live so long.” Next, running through-

out, I find the assumption that, for me, feminist activism is necessary. (No

doubt this is a choice, but it hasn’t felt like one.) Finally, also all through, I

hear a thrumming, inescapable, and sometimes much valued tone of uncer-

tainty, an acceptance of the blundering in the dark that is part of all activism.Everyone who engages in the tragicomedy of activism will negotiate the

stretch between speculative desire and the shortfall of action in her or his

own way. Happy endings require that one set sail toward a near enough hori-

zon and keep one’s eyes off the inevitable: failure, confusion, and the falling

out of comrades. There is no right way to balance these things, and this book

is not meant to be exemplary. What it does offer is a variety of descriptions

of how one person has tried to locate feminism in her life — in situations

that keep changing.I have acted (and written) with passionate conviction while constantly

wondering where such actions lie in larger schemes of things. Like Doris

Lessing, a novelist whom I have treasured in all her phases, I am subject to


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2

disconcerting shis in my perception of scale. Today we marched against

recent homophobic violence in Greenwich Village; tomorrow New York City

is under water and men and women (if they are still so identified) are travel-

ling over our momentary Bohemia in boats, gazing down with incomprehen-

sion at our ragged neighborhood through thirty feet of water. Does anythingfeminist activists once did shape what these travelers of the future are saying

and doing?

As my friend V. says, who cares? For her, the only thing that matters is to

be vital in one’s own moment. The aer-lives of our thoughts or acts are of

no consequence. Since our being and intentions cannot be remembered or

retrieved, what we do can never confidently be assigned a long-term value,

pernicious or benign. Forget the future, V. says, as the future will forget us.

But, then, V. is not an activist.

I became a feminist activist in 1969. My first consciousness- raising meeting

in the fall of that year — quite by chance and thanks to the urgings of my

friend Cellestine Ware — turned out to be the founding of New York Radi-

cal Feminists. There’s no counting the number of meetings that followed.

(Once, a friend going in the other direction on the street called out to me in

alarm: “Oh, dear. Am I missing a meeting?”) Many have recorded what that

time felt like: a love affair, a revelation, a little click of the lens that refocused

everything. So now I was a feminist for life. But what would this mean? The

particular rush I experienced in those first months couldn’t maintain itself

for two breaths. Sisterhood crumbled at a touch, weakened by differences

of race, class, and political traditions, and also by damaged selves and the

“tears of things.” Our astonishing and bracing rage at patriarchy was neces-

sary but insufficient for the long haul.

From 1969 onward, polemics and reviews poured from me, but all that isabsent from this collection because it was champagne with a fizz that soon

went. Though I didn’t know it then, behind all that frenzy I was searching for

ways to do feminist writing, teaching, and activism that would be resilient

enough to sustain this love I felt for the women’s liberation movement into a

future I might happily inhabit. This book includes a sampling of my writing

between 1978 and 2014. These pieces seem to me to explore a feminism I

hope can endure yet be flexible enough to turn and turn about, through the

shape-shiing of history, while remaining linked to my early utopian femi-nist desires, desires which linger even when they seem far to seek.

It would be easy to say that some ineluctable logic and beauty I discovered

in my early encounters with feminism cured primal wounds and fueled my


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3

continuous engagement. And, to be sure, that would be one piece of the

story — though one can’t help remarking that many women, even some who

desperately need change, have seemed impervious to this allure. I suspect,

rather, that to understand such a relentless commitment, I would need a

longer narrative, a trip further back to my girlhood, when I had no consciousfeminist ideas whatsoever — though perhaps I already had what I might rec-

ognize now as feminist feelings.

The family breakfast table: My mother and father are sitting at the head and

foot of this small table, I and my younger brother between them, say 10 and

5 years old. Our parents are both reading The New York Times, my father

placid, enjoying his usual burnt toast with marmalade, my mother, increas-

ingly agitated. She reads out something — probably about the evil of racismor the injustice of poverty or the stupidity of the government — and here is

her oen-repeated remark, which has mattered so much: “Something must be

done!”

Something must be done? Such a call to action requires quite a lot of un-

packing. For a (newly) middle-class woman, the child of restless, unfulfilled,

and socially powerless immigrants, a woman who observed with longing her

father’s exits from home to meet other men at the Working Men’s Circle while

her gied mother stewed at home, a woman who became a communist in 1933

and passed in the late 1940s into anxious post-McCarthy retreat, a woman

who then reinvented radical politics for herself hidden in this solid suburban

scene, such words have many, layered meanings. What could this still-hungry

mother of mine have imagined we at that table should or could do?

My father, also the child of struggling immigrants, and with progressive

values himself, had no expectation that he could change the world; he was

delighted to be part of it and, starting from scratch, to succeed on its terms.But on my mother’s side the inheritance is clear: Changing the world is an

absolute duty; and — though this part was never voiced — such work is also

a deep pleasure, offering a path into a significant life. Looking back at this

primal scene, the founding scene of “politics” for both my brother and me,

I see how essential the Le- wing utopian dreams of my parents’ generation

were to us both. But the source of my feminism also makes an appearance at

that breakfast table. Creative as my mother was in finding ways “to do some-

thing,” she was also constantly balked in her efforts to be an active, publicbeing. She was, alas, merely a woman. When, finally, Women’s Liberation

took wing in all directions, her anger fused with mine; feminism was simply

it for both of us, the best salve for our wounded hearts.


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4

Guilt was an element in our activism too, of course. Aer all, how could

we be sitting at this well-stocked table while so many we read about were suf-

fering? But such guilt is well-trodden ground. And even in extremis, activism is

not inevitable; some do, some do not. Let me return to family states of mind

that were more productive than guilt in my activist life — and perhaps in thelives of others — the naïveté of utopian wishes and the vaunting desire for a

life of consequence.

No activism is possible without naïveté, some faith in action in spite of

rational assessments of what can actually be done. And, also, no activism

without some grandiosity, some earnest belief in the value of making an

unseemly display. It’s easy to see activism as a fool’s game, a piece of self-

expressive insistence with no clear promise of bringing change — though a

move to activism is always, itself, change. I think of the many years I workedto bring Gender Studies into full reality in a hostile or indifferent university

environment, where feminism was seen as the height of unsophistication; I

think of the early days of my work in postcommunist Eastern Europe where

fine people (for example, the great Polish dissident Adam Michnik) laughed

when they heard I was a feminist organizer. So silly was feminism that hos-

tility wasn’t even necessary. One had to be willing to seem ridiculous, ex-

treme, grotesque. One had to be naïve enough to imagine that something

could — and must — be done in this obviously impossible environment.

One way to make sense of this story of unwavering engagement, and to

give it a meaningful arc, would be to assume that one moves from the in-

nocent belief that one can direct change and the grand certainty that one

is right, to critique, to knowledge of complexity, and to humility. But, for

me at least, that is not how it has been at all. Of course one hopes to bene-

fit from second thoughts, more experience, critical analysis — even from

growing wisdom. One strives to understand scale, to recognize that eventhe most successful organizing is but a piece, of a piece, of a piece of larger

events one can seek (but rarely expect) to shape — events that break apart

into an infinite diversity of narratives. But all my years of activism have also

been shot through with moments when I denied impotence and indulged

in gormless hope, states of mind that sustained me through actions that

came to little (like our theory/action group Take Back The Future’s endless

marches against the U.S. attack on Iraq, 2002 – 2006), and actions that may

well have contributed in some solid way to valuable political shis (like abunch of friends sitting in the rain at Zuccotti Park trying to add “feminism”

to the mix in the first astonishing weeks of the massive uprising known as

Occupy Wall Street, 2011).


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5

Recently, a friend told me, “Occupy is finished.” But how can she know?

Occupy aspires to be everywhere; look for it under your boot soles. Occupy’s

inventive, dispersed actions brought back into open, loud expression both

rage at injustice and utopian hopefulness, feelings that had long been sup-

pressed in public life. The energy that came from this return is incalculable.Skepticism about Occupy Wall Street is easy to justify, but rising expecta-

tions have a long reach.

My entry into feminist organizing in East Central Europe, described in

several essays in this collection, depended on the entirely mistaken idea that

the shock of postcommunism would awaken an idealism and political inten-

sity similar to that of 1968 in the United States, a time of revelation I longed

to revisit. This ignorance gave way to knowledge and disillusion at once, but

it was too late. I was hooked by the entirely different desires and fears arisingfor new friends in actually existing postcommunism; I stayed to slog along

with them in the messy vrai. But no move to a linear narrative is intended

here, no direct line from wishful fantasy to sober truth. Recognizing limita-

tion is sensible but it is also inadequate. Embarrassing as I sometimes find it,

I don’t want to dismiss the value of the initial thrilling illusion; my ignorant

excitement was determinative, and its ghost lingers in the work I continue

to do in my activist travels in East Central Europe.

Uncertainty. Embracing uncertainty — since I can never get far beyond it — is

both my temperament and the political aesthetic I can still sustain without

tasting ashes. My field is literature, and the form I’ve been using for many

years is the personal essay. What Doris Lessing has called “the small per-

sonal voice” is both a way of knowing and of exposing how little one knows.

In these essays I have tried to offer unsettling details to mess up big stories

with smaller ones.At the end of her life, and in her most pained, apocalyptic mood, the fem-

inist

the feminism of uncertainty by ann snitow

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