Kesselman-Women's Liberation and The Left

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Womens Liberation and the Left in New Haven, Connecticut, 19681972

Amy Kesselman
uch has been written about the failure of the twentieth-century American left to achieve the elusive goal of a unified movement that speaks for universal freedom. Some scholars such as Michael Tomasky and Todd Gitlin have laid blame at the doorstep of the principle of separate organization on behalf of distinct interests that raged through the movement in the 1960s and 1970s.1 Rejecting the broad humanitarian goals of the left in favor of a worldview in which race and gender were preeminent, identity-based movements, they argue, caused the universalist impulse to fracture again and again.2 While recognizing that race- and gender-based movements have generated legitimate critiques of discrimination and have produced valuable scholarship, Gitlin and Tomasky aim their guns at identity politics, which Tomasky defines as a politics based on personal identity, as opposed to doctrine or philosophical world view. For Gitlin, identity politics is that stage of a social movement in which the group emphasizes separate organizations and searches for and cultivates distinct customs, qualities, lineages, ways of seeing or, as they come to be known, cultures.3 Arguing that separatist groups are not able to unite with others if they cultivate a separate instead of a common culture, Gitlin asserts that there was no going back from a separatism of spirit. Identity politics, according to Tomasky, has proved to be a disaster for the left.4 Critics of this point of view, such as Robin D. G. Kelley and Jesse Lemisch, have argued that identity-based movements have been crucial in generating analyses
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that help people to, in Lemischs words, keep thinking about what thorough-going equality and real utopia would be.5 In contrast to Gitlin and Tomasky, they point out that identity-based movements have often sought to connect their struggles with those of others, and they criticize a left dominated by white men for failing to incorporate the ideas generated by the feminist, black liberation, and gay movements. Kelley argues against seeing identity-based movements as inherently narrow and particularistic and concludes that the failure to conceive of these social movements as essential to the emancipation of the whole . . . remains the fundamental stumbling block to building a deep and lasting class based politics.6 Movements that purport to be universalist, Kelley and Lemisch point out, often subordinate the priorities of groups with less social power. Womens liberation is one of the main culprits in the Tomasky-Gitlin narrative, which highlights the early 1970s, when an autonomous womens liberation movement separated from the left from which it had emerged. According to Tomasky, 1970 was the moment when the American left cashiered traditional classbased politics for a new variant in which race and gender were preeminent.7 Gitlin and Tomaskys critique of the separatist impulse of womens liberation is based on an interpretation of the relationship between womens liberation and the left that relies largely on the writings of national figures. But both the New Left and womens liberation were decentralized movements in the 1960s and 1970s. As Alice Echols has pointed out, conflicts between the New Left and the womens liberation movement were a consequence of specific historical circumstances and not . . . the result of some inevitable and chronic antagonism.8 To understand the dynamic by which womens liberation and the male-dominated left pulled apart, we need to look at not only what people wrote but also what they did, not only on a national level, but in the many localities in which womens liberation and various New Left organizations coexisted.9 While activists had contact with each other, many of the events that have been described in histories of the movement as milestones in the development of feminism were unknown to most local womens liberation activists.10 A local focus will reveal the dynamics of the relationship between womens liberation and the left and enable us to answer the following questions: How and why did various womens liberation groups perceive the need for an autonomous womens movement? To what extent did womens liberation activists see their movement as part of a broader movement for social change, and what developments impeded the alliance between womens liberation and New Left organizations? New Haven, Connecticut, provides a useful context in which to examine the relationship between womens liberation and the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It had an active left organization, the American Independent Movement (AIM), from which the womens liberation movement emerged, and a lively womens movement that flourished throughout the 1970s. Through an analysis of both the
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written record and the recollections of AIM and womens liberation activists, I will make two arguments: first, because of a left culture that denigrated women, the solidarity engendered by an identity-defined movement was essential in enabling womens liberation activists to challenge womens subordination. Second, my analysis suggests that in New Haven it was not the inevitable logic of identity politics but the failure of the major New Left organization to take gender politics seriously that inhibited the development of an inclusive and broad-ranging left that spoke for universal freedom.
Emergence of Womens Liberation in New Haven New Haven in the late 1960s and early 1970s was losing industry and experiencing demographic changes. While the African American population was growing, Italians, Jews, and Irish had begun moving to the suburbs in the 1950s. The city government, in cooperation with Yale University, was involved in major redevelopment projects that destroyed several residential neighborhoods and built a highway through what had been a mixed residential and commercial downtown area. Yale University, owner of over a third of the tax-exempt property in the city, had become the largest employer in New Haven by 1970. The university and the citys population had an uneasy relationship that occasionally erupted into overt hostility. Although women had attended its graduate, medical, and law schools for some time, Yale did not admit undergraduate women until 1969. Womens liberation began in New Haven, as it did in many cities throughout the country, among women who had been involved in the radical activism of the 1960s. The women who started the first New Haven womens liberation group had been members of the American Independent Movement (AIM) a local organization begun by a group of antiwar activists at Yale that had run a candidate for Congress in 1966 on an antiVietnam War platform. By 1968, AIM had grown into a lively, multifaceted group that was organizing New Haven residents around local, workplace, and antiredevelopment issues as well as against the war. AIM was running its second congressional campaign and had created a number of alternative institutions such as a childrens school, a coffeehouse, and a printing press. AIM members were mostly white, although they worked closely with an African American community organization called the Hill Parents Association and the AIM newsletter covered events in the African American community. Most of the visible leadership was male, although a few women were members of the leadership committee. By 1968, AIM had become the dominant radical organization in the white community outside the campuses and had about sixty-five active members, most of whom were in their twenties and many of whom had some past or present association with Yale University. Most AIM members considered themselves socialists, but, eager to reach out beyond the community of left activists, they avoided explicitly socialist rhetoric. Peo-
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ple with left sympathies were attracted to AIM because they saw it, in the words of Gail Falk, a law student who had been active in the southern civil rights movement, as the place in New Haven where people were thinking in a somewhat nondoctrinaire way about society and the war.11 AIM members successfully challenged the citys plans to build a highway that would destroy more New Haven neighborhoods, supported local labor struggles, and continually exposed Yales corporate connections and irresponsible and racist relationship to the city it uneasily inhabited. AIM members believed that by organizing people to insist that institutions meet their needs they would expose the essential inhumanity and class character of American society. Like women in New Left groups throughout the country, the women in AIM played important roles but were not seen as theoretical or political leaders.12 Nina Adams, for example, one of the founders of AIM who worked full time in the AIM office during the 1966 electoral campaign, felt needed and respected, but never central. There was a sense, she recalls, of big men running a show and women being very critical to it but somehow peripheral. Like many of the AIM women reflecting on their experience, she remembers the inner circle of AIM leaders as a collection of very large men; she felt that she had to work hard to be taken seriously. I have this image of myself, she recalls, noting that it seemed like a metaphor for the culture of the organization, as short, fighting my way by voice and presence into the center of the group to make a point.13 There was not much room for talking about these feelings in AIM, whose group discussions remained abstract and rarely included interpersonal relationships. The first time such issues were brought up was when single people in the organization confronted the leaders of AIM, most of whom were heterosexual couples who mixed political and social life at dinner parties from which single people were frequently excluded. While some individuals became more sensitive after the confrontation, there was no organizational response. While some scholars have described personal politics and consciousness-raising as inherited by the womens movement from the left, this was not the case in AIM, in which activists saw themselves as catalysts for political change whose personal relationships were irrelevant to the main business at handbuilding an anticapitalist political movement.14
An AIM Womens Group? The possibility and necessity of organizing against injustice wherever one found it animated AIM activists and permeated the environment they inhabited. It is this spirit that Harriet Fraad invokes when she remembers her motivations for organizing the first womens group in New Haven in 1968. When her sister, Rosalyn Baxandall, showed her Notes from the First Year, a collection of articles written by New York Radical Women, she responded, Thats right, this is it, this is important; this is something I have to do; Ill do it.15
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But while organizing against a new form of oppression found support in the 1960s left, the idea of associating oneself with women as a group was frightening to many of the AIM women in the context of the male-dominated culture of their organization. While twenty women came to the first meeting called by Fraad and two friends from AIM, only two showed up for the second one, and the next few meetings attracted so few people that enthusiasm sagged and the group considered disbanding. The womens group, according to Polly Gassler, was seen as somehow divisive. Being in the group, she remembers, felt vaguely embarrassing, as if there were something a little wrong with you. It was like an admission of weakness to feel this personal need. It was shameful that you had felt oppressed and the grounds for that oppression were that you werent making it. Harriet Cohen, who stayed away from the womens group until 1970, remembers thinking the womens group was for people who were unhappily married or couldnt chair meetings. Nina Adams was not overly respectful of the group, which she saw as potentially divisive to the united movement she wanted to build. Judy Millers recollection captures the attitudes of many AIM women toward womens liberation. She describes herself as very opposed to it initially; I was one of those people who said, Were organizing working-class people, and womens liberation sounds like a middle-class, selfindulgent, self-absorbed kind of thing. So I was quite strident for a brief period of time.16 The nagging fear that gathering with a group of women would threaten their status in the eyes of the male leadership of AIM followed those women who persisted into the early meetings of the womens group. They resisted talking about their own experience and tried to legitimate womens liberation by connecting it with the staples of prevailing left rhetoric about capitalism and imperialism. Three years later, when a group of women reflected on those early meetings, participants remembered with disbelief how difficult it was for them to take themselves seriously and to see their own experience as a political resource. Most of the early meetings were spent in trying to determine whether or not women were actually oppressed. Feelings were never discussed.17 Judy Miller remarked in that discussion that she finally decided to join the group because she had read an article by Julius Lester, a radical African American writer, affirming the potential of the womens movement. The womens group was legitimate, she recalls feeling, as long as we focus on working-class women and women of color. Thats fine with me; I can do that. But Im not going to be talking about my oppression. Im not oppressed. In the early fall of 1968 the fledgling womens group foundered. After planning an action at the local mall that never materialized, they considered disbanding. But word had gotten out about the group beyond AIM circles. The Voice of Womens Liberation, a national newsletter based in Chicago, announced the New Haven group in its October issue and, much to the surprise and delight of the original mem-
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bers, ten new people arrived at the next meeting full of enthusiasm about doing something about these horrible injustices.18 The idea of disbanding was quickly forgotten. Emboldened by the enthusiasm of the new members, the group turned to the task of presenting their ideas to AIM. The first form this took was an article by Jane White in the November issue of the AIM Newsletter, preceded by a note that a group of New Haven women had been meeting for several months to discuss womens liberation. The article reflected the defensive posture of early womens liberation, sidling up to womens oppression through an analogy with black people and returning repeatedly to the question of whether women struggling for equality would lose their femininity. White invoked the devastation men suffer as a result of the current relations of the sexes and laid partial blame for the failure of womens struggles at the doorstep of women who have turned their struggle into an anti-male anti-marriage campaign fraught with the anger against men that often has little to do with true freedom. Meaningful activity outside the home, White assured her readers, would not interfere with womens ability to be good mothers, wives, cooks, and that wonderful thing called a woman.19 The womens group also wanted a chance to present their ideas in person, to engage in dialogue with other AIM members, and to talk about ways that womens liberation could be incorporated into AIMs program. Even though most of the new members had never been involved with AIM before, several of them were interested in its activities, and they all saw preparation for the presentation as a way to deepen their understanding of womens position and clarify their ideas about what would be necessary to change it. They each took responsibility for a different dimension of womens experience, scoured libraries, wrote for government publications, and exchanged womens liberation pamphlets, growing angrier as they learned the details of womens economic exploitation, political exclusion, cultural degradation, and the systematic discrimination against women in all aspects of social life. By mid-February they were ready and, with some apprehension, presented their findings at an AIM meeting. Their analysis, full of facts and figures, presented womens oppression in the context of a Marxist critique of capitalism and made clear that their goals went beyond equal opportunity to envision a society that would make all workers managerial workers.20 Reaction was mixed. While no one denied the reality of womens oppression, some AIM men argued that women should concentrate on building a socialist movement, since women would be free after the revolution.21 Some of the AIM women were frightened about the implications of this new feminist analysis for their own lives. It made sense to me but it scared me, remembers Mimi Abramovitz, for whom womens liberation raised questions about her married life.22 Some women were openly hostile, but others were clearly intrigued, and a new group of women from AIM began to come to meetings.
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Having believed that merely pointing out the ways that women were oppressed would immediately demonstrate the essential role of womens liberation in a socialist movement, some of the women in the womens group were taken aback by AIMs failure to take us to their bosom after their first presentation.23 They tried harder. An article entitled Womens Liberation: Its Relevance to Radicals, by Joelle Dominski, appeared in the next AIM Newsletter. Summarizing the evidence that the womens group had presented orally, the article argued that race and class distinctions are used by the ruling class to divide people, and thus to maintain the status quo and urged that radicals eliminate the vestiges of male chauvinism in their movement and incorporate a womens liberation program into their organizing efforts.24 AIMs response to these arguments continued to be uneven. The AIM Newsletter devoted space to articles about womens liberation activities; the womens liberation group used the AIM office for meetings and was invited to send a representative to the leadership group of AIM, the Interim Administrative Committee, which was composed of representatives of various AIM projects and groups. Womens liberation ideas, however, did not reshape the ideology, rhetoric, or imagery
AIM Newsletter, July 1969.
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Child-In, May 1970. Photo by Virginia Blaisdell.
that dominated AIM discourse. The cover of the July 1969 issue of the AIM Newsletter, for example, which declared, Its [sic] a system that keeps us apart, was accompanied by an illustration of a barbed wirewielding capitalist flanked by six figures who represented various oppressed groups; all of the figures were male. Meanwhile, the momentum in the womens group built as new women joined, and they began to engage in what the New York group Redstockings had recently named consciousness raising, examining their own experience for insights into womens position in society. While some women found this process threatening or alienating, most participants remember it as both politically exciting and personally compelling.25 Betsy Gilbertson, an AIM member who joined after the presentation, remembered:
We would take some piece of experience, that it had never occurred, to me at least, to think about differently, and talk about it. Like . . . high school, and the
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importance of having boobs, and what it was like to be smart, and . . . whether you could major in math or science. . . . And these themes would emerge when you started to do that. . . . The experience that captured that best for me was one day looking at the front page of the newspaper and there was not a single womans name on itand I had been reading the newspaper all my life and I had never noticed that. It was like that. And this lightI mean, it was literally like someone had screwed in a light bulb. And all of a sudden I had a set of lenses for looking at the world that I hadnt had before, and the whole world looked different through them.26
Gail Falk was also captivated by both the experience of totally rewriting your history and the feeling of everybody figuring things out together. After years of activism in the civil rights and antiwar movements she felt that this was the first movement that was about me and was delighted to be able to make connections between her own experience and the other causes she had been working for. As womens liberation became more visible through both the activities of the local group and the media attention the womens movement began to receive in 1969, women began to have similar epiphanies as they went about their daily lives. Harriet Cohen, an AIM activist who had resisted joining the womens group, thought to herself, Thats what theyre talking about! when a woman in a class she was taking commented, in a discussion about political change, You know the important people make the changes like the politicians and lawyers. You know, Harriet, like your husband. Hes a lawyer. Hes involved in that or something like that. And it was like this moment of truth because I was the one who was the activist in the family. And it just sort of, like, hit me over the head. Having seen themselves as organizers who only indirectly suffered from the injustices they challenged, the AIM women moved awkwardly, albeit ecstatically, toward building a movement on their own behalf. As the womens group grew, its relationship with AIM and with the left in general became ambiguous. Many AIM women found womens liberations claims on their time and energy more compelling than those of other movement work. After returning from a trip in 1969 in which they visited other womens groups, Judy Miller and Caltha Mellor concluded that in the cities in which the womens movement was strongest, radical women had made womens liberation a priority: Maybe one of the reasons that womens groups all over the country are having so much trouble making those decisions and realigning of commitments is that we still havent been able to take ourselves and our issues seriously. As women, its hard to believe that our movement is important. But until we are able to take ourselves seriously, only groups in highly unusual situations are going to be able to build a strong womens movement in their cities.27
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Womens Liberation Mushrooms In 1971, when a group of New Haven womens liberation activists gathered to write the history of their movement, they were incredulous at the hesitancy with which they had approached the first womens group. From the vantage point of 1971, they found it difficult to believe that the consciousness of the women involved was so low that they didnt understand yet that the womens movement deserved to exist on its own.28 In the intervening three years, womens liberation had expanded beyond the wildest dreams of the early founders. It had become an independent movement whose constituency was much broader than the AIM community. While some womens liberation activists continued to participate in AIM activities, the womens liberation movement was no longer an AIM project and, in September 1971, it ceased to make reports to AIM. The excitement generated by womens liberation ideas brought a continuous flow of new women to the weekly meetings, swelling them beyond capacity. In order to preserve the process of examining ones own experience through womens liberation lenses, the group adopted the practice of meeting once a week in the large group of seventy-five to a hundred women and in small consciousness-raising groups on other nights. To introduce new women to the movement, activists developed a series of workshops called the New Womens Course, which generated new small groups and a team of women to run the next series. Yale graduate students, law students, faculty and graduate students wives, and the newly admitted undergraduate women each formed groups; a womens center serving both Yale and the community opened in 1970. Womens liberation ideas were communicated through a weekly radio show (including a serial soap opera entitled The Liberation of Lydia), women-and-our-bodies courses, a speakers bureau, a womens liberation rock band, and forums and conferences in the community and at area colleges. AIM had bequeathed a mixed legacy to the womens liberation movement in New Haven. On the one hand, AIM culture had made it enormously difficult for women to claim their cause as legitimate. On the other hand, AIM had instilled in the activists who initiated womens liberation a belief in the power of collective action to both make changes and reveal the limits of change within existing institutions. This belief in organizing was one of womens liberations defining characteristics one that distinguished it from later incarnations of second-wave feminism. Once convinced of the legitimacy of their cause, womens liberation activists used their organizing skills in a wide variety of projects in the early 1970s to change laws and challenge sexist practices: a campaign to assist the organizing efforts of clerical and technical workers at Yale, a child-care alliance that staged a child-in at a Yale board meeting, a campaign against Morys (the men-only bar to which Yale faculty and administrators took visiting dignitaries), a camp-in on the town green to
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Demonstration at Morys, October 1970. Photo by Virginia Blaisdell.
protest the cuts in the grants to welfare recipients, a class action suit challenging Connecticuts abortion law, and an offensive defense squad that challenged sexual harassment on the street. The solidarity and enthusiasm generated by an autonomous, identity-based movement made it possible for womens liberation activists to develop the theory and practice involved in challenging patriarchal power relations. In AIM, as in other male-dominated domains, women who wanted to be taken seriously as political actors had to deny their connections with women as a group and downplay their femaleness. In contrast, the atmosphere within the burgeoning womens movement had a profound effect on womens self-confidence. The evaluations of the new womens course illustrate the transformation in womens consciousness generated in groups of women who were developing a political analysis together and shaping a political culture in which womens ideas and experience were valued. Palamona Ferris, for example, commented: For years I had been one of those women who said (at least to myself) that I didnt care for women, and I had come to value myself for what I took to be masculine qualities, rather than feminine ones. But suddenly, looking around at the women in that room, I thought that they were all beautiful, intelligent, educated (though not always formally), kind and that I belong to a noble sex.29 The emphasis on sisterhood in womens liberation discourse was an expression of this newfound sense of solidarity and pride. In contrast to the early meetings of the AIM womens group, women meeting together as part of an autonomous
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womens movement were able to tap their own experience to develop an analysis on a wide variety of topics and plan projects to address them. The electric energy generated by a sense of sisterhood in the early 1970s did not, however, mean that the womens movement had cut itself off from other movements for social justice. Despite the widening distance between AIM and womens liberation, the activists in New Haven womens liberation continued to see themselves as part of a broader movement for a social and economic revolution; they incorporated in their work both an anticapitalist perspective and an analysis of the interconnections among various struggles for self-determination.30 A session on Women and the New Left in the New Womens Course included a critique of capitalism, imperialism, and various forms of hierarchy. Anxious to avoid the appearance of reformism and to distinguish themselves from liberal feminist groups, womens liberation activists embedded every issue they addressed in a wide-ranging critique of American society (resulting in some very long leaflets). The very success of some of their campaigns worried them, lest the single issues they were working on become detached from a critique of both womens position and the general inhumanity of American society. In a discussion about the progress of their lawsuit against Connecticuts abortion laws, for example, Ann Freedman expressed frustration about speaking to a womens Democratic Club about the single issue of abortion: Because that doesnt change their minds around about whats wrong with womens Democratic Clubs, which is somehow a vital, important part of our message about abortion that if you dont know about whats wrong with the whole political system in this state you cant change the fact that a legislators going to screw around on abortion and women generally and also all the other things you believe in, because of the way that its set up.31
Modern Times, A Community NewspaperWhose Community? Whose Newspaper? When AIM replaced its newsletter with a tabloid-style newspaper in May 1971, many women were enthusiastic about the opportunity to communicate womens liberation ideas in a left context. While the new paper, Modern Times, described itself as a publication of AIM, it attracted volunteers from a broad spectrum of left-leaning political orientations to help write, edit, and produce the paper. Beginning with twenty-two volunteers, Modern Times, impelled by its motto What You Do Is News, covered a variety of progressive activities and events. A year after its birth, about ninety men and women worked on the paper, many of them from outside of AIM. We work on the paper, read the birthday issue, because we are fed up with much of present day America, and we think by working on the paper we can help build a better society.32 Many of these volunteers were attracted to the paper and to the left in general through womens liberation activities. For example, local housewife April Reiss heard about the paper on a television show about womens liberation, AIM, and Modern
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Times. Reiss, who describes herself as completely apolitical before she heard this program, was deeply affected by what appeared on the television that night: I could remember totally clearly seeing that show and it just hit me like a thunderbolt on the deepest level, like lightning. So I called the number. I never thought about it at all; it was like something boiling up in me. I called up and said, What can I do? They said, Come down to the newspaper. And I came down in this polyester pantsuit.33 While she felt odd midst all the hippies in wrinkled clothing, Reiss also felt a total connection with these people, especially the womens liberation activists who worked on the paper. She was inspired by the sense of hope she found at Modern Times and was eager to write about feminist issues in the paper. I knew this was where I belonged, she recalls. Because she had time and enthusiasm, she soon became editor. Kathy Wimer, another womens liberation activist, remembers a sense of urgency and excitement about the paper that inspired her to stretch herself thin in order to work on it: Im up breastfeeding this baby when it wakes up in the morning, taking it to the home day care provider in West Haven, getting on the highway going to Middletown, putting in a seven- to eight-hour day as editor at this nationally distributed paperback book club, picking the baby up in West Haven at the end of the day, breastfeeding her and toting her off to the Modern Times office and stripping photographs and shit like that for this newspaper.34 Modern Times began with an explicit commitment to an egalitarian structure and collective decision making as an expression of the staffs belief that theories about society should be mirrored by some real changes in the way we work and live together on Modern Times.35 However, an inherent tension simmered beneath the surface. In the wake of both local and national events in 1969 and 1970 that shook the radical movements of the 1960s (the fragmentation of the New Left and the influx of newcomers who were attracted to the trial of the Black Panthers), AIM reevaluated its politics, structure, and strategy. It emerged from this process as a more explicitly socialist group of organizers whose primary constituency was defined as the working class. Since the organization was emphasizing its work with labor, AIM members wanted a way to communicate with workers. Modern Times, they decided, would be a labor paper as an integral part of a community paper.36 But many of the non-AIM staff members who worked on the paper did not see labor as the papers primary constituency, and their contributions did not always reflect AIMs political priorities. Peter OConnell, an AIM member who served on the Modern Times staff in 1971, commented that while it was always a goal to get people involved, it was also felt that there had to be a little massaging, so to speak, because the[ir] ideology in some cases wasnt exactly what we wanted to see presented.37 Involving non-AIM members in Modern Times editorial decisions threatened AIMs goals for the paper. In addition, despite the assiduous efforts of its staff, Modern Times readers
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were primarily members of New Havens predominantly middle-class radical community. Should articles be written in a manner that appealed to the radicals who read the paper, or should they be tailored to the target audience, members of the white working class who tended to read the paper only when it covered events they were involved with? AIM members on the Modern Times staff worried that the articles on issues that they believed to be controversial among working-class people, such as abortion and the Black Panther trial, assumed a sympathetic readership. Working-class readers, they feared, might be alienated by articles that treated such subjects in an offhand, cavalier manner as if they were not controversial at all.38 For the first year and a half of the papers life, decision making remained collective; everyone was invited to the long staff meetings where the next issue was planned, and the anniversary issue proudly described the way that the paper differed from more hierarchical organizations. But it also made clear that the dominant tradition . . . and general political tone still comes . . . from the AIM members.39 When the tension erupted in late 1971, it was womens liberation that precipitated the crisis. A group of womens liberation activists who called themselves Women versus Connecticut had filed a lawsuit in March against Connecticuts antiabortion statute. Using the lawsuit as an organizing tool, they recruited over eight hundred plaintiffs and held rallies, speak-outs, and open meetings throughout the state. According to Peter OConnell, A lot of women thought this should be tremendously highlighted, constantly on the front page, played up, a major organizing focus. And other people felt, O.K., look, were trying to do organizing in communities like Fair Haven where a lot of people are Catholic, and you kind of have to work into that. Not that we dont believe in abortion rights, but the question is how you present it as an organizing focus. 40 The AIM leadership felt that issues of concern to workers should be featured on the front page, inducing workers to read the paper. If these working-class readers saw the newspaper as about their communities and their issues, said Matt Borenstein, one of the founders of Modern Times, if theyd read the paper and see that within that newspaper was another thing the paper thought was important then they might consider it in a better light. For example, a rent strike in Fair Haven on the front page and on page three or page five an article on what people were doing to get abortion rights and why; then they might look at that paper and read it. But if the abortion issue was on the front page they might not even pick it up and look at it.41 The conflict came to a head in December 1971 when Women versus Connecticut won a major victory. Reversing an earlier ruling, an appeals court declared that the lawsuit could be heard in court. April Reiss, who had newly become editor, placed a story headlined Abortion Suit Reaches Court on the front page of the January 1, 1972, issue, along with a story about a tenants rights victory.42 The front-page story about abortion convinced the AIM leadership that they
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needed to reassert control over Modern Times if their vision of the paper was to prevail. A new policy was announced at the next Modern Times staff meeting: only AIM members could participate in making editorial decisions; the full-time staff person must be an AIM member and the staff box would announce clearly that Modern Times was an organ of AIM. April Reiss was told that she could no longer be the editor.43 Since within the past year AIM had tightened its requirements for membership, joining AIM was not a simple matter. The new policy meant that a significant number of Modern Times staffers were excluded from decision making on the paper. The earlier commitment of the Modern Times staff to a style of democratic decision making that reflected their vision of a transformed world had been eclipsed by AIMs insistence on control.44 Fifteen Modern Times staff members signed a letter of resignation, written by Virginia Blaisdell, an AIM member and womens liberation activist. At a stormy AIM meeting, the factions squared off. The arguments focused not on the issue that had precipitated the split but on questions of editorial control. To the AIM leaders, Modern Times was their paper and it should reflect their politics. The dissenters (many of whom were not at the meeting since they were not AIM members) argued that the people who are motivated to work on an alternative newspaper deserve to have some power over the paper for which their labor is being used.45 To April Reiss, it seemed like a big split between the people who were feminists and the people who were Marxists. People on both sides saw the split at Modern Times as a watershed event. Virginia Blaisdell viewed the change in editorial policy as profoundly antidemocratic and dropped out of AIM. Peter OConnell, who supported the position of the AIM leadership, felt that it was unfortunate and tragic, even, that the split occurred; it certainly was a turning point for the left and marked the decline of the left in New Haven.46 After the resignations, Modern Times continued to publish with a sharply reduced staff, constantly struggling to find people to write articles and work on the paper. While it covered some events of interest to women, it emphasized those issues that seemed most consistent with AIMs political orientation, and many New Haven feminists felt increasingly alienated from it. When Connecticuts abortion law was declared unconstitutional in April 1972 as a result of the lawsuit brought by Women versus Connecticut, the story appeared on page two of the May issue with an announcement in a teaser box on the front page.
A Narrowed Vision In her brilliant study of the Owenites in nineteenth-century Britain, Barbara Taylor demonstrates that when late-nineteenth-century socialists abandoned the multifac-
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eted offensive against all forms of social hierarchy including sexual hierarchy in favor of a worldview that subordinated all struggles to the contest between capital and labor, womens emancipation became marginalized and seen as divisive to class unity.47 A similar dynamic was at work in the New Haven left in the 1970s. The antihierarchical spirit proudly described in the paper just six months earlier had been eclipsed by the priorities generated by a Marxist analysis. Like the socialist parties of the early twentieth century, AIM members saw the working class as the primary agent of revolutionary social change; labor issues should therefore be featured most prominently in their newspaper.48 As Mari Jo Buhle has pointed out in her history of women in the American Socialist Party in the early twentieth century, the simultaneous development of the New Left and the womens liberation movement exposed lines of tension buried since 1919.49 Like socialists in the early twentieth century, radicals of the 1970s were divided about which issues and activities would bring revolutionary change and which would merely reform a system of exploitative power relations. Kathy Wimer, who felt that she had to choose between Modern Times and womens liberation because of her limited time and energy, wrote in 1971: The AIM people say, We want a socialist revolution. We expect it to take many years to develop. Yet, working on anything short of a socialist revolution is reformist. Womens liberation says, Were making the revolution now, within ourselves, between ourselves, by building toward change in this society while not losing sight of a socialistic society as our ultimate goal.50 For Virginia Blaisdell, womens liberation ideas contributed essential insights to a revolutionary movement. I wanted to change society the way it was structured, for everybody, she recalled, and I thought feminism offered a window into the mechanisms of oppression that had not been seen before. The mechanisms of oppression were seen to be basically related to industryperhaps related to laws or perhaps related to the military but never examined the way we could examine them, the way they worked on peoples consciousness, and the way they worked on peoples sense of themselves.51 In the conclusion of a speech to a course on womens liberation a year and a half after the Modern Times split, Ann Glasser, a womens liberation activist, echoed a widely shared belief when she suggested that because feminism challenges the most basic assumptions about the nature of men and women that underlie all value systems and institutions, it may well inspire social change more fundamental and radical than any other political movement.52 For many AIM members, on the other hand, feminism was inherently liberal (as opposed to radical) because it was being popularized by the media and because it involved, according to Matt Borenstein, looking for a share of the world that men had rather than changing basic social relationships of the society. The labor movement, however, since it was involved in directly fighting against the capitalist class
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was, in his eyes, more important for socialists to promote. Such orthodox Marxism prevented Modern Times from incorporating into its political analysis the major feminist insight about power relations between women and men and the relationship between gender and class. Reproductive freedom was seen as a particularist demand rather than a central tenet of human emancipation.53 During its first year and a half, Modern Times represented a broad coalition of radical groups that included feminist as well as socialist perspectives and covered a wide variety of progressive struggles. This alliance was shattered not by the refusal of womens liberation to work with other segments of the left, but because the maledominated left, wracked by competing orthodoxies, narrowed its vision rather than broadening it to include the new insights and constituencies that womens liberation had generated. This local study sharpens questions about the relationship between the maledominated left and womens liberation in the early 1970s that I hope will be explored in future research: Did this relationship take different forms in locations where the radical movements were connected through a loose federation and were less dominated by the presence of an organization? Was the story different in locations in which the male-dominated left was less influenced by orthodox Marxism? Were there places in which the male-dominated left incorporated feminist politics into its theory and practice? In addition to clarifying the history of the 1970s, such research will help us understand the reasons that the left had difficulty responding to the right-wing attacks in the early 1980s. When the left marginalized issues having to do with private life and failed to connect them with an analysis of the allocation of power in our society, it left the field open for the Christian right, espousing family values, to speak to the sense of powerlessness that working people experience in this country.54
Notes
This essay has benefited from the thoughtful comments of Polly Beals, Jennifer Frost, Linda Gordon, Dewar MacLeod, Vivian Rothstein, Rickie Solinger, and Barbara Tischler. Im especially grateful for the insights of Virginia Blaisdell, who read many drafts and with whom I had many conversations. 1. Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of the Common Dream: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Holt, 1995), 100. 2. Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: Free, 1996), 86; Gitlin, Twilight of the Common Dream, 100. 3. Tomasky, Left for Dead, 74; Gitlin, Twilight of the Common Dream, 141. 4. Gitlin, Twilight of the Common Dream, 143; Tomasky, Left for Dead, 80. 5. Jesse Lemisch, Angry White Men on the Left, New Politics 6.2 (winter 1997): 99. 6. Robin D. G. Kelley, Identity Politics and Class Struggle, New Politics 6.2 (winter 1997): 88. 7. Tomasky, Left for Dead, 86.
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8. 9.
10.
11. 12. 13. 14.
15. 16.
17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.
30.
31. 32.
Alice Echols, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Notes Toward a Remapping of the Sixties, Socialist Review 22.2 (1992): 11. For the importance of local studies to the study of social movements, see Bret Eynon, Cast upon the Shores: Oral History and the New Scholarship on the Movements of the 1960s, Journal of American History 83.2 (September 1996): 563. See, for example, Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of the Womens Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage, 1979); Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 19671975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980); and Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open (New York: Viking, 2000). Gail Falk, interview by the author, October 10, 1993. See Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: 19621968, The Great Refusal (New York: Praeger, 1982); and Sara Evans, Personal Politics. Nina Adams, interview by the author, July 30, 1996. Harriet Fraad, interview by the author, July 20, 1993; Mimi Abramovitz, interview by the author, November 5, 1995; and Polly Gassler, interview by the author, July 21, 1996. See Breines, Community and Organization, and Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987) for the idea that personal politics and consciousness-raising had its roots in the New Left. Fraad, interview, July 20, 1993. Polly Gassler, Harriet Cohen, Virginia Blaisdell, and Mimi Abramovitz, group interview by the author, December 10, 1994; Nina Adams and Judy Dusty Miller, interview by the author, December 20, 1995. Summary of group discussion in October 1971 about the history of the New Haven womens movement, in possession of author. Virginia Blaisdell, interview by the author, August 2, 1991. Jane White, Womens Liberation, AIM Newsletter, November 1968. Virginia Blaisdell, notes on presentation to AIM, in possession of author. Virginia Blaisdell, group interview, December 10, 1994. Mimi Abramovitz, interview by the author, November 5, 1994. Blaisdell, interview, August 2, 1991. Joelle Dominski, Womens Liberation: Its Relevance to Radicals, AIM Newsletter, February 14, 1969. Fraad, interview. Betsy Gilbertson, interview by the author, July 6, 1991. Caltha Mellor and Judy Miller, What We Think Is Happening, unpublished manuscript, 1969, in possession of author. Transcription of group discussion in October 1971, recorded by Christine Pattee, in possession of author. Marianne Cayton, Palamona Ferris, and Pat Ferraro, Evaluation of the New Womans Course, mimeograph, papers of the New Haven Womens Center, in possession of the author. See Wini Breines, Sixties Stories Silences: White Feminism, Black Feminism, Black Power, NWSA Journal 8.3 (fall 1996): 10121, for a discussion of the links between womens liberation and the left. Herstory of Women vs. Connecticut: Our Thoughts on Abortion and Ourselves, transcript of a discussion tape recorded May 1971, in possession of the author, 26. Modern Times, May 5, 1971.
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33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.
41. 42.
43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.
49. 50. 51. 52. 53.
54.
April Reiss, interview by the author, February 15, 1995. Kathy Wimer, interview by the author, February 23, 1995. Modern Times, May 1, 1971. Internal AIM newsletter, July 5, 1971, See also AIM papers, February16, 1970, in possession of the author. Socialist Feminist Group, A Short History of AIM, unpublished manuscript, 1975, in possession of the author; Peter OConnell, interview by the author, August 30, 1997. Internal AIM newsletter, July 1971. Modern Times, May 1, 1971. OConnell, interview. Recent scholarship has suggested that the abortion practices and attitudes among Catholics are more complex than the left often assumed. Catholic women have abortions at least as frequently as non-Catholic women. Polls in the mid-1970s showed Catholics to be only slightly more opposed to abortion than Protestants. See Linda Gordon, Womans Body, Womans Right: Birth Control in America (New York: Penguin, 1990), 407. Matt Borenstein, interview by the author, March 4, 1995. Modern Times, January 114, 1972. Tensions regarding abortion had clearly been brewing before this event, as evidenced in the internal newsletter of the Interim Administrative Committee of AIM, December 10. Internal AIM newsletter, January 31, 1972. See Echols, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, 1415, for a discussion of the effects of the lefts repudiation of prefigurative politics. Kathy Wimer, unpublished manuscript, in possession of the author. Peter OConnell, interview by the author, August 30, 1997. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1983), xv. For a discussion of the subordination of gender to class struggle in Second International Socialist politics, see Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question, 18841911 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Renate Pore, A Conflict of Interest: Women in German Social Democracy, 19191933 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981); and Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981). Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 123. Wimer, unpublished manuscript. Virginia Blaisdell, interview by the author, June 13, 1995. Ann Glasser, Womens Role: Myths and Realities, Little Sister: New Haven Womens Liberation Newsletter, November 1973. For an example of a left group during the 1970s (with a predominantly Catholic constituency) that, as a result of the strong feminist presence in the leadership, made a broad reproductive rights agenda a central part of their politics, see Jennifer Nelson, Abortions under Community Control: Feminism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Reproduction among New York Citys Young Lords, Journal of Womens History 13.1 (spring 2001): 15780. See Linda Gordon and Alan Hunter, Sex, Family, and the New Right, Radical America 12.1 (November 1977February 1978): 925, for a discussion of the inadequacy of the lefts response to the New Right. They urged socialists to develop programs and organizations that address the dissolution of patriarchy and to make sex, family and womens liberation among our primary issues (18).
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Womens Liberation and the Left in New Haven, Connecticut, 19681972

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