Feminist Review: Issue 35 (Feminist Review Journal)

CONTENTS

Campaign Against Pornography Barbara Norden

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The Mothers’ Manifesto and Disputes Over ‘Mütterlichkeit’ Prue Chamberlayne

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Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception Lata Mani

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Cagney and Lacey Revisited Beverley Alcock and Jocelyn Robson

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Cutting a Dash: The Dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge Katrina Rolley

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Deviant Dress Elizabeth Wilson

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The House that Jill Built: Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Toronto, 1976–1980 Becki Ross

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Women in Professional Engineering: The Interaction of Gendered Structures and Values Ruth Carter and Gill Kirkup

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Comment: Identity Politics and the Hierarchy of Oppression Linda Briskin

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Poetry: Regina Bufkin

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Nancy Zumwalt

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Review Essay: Clara Connolly on Sacred Cows

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Reviews Linda Semple on The Dog Collar Murders and After Delores

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Alison Oram on Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?: Essays from the International Scientific Conference on Lesbian and Gay Studies

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Robyn Archer on Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This—My Life in the Jazz World

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Noticeboard

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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Feminist Review is published three times a year by a collective based in London, with help from women and groups all over the UK. The Collective: Alison Light, Alison Read, Annie Whitehead, AnnMarie Wolpe, Catherine Hall, Clara Connolly, Dot Griffiths, Erica Carter, Helen Crowley, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Loretta Loach, Lynne Segal, Mary McIntosh, Mica Nava, Naila Kabeer, Sue O’Sullivan. Correspondence and advertising For contributions and all other correspondence please write to: Feminist Review, 11 Carleton Gardens, Brecknock Road, London N19 5AQ. For subscriptions and advertising please write to: David Polley, Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Contributions Feminist Review is happy to discuss proposed work with intending authors at an early stage. We need copy to come to us in our house style with references complete and in the right form. We can supply you with a style sheet. Please send in 4 copies plus the original (5 copies in all). In cases of hardship 2 copies will do. Bookshop distribution in the USA Inland Book Company Inc., 22 Hemingway Avenue, East Haven, CT 06512, USA. Copyright © 1990 in respect of the collection is held by Feminist Review. Copyright © 1990 in respect of individual articles is held by the authors. PHOTOCOPYING AND REPRINT PERMISSIONS Single and multiple photocopies of extracts from this journal may be made without charge in all public and educational institutions or as part of any non-profit educational activity provided that full acknowledgement is made of the source. Requests to reprint in any publication for public sale should be addressed to the publisher, Routledge. ISSN number 0141–7789 We apologise to Lesley Ruda for omitting her name on her cartoon on page 22 of Feminist Review no.34.

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CAMPAIGN AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY Barbara Norden

The first Campaign Against Pornography (CAP) eonference took place in November 1989, shortly after the launch of Off the Shelf, CAP’s campaign to get W.H.Smith to stop stocking soft-porn magazines on its top shelf. The conference, entitled ‘Pornography and Sexual Violence’ had been planned for over a year, was massively oversubscribed and a 1990 repeat was planned. It was part of a programme of action between November 1989 and April 1990 which included a speaking tour and regional training events in February— sessions for activists on winning the arguments against pornography—and a national day of action on International Women’s Day. The November conference took place at Nottingham Polytechnic Students Union; students were much in evidence though the Townswomen’s Guild, which took part in the London press launch of Off the Shelf, was nowhere to be seen. A national women’s conference, as the event was subtitled, is a rarity in itself, but CAP’s conference was also unusual in that it did not invite debate about the issue. Though not confined to CAP’s 700 members, the registration form stated that women attending should be opposed to pornography and want to organise against it, before they had heard the arguments. Potential dissenters were excluded from the afternoon workshops. Women with press tickets were allowed to listen to the series of papers which formed the first half of the conference. A cheer went up when it was announced over the loudspeaker that a group of women who had distributed a leaflet ‘against the aims of this eonference’ during the lunchbreak were ‘no longer with us’. The leaflet contained a feminist argument against the dangers of censorship. Despite the fact that participants were presumed to agree already, the six papers which made up the first half of the conference were not about ways to combat pornography but a rehearsal of arguments and feelings against it. The speaker who said ‘We shouldn’t fall into the trap of rationalizing a collective experience, our deep and personal knowledge of it’ summed up a recurring theme. The only exception was a paper by Nickie Roberts, former stripper and author of The Front Line: Women in the Sex Industry Speak, read out in her absence, which described the closeness between women in the sex industry and the stigma and harassment they experience. At no time did her statement advocate or even logically lead to a campaign against pornography. Clare Short, Page 3 and Off the Shelf CAP was started by Labour MP Clare Short who in 1986 attempted to wrest the antipornography argument away from Mary Whitehouse and Conservative MP Winston Churchill and on to a feminist footing.

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Churchill was trying to pass a bill banning violence on TV which could have affected war reporting and medical textbooks. Clare Short’s by now well-known account of the impulsive decision to introduce her Indecent Displays Bill banning Page 3, and the childish and prurient behaviour of male Tory MPs, which elicited 5,000 letters of support from women, formed the opening speech of the CAP conference. At the time of the Bill, Clare Short was not in favour of banning all pornography as she told Melissa Benn in early 1987: I was quite careful about the phrasing of [the Bill] so it would cover Page 3 only. I thought you can’t do it all at once, can’t get rid of porn. It would go underground anyway. So instead of hunting out the most vile porn, I thought: start in the middle and go for the thing that everyone’s exposed to all the time.’ (Quoted in Chester and Dickey, 1988:29) At the conference she described her anti-Page-3 Bill and the Off the Shelf campaign as if they were equally mainstream, though magazines displayed on the top shelves of newsagents—CAP specified Health & Efficiency, Mayfair, Penthouse, Playboy, Playmates in the Spotlight and Sunday Sport Magazine in its petition to W.H.Smith—are regarded by the news trade as specialist, ‘men’s interest’ magazines as opposed to ‘mainstream’ tabloid newspapers, and their position on the top shelf implies restricted availability; for instance, Smiths would not sell them to children. Clare Short’s speech proposed not a legal ban but a campaign to drive porn from the mainstream by creating a climate of shame: I moved on to this campaign, Off the Shelf, which is a wonderful campaign because it’s about using all that anger, passion and power of women to challenge the distribution of pornography in the mainstream of our society…It isn’t just funny, screwed-up men who use it, it’s mainstream, most men must use it and consume it…Our campaign is going to ripple and grow in groups throughout the country, I feel very optimistic, the tide is turning. And our aim of course is to have a society where porn is not acceptable in the mainstream, where anyone who dares produce it or look at it has to huddle and hide because everyone knows how disgusting and unacceptable it is… Feminist critics of antiporn feminism have repeatedly pointed to the dangers of making alliances with the antifeminist right. Antiporn feminists insist that their analysis and tactics are distinct from those of the right. Sheila Jeffreys’ most recent book, Anticlimax, bases much of its argument—that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was directly opposed to women’s freedom—on the growth of the porn industry. Describing feminist critics of the antiporn movement as libertarian, she asserts: To a woman the libertarians describe the anti-pornography feminists as being conservative, rightwing, allied to the moral majority. It is not easy to find evidence of present-day feminists being allied with moralistic right-wing movements…(Jeffreys, 1990:269) Several speakers at the conference were anxious to pre-empt any suggestion that they would ally with the right and, in a brief Guardian interview, CAP’s director Sam Chugg dissociated herself from the moral majority: I think Mrs Whitehouse is a straw opposition to pornography. Although she and the people behind her are full of fire about how awful pornography is, they are actually in a position which is reactionary

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and to do with sexism. They manipulate women’s anger at pornography to get support for an actually reactionary project. It is not because selling pornography is to do with women’s rights or sexual violence—it is to do with imposing their morality on others. (Guardian, 15 November 1989) Yet CAP clearly is prepared to make pragmatic alliances with the right. A letter to all women MPs resulted in Jill Knight, the Conservative MP responsible for Section 28, declaring her support for Off the Shelf. CAP could have taken a decision to declare its distance from her as well. Clare Short’s response to challenges from the audience on this issue was unambiguous: Jill Knight is a neighbour of mine in Birmingham and I know all about her terrible attitudes on everything. But this is a hegemonic project and it means we will make alliances with people that we don’t always agree with because we want everybody and we want to win. Well even take Jill Knight. Lynda Lee-Potter of the Daily Mail did a ‘Femail’ special report on the launch of Off the Shelf, which, like Sheila Jeffreys’ book, and in very similar language, lays the blame at the door of the sexual revolution. She advocates a return to the level of film censorship prevalent in the 1950s and early 1960s: We need to go back 20 years in our history to see why and when the decline began, not only in our morality but in our common sense. In the Sixties there was a belief that sexual abandon was the way to Utopia, that women had the right to have multiple partners, that all restraints should be torn aside… We didn’t face the possibility that lack of censorship would produce scenes of sadism and horror that would corrupt, debase and ultimately lead to a savage increase in rape on our streets… This is why I believe we need censorship. Of course, there are still people who defend the right to publish anything, however obscene it might be. They believe the reintroduction of censorship would be wrong because where would it stop? I think it’s a risk we must take. (Daily Mail, 17 November 1989) The language of antiporn feminists is not far removed from this. Like Lynda Lee-Potter, Sheila Jeffreys portrays two decades in which pornography has unleashed woman-hating violence on the world. Only in Anticlimax it is not ‘all of us’ who are to blame for a decline in standards but a few feminist collaborators trapped in a gay male socialist conspiracy—the libertarians. The ‘libertarian backlash’ Susanne Kappeler, the second speaker at the CAP conference talked of women allying against pornography regardless of party politics and gave an analysis of the ‘libertarian backlash’ closely allied to Sheila Jeffreys’. It was a double-edged speech, concentrating on prostitution and sex tourism as if these were the same as the production of pornographic magazines and videos. They do not inevitably go together; for instance, in Thailand the government has encouraged sex tourism for economic reasons but poraography is officially banned. Kappeler also claimed to side with workers in the sex industry while attacking those ‘privileged few’ women who say they enjoy their work; ‘The point is not whether there is a sex worker who enjoys her work but the majority the world over who did not choose it or for whom sex work is still the best option’. She stressed the economic exploitation of women ‘who earn a survival wage in an industry which makes giant profits for white male Western capitalists’—a description which would equally apply to the electronics industry. Though she stressed that pornography affects women ‘differentially’ by race, class and wealth she made no reference to the women who do make money out of the industry not only as sex

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workers but as producers; for instance the ex-model and nominal editor of Penthouse Linzi Drew, or the West German porn baron Beate Uhse who started out in the 1940s by running a contraceptive advisory service and whose company with its £30 million-a-year turnover sponsors a women’s handball team. These women may be the exceptions that prove the rule, but can feminists ignore the fact that the fastest growing market for pornography is said to be women and heterosexual couples? Feminist critics of antipornography feminism were portrayed as exclusively white, middle-class, cynical consumers of pornography who enjoyed their porn so much that they couldn’t bear to give it up like not fighting on Third World issues because you like jeans made in Taiwan’: ‘Let’s be clear about the cynicism and implicit imperialism of these privileged women in exploiting the struggles of sex workers’. In an almost direct quote from Andrea Dworkin (quoted in Jeffreys, 1990:262), Susanne Kappeler dismissed members of FACT, the feminist group which took an anticensorship stand against Dworkin and McKinnon’s Minneapolis ordinance, as a bunch of lawyers, writers and publishers, a ‘pro-porn white middle-class élite’. The language of guilt rather than responsibility, and accusations of collaboration were strongly reminiscent of Love Your Enemy, the notorious 1970s revolutionary feminist paper accusing women who had sex with men of betraying women as a whole with their weakness. The danger of censorship Lesbianism poses a practical problem to advocates of antiporn legislation. Catherine Itzin of the Campaign Against Pornography and Censorship, when advocating a legal ban in an interview said she hadn’t seen any lesbian or gay pornography but supposed that would have to be banned too. Because the CAP conference was not advocating legislation this contradiction was avoided but, if W.H.Smith stopped stocking soft porn as a result of Off the Shelf it is unlikely that Gay Times which is not pornography but which the chain previously refused to stock, would survive on its shelves. Susanne Kappeler clearly limited her definition of porn to that made for heterosexual men. It is not a distinction that all antiporn feminists would make. For Sheila Jeffireys, lesbian or heterosexual sadomasochism and all pornography are inextricably linked, expressions of the eroticized power differences which oppress women and which libertarians defend (Jeffreys, 1990:3). Maud Sulter, in a speech about representation and power and the cultural sanction of rape in which she argued that pornography is ‘the glove that softens the blow’ of sexual violence, similarly drew a connexion between the feminist pornography debate and the lesbian sado-masochism debate, implicitly likening heterosexual pornography to the US lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs and the British one-off equivalent Quim. She argued that these extreme and, in her view, oppressive expressions of lesbian sexuality were a result of the domination of debates about representation by heterosexual feminists in the early 1970s. The connexion with Jill Knight and the likelihood that any measures of censorship of sexual representation would be applied first and most strongly against lesbian or gay material have made lesbians wary of an antipornography campaign. It is possible, also, that lesbians, especially young lesbians, have had more exposure in the last few years to alternatives to antiporn radical feminism than young heterosexual feminists. The launch of new antipornography campaigns have been the first sign of highly visible feminist activity in Britain since the mid 1980s. They have gained some credibility in British institutions from trade unions and the National Council of Civil Liberties to support from MPs and the press. The involvement of the NUS in CAP is an indication of the campaign’s influence in colleges, which may also have something to do with the involvement of feminist teaching academics in the campaign. However, the introduction into parliament of Clause 28 in 1987 led to a resurgence of lesbian and gay cultural and political activity also with a very high profile among students. The sado-masochism debate, at

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its height in London in 1986, is still echoing in lesbian circles in other cities in Britain. Its effect on lesbian sexual politics and, later, the wave of tolerance which accompanied the visits to London of a variety of American lesbian writers, films and plays addressing sexuality have been charted in Feminist Review (Ardill and O’Sullivan, 1988). Joan Nestle, the author of A Restricted Country brought over to Britain by Sheba Feminist Publishers in 1988, Kamikaze Hearts, Juliet Bashore’s film about the lesbian relationship between two porn actresses (incidentally Bashore is not pro-pornography), shown in London at the 1989 lesbian and gay film festival, or the New York lesbian theatre company Split Britches whose Little Women: The Tragedy brilliantly explored sex and censorship when it came to London in September 1989 all offered lesbians feminist alternatives to radical feminist orthodoxies on sexuality. However these cultural products had extremely limited circulation and arguably little immediate relevance to the lives of most women. Mainstream opposition to censorship or pornography is hardly profeminist, as in Alexander Walker’s piece about Off the Shelf, Let’s Take Leave of Our Censors (Evening Standard, 21 November 1989), which talked of raucous women who should stay at home looking after their children. Even in more liberal circles mainstream discussions of pornography tend to ignore or underrate misogyny and cases of abuse — for instance, David Hebditch and Nick Anning in the generally wellresearched and informative Porn Gold mention that the film Deep Throat packed out US cinemas, but fail to mention Linda Marciano’s disclosures that she was kept as a slave and forced to perform in it at gunpoint. Links with sexual violence The links between pornography and sexual violence are usually cited as the reason for extending censorship. The fourth speaker, Liz Kelly, admitted that American studies had not suggested a causal link between sexual violence and pornography, though it has been shown that representations of women enjoying rape, not surprisingly, aid the acceptance of myths about rape. She could have added that the legalization of pornography in Sweden, Denmark, West Germany and Holland has not increased the sexual crime figures. She repeated the well-known argument that ‘snuff movies’ have been made in which people were actually killed. Porn Gold gives a convincing account of the source of this item of antipornography faith and reports that the Adult Film Association of America offered $25,000, which has never been claimed, to anyone who could produce evidence that this had taken place. (Hebditch and Anning, 1988:336–9) The argument that pornography should be the primary target of feminists because convicted rapists are often reported to use pornography and sex murderers have even blamed pornography for their behaviour is impossibly open ended. It is not surprising that men for whom violence is sexual should seek out violent porn. The gunning down of fourteen female students in Canada by a man who said he hated feminists and watched a lot of war films (Evening Standard, 8 December 1989) does not mean feminism or war films should be singled out as uniquely likely to lead to the murder of women. Many men (including judges) have blamed crimes of sexual violence on women’s ‘provocative’ dress. It does not follow that women covering themselves up eliminates rape. Many rapists consume alcohol or drugs; should these too be singled out as responsible for sexual violence? The feminist antipornography campaign polarizes feminists into ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ positions. By caricaturing dissenting feminists, who see a blanket crusade against pornography in Britain today as potentially more harmful than helpful, as being uncritically pro-porn and only interested in defending male capitalist interests, CAP does feminist thought a disservice. Few feminists would disagree that pornographic images, like all images, should be subject to feminist analysis and, where appropriate, condemnation, or that newspapers like The Sun in all its sexist, racist, homophobic reactionariness are suitable targets for carefully

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thought-out campaigns. But in brooking no debate and in not putting readily available facts before its audience the CAP conference showed a lack of confidence in its own position and in the ability of potential supporters to think for themselves. It was not even mentioned, for instance, that Britain has the toughest antiporn laws in Western Europe apart from Ireland, surely a relevant consideration in a campaign led by an MP. An observer from another planet would have imagined that Britain was awash with child pornography and ‘snuff movies, yet all hard-core porn is illegal under the Obscene Publications Act. Not that national laws will make much difference in the future; new technology will make higher quality pirating and international transmission of images impossible to resist. The Single European Market in 1992 will make it even more difficult to keep material that is legal in one Western European country out of Britain. Far from having to ‘huddle and hide’, those who want to get hold of porn will find it easier. Meanwhile, the news trade in Britain already favours the distribution of large-circulation commercial magazines over independent, dissenting publications. Attempts at censorship are far more likely to backfire on cultural products that threaten the status quo. Note Barbara Norden works part time as a reporter for a council newspaper and as a freelance journalist. She worked for Spare Rib between 1984 and 1987. References ARDILL, Susan and O’SULLIVAN, Sue (1988) ‘Sex in the Summer of ‘88’, Feminist Review, no.31. BENN, Melissa (1988) ‘Page 3 and the campaign against it’ in CHESTER and DICKEY(1988), pp. 26–35. BARKER, Dennis (1989) ‘Taking issue with Mrs Whitehouse’, Guardian, Wednesday 15 November 1989, p. 6. CHESTER, Gail and DICKEY, Julienne editors (1988) Feminism and Censorship: The Current Debate, Dorset: Prism Press. JEFFREYS, Sheila (1990) Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution, London: Women’s Press. LEE-POTTER, Lynda (1989) ‘High street shame: why Clare Short is so right’, Daily Mail, Friday 17 November 1989, pp. 28–9. WALKER, Alexander (1989) ‘Let’s take leave of our censors’, Evening Standard, Tuesday 21 November 1989. HEBDITCH, David and ANNING, Nick (1988) Porn Gold: Inside the Pornography Business, London: Faber & Faber.

THE MOTHERS’ MANIFESTO AND DISPUTES OVER ‘MÜTTERLICHKEIT’ Prue Chamberlayne

From the standpoint of Thatcher’s privatized Britain, the Mother’s Manifesto, issued by a section of women in the West German Greens in 1987, seems radical indeed. Its demands include collective provision for child care, a revision of urban design, pay and pensions for home carers, flexible employment, increased leisure time, and the facilitation of political activity for mothers (Table 1). Yet it provoked a year-long blaze of discussion in the Federal Republic. For ‘emancipationists’ and advocates of ‘equal rights’, the resurrection of ‘Mütterlichkeit’1 spelled reaction, even Nazism and Mothers’ Crosses.2 Understanding this rift requires an exploration of the resonance of ‘neue Mütterlichkeit’ in the German context, a questionable undertaking for an outsider, here hazarded from three angles. I look first at debates in German feminism, which have framed discussions about the Manifesto and are linked to wider developments in Western feminism. Second, I consider the context of family policy in the ruling conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the 1980s, and Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Green Party responses. And third, I discuss the history of the concept of ‘Mütterlichkeit’ in pre-Weimar, Weimar and Nazi Germany, the reading of which is hotly contested. Debates within feminism While the parameters of present and past German feminism throw light on the Manifesto debate, the issue also resonates with shifts and ambiguities in contemporary feminism internationally. Post-1968 feminism united broad strata of women, often on such basic equal rights issues as equal pay, abortion and equal opportunities, in spite of bitter divisions between liberal, socialist and radical feminist approaches. Feminism in the 1980s, however, has pluralized into interest groups and a ‘politics of identity’ based on ethnicity, occupation or sexual orientation, etc. (Adams, 1989) The West German identification of a separate constituency of ‘mothers’ exemplifies this trend. In contemporary feminism the goal of ‘equality’ has also been questioned, and earlier feminist ‘solutions’ to issues of reproduction reappraised. Disenchantment with the values of competitive, individualistic, industrialized society has thrown doubt on the socialist project of emancipation for women through participation in the public domain on equal terms with men. Bureaucratized welfare has cast doubt on public provision ‘replacing’ the family. The radical feminist valorization of emotional aspects of ‘caring’—which is contrasted with ‘work’—has gained ground, as has the recognition of biology in female experience and identity, in love and the desire for children, for example.

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In the Mothers’ Manifesto, these dilemmas are explored and debated in terms of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ between the sexes, or ‘equal rights’ versus ‘autonomy’. In the ‘Mothers” view, the Greens have equated emancipation with employment, and in so doing, have contributed to the reproduction of a world of work organized around time-efficiency and stress, hierarchy and élitism. By seeking freedom from gender’ in the labour market, the Greens are seen to extend the masculinist project of capitalism, of individualism and rational control over nature, which will leave society ‘entsorgt’ rather than ‘Versorgt’ (without care rather than cared for). (Erler, 1989:67) Few women achieve equality, it is said, for, despite equal rights legislation, the dual labour market increases gender divisions, and the fields women enter, including local—and nationallevel politics, become devalued. Those who do ‘succeed’ are superwomen—childless, neutered androgyns who have never seriously engaged with the issue of gender (Erler, 1989:57). The ‘Mothers’ argue instead for the recasting of emancipation in favour of the 90 per cent of women who do three-quarters of society’s labour, i.e., all its unpaid reproductive work and one-third of its paid labour, for paltry reward. (Pinl, 1987) The Manifesto is a declaration of war against non-mothers, comparable to that launched fifteen years ago by women against men, against exclusion and disadvantage. Mothers, says one of the theorists of the movement, Gisela Erler, feel marooned, relegated to a ‘reserve’ as guardians of a dying culture. (1989:68) For the sake of humanity mothers must be returned to the centre of society; time and organizational structures must be revised, mothers’ qualities of sharing, intimacy and the uniting of body and soul, which have been all but destroyed by ‘reason’, must gain ascendancy. (Stopczyk, 1989:112) Feminism in the 1970s rebelled against the equation of women with motherhood. Feminists claimed that roles considered ‘natural’ and biological were socially constructed and that women must free themselves from subjugation to the needs of others. ‘Mein Bauch gehört mir!’ (My stomach is my own) was a key slogan used in West German feminism against abortion clause §218. Yet more recently there has been a ‘repossessing’ of femininity from patriarchal definitions and from male ‘Körperentfremdung’ (physical alienation), a reclaiming of female sexuality and fertility as a source of strength and potency. ‘Wir sind unsere Körper’ (We are our bodies) is an extreme version of this (Böttger, 1987:17), but there has been growing feminist recognition of the interrelatedness of nature and culture, as expressed in the desire for children, for example, (Rowbotham, 1989) and of the need to find a greater correspondence between feminist perceptions and private desires (Ortmann 1989:116). The ‘guilt’ many women felt in the 1970s about wanting children, (reflected in a Berlin leaflet—‘Anyone wanting a child in this day and age is the victim of capitalist propaganda’ (Sichtermann, 1986:17)) and the conflict between being a ‘good mother’ and ‘a good feminist’ (Gieve, 1987:39), have lead to a painful and unresolved reconsidering of former certainties. In West German debates on these issues there is an important difference between those who uncritically claim an ‘essential’ femaleness in existing women’s culture, and those who problematize the extricating of ‘femininity’ from its patriarchal ‘dispossession’ (Enteignung). Many balk at the ‘easy’ transposing of yesterday’s oppressions into today’s transformations and many look for new qualities in both sexes, rather than simply embracing ‘what is’ among women. Barbara Sichtermann, for example, envisages the development of a new male tenderness and responsiveness through intimacy with babies, as well as a rediscovery and extension of eroticism in experiences surrounding reproduction. Women, for their part, need to learn how to form ‘object relations’ in their personal and public lives. For, just as men are currently unable or unwilling to be constructed as objects by and for others, women too, argues Sichtermann, have difficulty constructing others as objects for themselves. (Sichtermann 1983:69–80) Sichtermann seems then to be suggesting a transcendence of existing gender roles, which will none the less retain the possibility of difference. By contrast, the so-called ‘post-feminists’ refuse to acknowledge the possibility of changing male behaviour. (Rosenfeldt and Stacey, 1987:91) Their focus instead is on the

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female self—though here too, feminism has shifted from individualistic notions of ‘self-determination’ and ‘self-realization’ to more relational concepts of ‘self-fulfilment’ and ‘self-consciousness’. (Rosenfeldt and Stacey, 1987:88) Similar divergences mark recent West German feminist responses to second-wave feminism’s call for ‘equality’ in the public sphere. In one view, female values are called upon to rehumanize society, at work, in the environment, or for peace. Chernobyl gave enormous impetus to the perceived need amongst many West German women to place food, life and well-being at the centre of public political agendas and gave rise to the demands for 50–70 per cent mothers’ quotas on public bodies and for an international ‘Weiberrat’ (women’s committee) such as apparently existed in Roman times, with veto powers over statesmen’s decisions. (Stopczyk, 1989:106) Another standpoint envisages a humanization of society through the transcendence of existing gender roles, by breaking down the social division between production and reproduction. The post-Fordist and post-industrial prospects of a reduction in work-time lend credence to this approach. Although the first view echoes postmodernism in its rejection of reason as its guiding principle, it is basically specific to radical feminism and ‘Mothers’ are therefore more isolated as a political position, whereas the second view enjoys the backing of mainstream Green and post-socialdemocratic thinking. Post-materialist values and romanticism are common to both, however. (Riedmüller, 1988:17) CDU family policy Some equal rights feminists attribute ‘post’ or ‘new feminism’ to rightward shifts in government internationally rather than to developments within feminism. Certainly in Germany there are discomforting similarities between right-wing and new feminist or ‘Mothers” politics. The new forms of rightism have however varied greatly, perhaps nowhere more so than between neo-liberal Britain and the corporatist Federal Republic. In its initial 1980s phase under Norbert Blüm, CDU family policy addressed the decline in the birth-rate and the rise in unemployment. (West Germany’s low birth-rate, with 60 per cent of women aged 18–35 renouncing childbearing, has created a panic about future dependency ratios. (Ortmann, 1989: 116)) Blüm’s keynote document ‘Die sanfte Macht der Familie’ (The gentle strength of the family), was widely criticized for its sentimental view of ‘neue Mütterlichkeit’ (new motherliness). It redefined ‘Beruf’ (profession) to include the housewife’s role, focused ‘equal rights’ and ‘disadvantage’ on inequalities between working women and housewives, suggested that emancipation lay in ‘self-fulfilment’ in motherhood and called on women to assert their ‘motherly’ qualities in the workplace. Other pro-family policies included the founding of the Stiftung Mutter and Kind (Mother and Child Fund), established in 1984 to make discretionary grants to forestall abortions on grounds of material hardship (which was the reason given for abortion in the majority of cases), and in 1986, following much debate, the 10 billion DM package of Erziehungsgeld (child-care allowance), which paid mothers (or fathers) to stay at home with young babies. Writing in 1984, the feminist sociologist Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim argued that these policies, together with the facilitation of part-time and voluntary work, aimed to disemploy women and boost fertility, and marked the abandonment of CDU commitment to equal rights and ‘compatability’ between home and work. (Beck-Gernsheim, 1984) CDU ‘generosity’ towards the family has been more recently challenged on the grounds that the 10 billion DM package was heavily counterbalanced by cuts. (Pfarr, 1988: Flieshardt and Steffen, 1986) Flieshardt, for example, estimates that additional annual government expenditure on child care amounted to only 0.7 billion DM in the five years between 1983 and 1988. (This figure is

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unrepresentative of the later years, since the main benefits of tax exemption and Erziehungsgeld only began to take effect in 1986.) (Fleishardt and Steffen, 1986:26). In 1985, the then Minister for Youth, Family and Health, Heiner Geissler, introduced the so-called ‘Essen principles’. Implemented by his successor Rita Süssmuth, these have been heralded as signalling a dramatic change in CDU policy. Hysterically opposed by some sections of the party as a betrayal of mothers and a heroization of career women, the programme described traditional gender divisions as ‘antiquated’ and called for action by influential sections of society to bring about ‘equal rights in everyday life’. The necessary legal and social conditions were pledged, to achieve what Geissler in his Abschied von der Männergesellschaft (Goodbye to male society) described as ‘the central socio-political task of this century’. (Geissler, 1986:19) The new CDU policy was prompted by signs of women deserting the party for the Greens, together with the exigencies of flexible specialization and the dual labour market. (Pinl, 1986) In 1980 more women voted SPD than CDU for the first time, with marked electoral mobility among women under the age of thirtyfour. Meanwhile employers, desperate for the expertise and creativity of women, predicted the collapse of whole sections of industry through the ‘baby year’ (child-care allowance) system.3 (Geissler, 1986) In fact post-Essen policy attempted to bridge home and work roles. It stressed the need for greater choice and easier access to jobs for women, argued for the sharing of household roles, including parenting—the possibility of fathers taking parental leave—and more social and financial recognition for ‘invisible’ domestic labour and voluntary activities. In the political landscape mapped out by CDU family policy, the ‘Mothers” revaluation of traditional female roles positions their Manifesto closer to Blüm’s right-wing vision of ‘neue Mütterlichkeit’ than to Geissler’s post-Essen egalitarianism. In other respects, however, the Mothers’ views are more radical and appear more left than neoconservative: more ‘radical’ in their vision of a female-dominated public sphere and more ‘left’ in their call for a child-friendly society underpinned by comprehensive state provision. Thus in July 1987, Rita Süssmuth distanced herself from the Manifesto in ‘10 Theses’; in particular, she repudiated the notion of a ‘women’s culture’ and of a merging of private and public life. She also warned against dividing mothers from nonmothers and excluding men from parenting. (Jansen, 1987) In response to the Essen principles, the SPD and Greens have insisted on more decisive policies towards gender equality at work and shared parenting at home, on a widening of ‘choice’ to include alternative living styles, and on basic income guarantees to home carers, rather than mere pension credits (Table 1). The SPD calls for a 30-hour week and 30 per cent gender quotas at work, the Greens for a 35-hour week and 50 per cent quotas, with a guaranteed social wage. Against the CDU conceptualization of mother and housewife roles as alternative ‘careers’, which continues as a CDU theme despite ‘Essen’, the SPD and Greens Table 1 Summary of Mothers’ Manifesto demands * Remuneration, insurance, pensions for mothers at home. (Currently need 35 children to get minimum pension.) * Neighbourhood infrastructure of crèches, mothers’ centres, communal dining/living rooms, etc. * Flexible access to work: shorter hours, part-time work, lifting age barriers to training and education, recognition of social experience of mothering. * 50–70 per cent of women’s quota positions for mothers, in politics and employment. * Timetabling of political life to suit mothers, with paid child care. * The right to fulfil the desire for children without constraints, to allow spontaneous life rhythms.

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* Male participation to be encouraged, under direction of mothers; involvement of childless women. The couple’ cannot cope alone. * Better provisions for disabled and for carers of elderly, e.g., pay, suitable housing, insurance, right to return to work. * Working group (Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft—BAG) for ‘Mothers’ within Greens. Greens’ demands for women * Elimination of abortion clause §218. * Quotas and workplace strategic plans for equal opportunities, ban on job sharing, variable hours (Kapovaz—kapazitätsorien-tierte variable Arbeitszeit) and home work (Heimarbeit). * guaranteed workplace; right to part-time work; leave for home care and social activities, e.g., community meetings. * Adequate, needs-based child benefit and parental leave, latter 1200–2000DM (£400-£700) per month over 15 months or spread over 3 years. * Basic income of 1200DM (£400) per month; pay for carers, adjusted to costs and income, additional to rent; adequate pay for child-minders, male and female; insurance for home carers. * Flexible, comprehensive child-care provision; funding of selfhelp parent initiatives. * Abolition of joint taxation (Ehegattenssplitting); choice of household form, i.e., no privileging of marriage; abolition of state guardianship for illegitimate children. * Inclusion of education and training periods in pension entitlements. * Crèches or paid child care for political activity.

insist on women’s right and need to work, and the primacy of equality in the labour market. They oppose the CDU tailoring of female labour to the post-Fordist labour market through the facilitation of part-time work, flexible working hours and home-work, and argue instead for basic incomes for all. Their response to the Mothers’ Manifesto has thus been hostile. Mainstream Greens fear that the Manifesto offers a cheap and subversive option to their more fundamental project of humanizing society through the transcending of gender roles. The ‘Mothers’, however, contest the efficacy of privileging equal opportunities at work on at least three grounds. Firstly, they are sceptical of the possibility of changing male domestic roles by reducing the working week, given that ‘the 8½-minutes-a-day father’ has already received a twenty-hour reduction in working hours this century. (Erler, 1989:63) They argue that change must begin in the sphere of reproduction; that only when mothering and child care are given the reward and social regard due to them will men’s habits change. Secondly, the Greens’ prioritizing of employment rights is seen to have little bearing on feminist preoccupations with questions of social relations, with relations between nature and culture, with eroticism, ‘time rhythms’ and caring. And thirdly, the focus on women’s waged work is seen as deflecting attention from the considerable practical achievements of mothers in the Federal Republic in recent years. These achievements are illustrated by the remarkable growth in mothers’ centres in the 1980s. A mothers’ centre congress in the small town of Langen in 1988 attracted 500 women and 200 children from the national network of 130 centres. In the two years of its existence the Langen mothers’ centre had already set up a Chernobyl information centre, established a babysitting and childminding network, a regular local radio phone-in programme, a rights conference on ‘Mothers and Work’, and courses in housework for men; it had successfully lobbied for an increase in the number of local kindergartens as well as an extension of their hours of opening. The congress itself held discussion groups on ‘women and politics’, on tax allowances for child-care costs, public provision for the 0–3 age group, and for an ‘employment culture’ which would take child-care responsibilities into account. (Emma, 1987)

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The Chernobyl disaster provoked vigorous political activity amongst German women, and for some a dramatic ‘conversion’ to Mothers’ politics (Stopczyk, 1989). 95 per cent of the 300 groups which sprang up were run by women, often as ‘Mothers after Chernobyl’ (Stopczyk, 1989:108). Striking about both the women’s centres and Chernobyl initiatives, beyond the energies they captured, is that they appeared neither separatist nor restricted to women at home with children; indeed many of the Chernobyl groups were disbanded after they were taken over by the so-called ‘old activists’. Another, more direct, impetus for the Manifesto came from a research project undertaken by the Munich Deutsche Jugendinstitut (German Youth Institute). The research brief was to investigate ways of modernizing and improving the functioning of ‘socialization agencies’; the anticipated conclusion was an SPD-style advocacy of familial adjustment through shared roles, parental education and support services. Instead the researchers challenged the ‘social conditions of mothering’ and raised questions about the ‘emotional climate’ of mothering and the ‘contentedness’ to which it supposedly gave rise; they pointed particularly to the ‘external constraints’ contemporary mothering places on women’s everyday life and mother-child relationships. (Stoehr, 1989:95) The Cheraobyl initiatives and the Youth Institute report combined philosophical and practical concerns— two different thrusts which have been regularly apparent in the Mothers’ movement. On the one hand, the movement has demanded concrete measures to alleviate the isolation, frustration and hardship of motherhood, to create flexible access to work and a comprehensive infrastructure of child-care provision. On the other, elements within the Mothers’ movement seek a cultural revolution to end industrial tyranny over ‘natural’ desires and spontaneous life rhythms and thus to save the world from destruction. At conferences on the Manifesto each side has been said to be barely interested in the preoccupations of the other. With its regard for mothers’ roles in society, the Manifesto is clearly in line with Blüm’s family policy orientation; yet the breadth and depth of the Mothers’ vision, whether on practical matters or values, outstrip CDU policy in any guise. Whether the Essen shift, aimed at halting a haemorrhage of CDU supporters to mainstream Greens, actually lost ‘traditionalist’ members to the Green Mothers would make an intriguing investigation and an interesting test of social movement politics. The history of ‘Mütterlichkeit’ Two further reasons for the contentions surrounding debates on ‘Mütterliehkeit’ in West Germany are its prominence in early German feminism, and the association of the term with Nazism. (At one Manifesto conference, opponents of the Mothers Manifesto spread around Nazi Mother Cross stickers; the ‘Mothers’ were unutterably shocked.) Retracing the history of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century German feminism inevitably resurrects deep divisions between bourgeois and social democratic feminism, the latter ‘revolutionary’ until the First World War. ‘Mütterlichkeit’ as a mobilizing theme belonged to bourgeois feminism, though it was never used simply to validate biological motherhood or the values of ‘hearth and home’. Instead it was used to argue for greater civic power for women and for a public strengthening of feminine values against the vicissitudes of the machine age. In an account which may well be partisan since it comes from the pro-Manifesto collection ‘Mütter an die Macht’ (Mothers to Power) Stoehr traces three phases in the development of the notion of ‘Mütterlichkeit’. Coined in the 1880s, the term ‘geistige Mütterlichkeit’4 indicated the desired qualities educated, unmarried women teachers should bring to girls’ education, including education at higher maledominated levels. ‘Geistige Mütterlichkeit’ constituted the basis for women’s participation in public life, not as equals to men

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but as stroftg individuals with distinctive qualities capable of humanizing the mechanical and bureaucratic world. It did not arise automatically in mothers; physical motherhood had to be elevated into spiritual motherhood. Thus, for example, in 1905 the ADF (Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein, All-German Women’s Association, founded 1855) invoked the concept in a call to extend women’s special influence in education, the professions, the family, and local and national public life. (Stoehr, 1989:76) In addition to counterbalancing male with female power, bourgeois feminists sought to exercise their share of class power as professionals and employing housewives. As Gordon says: ‘At its edges feminism slides imperceptibly into non-feminist assertions of women’s power’. (Gordon, 1987:102) In the second phase of feminist organization around the theme of ‘Mütterlichkeit’, housewives themselves and the reduction (Entleerung) of household roles through mass production became the focus of debate. In 1915 the ADF, for example, switched its sixty-year commitment to protective legislation and the right to work to ‘protection from work’. Marianne Weber, wife of Max Weber, counterposed ‘motherly being’ to the masculinism of industry, finding, as some feminists fatigued by the double burden perhaps do now, more ‘freedom’ in ‘inequality’. Bourgeois women also challenged ‘social state’ interventions in the domestic sphere, which at the time included hygiene inspections of housing, breastfeeding allowances (Stillprämien), domestic-science training for the poor and social work. They feared women would become ‘objects’ in a process which they wanted instead to see ‘politicized’ through the collective organization of women as mothers—a process for which they coined the term ‘organisierte (organized) Mütterlichkeit’. At school, they argued, girls should be taught household skills and shown the political nature of their daily tasks. Here again ‘Mütterlichkeit’ was to exert itself in the public sphere through ‘female citizenship’ (weibliches Staatsbürgertum); newly politicized as citizens, women would influence taxation policy, monopolies and cartels, social provisions and education, and administer state interventions into family life, all in the name of the ‘common good’ rather than ‘mothers’ interests’. (Stoehr, 1989:86) The position of the social democratic wing of the pre-Nazi women’s movement was equally complex. The ‘Radicals’ (VFF—Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine, League of Progressive Women’s Associations, founded 1899) who belonged to the pacifist left bourgeois’ umbrella organization, the BDF (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, League of Women’s Associations, founded 1894), held out for women’s right to work, partly to maintain links with the Social Democrats. That the path to women’s emancipation lay through employment was incontestable to the left. Yet it was ‘Radicals’ who often used ‘Mütterlichkeit’ in a biological sense to argue women’s suitability for certain types of work—philanthropic work with the poor, for example. As feminism entered the turbulent 1920s, however, arguments for women’s right to work were increasingly contested. Promises of emancipation, justice and reform paled in the face of the rigours of the labour market and inflation, though conflicts over women’s roles exploded in mass actions over abortion rights. In this context the notion of ‘Mütterlichkeit’ was used in counterposed ways. The intellectual, Helene Stöcker, president of the BM (Bund für Mutterschutz, League for the Protection of Mothers, founded in 1904), still used the term in its original sense. Seeking to combine Nietzschean individualism with socialism, she argued that women must transcend both masculinism and ascetic moralism, to ‘create our own personal view of the world and life, as it derives from our own culture’. She hoped for ‘the triumph of “Mütterlichkeit”, which expressed itself in love and cooperation’ and for a’spiritual evolution’ of society against hatred and barbarism. (Hackett, 1984:117;123) A different view was being propounded by the broad-based movement for Mothers’ Day, started in 1922 and supported by the Nazis. By 1927 it had 349 corporate members including twenty-six local authorities. Here mothers, as ‘the refuge of the Volk, the protector of our racial heritage’, were rallied to defend traditional society. ‘Sacrifice’ and ‘devotion’ were presented as the magic formulae by which mothers

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Drawing by Claire Bretécher Frustration; Methuen 1982

would transform society. (Hansen, 1984:145;149) In reality, says Hansen, women were simply mitigating the severity of the national crisis through their double role as workers and mothers. The Mothers’ Day organization, supported by the full range of church welfare agencies, backed the repeal of abortion rights in 1932 and called on women to observe ‘racial and eugenic standards’. The antithesis of women’s emancipation, it was not supported by the BDF (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine); yet the BDF remained ambivalent on the question of whether women should work outside the home. Speaking at a BDF conference in 1931 the eminent Maria Baum lamented the spiritual impoverishment of women’s employment and pinned hopes on the family as a ‘fount of social revival’ against the ‘inhuman harshness of capitalism’. (Stoehr, 1989:89) Gertrud Bäumer, soon to become a Nazi supporter, retorted that children’s education might well depend on mothers’ earnings, and counterposed a six-hour day for all, with a bigger share of housework by men! In recent years feminists in West Germany have interrogated the role of women under Nazism, particularly around the theme of complitity (Mittäterschaft). (Bock, 1986; Bridenthal, 1984) It is perhaps not surprising to find such opposing interpretations of the relationship between Nazism and earlier feminism as those of Stoehr and Koonz. In Stoehr’s view none of the earlier views on ‘Mütterlichkeit’ expressed within feminism served as a model for National Socialism, whereas for Koonz ‘the middle-class women’srights organisations subscribed to an ideal of motherhood shared by Hitler and his followers’. (Koonz, 1986: 144) It is true that in the early 1930s prominent Nazi women voiced opinions similar to those of the bourgeois women’s movement. Gottschewski, for example, hoped to make women’s ‘spiritual powers’ fruitful, to effect a spiritual revolution by women as a counterpart to Hitler’s political successes. (Koonz, 1986:142) Diehl dreamed of a Women’s Chamber at top government level, and Siber declared, ‘Women must create the family and the soul of the state’. (Koonz, 1986:166) Up to 1933 such Nazi women ran their various organizations fairly autonomously, since the Nazi hierarchy was largely dismissive of them and they looked forward to leadership positions and strong state backing for women to maintain their own separate sphere in education, social work and family affairs. Koonz maintains that it was in anticipation of such power that many former bourgeois women’s leader’s submitted to Hitlerism. (Koonz, 1986:173) In 1933 however Krummacher, a man, was appointed to reorganize the women’s sections. ‘Old-time’ women leaders, distrusted for their energy, autonomy and commitment, were dismissed and their

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organizations disbanded in favour of the Women’s Front and Women’s Organization. Scholtz-Klink, a nonentity, was ushered in to lead the women’s organization. She made dull speeches about ‘sacrifice’ and the need to use ‘feminine tactics’ and to avoid the overly sterile and intellectual weapons of reason and intelligence. Women were debarred from practising as doctors and lawyers. Such passivity and subordination ran directly counter to the pre-Nazi notions of an assertive public role for Mütterliehkeit’. The BDF voted to disband rather than submit to Nazi conditions. The housewives’ organization (RDH— Reichsverband Deutscher Haus Frauenvereine, Imperial Union of German Housewives’ Associations) chose submission, and many middle-class women also worked actively in support of eugenicist policies in social work and administration. In fact Bock argues that all German women were implicated in Nazism, on the one hand as the objects of procreation promotion and abortion prohibition, on the other as candidates for sterilization or forced abortion; in any event, all women were implicated in eugenic classi-fication and registration. (Bock, 1984 and 1986) It is perhaps true that the dedication of many housewives to work in the home was the result of a drive to ‘improve their women’s world rather than competing in a political contest they could not win’. (Koonz, 1986: 173) But such acquiescence, even if unwilling, amounted to complicity. Many bour-geois women’s organizations voted to disband in the face of Nazism, but that was not enough. Because they did not more actively stand out against Nazism ‘non-socialist women’s leaders provided an avenue along which battalions of women marched into the Nazi world’. (Koonz, 1986: 145) Does this make the pre-1933 concept of ‘Mutterlichkeit’ responsible for at least aspects of Nazism, even though the Nazis themselves fought it as ‘degenerate’ and ‘dreamy-eyed’ (‘ins Ungesunde ausartende Nachstenliebe’ and ‘Humanitatsduselei’)? (Stoehr, 1989: 92). Haug argues that by according themselves a distinct sphere, women made their strength their weakness, allowing Nazis to appeal to them as housewives and mothers in their everyday lives, making the private into a public sphere. (Haug, 1989) For Gordon the very positing of a deep difference between men and women may lead to submission to authority, ‘an important base for fascist regimes’. (Gordon 1987: 95) Some Greens maintain that the motherhood model inevitably leads women to subordinate themselves to others. There is a danger here of implying ‘universal truths’ about gender divisions and differences. Considerations of how ‘caring can retain its positive and predominantly female attributes but avoid the trap of self-subordination is a central concern of contemporary feminism (Gieve, 1987), and surely not the stuff of which fascism is made. Haug’s and Koonz’s comments are addressed to a specific historical situation, however, whereas Gordon’s remarks veer towards timelessness and the wild ahistoricism of allegations of Nazism thrown at the Mothers. It must also be remembered that the recency of the determination amongst German feminists to explore and address the scale and nature of women’s complicity in Nazism affects the situation in a way which is difficult for outsiders to gauge. Conclusion Pre-Weimar and Weimar versions of ‘geistige Mutterlichkeit’, the Nazi mother cult and the CDU early 1980s ‘neue Mutterlichkeit’, in their contended interpretations, all have a bearing on the Mothers’ Mani festo’. In the Federal Republic the debate has crystallized around a division between those who advocate female solutions to issues of humanity and those who seek to transcend existing gender roles. The legacy of ‘Mütterlichkeit’ plays a considerable part in this polarization, as I hope the opening section of this article has demonstrated. The Mothers’ Manifesto can be seen as yet another attempt in the long tradition of German feminism to assert human and female values over society and to define a gender-specific sphere of ‘Mütterlichkeit’, free of subordination and permeating public life. It has much in common with the ‘geistige Mütterlichkeit’ of

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early bourgeois feminists, which reappears in the left-radical interwar figure, Helene Stöcker. Leading Nazi women who voiced similar ideas up to 1933 had their hopes of power dashed. CDU leader Blüm invoked the term again in the early 1980s, though there was little of the ‘transformative’ in his policy. Geissler and Süssmuth, preferring ‘partnership’ to the traditional gender divisions of ‘neue Mütterlichkeit’ and the Manifesto, have also rejected the latter’s collectivism. The Mothers’ Manifesto has the distinction of combining demands for a comprehensive set of collective facilities and financial benefits for mothers with the conception of a society hospitable to children in its physical and time structures. Some of these challenging ideas appear utopian, but many have an immediacy, as the mothers’ centre movement has shown. Ironically it may be this very ‘winnability’ that most antagonizes mainstream Greens, who fear detraction from what they consider the more fundamental goal of systematic gender quotas in all public spheres and time off for both parents to fulfil child-care commitments. It will remain the special achievement of the Mothers’ Manifesto to have made a sufficient stir (‘Wir kochen schon lange, wir machen einen Auflauf!’—‘We’ve been boiling (cooking) for ages, now we’re making a stir (soufflé))’, to put the special needs of mothers and children on the political agenda, and to have highlighted the importance of the constituency of mothers among ‘women’. Once the ‘Mothers’ gained a special committee and funding within the Greens the debate died down, though discussion has continued on aspects of home care (Betreuung) such as social insurance, job guarantees and shorter working hours. Certainly Green support among women has not been adversely affected by the dispute, at least judging by Emma’s survey of its readers, whose support for the Greens rose from 42 per cent in 1980 to 70 per cent in 1987, while SPD support dropped from 43 per cent to 15 per cent in the same years. (Emma, 1987: N=2000) The Mothers’ Manifesto is also said to have influenced discussion in the SPD, including perhaps their hotly disputed decision in autumn 1988 to advocate three years of paid shared parental leave, half to be forfeited if not taken by the male partner. While offering men a powerful inducement to become involved in infant care, this policy also recognizes that the parenting of small children involves full-time commitment. Notes Prue Chamberlayne teaches Social Policy and European Studies in the Sociology Department at the Polytechnic of East London. Her original degree was in German. She has recently done research in the GDR on neighbourhood and tenant participation and on housing co-ops, and is currently writing on various aspects of women and social policy in Western Europe. Many thanks to Ilona Ostner for help with references, and to Erica Carter and Eva Kolinsky likewise, and for discussion and encouragement. This article is based on a paper given at a conference at the Goethe Institute in May 1989: The Federal Republic—Forty Years On’. It will be published by Gower in a collection under that title edited by Eva Kolinsky. 1 ’Neue Mütterlichkeit’ literally means ‘new motherliness’, ‘motherhood’ being too physical. It has close affinities with ‘geistige Mütterlichkeit’, a term much used in earlier feminism, (see section on history, p. 16–20). ‘Spiritual’, ‘intellectual’ or ‘enlightened motherliness’ are all possible but cumbersome translations of this. Koonz’s ‘maternal spirit’ conveys the historical concept, but sounds inept for modern usage, so I have kept to the German. 2 On Mother’s Day 1939, 3 million Honour Crosses of the German Mother were awarded to prolific mothers of ‘good character’ and ‘Aryan stock’. The crosses bore the legend The child ennobles the Mother!’, and were issued in bronze, silver and gold, for four, six and eight children respectively.

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3 An allowance, in addition to maternity leave, for any parent at home fulltime with a child, or working less than eighteen hours a week. Introduced in 1986, it was increased from ten to twelve months in January 1989. 600DM (£200) are paid for the first six months, after which a ceiling on income operates. It is paid to single mothers in addition to welfare payments and can be moved from one partner to another. 4 See note l.

References ADAMS, Mary Louise (1989) ‘There’s no place like home: on the place of identity in feminist politics’, Feminist Review, no. 31. AUS POLJTIK UND ZEITGESCHICHTE, 1984 B20/84. Special issue on opposing family policies. BECK-GERNSHEIM, Elisabeth (1984) ‘Frauen zurück in die Familie?’, WSI Mitteilungen 1. BOCK, Gisela (1984) ‘Racism and sexism in Nazi Germany: motherhood, compulsory sterilisation and the state’ in BRIDENTHAL, R. (1984). BOCK, Gisela (1986) Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus—Studien für Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. BÖTTGER, Barbara (1987) ‘Macht und Liebe, Gleichberechtigung und Subsistenz —Kein Ort. Nirgends—Auf der Suche nach einem feministischen Politikverständnis’, Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis, no.19. BRIDENTHAL, Renate, et al. (1984) editors, When Biology Becomes Destiny. Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, New York: Monthly Review Press. EMMA (1987) West German feminist magazine. ERLER, Gisela (1989) ‘Herr, wo Du bist, da will ich auch hingehen—Befremdliches über die Zukunft der Geschlechtsrollen’ in PASS-WEINGARTZ, D. and ERLER, G.(1989). FLIESHARDT, Peter and STEFFEN, Johannes (1986) Renaissance der Familie?, Hamburg: VSA-Verlag. GERHARDT, Uta, et al. (1988) editors, Frauensituation. Veränderungen in den letzten 20 Jahren, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. GEISSLER, Heiner (1986) editor, Abschied von der Männergesellschaft, Frankfurt/M: Ullstein. GIEVE, Katherine (1987) ‘Rethinking feminist attitudes towards motherhood’, Feminist Review, no.25. GORDON, Linda (1987) ‘Review essay: Nazi feminists?’, Feminist Review, no.27. GROTTIAN, PETER et al. (1988) editors, Die Wohlfahrtswende—der Zauber konservativer Sozialpolitik, Munich: Beck. DIE GRÜNEN, (The Greens) (1987) Stellungnahme grüner Frauen zum Müt-termanifest. HACKETT, Amy (1984) ‘Helene Stöcker: left-wing intellectual and sex reformer’, in BRIDENTHAL, R. (1984). HANSEN, Karen (1984) ‘Mothers’ Day in the Weimar Republic’, in BRIDENTHAL, R. (1984). HAUG, Frigga (1989) ‘Mothers in the fatherland’, New Left Review, no.172. JANSEN, Mechthild (1987) ‘Ritas Kritik am Müttermanifest’, taz, 8 July 1987. KOONZ, Claudia (1986) Mothers in the Fatherland, London: Methuen. ORTMANN, Hedwig (1989) ‘Die Verleugnete Mutter’ in PASS-WEINGARTZ, D. and ERLER, G. PASS-WEINGARTZ, Dorothee and ERLER, Gisela (1989) editors, Mütter an die Macht, Hamburg: Rowohlt. PFARR, Heide (1988) ‘Mutterschaft und Mitleid—Der Zauber konservativer Frauenpolitik’, in GROTTIAN et al. (1988). PINL, Claudia (1986) ‘Die CDU und die Frauen’, Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis, no.18. PINL, Claudia (1987) ‘Mütterfrust gegen Emanzen’, taz 23 March 1987. RIEDMÜLLER, Barbara (1988) ‘Das Neue an der Frauenbewegung-Versuch einer Wirkungsanalyse der neuen Frauenbewegung’, in GERHARDT, Uta, et al. (1988). ROSENFELDT, Deborah and STACEY, Judith (1987) ‘Second thought on the second wave’, Feminist Review, no. 27. ROWBOTHAM, Sheila (1989) To be or not to be: the dilemmas of mothering’, Feminist Review, no. 31.

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SICHTERMANN, Barbara (1986) Femininity. The Politics of the Personal, Oxford: Polity. Original publication in Germany in 1983. STOEHR, Irene (1989) ‘Mütterfeminismus—ein alter Hut?’, in PASS-WEINGARTZ, D. and ERLER, G. (1989). STOPCZYK, Annegret (1989) ‘Von der “autonomen emanzipierten” zur “müt-terbewegten” Frau’, in PASSWEINGARTZ, D. and ERLER, G. (1989).

MULTIPLE MEDIATIONS: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception Lata Mani

‘“unusual knowing”, a cognitive practice, a form of consciousness that is not primordial, universal, or coextensive with human thought.[…]but historically determined and yet subjectively and politically assumed’ (de Lauretis, March 1990). On the acupuncturist’s table, Berkeley, California, July 1988. I am lying in wait for the complex verbal negotiation that attends each visit to my acupuncturist. I want a diagnosis—a definable illness, a definite cure. He is disdainful of this desire for clarity and resolution and insists on treating my body as a zone in which energies rise and fall, sometimes rebelliously, at other times gracefully and once even, as he put it, ‘stroppily’. As I ponder the frustrating untranslatability of his idiom, he asks the dreaded question: ‘Well, what is your Ph.D. thesis about?’ I stare at the infra-red lamp and wonder which version to present. The various responses I have elicited over the years race through my mind like a film running at high speed. My usual strategy is to assess the cultural politics of those addressing me (such as I can discern them), the tenor of the question (is this a serious inquiry or merely a polite one?) and my frame of mind at the time (do I want to educate, be patronized or try to avoid both by being vague, but thereby risking the impression that I know not what I am doing?). I did not, however, have time for such musings. I was trapped under the beady eye of my white American doctor of needles who, having taken my pulse, was awaiting a reply. So I blurted out what Iconsider my minimalist ‘no-nonsense’description: ‘I am working on the debate between colonial officials, missionaries and the indigenous male élite on sati (widow burning) in colonial India.’ I felt weak, as though it had been a confession extorted from me after intense cross-examination. I sighed inwardly. Meanwhile, my declaration had provoked what turned out to be a half-hour lecture on the dilemmas of cross-cultural understanding. He said that such practices would always be difficult for Westerners to comprehend, hastily adding that it was important none the less not to impose alien values and that sati probably had a particular significance within Indian culture which it would be enlightening to know. At this point he turned away from my foot, into which he had just finished inserting needles, and asked, ‘So how do you understand widow burning?’ I felt myself stiffen. He had thrown me a challenge that would require a command performance in colonial and post-colonial history and discourse, one that I did not feel equal to at the time. So I said evasively, ‘It’s a long story and ‘I’m trying to sort it out.’

Feminist Review No 35, Summer 1990

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‘Good’, said the genial man in the white coat tapping my arm. Not waiting for a response, he continued. ‘Of course, you are Westernized and your ideas have probably changed from living here. I wonder what women in India feel about it?’ So saying, he left the room. I was furious. I had not interrupted his liberal, relativist, patronizing discourse, and was as a result caught in its pincer movement: an apparent but ultimately repressive tolerance, a desire for ‘true’ knowledge, and a demand for authenticity that was impossible for me to meet, given that any agreement between us, however fragile and superficial, would immediately make me ‘Westernized’: not like ‘them’ but like ‘him’. I wished for the millionth time that I had been working on a less contentious topic, one that, unlike sati, had not served as metonym for Indian society itself…or had had the panache to wag my finger like him and say, ‘Read my book and you’ll find out’. The emergence of a politics of location This paper explores questions of positionality and location and their relation to the production of knowledge as well as its reception. These issues have animated feminism from its inception. Here they are approached through a set of interconnected reflections, on the processes that shaped my study of debates on sati under British colonialism, and on the different ways in which this analysis has been received in Britain and in India. Such alternative readings thematize the politics of intellectual work in neo/post-colonial contexts, and the difficulties of achieving an international feminism sensitive to the complex and diverse articulations of the local and the global. Contemporary theory in feminism and in the humanities has brought a critical self-consciousness to bear both on the place and mode of enunciation (who speaks and how) and that of its reception (how it is interpreted and why). As claims to universality and objectivity have been shown to be the alibis of a largely masculinist, heterosexist and white Western subject, both readers and writers have had to confront their particularity and history. Gender, race, class, sexuality and historical experience specify hitherto unmarked bodies, deeply compromising the fictions of unified subjects and disinterested knowledges. Such developments, or should I say acknowledgements, require attentiveness to the theoretical and political impulses that shape our projects, and an openness to the inevitable fact that different agendas may govern their reception. Needless to say, there have always been multiple investments and diverse audiences. Our accounting of these phenomena today simply attests to the successful struggles for discursive spaces of those overlapping and hitherto marginalized groups, women, Third World people, gays and lesbians. Institutional concessions to the heterogeneity of the social landscape has prompted the emergence of new fields of study within US universities, for instance ethnic studies and-women’s studies. It has also given new momentum to interdisciplinary work. The current mobilization of talents and energies around culture studies is a case in point.1 The revolt of the particular against that masquerading as the general, of what Donna Haraway has called ‘situated’ as against ‘disembodied knowledges’, (Haraway, 1988) has brought to the fore theoretical and political questions regarding positionality and identity. This issue has probably been most fully developed within feminism, in part in debates about the relationship between experience and knowledge. One locus of such discussion in the Euro-American context has been the related struggles over racism and white centredness of dominant feminism (Moraga and Anzaldua, 1981; hooks, 1981, Amos et al., 1984; Bhavnani and Coulson, 1986, among others) and its replication of elements of colonial discourse (Spivak, 1981; Mohanty, 1984; Minh-ha 1986/7; Lazreg, 1988). Feminists have called for a revised politics of location —‘revised’ because, unlike its initial articulation, the relation between experience and knowledge is now seen to be one not of correspondence, but fraught with history, contingency and struggle (In addition to the

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authors already cited, see Bulkin et al., 1984; Segrest, 1985; Rich, 1986; de Lauretis, 1986; Kaplan, 1987).2 These terms powerfully suggest some of the problems of positionality as they confront me: a post-colonial Third World feminist working on India in the United States. Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues that developing a politics of location requires exploration of ‘the historical, geographic, cultural, psychic and imaginative boundaries which provide the ground for political definition and self-definition’ (Mohanty, 1987:31). Location, in her terms, is not a fixed point but a ‘temporality of struggle’, (p. 40) characterized by multiple locations and nonsynchronous processes of movement “between cultures, languages, and complex configurations of meaning and power.’ (p. 42) These processes, in Mohanty’s view, enable ‘a paradoxical continuity of self, mapping and…political location… [M]y location forces and enables specific modes of reading and knowing the dominant. The struggles I choose to engage in are then the intensification of these modes of knowing.’ (p. 42).This definition of the space of politics very nicely illuminates the dynamics of how my conception of a project on the debate on sati in colonial India bears the traces of movement between cultures and configurations of meaning, multiple locations and specific modes of knowing. My research examines colonial official, missionary and indigenous élite discourses on sati in Britain and India in the late eighteenth—and early-nineteenth centuries. I investigate the conditions of production and the burden of each of these discourses, the intersections, differences and tensions between them, and the competing and overlapping ways in which they were deployed. Among other things, I argue that a specifically colonial discourse on India framed the debate on sati, producing troubling consequences for how ‘the woman’s question’ in India was to be posed thereafter, whether by Indian nationalists, or Western feminists (Mani, 1989). One of the things that has prompted and sustained my energy through hours of plodding through archival documents and reels of dizzying microfilm has been a conviction of the importance of the contemporary ideological and political legacy of such debates about women and culture. I have always been aware that this legacy has had a differential trajectory in India and in, for example, the US or Britain: that the relation of this earlier discourse to contemporary knowledges, popular and specialist, about India in the West, was different from its relation to the contemporary self-knowledge of Indians. It is the contours of this difference that this paper will now explore. The following section reflects on the experience of presenting my work (Mani, 1987) to groups in the US, Britain and India and discovering that the audiences in these places seized on entirely different aspects of my work as politically significant. These responses in turn have caused me to reflect on how moving between different ‘configurations of meaning and power’ can prompt different ‘modes of knowing’. The experience has also required me squarely to confront a problem not adequately theorized in discussions of positionality or of the function of theory and criticism: the politics of simultaneously negotiating not multiple but discrepant audiences, different ‘temporalities of struggle’.3 Back to the future: the after-lives of colonial discourses ‘Colonial’ or Eurocentric discourses on India, and on the Third World more generally, have an abiding presence in the USA and Britain, the two Western countries with which I am most familiar. Television documentaries, scholarly writing and popular wisdom circulate such notions as the centrality of religion— whether framed as the essential ‘spirituality’ of the East or as the dominance of caste (Inden, 1986; Appadurai, 1988)—the antiquity of Indian ‘culture’, and the victimization of women. These ideas ‘hail’ those of us living here with a systematicity that, over time, makes them truly oppressive. As a Marxistfeminist who had come to feminism in India, I initially responded to the predominance of culturalist

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understandings of Indian society with surprise and bemusement at the ignorance they betrayed. I assumed that such ignorance must also account for my having so often to explain the supposed anomaly of being an Indian feminist. The repetition of such incidents as my encounter with the acupuncturist, the dynamics of which I would barely have been able to fathom when I first arrived in the US, compelled me to think seriously about the prehistory of such knowledges about India and Indian women. I brought this new sensibility to bear on reading the debate on sati. It has been, I believe, by and large productive. For although I have read many of the same documents as other historians, Indian and nonIndian, an alertness to how British colonialism may have shaped knowledge about colonized society has turned up unexpected disjunctures, contests and determinations, for instance, over what constitutes ‘tradition’. Given a context in which elements of this nineteenth-century discourse continue to circulate, on occasion virtually unreconstructed, in the service of British racism and US cultural imperialism, I consider excavation of the colonial prehistory of such ideas to be a political gesture. By and large, most discussions that followed presentations of my work in the US or Britain tended to focus on the contemporary replications, resonances or rearticulations of what I had sketched. In Britain, for instance, we explored how the British state manipulates women’s ‘oppression’ in Indian and Pakistani ‘culture’ to legitimate virginity tests, immigration controls and policing of Asian marriages and family life. This ‘civilizing’ racist British state has placed black feminists in Britain in a position analogous to that of nineteenthcentury Indian male social reformers, who defended ‘culture’ and ‘women’ in a similarly overdetermined context (Parmar, 1982; Amos et al., 1984; Grewal et al., 1988). The significant difference between then and now is that black feminists (unlike many male nationalists) have insisted on keeping women at the centre of the struggle, refusing to let themselves become mere pawns in a contest between the state and community. They have charted a complex strategy. On the one hand, they have challenged the selfserving appropriation of ‘women’s issues’ by a racist British state. Simultaneously, they have resisted both the ‘proteetion’ of men in the black community when it has come with a defence of practices oppressive to women, and white feminist attempts to rescue them from patriarchy. In short, black feminists in Britain have refused ‘salvation’, whether by the state in the name of civilized modernity, by black men on behalf of tradition and community integrity, or by white feminists in the interest of ethnocentric versions of women’s liberation. In this context, discussions after my presentations explored, among other things, questions of rhetoric and strategy: how to argue for women’s rights in ways that were not complicit in any way with patriarchal, racist or ethnocentric formulations of the issues. Thus, given that the British state draws on key elements of nineteenthcentury discourses on India to further its own current projects, my delineation of the colonial dimension of these discourses was seen to have an explicitly political character. In India, however, this dimension of my project was interpreted quite differently, primarily as an academic and historical argument. To some extent this is not surprising. Notions of ‘timeless textual traditions’ or the essential spirituality of Indian society have a different afterlife in the Indian public domain. Quite simply, they are not, as in Britain, critical to the elaboration of hegemony. Certainly, development policies explicitly embrace the logic of modernity, brahmanical texts have come to represent quintessential Hinduism, and the colonial legacy of making religious scriptures the basis of civil law has enormously complicated feminist projects of legal reform. However, notions like ‘timeless traditions’ function most often to inspire literature from the Indian Tourist Development Corporation or to feed the fantasy life of petit-bourgeois middle—and high-caste Indians regarding the glory of ancient India (read, ‘of their own lineage’). Except in the case of Government of India documentaries on tribal peoples, or sometimes in relation to remote rural areas, there does not exist a serious convention of representing Indian citizens as lacking agency, inhabiting a timeless zone, and immobilized by ‘tradition’. Indeed, this kind of

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analysis would be difficult to sustain, given that the authority of the Indian state has been continually challenged since independence, and is bolstered today not by a democratic consensus but through a brutal and increasingly unashamed use of violence. The Indian context thus presents a sharp contrast to the West; naming something ‘colonial’ in India has, accordingly, a different import. It becomes a question of periodization, rather than a crucial move in developing an oppositional, anti-imperialist critical practice. Such a reading is further comprehensible because, in a palpable, existential sense, when one is in India, colonialism does indeed seem like a thing long past. Despite India’s economically dependent status in the world economy and its wilful exploitation by multinationals and agencies like the World Bank, ‘the West’ as ideological and political presence articulates with such a density of indigenous institutions, discourses, histories and practices that its identity as ‘Western’ is refracted and not always salient. This is not to say that Indians are naive about the impact of the West. (There was, for example, little confusion about the ultimate culpability of the US-based corporation Union Carbide, in the Bhopal industrial disaster.) What I am suggesting is that, unlike, for example, many nations in the Caribbean or in Central America, in India it is not the boot of imperialism that is felt as an identifiable weight upon one’s neck. The pressure one feels compelled to resist is rather that of the nation state, dominant social and political institutions, and religious ‘fundamentalisms’ of various kinds. No doubt, the activities of the nation state are themselves related in complex ways to regional and global geopolitical trends, but it is the local face of this international phenomenon against which one is moved to struggle. It comes as no surprise, then, that in India, the ‘political’ dimension of my work is seen to be expressed primarily in my engagement with nationalism, the limited parameters within which nationalists posed the question of women’s status, the marginality of women to nineteenthcentury discussions supposedly about them, and the legacy of colonialism in contemporary discussion of women’s issues. This last point was made in my presentation in relation to the recent controversy over reform of Islamic law provoked by the ‘Shahbano case’. The case was one in which the Supreme Court had upheld the application of a Muslim woman, Shahbano, for lifelong maintenance from her ex-husband. The Supreme Court’s verdict became a rallying point for many Muslims who felt that the court had (contrary to its claims) violated Islamic law and thus undermined the only legal protection Indian Muslims enjoyed as a religious minority (Punwani, 1985; Kishwar, 1986; Engineer, 1987; Pathak and Sunder Rajan, 1989). In analyzing the case, it was possible to point out how, in this as in many instances in the nineteenth century, contests over women’s rights were being debated as contests over scriptural interpretation, and as struggles over a community’s autonomy and right to self-determination. While these terms do not exhaust the arguments made in relation to the case, they point to significant parallels between nineteenth-and twentieth-century debates on women. (Mani, 1987:153–6). My interest in such continuities was in the ways in which they constrained the form and content of contemporary discussions. I did not assume that the persistence of certain discursive elements implied unchanged significance, meanings or effects; ideas are potentially available for different kinds of appropriation by different social forces. Suffice it to say that the case, more than any theoretical argument about ‘colonial discourse’, served to convey some of the political impulses of my project. Even here, however, the ‘colonial’ dimension was of academic interest. The burden of the discussion, not inappropriately, fell to the practical problems of building coalitions between Hindu and Muslim women in the wake of the divisiveness produced by the Shahbano case and the growth of communalism in Indian politics.

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Situating our interventions These differing receptions of my work in Britain and India raise questions regarding the relationship between ‘experience’ and ‘theory’, one’s geographical location and the formulation of one’s projects. It seems to me that travelling to the US and living under its regimes of truth regarding India and the Third World more generally have intensified for me certain ‘modes of knowing’. The disjunctions between how I saw myself and the kinds of knowledge about me that I kept bumping into in the West, opened up new questions for social and political inquiry. Reading Edward Said’s Orientalism in this context was enormously productive and energizing (Said, 1979). It contextualized the phenomena, discourses and attitudes I was encountering and helped me in the task of situating personal experiences within a historical problematic. It quickened my impulse to take more seriously than I had previously been inclined to, colonial official and missionary discourses on India. My interest in these was not merely that of a historian of ideas, but of someone curious about the history of the present. I can only wonder at how my project might have been fashioned in the absence of this experience of travel to a different economy of power and knowledge. In this regard, I find it significant that an Indian friend of mine once remarked that the full force of Said’s argument in Orientalism had come home to her only after spending time in Europe. Prior to this she had believed, and this is a fairly common perception in India, that Said was perhaps overstating his case, stretching a point.4 It seems to me that the politics and epistemology of differing readings such as these dramatizes the dilemma of post-colonial intellectuals working on the Third World in the West. One diagnosis of this situation accuses such intellectuals of inauthenticity or ideological contamination by the West. This charge may be levelled by First World intellectuals demanding a spurious authenticity of their Third World colleagues. It often works to challenge the latter groups’ credibility, by implying that their politics are exceptional and ungeneralizable. This analysis may, however, also be shared by Third World intellectuals working in the Third World. The criticism in this instance may be rooted in the assumption, not always unwarranted, that intellectuals abroad are, so to speak, ‘selling out’. It is, however, ultimately simplistic because it overgeneralizes, and one does not, of course, have to leave home to sell out. Alternatively, assertions about ideological contamination are often shorthand allusions to genuine issues, such as asymmetries in the material conditions of scholarship in metropolitan and Third World contexts. Such problems are, however, not clarified by a moralistic formulation of the issue in terms of purity or pollution. In the face of this discourse of authenticity, some Third World intellectuals working in the First World have reterritorialized themselves as hybrid. This strategy is compelling when such a demonstration of hybridity becomes, as in Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands (1987) an enabling moment for the possibility of a collective politics attentive to difference and contradiction. When, however, the elaboration of hybridity becomes an end in itself, serving only to undo binary oppositions, it runs the risk of dodging entirely the question of location. To this one must say, ‘necessary but insufficient’. Finally, for those intellectuals from the geographical Third World who have an elsewhere to return to, there is the possibility of adopting a tactic which would separate projects into what is deemed appropriate or inappropriate to do ‘while one is in the West’. Here again we have a prescription which may make sense in specific instances, for political and practical reasons. On the other hand this strategy also has the potential for side-stepping the issue. It implicitly conceives of the West and non-West as autonomous spaces and thereby evades the thorny issue of their intersections and mutual implications (Mohanty, 1989). How, then, would I proceed to delineate, in my own case, the potential and limits of my location, working on the Third World in the belly of the First? For one thing, it seems to me that the mode of knowing enabled by the experience of existing between discursive systems makes it difficult for me to isolate colonialism as a distinct historical period with little claim on the present. Consequently, I have tried to train myself to look

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for discontinuities in apparently smooth surfaces, and continuities across the dominant and oppositional. Secondly, the deadening essentialism of much historical and contemporary Western representation of the Third World has confirmed for me, albeit in a different way, a lesson learnt earlier from Marxism: an abiding suspicion of primarily cultural explanations of social phenomena. At the same time, perhaps not paradoxically, experiences of such a persistent privileging of ‘culture’ have in turn compelled me to take very seriously the domain designated by it. What counts as ‘culture’? How is it conceived and represented? With what consequences? In short, I have been persuaded of the need to open to critical reflection the vexed and complex issue of the relationship between colonialism and questions of culture. This is a problem that is, to my mind, yet to be adequately thematized in the literature on colonialism in India. Historiography on nineteenth-century India, for instance, has produced sophisticated analysis of the impact of colonialism on India’s economy and politics, but has paid comparatively little attention to its impact on culture or on conceptions of it. Perhaps the ways in which I may be tempted to frame the problem will be marked by the fact that it became an issue for me as a result of my experience of Britain and the US. It may be that I accent the colonial rather more heavily than my imagined counterpart, the feminist writing in India. But as I reflect on what moves me, I also need to be aware that I now inescapably participate in multiple conversations, not all of which overlap. As for the gains of being situated in the interstices, only time will tell. In the meantime, it seems to me that my attempt to specify location might also be fruitfully undertaken in dialogue with feminists in India. After all, the dangers of reading the local as global are potentially present both in India and in the West: in the former through minimizing colonialism, in the latter through aggrandizing it. Priorities redetermined: the aftermath of Roop Kanwar’s burning The difficulties of straddling different temporalities of struggle cannot, however, always be resolved through listening for and talking about our specificities. There are political moments which pose limits to the possibility of conceiving of international feminist exchanges (whether between First and Third World women in the West or between Third World women cross-nationally) as negotiated dialogues which, while they may alternately diverge and intersect, are ultimately benign and noncontradictory. On 22 September 1987, Roop Kanwar died on the funeral pyre of her husband in Deorala, Rajasthan. The incident has sparked off a nationwide controversy on sati in India, unearthed the information that there have been at least thirty-eight widow immolations in Rajasthan since independence, and dragged out of the closet vociferous supporters of the practice. In this recent case, the government of India vacillated in taking action against family members found to have coerced Roop. State officials were present along with an estimated 300,000 others at an event ‘honouring’ the episode thirteen days after the burning, and when the state finally banned glorification of sati, the response was too little, too late. Meanwhile, a massive debate on sati had been set in motion, with opponents and defenders staking out their claims in terms that were in many ways remarkably reminiscent of the nineteenth-century controversy which is the subject of my own research. As in the colonial period, issues of scriptural interpretation, the socalled ‘traditional’ nature of sati, its barbarity, the role of the state, women’s social conditioning and the question of the widow’s consent, all emerged as key items in the debate. Four positions were discernible in the discussions that followed upon Roop Kanwar’s death. Each of these is more elaborate than my characterization of it suggests, but my purpose here is merely to sketch in broad strokes the discursive space that was constituted, referring readers to others who have analyzed them more thoroughly (Patel and Kumar, 1988; Sangari, 1988, among others). There was firstly, a ‘liberal’ position, critical of sati as ‘traditional,’ ‘religious’ and barbaric and arguing that the incident represented the

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failure of the project of modernization. Secondly, and opposed to this, was the conservative, pro-sati lobby. This valorized sati’s ‘traditional’ and ‘religious’ status and argued that the rationality of the practice was necessarily inaccessible to westernized, urban Indians. Ostensibly critical of both these positions, although reserving the burden of its critique for the former and ultimately aligning itself with the latter, was a third stance (Nandy, 1987, 1988a, 1988b). Ashis Nandy, a trenchant critic of the philosophies of modernization and development, castigated liberal condemnation of sati as the response of a rootless, decultured urban bourgeoisie, unable, if not unwilling, to comprehend the masses. We may agree with Nandy that the incomprehension of sati expressed by the liberal media required examination and critique: after all, sati is only one among many practices exploitative of women. In a sense, contemporary liberal incomprehension parallels nineteenth-century colonial horror. Both cast sati simultaneously as an exceptional practice and one that is emblematic of society as a whole. The sense of its exceptionalism emerges in analyses of sati which treat it in isolation from women’s subordination in general, while its emblematic status is dramatized in the way in which the incident has provoked anxiety about the nature and extent of India’s social progress. This, however, is not the direction in which Nandy develops his argument. Nandy’s ire is directed mainly at what he perceives as the ‘Western’ modes of denouncing sati’ reproduced by ‘modernists’. Nandy’s stand on sati has drawn sharp criticism from feminists (Qadeer and Hasan, 1987; Patel and Kumar, 1988, Sangari, 1988; Philipose and Setalvad, 1988) whom he scorns as modernist, overlooking thereby important distinctions between feminist and liberal critiques of the practice (Nandy, 1988b). What is even more curious, however, is that Nandy’s critique of the colonial mentality of these modernists itself reproduces three key moves of colonial discourse. He reaffirms the ‘tradition/modernity’ dichotomy in analyzing the practice, and replicates the colonial oppositions, ‘glorious past/degraded present’ and ‘authentic/inauthentic sati’. The latter two are brought together in his positive evaluation of the original, mythological sati, said to express women’s sacred and magical powers, as against his negative description of contemporary widow burning which, he claims, is merely the product of a dehumanized market morality. The fourth, and to my mind, genuinely anti-imperialist position (even though, unlike Nandy’s it was not articulated as such) was that taken by feminists. Not surprisingly, concern for women’s lives was very much at the centre of feminist discourse. Feminists insisted that Roop Kanwar’s death should be understood in the context of the general subordination of women in Indian society, challenged attempts to frame the issue as one of tradition or religion and located the Deorala incident within post-independent political and economic developments in Rajasthan (Kishwar and Vanita, 1987; Bhasin and Menon, 1988; Vaid, 1988, among others). Feminists also pointed to the modernity of the incident and to the character of the pro-sati lobby, whose members were urban, educated men in their twenties and thirties. For example, Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita argued that Deorala was not a rural backwater, but rather a prosperous town with electricity, tap water and a 70 per cent literacy rate (Kishwar and Vanita, 1987). Further, they pointed out that Roop Kanwar was a city-educated woman while her husband had a degree in science and her father-in-law, one of the abettors, was employed as a school teacher. In addition to the insufficiency of derisively analyzing sati as ‘traditional’, feminists argued that such a ploy would play into the hands of pro-sati ‘traditionalists’. Religious arguments were similarly exposed as serving to legitimate the oppression of women. Again, Kishwar and Vanita described how the daily rituals around the spot where the burning had taken place resembled victory celebrations, not religious devotion. In arguing that cries of ‘religion’ could not absolve anyone of murder, Indira Jaising put it thus: ‘just as the personal is political, the religious is secular where women are concerned’ (Jaising, 1987). Finally, feminists warned against the danger of demanding more stringent laws and greater state intervention, the recurring pleas of liberal opponents of sati. They highlighted the appalling lack of will

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demonstrated by the state in prosecuting Roop’s in-laws, and the possibility that the state would merely abuse the greater powers that would accrue to it. These fears have largely been realized. Local police have used their powers to harass journalists and others investigating the case and, despite the law against abetting and glorifying sati, an estimated 8,000 people gathered at Deorala in September 1988 to ‘celebrate’ the one year anniversary of the burning of Roop Kanwar (Pachauri, 1988). And perhaps worst of all, one of the provisions of the legislative act on sati makes its victims liable to punishment: women who attempt sati are hereafter to be subject to fine or imprisonment! The events that have followed Roop Kanwar’s burning have radically changed the Indian context for my work. Widow burning is no longer, as it had been when I began, a ‘historical’ problem, but very much a charged and explosive contemporary issue. Although my own discussion here has focused most on feminist arguments, they are, alas, marginal to the current debate. The discursive space is principally being defined by conservatives and liberals. The former are more active in mobilizing a constituency and have had the support of political parties more wedded to securing votes than to fundamental rights of any kind. This context has made it imperative to contextualize and frame in particular ways some of the arguments I develop in my thesis. How, for instance, might my critique of the civilizing mission be appropriated in the current situation? Part of my argument has been to show, in some detail, what is occluded in the following statement which represents a dominant story about colonialism and the question of woman: ‘we came, we saw, we were horrified, we intervened’. Taking the instance of sati, whose abolition by the British in 1829 supposedly illuminates, par excellence, the legitimacy of this account, I have tried to suggest that the story is much more complicated. Among other things, I point out that legislative prohibition of sati was preceded by its legalization, a procedure that involved British officials in determining and enforcing a colonial version of the practice deemed traditional and authentic; that intervention in sati provided grounds for intervention in civil society; and that a fundamental ambivalence to sati structured colonial attitudes to the practice (Mani, 1987). I argue that missionary involvement in sati was similarly complex and ambivalent, with horror being reserved primarily for fundraising material produced for a British public. My point is that ultimately, for both officials and missionaries, women were not really at issue. Women rather provided ground for the development of other agendas. I make a related argument about nineteenth-century indigenous discourses on sati. I argue that these developed within the constraints of a discourse on Indian society privileged by the British, that ambivalence to the practice is discernible even among those passionately opposed to sati, and that here too, concern for women seems secondary to concern for ‘tradition’ or for the general good of society. Women thus appear as obstacles to societal reform, and as individuals who must be trained to take up the duties of modern life with its own requirements of good wife and mother. My argument, then, has called into question the overly positive evaluation of the civilizing impulses of colonialism and the modernizing desires of protonationalism and nationalism: not because women did not gain from them, but because neither seemed to me to be selfless and benign in their espousal of women’s rights, nor even centrally concerned with them. How will such a critique of colonialist and nationalist arguments against sati resonate in India today? Is there any danger that my critique of the terms of these arguments will be read reductively as support for sati? Authorial intention, it is generally conceded, guarantees nothing. Considerable care will be necessary in framing my discussion in such a way that only a deliberate misreading can appropriate my arguments to reactionary ends. In addition, perhaps in my discussion of the nineteenth-century debate on sati I should also explicitly engage the contemporary moment so as to clarify how once again, with the signal exception of feminists and some progressives, arguments about women’s rights have provided the basis for a further

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entrenchment of patriarchy in the name of ‘tradition’ (a point made by many Indian feminists) and for the arrogation of greater powers to the state in the name of ‘modernity’. I was lucky to be in India in the aftermath of Deorala. Lucky, because, in and of themselves, newspaper clippings and magazine articles could not have conveyed to me the political temperature there. Grasping the situation required the cumulative experience of countless conversations with friends, family members and neighbours, chance encounters on buses and trains, reports from feminists and civil libertarians who had travelled to Deorala, public meetings, and accounts of group discussions held in schools, colleges, political and community organizations. Much of this would obviously have been unavailable in print. My combined impressions strongly suggest that great care will have to be exercised in making arguments such as a critique of the Western civilizing mission. The possible implications of other issues, such as exploration of the question of women’s agency, appear to be even more treacherous. The problem of women’s agency occupies a paradoxical position in feminist thinking in that, despite being a central concern, it remains poorly theorized. This is equally true of poststructuralist theory which, while being critical of the bourgeois conception of agency as the free will of an autonomous self, has yet to produce an adequate alternative formulation. The widow’s will has been a recurring theme in both the nineteenthand twentieth-century debates on sati. Here, discussion of agency is framed around the limited and analytically unhelpful binary terms, eoercion and consent. Those defending sati have, then as now, made claims about the ‘voluntary’ nature of the act. Against this, opponents of sati have emphasized coereion, and questioned the meaning of consent. In the earlier debate, consent was sometimes conceived as impossible by definition: women were simply deemed incapable of it. At other times, the issue was formulated more broadly in terms of women’s social position and of the meagre alternatives available to them. For instance, it was pointed out that one could hardly speak of consent when widowhood imposed its own regimes of misery. By and large, those against sati today have developed this latter argument, feminists far more consistently than liberals. In the colonial situation, this dualistic conception of agency led to legislation requiring women to be crossexamined at the pyre and being permitted to burn if their action was declared to be voluntary. A static conception of agency intersected with the assumption of religious hegemony to marginalize the ways in which women actively negotiated and struggled against the social and familial constraints upon them. Nowhere is this more evident than in colonial eyewitness accounts of sati, which consistently effaced signs of women’s agency in struggle, resistance and coercion (Mani, 1989). I have long felt anxious about how a broader consideration of women’s agency is foreclosed by its reductive translation into an issue of whether or not the widow went willingly. Limiting discussion of women’s agency in this way makes it difficult to engage simultaneously women’s systematic subordination and the ways in which they negotiate oppressive, even determining, social conditions (Ong, 1987 and Gordon, 1989 develop such complex analyses of women’s agency). I know that part of my own concern with these questions comes from a sense of the extent to which Third World peoples are consistently represented in Eurocentric discourses as lacking agency. I also know that it comes from a conviction that structures of domination are best understood if we can grasp how we remain agents even in the moments in which we are being intimately, viciously oppressed. The discourse of woman as victim has been invaluable to feminism in pointing to the systematic character of gender domination. But if it is not employed with care, or in conjunction with a dynamic conception of agency, it leaves us with reductive representations of women as primarily beings who are passive and acted upon. In other words we are left with that common figure of Eurocentric feminist discourse: the Third World woman as ‘always, already victim’ (Mohanty, 1984). What is forsaken here is the notion of women’s oppression as a multifaceted and contradictory social process. It is crucial to stress in

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this regard, however, that when Indian feminists speak of woman as victim it is in a complex material sense. It is also important to note than in emphasizing women’s systematic subordination rather than debating questions of agency, Indian feminists are specifically attempting to counter rightwing discourse that falsely proposes women’s total freedom.5 Questions of agency provoke issues at the heart of feminism. But in raising them in the current Indian context, one walks a tightrope. Firstly, given the dominant discourse on sati, to claim that women are agents even in their coercion is to court the possibility of misappropriation by the right wing. Secondly, current legislation on sati, by making women attempting sati liable to punishment, implicitly conceives of them as ‘free agents’. The law states that any such punishment must take account of the circumstances in which the woman’s decision was taken. But given that legal and political institutions routinely punish victims instead of perpetrators, why should we trust that this proviso will not work against women? In the short term, then, it seems safest to counter the notion of woman as free agent by emphasizing her victimization. However, unless we include in this a complex sense of agency, we run the risk of producing a discourse which sets women up to be saved. This would situate women within feminist analysis in ways that are similar to their positioning within colonialist or nationalist discourse. The example of women’s agency is a particularly good instance of the dilemmas confronted in simultaneously attempting to speak within different historical moments and to discrepant audiences. What might be a valuable pushing of the limits of current rethinking of agency in Anglo-American feminism, may, if not done with extreme care, be an unhelpful, if not disastrous move in the Indian context. If criticism is to be ‘worldly’ (Said, 1983:1–30) or ‘situated’ (Haraway, 1988), or engaged, it must take account of the worlds in which it speaks. Perhaps to Bruce Robbins’ suggestion that theory is a ‘when’ not a ‘what,’ (Robbins, 1987/8:5) we should also add the notion of a ‘where’. Notes Lata Mani received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1989. She has been active in feminist struggles in India and in feminist and antiracist work in the US. Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Vivek Dhareshwar, Ruth Frankenberg, Mary John and Kamala Visweswaran have left the imprint of their critical readings on the final version of this paper. I am also indebted to Indian feminists and progressives whose political insight and imaginative interventions in the contemporary debate on widow burning have been inspiring and instructive. An earlier version of this paper appeared in Inscriptions, no.5, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1989. 1 The relative rapidity with which the concept of ‘culture studies’ has found institutional support in the US academy compared to ethnic or women’s studies should give us pause. bell hooks (Gloria Watkins) and Gayatri C. Spivak have recently mapped out what is at stake intellectually and politically in the kinds of theoretical and curricular agendas being privileged and excluded in the institutionalization of Third World’ or ‘culture studies’. bell hooks, ‘Critical integration: talking race, resisting racism’, Conference on Feminisms and Cultural Imperialism: The Politics of Difference, Cornell University, 1989 April 22–3; Gayatri C.Spivak, ‘Post-coloniality and the field of value’, Conference on Feminisms and Cultural Imperialism: The Politics of Difference, Cornell University, 1989, April 22–3. 2 As a whole, however, as Norma Alarcon (forthcoming), Aida Hurtado (1989) and Chela Sandoval (forthcoming) have recently argued, the critique of US white feminism has been taken up very unevenly and has failed fundamentally to transform dominant feminist thinking.

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3 Edward Said (1986) raises the problem of discrepant experiences and constituencies but develops instead a case for foregrounding the shared intellectual and political terrain produced by colonialism. See also, Said, 1983:226– 47). 4 There may be many reasons for a critique of Said’s Orientalism, some more persuasive than others (Mani and Frankenberg, 1985). There is firstly the theoretical resistance of those working within an objectivist paradigm to his social constructionist approach. Then there is the question of the scope of his argument. Many Indian readers, for example, felt that the book’s value for them was seriously limited by its primary focus on the West and its lack of analysis of internal class and power relations in colonized territories. My point here, then, is not that there are no grounds to criticize Orientalism: rather that, in India, the political and ideological impetus of Said’s project has generally not been apprehended as compelling, a response tied to both geographical location and historical experience. 5 Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is approaching the problem of the widow’s subjectivity in sati from a different perspective. She argues that the ‘methodological impasse’ generated by the ‘coercion-consent’ framework can be avoided if the question of the widow’s subjectivity is engaged via an exploration of ‘both the phenomenology of pain and a politics that recognizes pain as constitutive of the subject’ (forthcoming).

References ALARCON, N. (forthcoming) The theoretical subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American feminism’, in CALDERON and SALDIVAR. AMOS, V., LEWIS, G., MAMA, A. and PARMAR, P. (1984) editors, ‘Many voices, one chant: Black-feminist perspectives’, Feminist Review, no.17. ANZALDVA, G. (1987) Borderlands/LaFrontera:TheNewMestisa, San’Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. APPADURAI, A. (1988) ‘Putting hierarchy in its place’, Cultural Anthropology, vol.3, no.1. BHASIN, K. and MENON, R. (1988) ‘The problem’, Seminar, no.342, Special Issue on sati. BHAVNANI, K-K. and COULSON, M. (1986) Transforming socialist-feminism: the challenge of racism’, Feminist Review, no.23. BULKIN, E., PRATT, M.B. and SMITH, B. (1984) Yours in Struggle: Feminist Perspectives on Racism and AntiSemitism, New York: Long Haul Press. CALDERON, Hector and SALDIVAR, Jose D. (forthcoming) editors, Chicano Criticism in a Social Context, Durham: Duke University Press. CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES (1982) ‘The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, London: Hutchinson. DE LAURETIS, T. (1986) editor, Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, Bloomington: Indiana. DE LAURETIS, T. (1990) ‘Eccentric subjects: feminist theory and historical consciousness’, Feminist Studies. ENGINEER, A.A. (1987) The Shahbano Controversy, Bombay: Orient Longman. GORDON, L. (1989) Heroes of their Own Lives, The Politics and History of Family Violence, New York: Penguin. GREWAL, S., KAY, J., LANDOR, L., LEWIS, G. and PARMAR, P. (1988) editors, Charting the Journey: Writings By Black and Third World Women, London: Sheba. HARAWAY,D. (1988) ‘Situated knowledges: the science question and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies, vol.14, no.3. HOOKS, B. (1981) Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Boston: South End Press. HURTADO, A. (1989) ‘Relating to privilege: seduction and rejection in the subordination of white women and women of color’, Signs, vol.14, no.4. INDEN, R. (1986) ‘Orientalist constructions of India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol.20, no.3. JAISING, I. (1987) ‘Women, religion and the law’, The Lawyers Collective, vol.2, no.11. KAPLAN, C. (1987) ‘Deterritorializations: the rewriting of home and exile in Western feminist discourse’, Cultural Critique, no.6.

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KISHWAR, M. (1986) ‘Pro-woman or anti-Muslim? The Shahbano controversy’, Manushi, no.32. KISHWAR, M. and VANITA, R. (1987) ‘The burning of Roop Kanwar’, Manushi, no.42–3. LAZREG, M. (1988) ‘Feminism and difference: the perils of writing as a woman on women in Algeria’, Feminist Studies, vol.14, no.1. MANI, L. and FRANKENBERG, R. (1985) ‘The challenge of Orientalism’, Economy and Society, vol.14, no.2. MANI, L. (1987) ‘Contentious traditions: the debate on sati in colonial India’, Cultural Critique, no.7; also published in SANGARI and VAID 1989. MANI, L. (1989) ‘Contentious traditions: the debate on sati in colonial India, 1780–1833’, Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz. MINH-HA, TRIHN, T (1986/7) editor, ‘She the inappropriate/d Other’, Discourse, no.8. MOHANTY, C.T. (1984) ‘Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, Boundary 2, Spring/ Fall, vol.12, no.3/vol.13, no.1. (revised, 1988, Feminist Review, no.30). ——(1987) ‘Feminist encounters, locating the politics of experience’, Copyright, vol.l, no.1. MOHANTY, S.P. (1989) ‘Us and them: on the philosophical bases of political criticism’, Yale Journal of Criticism, vol.2, no.2. MORAGA, C. and ANZALDUA, G. (1981) editors, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, Watertown Mass: Persephone. NANDY, A. (1987) ‘The sociology of sati’, Indian Express, October 5. ——(1988a) ‘The human factor’, The Illustrated Weekly of India, January 17, 1988. ——(1988b) ‘Sati in Kaliyuga’, Economic and Political Weekly, September 17. ONG, A. (1987) Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Resistance: Factory Women in Malaysia, Albany: SUNY Press. PACHAURI, P. p. (1988) ‘Turning a blind eye: glorification of sati continues despite the law’, India Today, October 15. PARMAR, p. (1982) ‘Gender, race and class: Asian women in resistance’, in CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDEES (1982). PATEL, S. and KUMAR, K. (1988) ‘Defenders of sati’, Economic and Political Weekly, January 23. PATHAK, Z. and SUNDER RAJAN, R. (1989) ‘“Shahbano”’, Signs, vol.14, no.3. PHBLIPOSE, P. and SETALVAD, T. (1988) ‘Demystifying sati’, The Illustrated Weekly of India, March 13. PUNWANI, J. (1985) ‘The strange case of Shahbano’, The Sunday Observer, November 24. QADEER, I. and HASAN, Z. (1987) ‘Deadly politics of the state and its apologists’, Economic and Political Weekly, November 14. RICH, A. (1986) ‘Notes toward a politics of location (1984)’, in Blood Bread and Poetry, New York: Norton. ROBBINS,B. (1987/8) ‘The politics of theory’, Social Text, no.18. SAID, E. (1979) Orientalism, New York: Vintage. —— (1983) The World The Text and the Critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —— (1986) ‘Intellectuals in the post-colonial world’, Salmagundi, no. 70–1. SANDOVAL, C. (forthcoming) ‘US Third World feminism: the theory and method of oppositional consciousness’, in ‘Oppositional consciousness in the post-modern world’, Doctoral dissertation in progress, University of California, Santa Cruz. SANGARI, K.K. (1988) ‘Perpetuating the myth’, Seminar, no.342, Special Issue on Sati. SANGARI, K.K. and VAID, S. (1989) editors, Recasting Women: Essays on Colonial History, New Delhi: Kali. SEGREST, M. (1985) My Mama’s Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture, Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books. SMITH, B. (1983) editor, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press. SPIVAK, G.C. (1981) ‘French feminism in an international frame’, Yale French Studies, no.62. SUNDER RAJAN, R. (forthcoming) ‘The subject of sati: Pain and death in the contemporary discourse on Sati’, Yale Journal of Criticism. VAID,S. (1988) ‘Politics of Widow Immolation’, Seminar, no.342, Special Issue on Sati.

CAGNEY AND LACEY REVISITED Beverley Alcock and Jocelyn Robson

Theoretical context Much contemporary writing within the field of cultural studies addresses the agenda set by feminist film theory. Work on female representation in the cinema has, since the mid-seventies, been informed by Freudian psychoanalysis in attempting to explore the mechanisms by which patriarchy organizes psychosexual structures within ideology. Two articles by Laura Mulvey have been crucial in this respect: ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ (1975) and ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” inspired by Duel in the Sun’ (1981). In the first article, Mulvey unashamedly pillages Freud as a means to unpacking patriarchal texts (Hollywood films) and investigating the male gendering of film audiences. In the second, she moves to a consideration of the position of the female spectator. These articles, although intended as radical forays into enemy territory in search of weaponry that might be useful in the ideological struggle, formed, paradoxically, the basis for what became the orthodox feminist approach. While it is true that subsequent feminist work, which leant heavily on psychoanalysis, has provided insights into the workings of patriarchy, it is also true that it has obscured alternative approaches; for at least a decade we appeared to be stuck with the Oedipal baby and the Freudian bathwater, so to speak! With the proliferation of work on popular cultural forms, particularly television, the early eighties saw a shift in emphasis away from the text and towards the reader. In fact the need to conceptualize some kind of space for the female spectator, to account for the pleasures women clearly derive from cinema and TV, was addressed by Mulvey herself in the second article ‘Afterthoughts’ and has since been located as an important site for feminist theory. However, she continues to use psychoanalysis as the frame of reference in accounting for the pleasure available to the female spectator and points to ‘the ego’s desire to phantasise itself in a certain active manner’. The article concludes in a particularly deterministic way: I have argued that Pearl’s position in ‘Duel in The Sun’ is similar to that of the female spectator as she temporarily accepts ‘masculinization’ in memory of her ‘active’ phase. Rather than dramatizing the success of masculine identification, Pearl brings out its sadness. Her ‘tomboy’ pleasures, her sexuality, are not accepted by Lewt, except in death. So, too, is the female spectator’s phantasy at crosspurposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes.

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Despite its pessimism, the article nevertheless marks out a new terrain; an area that is being explored within the contemporary context, that of audience and the active role of the female reader in the struggle between dominant and opposition meanings within cultural production. One example of this approach is Lorraine Gamman’s article ‘Watching the detectives: the enigma of the female gaze’ (1988), in which she inverts Mulvey’s notion of the man as the bearer of the look and argues that in the series Cagney and Lacey the female viewer may locate certain strategies at work within the text which serve to disrupt the dominant male gaze. She gives as an example the use of mockery by the two female protagonists, to undermine the machismo of certain of the male characters. While in a sense this does locate one kind of pleasure available to the viewer, Gamman seems to be saying little more than that it is important to have strong female characters with which to identify. In our view, the presence of such characters does not necessarily subvert the patriarchal working of the text, any more than does the role of Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or The African Queen, since the strong woman character is often relocated, through the workings of the plot, into a traditional female space. This is precisely the lesson of seventies’ film theory, most notable in feminist work on the ‘femmes fatales’ in film noir. In her article, Gamman proceeds like a theoretical guerrilla, liberating ideas from feminist film theory which seem useful, in much the same manner that Mulvey lifts ideas from Freud. An example of this is her use of the notion of ‘the female gaze’ with which she seems to be arguing that we can reclaim the text by seizing the look. This ignores any consideration of the patriarchal structuring of the subject who reads and wipes out at a stroke the most crucial insight that Mulvey provides. At all events the proposition that dominant meanings may be dispensed with by an act of choice on the part of the reader seems altogether too simple. It is our view that the series Cagney and Lacey is not so easily rescued; and we suggest, in opposition to Gamman, that it is a fundamentally reactionary text consistent with the mood of the late eighties, pleasurable perhaps but not progressive. In the analysis that follows we abandon psychoanalysis in the interests of positing a reader who is not completely fixed within the strict gender opposition male/female, theorized by Mulvey after Freud, and taken up by Gamman. Our reader ‘freewheels’ between the poles of sexual identity and identification, but unlike the female spectator Mulvey envisages, she is neither unhappy nor restless in ‘transvestite clothes’ because she is used to violating the boundaries staked out by heteropatriarchy, not only in fantasy (the cinema) but also in the world. For what feminist film criticism has always failed to take account of, both in terms of female representation and female readership, is the lesbian subject. Such a subject theoretically and actually ruptures the strict opposition of the Freudian model which underpins the heterosexual world view. Furthermore the lesbian reader is potentially more ready to perceive that within the operations of popular culture the punishment of the strong woman also entails the laying of the lesbian ghost. It is from this perspective that we will be looking at Cagney and Lacey and commenting on what we see as the demise of Christine Cagney, with particular reference to the last three episodes of the penultimate series broadcast in the UK during the summer of 1987. Introduction In a period of marked conservatism in both society and popular entertainment, the TV show Cagney and Lacey has attracted attention for its seemingly more liberal stance. Traditional gender roles appeared to be challenged by the casting of two women as active professionals in a cop partnership; such ‘buddy’ relationships had previously been reserved for men (e.g., as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and cop series (even those featuring women) had not convincingly reflected the changed position of women in society.

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Further, the show quickly developed many of the generic features of soap opera (such as an emphasis on the importance of the woman’s role) and as such it was able to construct a series of private spaces for the women, including those they shared with their families. The generic crossover between cop show and soap opera serves to identify, as it were, the masculine and feminine aspects of the key characters and, as we shall describe later, these two sites (of work precinct and home) although distinct, meet and overlap in the bodies of Christine Cagney (woman and cop) and of Mary Beth Lacey (woman and cop). The show thus appears (at first sight) to challenge strict generic boundaries, as well as traditional gender roles. The seventies produced a crop of ‘women’s films’ which featured strong women characters and at times (as in Julia and Turning Point) strong friendships between women. Such films may be thought of as the legacy of seventies’ feminism. Cagney and Lacey shares some of their concerns, notably the concern with the relationship between women’s working and private lives, but it extends others. In particular, as we shall describe, it examines the friendship and the emotional ties between the two women in such a way that this friendship itself eventually becomes central to the drama. The discrepancy between what Cagney and Lacey are (women) and what they are at work (cops) generates the most interesting motor of their relationship. Accordingly, most of the key discussions take place in the context of the precinct but in spaces which are separated off from it, eg., the squad car, the women’s room. Despite these liberal concerns, however, we shall argue that there is in Cagney and Lacey a fundamentally reactionary project at work in the demise of Christine Cagney, via alcoholism and a freewheeling lifestyle. In a contemporary context, there are some basic similarities between Cagney and Lacey and the much more overtly reactionary Fatal Attraction. As in forties’ melodrama, independent women who transgress against the heteropatriarchal order must be punished and face rehabilitation (or death). The career woman (played by Glenn Close) in Fatal Attraction is a malign and obsessive person who threatens the stability of the family unity and is violently eradicated by her rival (a ‘proper’ woman). Similarly, as we hope to show, Christine Cagney is brought to heel, though far less violently of course. Her humiliation can be seen as the price she must pay for her independence and her rejection of traditional family and sexual roles. The protagonists Mary Beth Lacey is a successful woman. First and foremost she is successful because she has the ability to integrate her roles at work and at home and she finds fulfilment in both, despite their conflicting demands. She has in fact a ‘proper’ family, a loving husband and children, and a house (not an apartment). Further, she is seen to have established herself in these ways despite an unsatisfactory relationship with her own father, with whom she still refuses to communicate. She plays by the rules. She does not try to wear the trousers at home and at work, her male colleagues treat her with distance and respect. She is a true woman, for she is also a mother; she is emotional; she cries, is afraid and feels joy. On duty, she worries a lot about her family, she draws her strength from them. There is a sense in which Cagney and Lacey are both honorary ‘men’ at work since they are agents of law in a patriarchal order. Nevertheless, Mary Beth’s interaction, body language and dress differ markedly from Christine’s and her nature is generally constructed as female within this context, as at home. Her husband Harvey will nurture and protect her, as patriarchy protects. At work, Lieutenant Samuels, the authority figure within the precinct, partially fulfils this role; the rest of the men in the precinct collude and Mary Beth fits comfortably into the space constructed for her. It follows perhaps, that despite a more liberal outlook in political terms, Lacey is less militant than her partner on issues relating to women.

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Christine Cagney is a woman who wants to be a man. She wants equivalent power and status and she wants independence. For Christine, her father Charlie is an important role model; he is an ex-cop and he too has a drinking problem; the links between them are strong. (‘Like Dad, like daughter’, she announces at his funeral). Family life for Christine had been far from happy; her parents quarrelled a great deal and Christine’s sympathies were with her father. He brought her up and she loves him uncritically. In the episodes we shall examine, we see Christine failing to acknowledge the fact that Charlie is responsible for his own death and eventually colluding with his alcoholism; he in turn, colludes with her disregard for the rules of the precinct. Christine’s discomfort at her positioning as a woman, as a member of a family or even a sisterhood is repeatedly contrasted with Mary Beth’s contentment and ability to care. It may be possible to argue that as a woman who rejects her assigned gender role, Christine is consequently ‘lost’ and must be found (or rehabilitated) by another (true) woman. Certainly, in the precinct Christine wanders dangerously close to the boundaries. She balks at the concessionary nature of her positioning inside the patriarchal space. Her nature here is constructed as male; her dress (despite the fluffy jumpers) her body language and her interactions indicate that she considers herself to be part of the male ‘buddy’ network. As we have already noted, Christine is most of the things her father Charlie is or has been—Irish, a drinker, a cop, and a person unable to sustain a relationship. There is of course one crucial difference— Charlie is a man, Christine a woman. In the precinct context, as ‘Detective Cagney’, Christine is able to efface this difference, but it is this act that contains the seeds of her self-destruction. Narrative themes The first of the three episodes we are concerned with is entitled ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’. It is in several ways the most significant of the three since in it, as a result of Mary Beth’s sustaining a gunshot wound, the friendship between the two women comes under close scrutiny for the first time in the series. For the first time there is a promise that their potential for a relationship that is more than just buddies will be explored. The episode opens with a visit to the precinct by a gun collector from the South who is reporting the theft of one of his weapons. In the precinct, guns (obvious signifiers of maleness) are identified as belonging to Cagney’s province. They are also explicitly associated with sexual interactions; the gun collector flirts with Christine and invites her to accompany him on a shoot. He assures her that ‘it is pretty exciting stuff’ to fire an automatic weapon. Later, another female cop in the precinct remarks suggestively, ‘I like a man that’s heavily armed.’ The incident with the gun collector serves to encapsulate the contradictions inherent in the Cagney character: her role as the blonde who is attractive to men (and to the male spectator) and her own active desire for men, as the site of power and danger. As such, in Cagney, we have a representation of a powerful woman, in itself a contradiction since power is normally a masculine attribute. The double-edged nature of her position as the desirable one (classic female blonde) and the one who desires (active cop) allows the spectator a range of reading choices increasingly rare in contemporary female representations. Whilst it allows the male audience to respond traditionally, it also opens up a space for the female spectator, through identification with Cagney, to be the active desiring one and to share the excitement of the narrative drive. As suggested above, the lesbian spectator may be more inclined to seize the oppositional moments and so liberate the text. Cagney is in charge of the fire-arms check; it becomes plain that the majority of her male colleagues are flouting the rules of the precinct either by carrying the wrong gun or by carrying too many guns. The men

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are generally casual about their weaponry, the trappings of power; they appear to flaunt it and to resent Cagney’s attempts to make them more accountable. Crucially, it is the gun collector’s missing gun that later wounds Lacey. Lacey, the victim, is careful about her gun and her body; Cagney (like the men) is reckless with hers. The female signifier, the protection from the gun, is the bullet-proof vest. In accordance with the rules of the precinct, Lacey wears her vest; Cagney (like Isbecki) has to be reminded. The vests are an encumberance; they may (it is suggested) render the wearer sexless as well as safe. To Harvey, Mary Beth feels ‘like Yogi bear’ when she is wearing the vest. To Charlie, Christine looks ‘chunky’: ‘I thought you might be pregnant or somethingl’ As the episode

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progresses it is the vest, as a symbol of both female sexuality and vulnerability that becomes the central motif in the unfolding emotional drama between the two women. On the second occasion that they are called out in pursuit of the gun thief, Christine leaves the precinct without her vest. She had taken it off the night before at Charlie’s and has left it there. Since the vest signifies vulnerability and femaleness, Christine’s casual ‘forgetting’ may be seen as a refusal to accept her gender role. She is ‘punished’ for this by the knowledge that if she (and not Lacey) had been shot, she would have died. The male characters respond in distinctive and protective ways. Charlie returns Christine’s vest to her and colludes with her failure to wear it. Harvey takes his anger out on the Lieutenant (the man really responsible) who colludes with his anxiety. Events are described in terms of the injury sustained by them, and not Lacey: ‘Nobody ever shot your wife,’ says Harvey; Well, somebody shot one of my detectives,’ replies Samuels. Lacey is alive because she followed the rules; she did what a good cop should do and there is talk of a promotion. There is an implication too, however, that she is alive and whole because of her acceptance of her vulnerability as a woman. As if to underline this point, she assures Harvey of her loyalty as a wife: ‘If you ask me to choose between you and the job, it’ll always be you’. She is not happy, however. She nurses anger at her partner and significantly she refuses now to remove her vest. In response to Christine’s question as to whether this is to protect her broken rib, she replies that it is to protect her ‘everything’. Clearly the imagery which charaeterizes this episode functions to throw into relief the difference between the two women and to represent Cagney’s impending crisis as specifically the result of bending gender boundaries. Increasingly, Christine turns to tablets and to drink and, increas ingly, there are signs that in both professional and personal spheres she is failing to cope. An exasperated plumber has called at her apartment twice and twice she has failed to leave him the key. Papers are disappearing from her desk in the precinct; her relationship with Lacey is strained. A visit to psychological services is routine after such incidents and Cagney is reminded of this by Samuels. She is dismissive of her interview with a therapist but Lacey is not able to shrug off recent events so easily. When Lacey is describing her background to her therapist, she includes Christine in her list of family members. She expresses fear and denial but also acknowledges her unhappiness: Therapist: ‘It’s OK, detective.’ Mary Beth: ‘No, it’s not.’ Therapist: ‘It’s OK.’ Mary Beth: ‘No, it’s not.’ Mary Beth brings Christine with her to her next interview. Christine is defensive and accuses her partner of collusion; she feels she is being ambushed. In the confrontation that follows, Mary Beth accuses Christine of letting her down. The exchange is reminiscent of that between an angry mother and a wayward daughter; indeed, Christine for her part accuses Mary Beth of ‘mothering’ her. Twice, Mary Beth asks, Why is it all right for you to die?’ ‘No, it is not all right if I die’, comes the angry response. ‘You act like it is.’ While the verbal cues in this exchange reinforce a reading in terms of Mary Beth as caring ‘mother’ and Christine as wayward ‘daughter’, on the level of gesture and emotional charge there is more than a hint of sexual anger and physical attraction. The therapist withdraws and the two women are alone in the room. In response to Mary Beth’s assertions of care and concern for her, Christine stalks to the door: ‘I don’t want to hear any more of this crap.’ Mary Beth stops her: ‘Not this time, sister. I care about you, Christine Cagney. I care about what happens to you.

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Wish that didn’t scare you so much.’ She moves as if to touch Christine on the shoulder but then drops her hand. This foregrounding of the moment where physical contact is attempted but thwarted only serves to extend the possibility of constructing a lesbian subtext; it is a moment not only of dramatic but of sexual intensity. Christine’s refusal to acknowledge the emotional side of herself and her (womanly) vulnerability is the path to self-destruction. Lacey accuses her of betrayal; she has betrayed their partnership, their friendship but, more crucially, herself as a woman. There is an underlying suggestion implicit in her increased dependence on alcohol that the therapy Christine requires goes beyond that offered by the police psychological services; she will be required to break her identification with men (especially Charlie) and to find herself as a woman. It is precisely the ambiguity of Mary Beth’s message—verbally she reprimands Christine’s deviant behaviour, physically she’s moving into intimacy—which opens up a space for the lesbian reader. The inherent ambiguity of Cagney’s position in gender terms, as elaborated above, is for a moment clearly foregrounded. These final moments of broken looks and gestures are excruciating in their intensity and suggestiveness. As the frame freezes, the spectator is suspended in almost unbearable animation. The next two episodes, ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ (Parts 1 and 2) which were shown in the UK as a double-bill are similarly concerned with Mary Beth’s wholeness as a woman and a mother and with Christine’s continued disintegration. Here, as never before, their positions are polarized to a point where sides must be taken, lines drawn. Their differences, contained for so long, finally errupt into a moral conflict that cannot be negotiated; Mary Beth, stable, heterosexual wife and mother versus Christine, reckless, deviant, alcoholic: the result is a foregone conclusion. The dramatic opening of ‘Turn, Turn, ‘Turn’, in which Lacey rescues a baby from a burning car is another opportunity for us to see her as the caring woman. She enjoys considerable acclaim, the admiration of her male colleagues and her family for this brave action. By contrast, Christine is now having to cope with the demands that her father, Charlie, is making on her. Prompted by Lieutenant Samuels, she suggests to Charlie that he visit Alcoholics Anonymous, but is rejected: ‘I’m Irish. I like to have a few nips of whiskey.’ The question of his drinking is a sensitive one for she is a heavy drinker too, and she does not tackle her father with very much conviction. Later, she refuses, despite the evidence, to acknowledge that if he had been sober he could probably have saved himself. As it is, one night at home after a heavy drinking bout, he falls and hits his head on a low table. Cagney’s attempts to revive him fail and he is dead on arrival at hospital. Christine’s problematic identification with her father, which comes to a head with his death, and her ambivalence towards her family are both explored in the funeral episode. When her brother Brian arrives for Charlie’s funeral it becomes clear that his view of their family life differs sharply from Christine’s; the son defends the mother, whilst the daughter takes the father’s side: ‘I hated the way he talked to her,’ says Brian; ‘She always started it’, replies Christine. Christine finds mothers hard to tolerate; Mary Beth’s rescue of the baby from the burning car earns her the taunt ‘Mother of the decade’ from her partner. The rescue of the baby has set in train the search for a real mother; this is Lacey’s project and she pursues it keenly. Several false mothers put themselves forward but Mary Beth (a true mother) is not fooled. Christine is provoked into an angry outburst in the precinct at the sight of these ‘mothers’ and their evident need for children. Following Charlie’s death, Christine goes to stay with Mary Beth but leaves in the middle of the night: 1 can’t stay, I’m sorry.’ Later, she will leave her brother’s family in California earlier than planned; homes, families and houses are difficult places for her to be in.

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With Charlie’s death and funeral come again strong reminders of his life as a cop and the importance this has for Christine. Having tried and failed to resuscitate him, Christine phones for an ambulance. ‘A member of our force is down,’ she cries. Similarly, the first item she retrieves from his flat is his police uniform, which she clutches to herself throughout her conversation with Brian. All Cagney’s male colleagues from the precinct attend the funeral and the wake; Charlie was their colleague too, ‘a real cop’s cop’. Christine says, ‘All I wanted to do was grow up and be a cop like my daddy.’ Much is made of the burial and wake as a police ritual; this bar, the cop’s bar, is an extension of the precinct. This ‘father’ has a double power. Like her father, Christine drinks too much and has difficulty sustaining relationships. Her ex-lover David watches from the sidelines. ‘Can’t tell me she’s not cracking up a little,’ says Isbecki. Life without Charlie is a sore test for Christine. Whilst Mary Beth is receiving an award for bravery and later the long-awaited promotion, Christine is drinking her way to ruin. She is absent from the party Mary Beth throws to celebrate her promotion; a late arrival turns out to be not Christine but, ironically, the rescued baby’s real mother; the parents are reunited with their child and they present themselves to Lacey in final, melodramatic confirmation of the importance of the family unit, and of Mary Beth’s ability to integrate her roles at work and at home. It is Mary Beth, too, who finally brings Christine ‘back to the fold’. Christine is violent and drunk; David, the ex-lover, is at the point of exhaustion when Mary Beth arrives. The decision she makes to stay with Christine and care for her rather than to return to Harvey and the children is an important one. When it matters, Mary Beth can cross over the divide between family and work; emotionally, as was suggested in the first interview with the therapist, she feels Christine to be part of her family and, despite Christine’s earlier absence from the party celebrations, Mary Beth proves herself able to give, as a woman, in ways that are beyond her partner. ‘I don’t need a mother,’ says Christine the following morning. At the end of the confrontation that follows, Lacey claims, ‘Nothing ever fills you up. Nothing ever makes you feel all right.’ ‘Charlie did. He loved me no matter what.’ ‘Charlie killed himself, replies Mary Beth. ‘He didn’t just fall, Christine, he was drunk. Your father was a drunk, Christine. So are you’. So we return via an emotional morass of families, fathers, brothers and boyfriends to the central motor of the narrative, namely the relationship between the two women. It is once again Mary Beth’s intimacy that disarms Christine. Christine is finally defeated. ‘I don’t know what to do any more. I don’t know what to do.’ What she must do, of course, is to acknowledge her real womanly identity and her vulnerability. With Lacey at her side, she stands and announces to fellow sufferers, ‘My name is Christine. I am an alcoholic.’ Women who transgress against the heteropatriarchal order are punished. Christine has saved herself with the help of her friend Mary Beth but we have tried to show that there is a sense in which she has lost her power, in which this is her demise as an independent and freewheeling woman. It is within the confines of the Lacey universe that Cagney realizes she must reside; no more breaking the rules. The rescuing of Christine Cagney by her female buddy Mary Beth Lacey represents, then, at the ideological level, the recuperation of the free woman by the forces of law and order. As such, Mary Beth is the agent of patriarchy who drags Christine back to the straight and narrow. While such a repressive resolution was never in doubt, it is nevertheless a disappointment for those of us who dared fantasize another kind of ending. However, the series offers a number of pleasures along the way, not least the pleasure of female protagonist as hero. Cagney is the character who drives the narrative forward and it is with the resolution of her disequilibrium that the plot is primarily concerned. We may identify with her as the central character who, as transgressor of social order and gender boundaries, provides, however fleetingly, a positive image of female deviation. In breaking Cagney, the series destroyed

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itself-the final series was a disaster—with the character of Cagney subjected to rape and a prolonged courtship. The character of Cagney may also be seen to exist as the active site of female desire. In textual terms, Cagney is designated ‘deviant’ precisely because of her lack of a fixed position; she is desirable because of the reckless and cavalier fashion with which she drives the narrative to the boundaries of the permissible. It is also possible, as we hope we have demonstrated, to read the relationship between Cagney and Lacey as structured upon desire, so that against all the odds, we are able to read those moments of intense emotional conflict as positively erotic. Notes Beverley Alcock lectures in Film Studies at City and East London College and teaches the Introduction to Cinema course at the British Film Institute. She has published articles on cinema in Spare Rib and is currently working on women and science fiction. Jocelyn Robson lectures at Thames Polytechnic and is specifically concerned with training Media Studies teachers for Further and Higher Education. She has taught the Open University module ‘Representations of Women in Film’ and is currently working on materials for media education. References GAMMAN, L. (1988) ‘Watching the detectives: the enigma of the female gaze’, in GAMMAN and MARSHMENT (1988). GAMMAN, L. and MARSHMENT, M. (1988) editors, The Female Gaze, London: The Women’s Press. KAPLAN,E. Ann (1980) editor, Women in Film Noir, London: BFI. MULVEY, L. (1975) ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 6–18. MULVEY, L. (1981) ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” inspired by Duel in the Sun’,Framework, nos. 15/16/17.

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CUTTING A DASH: The Dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge Katrina Rolley

Dress has long been accepted as a medium of both expression and communication, a silent language through which, consciously or unconsciously, we ‘speak’ our race, age, class, sex, occupation, …the components of identity are endless. The communication of identity through dress, like its expression, is of particular significance for lesbians.1 Clothing, with its ability to speak without the commitment of words, can be a vital resource. It can allow instant recognition in an alien environment and can be a way of fighting back and announcing one’s existence to every passer-by. For years, ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ found expression through dress, and it was a fascination with the styles of self-presentation evolved by past lesbians that provided the initial stimulus for this article. Rather than attempt to consider a number of women briefly, I have chosen to concentrate on only two; the author Radclyffe Hall, most famous for her overtly lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, and her lover Una Troubridge. They have been chosen not because they are in any way representative but because their lives, unlike those of most lesbians, have been substantially and accessibly documented. Both women defined themselves as ‘inverts’, the most popular contemporary term for a homosexual, and they accepted and supported the theories of Havelock Ellis, the sexologist whose work was most influential in Britain at the time. According to Ellis, the lesbian couple comprised an active ‘congenital invert’, in this case Radclyffe Hall, and a passive ‘pseudo invert’, Una. ‘Congenital inverts’ were ‘inter-sex’ and possessed ‘some approximation to the masculine attitude and temperament’ (Ellis, 1941:199). ‘Pseudo inverts’ were, on the other hand, ‘womanly women’, ‘the pick of the women whom the average man would pass by, [who] so far as they may be said to constitute a class, …seem to possess a genuine, though not precisely sexual, preference for women over men’ (Newton, 1984:567). Such an analysis served to separate ‘lesbians’ from ‘real women’ whilst, simultaneously, explaining the seemingly impossible desire of two ‘passive’ women for each other by recreating the ‘heterosexual’ active/ passive dichotomy within the lesbian relationship. It is, however, important not to oversimplify the situation and accuse women like Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge of passively accepting the definitions thrust upon them by hostile sexologists. For centuries women who desired women had been puzzling over their place within a ‘heterosexual’ society, as the recently published diaries of Anne Lister demonstrate, and Alison Hennegan suggests that: ‘It is almost impossible now to determine whether the “men of science” created theories which inverts then tried to fit or whether inverts revealed to the scientists theories which they themselves formulated. Certainly it was a two-way traffic.’ (Hall, 1982: x) For some women, such as Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, the sexologists provided an answer and an identity, for others the questions remained, and remain, unanswered.

Feminist Review No 35, Summer 1990

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As previously suggested, the components of identity are endless, as are the influences on our dress and appearance. Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge dressed not just as lesbians, but as women with particular backgrounds, experiences and personalities. They were affected by the fashionable/acceptable female dress of their lifetimes and by contemporary attitudes towards their gender and sexuality. All these aspects of their lives need to be considered if some sense is to be made of the styles of self-presentation they developed. Both Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge were born into upper-class families during the later nineteenth century and, at the age of twenty-one, Radclyffe Hall inherited a substantial private income. This income allowed her to live independently from her family and to discard the ‘feminine’ clothes chosen by her mother in favour of tailor-made styles. Radclyffe Hall’s wealth and independence later allowed her and Una Troubridge to disregard public opinion and appear together in clothes which announced, to an informed viewer, their respective roles within a lesbian relationship, as the 1937 painting, ‘Private View’, by Gladys Hynes demonstrates [plate 1]. The dress and appearance of each woman is clearly gendered. Radclyffe Hall stands at the centre of the painting, squarely facing us; feet apart, hands in pockets and cigarette in mouth. She wears a feminized version of a man’s suit, and Hynes has ironically contrasted her with the effeminate young man on the right and the sculpture of a naked woman directly above her. Una stands beside her, a cigarette in one hand, the other placed delicately on her hip. Her high-heeled shoes are in direct contrast to Radclyffe Hall’s low-heeled lace-ups, and her more ‘feminine’ dress and pose serve to complement and highlight the ‘masculinity’ of her partner. Whilst the couple’s wealth and class freed them from the constraints of public opinion, it also meant that for viewers who were unaware of their sexuality, especially those distanced by class, their appearance might be (mis)read as part of the aristocratic tradition of eccentricity, especially since Radclyffe Hall was also a writer. Even Patience Ross, who worked for Radclyffe Hall’s literary agent during the publication of The Well of Loneliness, still believed the couple to be ‘platonic friends who had a mission to help “those poor people” ’ (Baker, 1985:202). An impression of aristocratic individuality could be reinforced by the stylish and expensive clothes both women wore, and the resultant glamour may, on occasions, have overshadowed other implications. Mrs James, who attended a party in the mid-1930s at which the couple were present, is quoted by Richard Ormrod as saying: I can remember exactly what they were wearing… Radclyffe Hall wore a beautifully cut man’s dinner jacket and skirt, a stiff shirt and bow tie…. Lady Troubridge wore the most glorious dress, and looked like a bride. It was an evening dress in cream coloured soft satin. She wore only pearls; earrings and two or three strings of pearls round her neck…she looked beautiful, almost over-dressed. Everybody’s eyes were riveted on her. They cut a tremendous dash as a pair. (Ormrod, 1984:247) As this last quotation suggests, whilst Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge might be willing to disregard gender conventions in their dress, they continued to observe the conventions of class. As another contemporary remembers, they ‘always dressed for dinner’ (quoted in Ormrod, 1984:195). Class also plays an important part in Una’s description of her lover in The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall. She emphasizes Radclyffe Hall’s clear complexion and beautifully set eyes, with their ‘curiously fierce, noble expression’; the ‘unusually pure oval’ of her face; her well-proportioned figure and ‘quite beautiful’ hands and feet (Troubridge, 1961:45). All these attributes traditionally signify aristocratic birth, and establishing Radclyffe Hall’s inherent nobility was one way of repudiating the long-established view of homosexuality as a morbid or degenerative condition.

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An understanding of contemporary fashionable and acceptable dress, as the mean against which any deviation is measured, is obviously vital to an interpretation of lesbian’ styles. Women’s dress altered decisively during the first few decades of the twentieth century, as is clearly visible in Radclyffe Hall’s and Una Troubridge’s changing styles of self-presentation, but these developments affected each woman differently. Radclyffe Hall, as previously mentioned, always had a preference for simple, tailor-made clothes which, although they derived from ‘masculine’ styles, were an accepted part of women’s fashion from the late nineteenth century. During the early years of their relationship -presumably to assert her new sexual identity—Una also adopted a tailor-made style of dress, and in plate 2 the two women emphasize their partnership by wearing very similar clothes. Radclyffe Hall’s ‘masculine’ role within the relationship is, however, clearly established by subtle sartorial indicators: her hat, cravat and pin and the severer cut of her skirt. Three years later, in 1923, both women wear breeches to Crufts [plate 3], indicating a gradual acceptance of trousers as a part of women’s dress for a few, very specific, occasions. Trousers were not, however, generally accepted as women’s wear until the 1940s or 1950s and Radclyffe Hall never wore them as formal dress, although there are some private photographs of her wearing them during the 1930s. Una appears to have worn trousers even more rarely than her lover, if at all, and as the two women become more involved with, and convinced of, Ellis’s theories about inversion, their styles of dress became increasingly polarized along ‘masculine’/‘feminine’ lines. The period following World War I saw short hair becoming acceptable, and indeed fashionable, for women. Una—as an ‘artistic’ sculptor and singer, and probably also as a rebellion against her husband— actually wore hers short some years earlier, as photographs from around 1915 testify. Radclyffe Hall waited until 1920 before she had her long hair cut, but she then chose to have it ‘Eton cropped’ [see plate 4], a far shorter and more ‘masculine’ style than Una would ever wear. Radclyffe Hall’s Eton crop was some years in advance of that style becoming generally fashionable for women and this, together with her severe style of dress, meant that many people perceived Radclyffe Hall as ultra-modern during the 1920s. Consider, for example, this description of Radclyffe Hall from the Newcastle Daily Journal of 1928, and compare it with a caricature of her which appeared in 1926 [plate 5], and a Punch cartoon of the same date [plate 6]. Radclyffe Hall, the paper says, may frequently be seen at the West End theatres dressed in what is, save for the tight skirt, a gentleman’s evening dress suit, with white waistcoat complete. She wears her Titian hair in close Eton crop, and looks the strong and silent woman to the life. With her notably fine forehead and beautiful hands, her whole aura is high-brow modernism. (Newcastle Daily Journal: 22/8/28) Radclyffe Hall’s modernity resulted from her need to express her sexual identity through ‘masculine’ dress and appearance. For her, every change in fashion which allowed women to wear clothes formerly designated ‘male’ was of importance and, since a process of ‘masculinization’ characterized women’s dress during the 1920s, she must often have appeared ultra-fashionable. When, however, a more traditionally ‘feminine’ look returned, Radclyffe Hall continued to wear clothes which were now acceptable, but by no means fashionable [see plate 1]. Similarly, once short hair was established as acceptable for women Radclyffe Hall always wore hers close-cropped. During the 1920s this contributed to her ultra-modern appearance but, when longer hair came into vogue at the end of the decade, Radclyffe Hall adopted an even more severely ‘masculine’ cut. Una, as the ‘passive’, ‘feminine’ partner, was very differently placed in relation to fashionable dress. As in a heterosexual relationship, she was still defined largely by her

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Plate 1 Private View by Gladys Hynes, 1937.

relationship with her ‘masculine’ lover—a role not incompatible with ‘feminine’ dress—and during the 1930s her clothes and hair developed along fashionable lines [see plate 1).

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Plate 2 Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge at the Ladies’ Kennel Club Dog Show, Ranelagh, 1920.

Radclyffe Hall and Una, as ‘active’ and ‘passive inverts’ respectively, were as differently placed in relation to social definitions of gender, as they were in relation to fashionable dress. Radclyffe Hall— with her ‘active’ desire for other women and her need to compete with men for her lovers—was defined, and defined herself, as closer to masculinity than femininity; whereas Una—who was still ‘passively’ responding to ‘masculine’ desire, albeit housed in the body of a woman— remained closer to femininity. These gendered roles were reinforced by the fact that Radclyffe Hall had defined herself lesbian from an early age and could afford to live without marrying. Una, on the other hand, had married and was, therefore, moving from one ‘masculine’ partner to another when she left Rear Admiral Troubridge to live with Radclyffe Hall. It is, however, important not to oversimplify this. As Joan Nestle explains, with reference to the butch/ femme roles of the 1950s: ‘We labelled ourselves as part of our cultural ritual, and the language reflected our time in history, but the words which seem so one dimensional now stood for complex sexual and emotional exchanges.’ (Nestle, 1988:103) This complexity and exchange is difficult to determine in retrospect, not least because Radclyffe Hall and Una minimized it in their own testimonies to their relationship and their sexuality, but it is essential to recognize its existence. Una’s sexuality, as mentioned previously, was defined in relation to the ‘congenital inversion’ of Radclyffe Hall, leaving her, of necessity, in the more ambiguous role of ‘feminine’ or ‘pseudo invert’. Whilst ‘feminine’ dress, therefore, expressed Una’s sexuality when viewed in relation to Radclyffe Hall, apart from her she risked invisibility. After Radclyffe Hall’s death in 1943 Una began to wear her lover’s clothes. This could be explained by Una’s extreme grief and her desire to feel close even after death, but this does not explain why she had her hair cut short, stopped wearing make-up, and adopted male dress to

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Plate 3 Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge at Crufts, 1923.

the point where she was, on occasions, mistaken for a man. Una had previously adopted uncharacteristically ‘male’ dress for her portrait, in 1924, by the artist Romaine Brooks, and Una’s dress here is very similar to that worn by Radclyffe Hall in a photograph published in The Bookman in 1927 [plate 4]. This seems to confirm the suggestion that when she was to appear independently of her partner, Una needed to adopt the dress of the ‘masculine’ invert to ensure recognition of her sexuality. It also suggests that Radclyffe Hall’s death freed Una from her supporting role and allowed her to take on that of ‘congenital invert’ in her own right, something which would have been impossible during Hall’s lifetime. Radclyffe Hall and Una accepted the theories of the sexologists to the point where the heroine of The Well of Loneliness, with her ‘muscular shoulders,…small compact breasts, and [the] slender flanks of an athlete’ (Hall, 1982:187), is an embodiment of the ‘congenital invert’, and Havelock Ellis was asked to write the book’s foreword. As previously mentioned, the label of ‘invert’ offered women an identity, a sexuality and—very importantly for Radclyffe Hall and Una, both devout Catholics—it absolved the ‘lesbian’, a victim of nature, from the accusation of perversion. It was, therefore, important that the couple prove themselves genuine ‘inverts’, as opposed to sexual degenerates, necessitating the ‘masculine’ partner, Radclyffe Hall’s, compliance with the definition of ‘congenital’. The ‘congenital invert’ was distinguished by a mind and body which ‘approximated to the masculine’ and Radclyffe Hall, like many other lesbians, was known by a masculine name in private—in this case ‘John’ and only ever used her surname in public life. Una writes, in The Life and Death of Radelyffe Hall, that her lover was mistaken for a boy ‘throughout her infancy’ (Troubridge, 1961:20) and was renamed Peter from a very young age, although neither claim is born out by Michael Baker’s research. By the end of her life, according to Sybille Bedford, Radclyffe Hall privately believed ‘that inversion could be detected in a baby’s

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Plate 4 Photograph of Radclyffe Hall published in The Bookman, May 1927.

physical characteristics—in, say, the width of shoulders or the thickness of an arm’ (Baker, 1985:248), a belief which explains why she later had a portrait of herself as a child repainted to make it appear more boyish. Clothes can be vital in accentuating or minimizing physical attributes, to the point where Richard Ormrod, author of Una Troubridge, The Friend of Radclyffe Hall, suggests that Radclyffe Hall’s facial features actually became more ‘masculine’ with age. There is, he says, ‘much more facial femininity in the 1928 photograph showing the flamboyant Spanish hat and the pearl earrings, than in the photograph of 1938…showing the rather more subdued French beret [and] the heavier, more masculine features’ (Ormrod, 1984:91)2. The faces actually look remarkably similar, all that has altered are the sitter’s clothes and her age, and old age rarely enhances femininity as it can do masculinity. When dress and appearance were such vital indicators of gender that a woman could pass as a man simply by adopting male dress, a woman who constantly wore ‘masculine’ clothes must, eventually, have been perceived, and come to perceive herself, as inherently ‘masculine’. Radclyffe Hall and Una clearly used dress and appearance to express and communicate their lesbian identities. In her ‘Day Book’ for 1931 Una condemns ‘the cowardice of those [inverts] who refuse to declare themselves’ (Baker, 1985:268), and she establishes dress as one way of ‘declaring’ oneself when she criticizes a former friend, ‘Youpie’ Lowther, for attempting to conceal her ‘congenital inversion’ by wearing ‘scarlet silk “confections” in the evenings.’ (Baker, 1985:247) However whilst Radclyffe Hall and

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Plate 5 Radclyffe Hall caricatured in T.P.’s Weekly, 1926.

Una’s styles of dress must have been easily read by other ‘inverts’, how likely were they to communicate similar meanings to a more general audience? When the Sunday Express denounced The Well of Loneliness as ‘a seductive and insidious piece of special pleading’, and attacked ‘the decadent apostles of the most hideous and loathsome of vices’ who ‘take delight in their flamboyant notoriety’ (Sunday Express, 19/8/28), it must have expected it’s audience to surmise Radclyffe Hall’s sexuality from the particularly ‘masculine’ photograph of her chosen to illustrate the piece [plate 7]. The sympathetic Daily Herald printed, in contrast, a photograph which— because of Radclyffe Hall’s hat and pearl earrings presented a more ‘feminine’ image [plate 8]. In a period of fashionable androgyny, signifiers of gender such as earrings become extremely important. When, therefore, the Daily Mail wanted to emphasize Radclyffe Hall’s ‘femininity’, in a 1927 article on ‘How other women run their homes’ [plate 9], it chose an image which could combine with the text to reinforce the message of ‘modern’ but still ‘feminine’. It remains, however, impossible to surmise just how many people would have understood the message inherent in the Sunday Express photograph. After all, Patience Ross, as previously mentioned, was familiar with both the theme and the author of The Well of Loneliness and yet did not connect the two. In 1937, nearly ten years after the book’s trial had supposedly familiarized everyone with the existence and nature of lesbianism, Naomi Jacob still felt able to include two strikingly ‘masculine’ photographs of herself and her lover, Sadie Robinson [Plates 10 and 11], in her autobiographical book Me—Again without, presumably, either her or her publishers feeling that it compromised her reputation. Or was it rather that appearing ‘as herself’ was so important to Naomi Jacob that the inclusion of these photographs was worth whatever risk it might have entailed?

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Plate 6 Cartoon from Punch, 1926.

Dress allowed women like Radclyffe Hall and Naomi Jacob to create certainty out of confusion. Defining themselves ‘invert’ gave women who ‘weren’t women’ a gender, a sexuality and an identity, and dress allowed them to triumph over their female bodies and express and communicate this identity. Richard Ormrod records that whilst Una Troubridge and several female friends were happy to bath naked when on holiday in France, Radclyffe Hall did not join them (Ormrod, 1984:192). Naked, stripped of her ‘masculine’ guise, Radelyffe Hall was revealed not as a ‘congenital invert’, a member of the third sex, but as a woman, and whilst the role of ‘invert’ may have been a compromised one, was it necessarily any more compromised than that of ‘woman’? Notes Katrina Rolley is the author of an article entitled ‘Fashion, femininity and the fight for the vote’ in the March 1990 issue of Art History, and the joint author of a forthcoming book on dress between 1900 and 1920. This article is drawn from the early stages of a more extensive research project which aims to consider in detail the dress of lesbians in Britain between 1901 and 1939. The author is particularly keen to make contact with lesbians, or their friends, who remember the years before World War II. If you can help, please write care of Feminist Review.

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Plate 8 The Daily Herald, ‘Novel Sent to “Jix” For Judgement’, 21/8/28. 1 There are problems in using the term ‘lesbian’ in a historical context. It is a category that has not been socially recognized in all periods and even when a similar category was recognized, different words with different implications have been used. Its use here should be understood as a shorthand. 2 The two pictures are in Troubridge (1961) opposite p. 33 and opposite p. 48.

References BAKER, Michael (1985) Our Three Selves, London: Hamish Hamilton. ELLlS, Havelock (1941) Psychology of Sex, London: William Heinemann (Medical Books) Ltd. HALL, Radclyffe (1982) The Well of Loneliness, London: Virago (first published 1928). Introduction by Alison Hennegan. NESTLE, Joan (1988) A Restricted Country, London: Sheba. NEWCASTLE DAILY JOURNAL (22/8/28) ‘London letter’. NEWTON, Esther (1984) The mythic mannish lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman’, Signs, vol. 9, no. 4, (pp. 557–75). ORMROD, Richard (1984) Una Troubridge, The Friend of Radclyffe Hall, London: Jonathan Cape. SUNDAY EXPRESS (19/8/28) ‘A book that must be suppressed’. TROUBRIDGE, Una (1961) The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall, London: Hammond, Hammond.

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Plate 7 The Sunday Express, ‘A Book That Must Be Suppressed’, 19/8/28.

Acknowledgements The following are thanked for the use of illustrations: Michael Parkin Fine Art Ltd. (Plate 1). Hulton Picture Co. Ltd. (Plates 2 and 3). The National Portrait Gallery (Plate 4). The British Library (Plates 5, 7, 8 and 9). Punch (Plate 6).

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Plate9 The Daily Mail, ‘How Other Women Run Their Homes’, 11/5/27.

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Plate 10 Photograph of Naomi Jacob published as the frontispiece to MeAgain by Naomi Jacob, 1937.

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Plate 11 Photograph of Sadie Robinson published in Me—Again by Naomi Jacob, 1937.

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DEVIANT DRESS Elizabeth Wilson

In the late 1980s it has increasingly seemed that lesbians experience a freedom and a pleasure in dress that is denied, if not to heterosexual women in general, at least to heterosexual feminists. The dyke event of the year in London in the winter of 1986/7 was a glamour ball, ‘Come Dancing’ at which women once seen in boots, denim and leather appeared in frocks, high heels, lipstick and dècolletage—items they would not have even thought of wearing in the seventies. Now, everything’s changed. Tickets were like gold dust. The feminist debates of the eighties have placed representation at the core of feminist concerns. These debates have included not only the role of poraography, advertising and other branches of the popular media in constructing women—or femininity—culturally, but have also made us aware of the extent to which we create individual identities by putting together our own self-representations. Clothes play a key part in our acts of self-presentation, whether we like it—or recognize it—or not. In this article I want to do three things: relate the fashions of the lesbian subculture to mainstream fashion; discuss their convergence in the 1960s and since; and suggest ways in which specifically lesbian styles may challenge what are still ‘taken-for-granted’ assumptions for some feminists. Feminists and fashion It has long been a standard figure of speech to refer to the way in which individuals of both sexes take a ‘pride in their appearance’. The word ‘appearance’, so taken for granted as a part of the vocabulary of grooming and fashion, actually acknowledges the performance element in dress. In our hairstyles, our choice of clothes and our use (or not) of cosmetics we create an ‘appearance’ for public and private consumption; an image whose relationship with some implied ‘reality’ beneath it is not so straightforward as it might seem. Many feminists do assume that there is a ‘real self beneath the artifice of fashion and that the feminist’s duty is simply to allow this ‘real self to ‘come out’. No such distinction between artifice and nature, however, can long be maintained. For everyone, indeed, culture enjoins that we construct an ‘appearance’ of some kind, preferably consistent with our social role. It is really only the mad, or those naked, crumpled figures in photographs of concentration camps, that have abandoned or been forced to abandon the attempt and with it, in a horrible way, their very humanity. Even a baby is tagged and assigned an outfit which grants its gendered entry to the human race immediately it is born. The Western stereotype of the ‘naked savage’ was always a myth; there has never been a culture without adornment, without some modification of the raw material of the body.

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Clothing naturalizes gender in the sense that we feel that it is ‘natural’ for girls to wear pink, just as it is ‘natural’ for them to be less aggressive than boys. How, though, can the lesbian or gay male gender by naturalized, when it is a challenge to the very notion of a ‘natural’ sexuality neatly matched to biological sex? Many women (and men) assume that what is meant by ‘fashion’ is haute couture, that is the original highcost creations designed in Paris, Tokyo and Milan for at most a few thousand women world-wide. This then becomes a second reason for radicals to reject it. Yet although ‘high fashion’ is generated to a large extent through the work of haute couture designers, it is disseminated through every level of reproduction and expense, to appear at length in the high street and the down-market mail-order catalogues. All Western dress is fashionable in the sense that it is ‘in fashion’—it operates in terms of style cycles, rapid change and innovation. The dress of men as well as women in the West is determined by fashion, although the ‘average man in the street’ (if such a person exists) might never think of himself as a fashion peacock. Male dress is still more conservative than women’s dress and styles change much more slowly; but they do change. Indeed, men are increasingly being included in fashion. The fashionable body of today for both sexes is also increasingly a masculine body: muscle vests for both sexes reveal actual muscles, put there by weight training. In this context, femininity is more obviously a ‘masquerade’ than ever: Madonna sleaze (denim skirts with lace frills, heavy, ‘fifties’ lipstick in deepest crimson) creates a different appearance from the Marilyn Monroe image of the 1950s. The feminist belief that a right-on woman can somehow escape fashion altogether is therefore a myth, and it is also a myth that women are uniformly oppressed by a totalitarian dictatorship of fashion. As Kaja Silverman has expressed it: The male subject, like the female subject, has no visual status apart from dress and/or adornment… Clothing and other kinds of ornamentation make the human body culturally visible…clothing draws the body so that it can be culturally seen, and articulates it as a meaningful form… Even if my sympathies were not fully on the side of extravagant sartorial display, I would feel impelled to stress as strongly as possible that clothing is a necessary condition of subjectivity—that in articulating the body, it simultaneously articulates the psyche. (Silverman, 1986: pp. 145, 147) The representation of gender has been an especially important feature of Western dress since the eighteenth century (see Wilson, 1985). Gender differences are part of bodily representations in all cultures, and this was true in the West as well, but what was particularly marked in Western dress since the late eighteenth century was an intensification of masculinity in the styles that men wore. Under the influence of Beau Brummell and other dandies around 1800, men gave up powdered hair, cosmetics, high heels and brightly coloured silks and satins. Henceforth, sobriety of style was the hallmark of the elegant man. Soon, manliness itself came to be associated with sober dress, and by the end of the nineteenth century flamboyant clothing for men was coded as irredeemably effeminate, and associated with homosexuality. Oscar Wilde’s interest in dress reform and aesthetic dress was, in the eyes of society at the time, not the least unsavoury aspect of his reputation as it deteriorated in the 1890s from the merely provocative to the absolutely sinister (see Ellman, 1988). In the nineteenth century, too, any rejection by a woman of traditional feminine attire was apt to attract ridieule. The ‘mannish woman’ was a phobia of bourgeois Victorian society, and many were the Punch caricatures of this unlovely creature. By the early twentieth century male dress for women was clearly associated, at least in France, with lesbianism. Upper-class lesbians, such as ‘Missy’, woman lover of the

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writer Colette, wore ‘drag’ as a badge of sexual identity, despite the rigours of the law, which apparently forbade this. (Squier, 1984; Benstock 1987). (French women bicyclists, on the other hand, wore ‘rational dress’— breeches—for cycling, more frequently than English women.) By the Radclyffe Hall period of the 1920s, masculine garb was a clear indication in a woman of a preference for her own sex. Yet mainstream fashion was also extremely boyish—the ‘garçonne’ look was one of the major fashions of the twenties. Mainstream fashion certainly continuously changes its own definitions of masculinity and femininity and plays with gender all the time. This must inevitably influence the way in which lesbians and male homosexuals can and will represent themselves and inscribe their deviant sexual identity on their bodies. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the development of sports and casual wear—largely for the leisured and the élite of Europe and the United States in the 1930s, but in the 1950s for the young, at least, of all classes; it witnessed the Second World War, when women joined the armed forces, were able to enjoy wearing uniform, and in many cases lived in female communities. The evolution of fashion in the war years was not divorced from the social upheaval taking place. Before the outbreak of war in 1939, Paris had turned away from the narrow, sloping-shouldered, sinuous styles of the thirties and was introducing wide, built-up shoulders and pinched-in waists in 1938. Although this prefigured Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’, which was to burst upon the world in 1947, the big shoulders and tighter waists were equally compatible with the military look of the war years. In the United States the uniforms of the armed forces were designed specifically to appeal to women and to give a smart appearance; they provided a glamorously modified military look. In the United States and Britain, shortages and restrictions dictated that skirts were skimpy. (See Wilson, 1985; Wilson and Taylor, 1989; and Ewing, 1974) Wartime fashions, therefore, combined an echo of pre-war Paris with militarism and austerity to produce a style that was slightly masculine yet also, at its best, both sexy and elegant. Lesbians and fashion When we come to butch and femme modes of dress in the 1950s, we are therefore not confronting exactly the same phenomenon as Radclyffe Hall in the twenties and thirties. In the first place, the ideology of the ‘third sex’ seems to fade. Secondly, butch and femme appears to have been a working-class rather than an upper-middle-class way of life in the 1950s and early 1960s. Thirdly, mainstream fashion styles were more various and relaxed and, in order to look truly different, a lesbian had to go to greater lengths to distance herself from them. Before the war, for example, even the most masculine lesbians, such as Radclyffe Hall, wore trousers only on informal occasions—as did daring heterosexual society women; by the fifties ‘slacks’ were widely worn; in 1969 they were permitted in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. In spite of the exaggerated femininity of the New Look and then of film stars such as Monroe, it was in the 1950s that youth and the youth market began to be taken seriously. The resulting casual look traded on a’gamine’ rather than an exaggeratedly feminine appearance. American styles—jeans, westerns, rock’n’roll —were important; so was the Paris Left Bank, a look that was popularized in several Hollywood films which starred Audrey Hepburn. Her style in turn influenced Barbara Hulanicki, creator of the important Biba shops in the sixties: Sabrina Fair [an Audrey Hepburn film] had made a huge impact on us all at college: everyone walked around in black sloppy sweaters, suede low-cut flatties and gold hoop earrings… Audrey Hepburn and Givenchy [her Paris designer] were made for each other. His little black dress with shoestring straps in Sabrina Fair must have been imprinted on many teenagers’ minds forever. (Hulanicki, 1983:54, 61)

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These fashions were not just about youth, they represented youth in rebellion against the conservatism of cultural life in the fifties—in France, the USA and Britain. Lesbian and gay subcultures could not but be influenced by this strange atmosphere of rebellion in the midst of cold war. In the repressed atmosphere of those times Princess Margaret broadcast to the nation, promising not to marry a divorce, and the official discourse concerning homosexuality was gradually moving it away from its connotations of criminality and betrayal towards concepts of neurosis and therapy. For me, a gay identity, although more than tinged with transgression—or for that very reason—offered hope. Edmund White has captured, in The Beautiful Room is Empty the way, at that time, all deviant identities were collapsed into one another, so that bohemianism, leftwing radicalism and homosexuality seemed naturally and inevitably connected. Things were simpler, clearer then.’ Although the general view might still be that lesbians dressed like men, and/or went about in couples as a ‘man’ and a woman, bohemian dress offered another option: I met Maria during my next-to-last year in prep school… I see her even now striding along in black pants and a man’s white shirt…her hair slicked back behind her ears…a sailor’s pea-coat and no make-up, although her eyebrows have been slightly plucked. She looks very scrubbed…but also faintly glamorous: the glamour clings to her like the smell of Gitanes in wool. Is it the hard defiance in her eyes or just the slicked-back hair with its suggestion of the high-school bad girl that lends her this dangerous aura? (White, 1988:1) By the early sixties, when I started to frequent the Gateways lesbian club in Chelsea, the two modes, the bohemian and the traditional butch/femme, coexisted, but had a distinct class meaning. (Whether this was also the case in the United States or Europe I do not know). The more casual bohemian style was associated with the middle-class teachers, journalists and artists whom my lover and I got to know; strict butch/femme styles were working class. Or that is how it seemed. On the other hand, two of the then aspiring writers we knew maintained strictly butch roles in their relationships even if they dressed in the casual leather-jacketand-jeans style that seemed the height of chic. What was changing was mainstream fashion itself, and this alone made heavily butch styles look out of date as much as anything. By 1964, when the Beatles first hit the charts, even straight men were looking androgynous. Counter-cultural and deviant styles—from Teddy boys’ drapes to CND duffel coats—were familiar in the fifties and sixties. ‘Alternative’ styles, whether intentionally or not, undermined the way in which early twentieth-century fashion in Britain expressed in a completely taken-for-granted ‘unconscious’ way class and gender be longing. Even the ‘boyish’ women’s styles of the 1920s were not associated with ordinary working-class women, certainly not with older women. After the Second World War, however, the expansion of bohemianism (and its marketing via films and other media) and the development of working-class youth styles signifying rebellion contributed to a different view of dress and adornment. Unlike the movements to reform dress in the nineteenth century (see Newton, 1974), these new alternative styles had nothing to do with ‘the natural’ or with comfort; they expressed allegiances and social attitudes. Bohemianism in the late fifties and androgyny in the sixties represented a rejection of the personal conservatism of the first decade after the war. For this reason, and because of its association with youth, androgyny was a highly sexualized mode of self-representation in the sixties. The androgyny of the early and mid sixties was a youthfully boyish look for both sexes. In Paris the designer Courrèges developed the archetypal sixties fashions of trouser suits, miniskirts and flat boots. In London Mary Quant, who came from the bohemian ‘Chelsea Set’ of the fifties, built her style around the beatnik look of black stockings, ‘off’ colours and simple, rather childish shapes in clothing: the pinafore dress, for example. To me at the time,

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these up-market ready-to-wear clothes seemed wonderful: they expressed bohemianism and boyishness simultaneously. Biba, whose clothes were cheaper, but very trendy, likewise emphasized cropped hair (although very long straight hair was also the height of fashion), a flat, narrow body and a ‘natural’ look in make-up (although it doesn’t look very natural today!). With the emergence of these styles, the lesbian could slip into the mainstream. In the late fifties I was wearing the tight black velvet or Black Watch tartan ‘drainpipe’ trousers, the flat ballerina shoes and big sweaters of the art schools as an alternative form of dress. By 1966 these styles had modified into high fashion. In 1969 I even started to wear trousers to work (as a social worker). At the time this was certainly frowned on, yet two years later social workers were roaming the inner city in torn jeans, gym shoes and bra-less T-shirts. By this time androgyny had shifted towards styles that were effeminate rather than boyish—the long hair and droopy clothes for both sexes popularized by the hippies. Whether boyish or effeminate, I could no longer easily appear as an ‘obvious’ lesbian. Indeed, with my long curls, I was sometimes mistaken for a gay boy. This reworking of gender in ‘unisex’ style had at the time an erotic charge which is now hard to recapture. Partly this was because it was associated with general social rebellion and sexual radicalism. Partly it was because it messed up gender so much more threateningly than the scrubbed little boy look of the early Beatles and Quant. Also, androgyny was not then, as it became for the feminism of the 1970s, a denial of difference and desire. The androgyny of the 1960s has usually been discussed in terms of feminization of men. When I look back, though, what I remember is the floridly macho look of long hair with flared trousers, boots, widebrimmed hats. These made both men and dykes look powerful, not wimpy. Despite the influence of Christian Lacroix minicrinolines and Dallasty glamour looks, the masculinization of all fashion has continued into the 1980s. Fashion has promoted a hard, tough image for women as much as or even more than men. Girl models are muscled, grease their hair, and even on occasion wear clothes that appear to have stepped straight out of Chain Reaction—while some of the outfits seen at Chain Reaction look like the latest fashion. Miniskirts worn with thick black tights and a leather jacket suggest freedom and even aggression rather than passive display. Punk, which gave shaved necks and spiked hair, hard make-up and urban aggro to fashion, the Japanese designers whose influence extended to heavy, muffled styles and black everywhere, and the Italians who popularized masculine tailoring—together they created an eighties fashion image that was really quite lesbian, even SM. On one occasion the Tatler used a model dressed in studded leather and a peaked cap to show off a diamond dog-collar. In the ‘post-modern’ 1980s counter-cultural fashions lost a good deal of their power to shock, being rapidly assimilated into media and then high-street culture. To some extent his has always been the fate of alternative dress; but never so quickly as today. On the other hand the pastiche and parody of the postmodern sensibility has acted to deprive fashion of its ‘naturalization of the arbitrary’. Today fashion styles are not taken so seriously as they once were. In 1948 the fashionable woman, of twenty or fifty, had to have a New Look outfit, almost regardless of class or income. Today the imperative of the single style in fashion has waned. It is not necessarily easier to ‘look fashionable’, for now we have to decide which fashionable we want to look. Which butch, which femme, which dyke—it’s so hard to look deviant these days.

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Note Elizabeth Wilson is the author of a number of books: Adorned in Dreams, Virago, 1985, Hallucinations, Radius, 1988, and, with Lou Taylor Through the Looking Glass, BBC Books, 1989. She has just finished writing a book about women in cities due to be published by Virago at the end of 1990. References BENSTOCK, Shari (1987) Women of the Left Bank: Paris1900–1940 , London: Virago. ELLMAN, Richard (1988) Oscar Wilde, Harmondsworth: Penguin. EWING, Elizabeth (1974) Women in Uniform, London: Batsford. HULANICKl, Barbara (1983) From A to Biba, London: Hutchinson. MODLESKI, Tania (1986) editor, Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. NEWTON, Stella Mary (1974) Health and Art and Reason: Dress Reformers of the Nineteenth Century, London: John Murray. SILVERMANN, Kaja (1986) ‘Fragments of a fashionable discourse’, in MODLESKI (1986). SQUIER, Susan Merrill, (1984) editor, Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. WHITE, Edmund (1988) The Beautiful Room is Empty, London: Picador. WILSON, Elizabeth (1985) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago. WILSON, Elizabeth and TAYLOR, Lou (1989) Through the Looking Glass, London: BBC Books.

THE HOUSE THAT JILL BUILT: Lesbian Feminist Organizing in Toronto, 1976–1980 Becki Ross

Ah, working in the kitchens, here’s what we found; Scrubbing the floors, here’s what we found; Raising the children, here’s what we found; and Being with each other, this is what we found: that if we Don’t let maneuvering keep us apart; if we Don’t let manipulators keep us apart; if we Don’t let manpower keep us apart; or Mankind keep us apart, we’ve won: What I mean is: We ain’t got it easy, but we’ve got it! (Alix Dobkin, Talking Lesbian’, 1975) In the early 1970s, across Western capitalist countries, collectives of self-identified lesbians emerged out of the heady ferment of mass political action and social change: in the US, groups like the Radicalesbians in New York, the Furies in Washington, DC and the Gutter Dykes in Ann Arbor, Michigan announced the birth of autonomous lesbian cultural and political organizing. Through their discussions, printed manifestos, ‘wimmin-only’ music and public demonstrations, these ‘new lesbians’ gave vent to their outrage at the erasure and/or the dismissal of lesbian issues inside the women’s movement, gay liberation and the new left. Undaunted by the familiarity of feeling marginal, this new wave of largely white, middle-class, urban and college-educated lesbian feminists set out to wrestle the category ‘lesbian’ away from the heterosexist consensus of sin, sickness and criminality. In so doing, they urged an appeal to lesbian pride, strength and visibility. To many, lesbianism became synonymous with the creation of a woman-identified Jerusalem based on principles of ‘sharing a rich inner life, bonding against male tyranny, and giving and receiving practical and political support’ (Myron and Bunch, 1975; Rich, 1980). According to popular lesbian demand, ‘feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice’ became the rallying call, and all things male or male-identified assumed the reviled status of ‘the enemy’ (see, Atkinson, quoted in Abbott and Love, 1972: 117; Shelley, 1970; Brown, 1976). Lesbian feminism early 1970s-style also signified a critique of the conservative, assimilationist respectability of the US-based Daughters of Bilitis and similar homophile associations that sprung up in the 1950s and 1960s. And, in keeping with a desire to forget or at least smudge the memories of earlier lesbian struggles, new lesbians advocated the rupture of ties to the ‘ugly heterosexual mockery’ of the butch/femme

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bar culture gay women built in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s (see Abbott and Love, 1972). Those with little knowledge of either of these two lesbian subcultures proclaimed the vertigo of starting from scratch, or, beginning from within a ‘country that has no language’ (Rich, 1978). By the mid-1970s, waves of lesbian activity that were rippling out over the US had spilled across the Canadian border to inspire and influence the emergence of independent lesbian activity.1 What follows is my attempt to bring into view the struggle of a distinct group of lesbians to claim a collective and empowering public presence in Toronto, Ontario between 1976 and 1980. The Lesbian Organization of Toronto, or LOOT, serves as the centrepiece of my inquiry. Drawing from archival research and taped interviews I conducted with twenty former LOOT members, I will demonstrate how the constitution of LOOT’s membership, the substance of its accomplishments and its own viability as both a self-help, social/ cultural centre and a politically motivated organization were enabled and constrained by complex material and ideological factors. ‘A’ is f or Amazon In the spirit of defiant ‘lesbian feminist connexionism’, LOOT was founded in November 1976. The organization was officially disbanded in the spring of 1980. Not only did it represent the largest and most well-known lesbian feminist institution in Toronto during the 1970s, it was unique in that LOOT members rented a three-storey house with two other lesbian cultural/commercial services: the radical feminist newspaper, The Other Woman and the Three of Cups Coffeehouse. Collectively the groups constituted the first lesbian centre in Canada. Similar lesbian cultural and political activity was emerging across Canada and Quebec—in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and Vancouver, however not all maintained an independent lesbian character. In Vancouver, the Lesbian Caucus of the British Columbia Federation of Women worked diligently inside the federation to integrate a slate of lesbian demands into the overall feminist agenda (Creet, 1986). In most smaller cities and towns, out of necessity, lesbians worked with gay men to develop social/cultural networks and communication lifelines like community newsletters. To the founders of the Lesbian Organization of Toronto, access to a spacious, centrally located building that would house LOOT and two other lesbian-run enterprises was a dream come true. From the start, LOOT’s publicized vision was that of an ‘umbrella organization open to all lesbians regardless of class, religion, race, political affiliation, degree of openness, or age’. No longer consigned to seedy, male-operated bars in the basements of run-down hotels or the uncomfortable edges of feminist, gay and sectarian left groups, 342 Jarvis Street or ‘the LOOT house’ would serve to raise the profile of lesbians and lesbian

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activism, and provide a ‘feminist alternative to the bar scene’. One LOOT lesbian describes her unbridled optimism: I had the definite feeling that every woman in the world is going to catch on to lesbianism and is going to come out and maybe only 10 per cent of women would remain steadfastly heterosexual, but basically every woman is going to get the hang of it. Just like everyone is going to start smoking dope and they’re going to realize it’s stupid to shoot people and we’re not going to have war anymore and human beings are going to change—everyone is going to realize that lesbianism makes complete sense and that the patriarchy will just dissolve. Above all, the women involved believed that a raised profile surely would contribute to a disintegration of hateful lesbian myths and stereotypes. And, based on the sheer strength of their conviction, resistance to the legacy of lesbian invisibility through the process of coming out would hail the dawn of a new lesbianpositive consciousness and culture. Building a membership and the paradox of closetry Ironically, although lesbian visibility was identified as key to the health and growth of a lesbian movement, many lesbians at LOOT harboured the very real, tangible fear of being ‘out’. For these women, whether they were afraid of jeopardizing paid jobs, alienating family members or losing custody of children, the situation demanded caution. Because all were not out equally, LOOT members went to extremes to protect the anonymity of their membership: the mailing list was kept under lock and key in suburban Toronto (and never publicly circulated), photographers were not allowed in the house, and women were encouraged to use pseudonyms in the monthly newsletter. Thus visibility at LOOT, which was not only the precondition for expanded membership but necessary for organized political and cultural intervention, was continually disenabled by the inability or unwillingness of most lesbians to assume a public stance. Very few women, whether they were LOOT members or not, were prepared to lead or even attend a demonstration; present a brief to the local school board, the provincial legislature, or the police commission; agree to interviews by mainstream journalists; give speeches in schools and community centres; or, lobby members of parliament. Each one of these initiatives would have sharpened LOOT’s profile both in the city and outside. At a 1978 task force meeting, Susan articulates a commonplace contradiction: ‘In terms of expanding the lesbian network, I don’t think LOOT is really going to grow if there are not more women who are going to come out publicly. The only way we can have political power is if we are all out of the closet.’ She continues a little later, ‘I do not want to be a public lesbian—I am not interested in having the first thing somebody says about me is that I am a lesbian.’ At the same time, Chris complains that, ‘It’s really a bummer to be one of the only two people called upon to speak as a lesbian 90 per cent of the time. I would really like to be number three. We can count the out public lesbians on two hands.’ It was not an easy time for lesbians to be out in Toronto. On the larger political scene, anti-gay and— lesbian fervour was gaining momentum. In 1975 racing steward John Damien was fired from the Ontario Racing Commission for being a ‘faggot’, and in 1977, Barbara Thornborrow and Gloria Cameron were dismissed from the Canadian Armed Forces for being lesbians. In early 1978, American antihomosexual ‘Save Our Children’ crusader Anita Bryant made her first visit to Toronto and succeeded in monopolizing mainstream media and stirring up an already vicious homophobic fundamentalism in new-right forces. For the first time, hate literature targeting lesbians (as distinct from gays) was strewn over Toronto streets. In California, the Briggs initiative was designed to permit all school boards to dismiss or deny employment to

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‘open and notorious homosexuals’. In the summer of 1977 in Toronto, the murder of shoeshine boy Emmanuel Jacques by a ‘homosexual mob’ reignited the early 1970s morality campaign to ‘clean up Yonge Street’, and this was quickly followed by the raid of the gay magazine, The Body Politic in late December 1977, and the 1978 small-scale bath raids.2 In all, and despite some evidence that early forms of resistance forced a growing tolerance of homosexuality, the spotlight was on lesbian and gay communities, and many lesbians were not prepared to be caught in its roving, penetrating glare. Whether they identified as feminists or not, for countless numbers of lesbians and gay women who lived in and around Toronto, the risks of learning even the LOOT address were great and the price of exposure extremely high. For LOOT-goers, the fear of police busts and charges being laid for selling liquor at the house, pandering to ‘minors’ or possession of illegal drugs remained a constant threat. At one of the dances, a lesbian was arrested by a plainclothes officer for selling beer illegally five minutes after the liquor licence expired. One lesbian I spoke with declared that, ‘everything LOOT did was against the law’. Hence the conundrum of how to recruit new members to an essentially lowprofile, inward-focused organization. And yet, undeterred, early LOOT members repeatedly echoed their original pledge ‘to be all things to all lesbians’. They vowed to translate this pledge into practice. The lavender lesbian sky is the limit From the late 1960s on, grass-roots feminist activists struggled to build radically different social structures which would stand in opposition to patriarchal conventions of hierarchy, leadership and élitism (Adamson et al., 1988). Following the lead of these early alternatives, and closely linked to the feminist ideology of ‘sisterhood’ (with a distinctly lesbian face), LOOT members committed themselves to the ideal of consensus decision-making, power-sharing and overall equality among group members. However, the open membership (i.e., anticriteria) and antistructure approach meant that LOOT as an organization did not have an official basis of unity to which members agreed in advance of joining the organization. Instead, an unofficial set of standards or norms came to define ‘political correctness’ at LOOT. Not unlike the dynamics of internal policing common to oppositional social movements in general, norms were activated by (informal) LOOT leaders to make a positive assertion of lesbian uniqueness, and to promote individual and community development in the midst of oppressive forces. At the same time, the norms typically revolved around selfrighteous, highly moralistic definitions of a ‘real’, idealized lesbian identity, and the more general insistence on the ‘magnificence of women’. Slowly, and not without resistance, antimale and correspondent antiheterosexual and antileft sentiments grew alongside the desire for lesbian affirmation and hardened into a purity yardstick (though its parts were never formally articulated to LOOT members or other feminist, gay and left groups in Toronto). Against this yardstick, judgements of LOOT members were made, and a reactive or a ‘first aid’ politics took shape. Under the umbrella: will the ‘real lesbian’ please stand up? At LOOT, in the name of lesbian validation, any sexual identity or practice that smacked of maleness or heterosexuality was the focus not only of suspicion, but of outright condemnation. Special clothing and accessories were used to announce political commitment (and this also manifested in feminist and other alternative communities outside of LOOT). At LOOT, the unwritten (paradoxically masculine) dress code prescribed flannel shirts, jeans, work boots, short hair, no make-up, little jewellery (except certain lesbian signifiers), no perfume; in other words, no trappings whatsoever of heterosexual femininity. As Millie attests, any departure from the norm spelled trouble:

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My first trip to LOOT was really offputting. I was with my lover of seven years who was an absolutely beautiful Woman-woman—she was into Miss Clairol, she was a blonde, wore make-up, had beautiful clothes and that was all important to her; I didn’t give a hoot. Well, talk about trashed! She couldn’t get her foot in the door, they were jumping all over her, because looking like that meant (a) she was less of a lesbian and (b), she couldn’t possibly be doing it for anybody but men. And I thought to myself, what am I doing here? To hell with it! Against a narrow standard of politically allowable lesbian behaviour, butch/femme role playing and lesbian bar culture more generally were spurned. Unlike early gay male liberation strategies, there was no organized drive to recruit LOOT members from the bars. Nan comments, ‘We made attempts but it was like, “Well if they can’t see what we’re talking about and the rightness of our ways, then fuck them”. We were that arrogant.’ Prostitution, bisexuality, and gay male sexuality (particularly its ‘public’ and ‘anonymous’ forms) were all subject to harsh criticism. Mothers, especially those with boy children, were either overtly scorned or simply made to feel unwelcome. In anticipation of the polemic formulated by American radical feminist Janice Raymond (1979), male-to-female transsexuals were deemed undesirable invaders of lesbian culture; after a long and heated debate, they were prohibited from the LOOT premises. Liz describes her personal dilemma: My best friend’s lover was a transsexual and we went to this meeting at LOOT about transsexuals and I’m sitting there going, ‘Oh boy, they’re talking about Sherry and whether or not she’s going to be accepted’. Now, I’m really upset and embarrassed because I was not true to my friend at that meeting. I was really pressured by group politics and I just felt like all these people were giving me the bottom line which was ‘If you’re changed from a man to a woman you’re still a man’, and I went along with it. At subsequent meetings they had posters up that said, ‘women born women only’ and there was this big transsexual scare where they went around hunting down transsexuals. In the haze of woman-identified solidarity there was little room for discussion of lesbian sexual pleasure, practice and/or fantasy. As Sharon extolls in the LOOT newsletter, ‘Being a lesbian isn’t an on again off again sexual pastime, it’s a full-time belief (August, 1979). When questioned about their experience of LOOT as a sexual space, former members invariably hesitated, and then emphasized the vast amounts of ‘erotic energy’ in the air. Monogamous relationships were valued at LOOT; lip-service was paid to the merits of nonmonogamy (provided that it didn’t involve raunchy sex outside of love). In part, the equation of sex with a slippery, dangerous slope reflected the emergence of male sexual violence as an organizing priority on the larger feminist agenda, and the extent to which lesbians themselves were beginning to identify as victims of incest and sexual assault. A number of women I interviewed pointed to the negative effects of years of training in sexual passivity and/or inhibition. Several others recall their zealous aim to dispel patriarchal myths of lesbian sexual prowess, which ironically, as they now conclude, served to romanticize and desexualize lesbian sex (at least at the level of talk), and to shut down communication with other sexual minorities. Furthermore, I would argue that the early tendency to conflate sex and danger prefigures the more elaborate ‘discourse of prohibition’ that currently prevails around issues of lesbian sexuality and sexual practice (see Ardill and O’Sullivan, 1989). At the same time, in the late 1970s, it’s unlikely that all the implications of LOOTs informal membership parameters were anticipated or fully understood. Clearly, the contradictory desire to appeal to an undifferentiated ‘lesbian sisterhood’, and to craft rigid lesbianproper’ guidelines made it difficult for LOOT members to retain the organization’s initial diversity. This contradiction, combined with the fear of visibility

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harboured by most lesbians, meant that effective community recruitment initiatives were negligible or halfheartedly pursued. As a result, working-class lesbians, lesbians of colour, young, disabled and older lesbians were underrepresented at LOOT. The handful of lesbians who did not fit the mould but who went (sporadically) to LOOT, now connect their inability to make sense of uneasy feelings at the time with an intense desire to belong, and their own and others’ lack of consciousness about the specificity of oppression. For others still, the decision not to seek concerted involvement in LOOT was directly connected to the exclusion they experienced as working-class lesbians without the language, the style or the desire to match LOOT standards, as young lesbians who knew the pain of being tagged ‘under-age’ both legally and experientially, as older lesbians who felt patronized by ‘the young hot-shots,’ or as lesbians of colour, most of whom chose to work with their own communities in the struggle against racism. No one that I interviewed remembers ever seeing a disabled lesbian at LOOT. So, the actual number and diversity of lesbians that LOOT attracted and held on to throughout its existence was very small. For those lesbians who were active in the organization, their involvement assumed a variety of complex meanings. All dressed up and nowhere to 90 Although a piece of the vision held by a number of founding LOOT lesbians was to develop lesbianfeminist policy and carry out public strategies, the political action committee disbanded shortly after its inception. With one exception—the Bi-National Lesbian Conference (English and French) which a group of LOOT lesbians organized largely independent of LOOT (though not without the disapproval of other LOOT members)—LOOT did not assume the organizing lead in Toronto’s larger political arena. While some women avowed that ‘LOOT’s very existence is a political act’, others disagreed. At a 1978 task force meeting, Pat claims that, ‘the biggest mistake we’ve made is neglecting the political and educational needs of our community. We accuse the faggots of all kinds of things, but they at least are organizing and we’re

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not’ (minutes, June, 1978). In a 1982 Broadside article, former LOOT members Lorna Weir and Eve Zaremba speak from their experience: One of the characteristics of dykes is that they are relatively easy to politicize—a process of becoming aware, angry and sensitive to a whole range of issues—and hard to organize. Just try putting out a leaflet or keeping a group together (1982:8). During the interviews I conducted, several women expressed exasperation at the lack of political definition and direction at LOOT, and the impossibility of collectively forging a lesbian-centred political programme that could then be presented to other local groups. Ann offers her view: It was sometimes difficult to deal with LOOT because you got a lot of rip-roaring angry women. For very good reasons we were very angry about a lot of things, but we didn’t approach things in a strategic way in order to get our demands met. Finding themselves in the gap fostered by a lack of lesbian-specific political projects and uncertainty or disagreement over how to proceed, the socialists and the gay liberationists were among the first to leave. (As happened elsewhere throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Canadian socialist feminists ceded much of the terrain of sexual politics to radical feminists; only recently has this been cause for serious reconsideration.)3 Those who stayed at LOOT turned away from the promise lesbian organizing held for challenges to their own experiences of heterosexism and homophobia. In late 1977, a group of LOOT lesbians founded and became heavily involved in Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), a predominantly lesbian organization without a lesbian agenda which met regularly on the LOOT premises (before swelling numbers necessitated relocation to a larger space). Following the lead of rapidly multiplying antipornography groups in the United States, WAVAW members in Toronto organized to stamp out ‘woman-hating propaganda’ through a series of direct actions. And in more general ways they publicized the growing incidence of violence against women and the underfunding of rape crisis centres and women’s hostels. So once the motivation to launch a lesbian political offensive at LOOT was either lost or diverted, reviving the original impulse was next to impossible. In the absence of a coherent set of goals and strategies internal to the organization, LOOT members shifted their attention to external political crises. Every bad thing=every patriarchal thing=every heterosexual thing=every male thing4 Pressured to take a stand on a succession of political developments arising beyond their own doorstep, LOOT members made some decisions with ease; others proved more knotty. Debate on contentious subjects was commonly marred by internal bickering, a lack of clarity and time to process thoughts, and reigning confusion as to what avenues to pursue. It’s also apparent that divisions within the membership often were suppressed and conflict avoided so as to protect the illusion of ‘one happy family’. Unacknowledged leadership and a less than democratic process meant that dissenters from the correct line either remained silent, were trounced or guilt-tripped in meetings, or resignedly left the fold. The positions eventually arrived at testify to a particular political consistency whether they were recognized as official LOOT policy or not.

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First, LOOT lesbians were reluctant to publicly, roundly denounce the Metropolitan Toronto Police force for raiding the offices of the Body Politic magazine following publication of the ‘Men loving boys loving men’ article in December 1977. In so doing, many lesbians reaffirmed the long history of ambivalence if not antagonism they felt toward this gay institution, and gay men more broadly. Ann comments: I remember there was a general feeling that it was awful and terrible and how could men do this to boys and there must be something wrong with these men and they’re really beyond the pale, and no wonder we didn’t want to have anything to do with them. I know for myself, I was pretty outraged at the time. I thought it was terrible. Though lesbians active at LOOT worked with gay men in the anti-Anita Bryant campaign, LOOT itself was fraught with disagreement over the priority of the campaign which significantly weakened the organization’s stand and its contribution. As a number of lesbians explained to me, they refused to countenance the ‘ugly, misogynist and unforgivable’ tactics deployed by some gay men, from the printing of buttons and T-shirts that proclaimed ‘Anita Sucks’, and ‘Squeeze Anita Out’, to the delivery of antiwoman speeches and the burning of the Orange Juice Queen in effigy. Second, in February 1978, after a ‘knock ’em down, drag ’em out fight,’ a contingent of very vocal, angry LOOT lesbians stormed out of the March 8th Coalition meeting protesting the decision to permit men on the International Women’s Day march; they arranged their own ‘women only march’ for the following week. And third, at the ‘LavenderHerring Meets the Hetero-Mackerel: A Fine Kettle of Fish’ event organized jointly by LOOT, the International Women’s Day Committee (IWDC) and Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) in March 1979 to discuss the relationship of lesbianism to the women’s movement, the dialogue degenerated into a bitter shouting match. An eventual stalemate arose largely between socialist feminists from IWDC and radical lesbian feminists from LOOT and WAVAW. Because personal experience was so revered at LOOT (and in most other grass-roots feminist groups, true to the ideology ‘the personal is political’), disseminating ‘inside information’ gave the disseminators a keen edge on ‘the’ authentic lesbian position. During debates, statements that carried the most weight were supplied by lesbians who knew Or had worked with gay men and who had ‘first hand’ knowledge of gay male ‘sexual perversion and rampant misogyny’. Similar negative encounters with socialist men prompted some lesbians to damn the ‘controlling sexism’ and Vanguardism’ of all ‘Trots’ (upon whom ‘too many straight feminists were miserably dependent’). Overall, from a purely moral perspective, political and social allegiance with men was interpreted as distasteful and potentially threatening to womanidentification. Paradoxically more androcentric than most would care to admit, this ‘pro-lesbian’ position contained little if any lesbian content (related to lesbian needs), unless one accepts (and most did) the lesbian identity of the ‘spokeswimmin’ themselves as proof of a sufficient politics. Not surprisingly, the prospect of lesbian political organizing internal and external to LOOT was either abandoned or riddled with discord. Family of woman we’ve begun… Unresolved struggles over visibility and political direction, and the strong need shared by most lesbians to nurture pride in their newfound identity, created the context from which evolved LOOT’s most sustained and sustaining function: the provision of services and culture. A corps of lesbians went to LOOT regularly, sometimes three or four times a week. Working without blueprints or knowledge of past initiatives, they set out to invent an infrastructure of lesbian-specific services: Amethyst—a support group for addicted

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lesbians, the monthly newsletter, Sunday brunches and meetings, weekly dropins, the counselling collective and phone-line. Ruth, a telephone counsellor, took calls a couple of nights a week: Our phone number was listed in the phone book and over the years, thousands of women called up looking for information and advice. Some were terrified to leave their own homes, some callers were unhappily married, others were young kids. Men would call up and masturbate on the line, or irate boyfriends would contact us looking for their girlfriends. Women who called would often show up in droves at the Friday night drop-ins. Chiefly a social register, at one point the LOOT newsletter was entirely written, designed, typeset, printed, pasted up and mailed out by LOOT members. LOOT was also used by several enterprising lesbians as a forum for carpentry classes and income tax workshops. Organized baseball and basketball games were introduced and co-ordinated by a couple of other LOOT members. For many, the immediate, practical tasks of service provision either coexisted with, or were supplanted by, the desire to spend enormous amounts of time listening to lesbian musicians Alix Dobkin, Meg Christian, Ferron, Beverly Glenn Copeland and Heather Bishop. As one former LOOT member reminisced, ‘Being able to sing “A, you’re an Amazon” out loud was very empowering.’ Members of the all-lesbian band Mama Quilla II practised in the basement of 342 Jarvis Street, next to the house printing press. Every August, carloads of lesbians made the pilgrimage to the fledgling Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival where they congregated in their thousands for a weekend of ‘exuberant lesbian communion and celebration’. On Friday nights at LOOT, lesbians danced, sometimes barebreasted. At sporadic intervals, movies were screened, picnics were organized and Dyke-O the Lesbian Bingo was scheduled. Either performing or supporting the performances of lesbian playwrights, actors, poets and film-makers was also an ongoing attraction. On two separate occasions, American lesbian activists and writers Jill Johnston and Charlotte Bunch were invited to LOOT to speak about their work. LOOT’s combined cultural and service orientation was further supported by an ever-transient collection of paying tenants at 342 Jarvis Street: Three of Cups Coffeehouse, The Other Woman, Sappho Sound, Superbia Press, and other sundry lesbian feminist business ventures that contributed much-needed operating cash to the LOOT coffers and introduced new women to the house. Many of the ideas for today’s more

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elaborate lesbian commercial and cultural network, like the music production company Womynly Way, were first conceived at the LOOT house. Overall, tremendous amounts of lesbian energy fuelled much of what came to be understood as Toronto’s alternative women’s culture in the late 1970s. Gradually, fewer and fewer lesbians made LOOT central to their lives. Mid-May 1979, two and a half years after LOOT’s opening, in an effort to reach beyond the borders of the organization’s shrinking constituency, LOOT hosted the Bi-National (English and French) Lesbian Conference. Although over 400 lesbians attended, LOOT was unable to benefit from either the rush of enthusiasm or the obvious show of new faces. By the end of May, the once abundant passion fuelling LOOT had all but dissipated. The daily outpouring of energy required to react to political crises coupled with the faithful provision of an enormous amount of social and cultural activity took its toll on the core group which rarely numbered more than fifteen. Some women blamed the early May opening of The Fly By Night, a lesbian bar (managed by a feminist) for draining LOOT’s last resources; others bemoaned the staggering level of burnout and the lack of interest or inclination among remaining members to introduce a fresh lesbian vision. The phone-line, the newsletter and the drop-ins limped along for another year. At the beginning of May 1980, the last of the furniture and the files were moved out and the doors to 342 Jarvis Street were closed. Is lesbian identity intrinsically liberated and liberating? It appears that the majority of lesbians active in the Toronto lesbian community during the late 1970s initially believed in the commonality of a true, transcendent lesbian identity as a medium sufficient for the creation of a politics, a culture and a community. In this way, autonomous lesbian organizing signalled the first of many fractures within what was then reviled as a heterosexual-dominated women’s movement. Later, women of colour and immigrant women, Jewish women, disabled women and working-class women charged feminism with its exclusively white, Christian, able-bodied, middle-class character. Splinter groups increasingly committed to a particular brand of identity politics proliferated (Bourne, 1987; O’Sullivan, 1987; Adams, 1988, 1989; Parmar, 1989). At LOOT, in the spirit and practice of making a ‘lesbian nation’, a tremendous amount of brash, original, and inspiring work was executed by dedicated, passionate women. That a social-service, culturally focused organization won out over the desire of a smaller minority to establish a militant, more traditional political

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formation, tells us much about the immediate needs many lesbians had in the late 1970s. According to LOOT regulars, for the first time in their lives access to a lesbian haven’ where they could talk, dance, meet lovers and friends, perform, read and just hang out became synonymous with nourishment, acceptance and safety. These women remember the exhilaration they felt in coming out through LOOT. They know that their efforts as pioneers served to heighten lesbian visibility in lesbian, feminist, gay and left communities, and, to a lesser extent, in mainstream society. For the majority of lesbians I’ve interviewed, the intensity and volume of lesbian energy generated at LOOT has yet to be matched. It is equally true that praxis so focused on self-empowerment and self-examination can assume a privatized, domestic and individualized character (see, Zimmerman, 1985). Lesbian difference itself can become an ‘explanation, an organizing method, a static and moralistic world view’ (Ardill and O’Sullivan, 1986:55). Initially, lesbians came to LOOT possessing differences in consciousness, degree of social conformity and analysis of the roots of lesbian oppression; however, well-intentioned claims to openness, consensus and diversity were quickly buried under the push to homogeneity. A positive lesbian identity was named and claimed in concert with the antimale, antileft, antigay, antiheterosexual, radical feminist politics of a small group of largely white, middle-class, young, able-bodied and educated LOOT leaders. Lesbian activist Sue Golding recalls that, ‘For the first time in the history of feminism, our raison d’être became a reactive and critical one, i.e., against men, rather than creative and analytic, i.e., how to destroy heterosexism’ (1982:34). With political attention so focused on the exact particulars of womenidentification and on what lesbianism wasn’t at LOOT, there was little ground from which the systematic construction of lesbian-specific goals and strategies might arise. Nor was there much room for collaboration

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with heterosexual feminists, gay men or members of Toronto’s Marxist and Trotskyist left (many of whom themselves were busy either denying the import of lesbianism to the women’s movement, labelling lesbians as prudes and paranoiacs, or discounting sexual politics as a bourgeois diversion from the all-important class struggle). That LOOT as an organization never succeeded in broadening its base of support beyond its narrow white, middle-class, radical lesbianfeminist base, tells us less about false political priorities (or a failure of political will) than it suggests the location of LOOT in a specific historical, social and political moment. In large urban centres across Canada and other Western countries, the 1980s have heralded the subdivision of activist lesbians into specialized groupings: lesbians of colour, Jewish lesbians, working-class lesbians, leather dykes, lesbians against SM, older lesbians, lesbian youth, disabled lesbians and so on.6 All of these groups sport their own particular brand of identity politics, all operate from their own particular analysis of lesbian oppression. Given the limitations of LOOT and early lesbian feminist praxis more generally, this diversity would seem to mark a positive step. But as Cherrie Moraga warns, ‘failure to move out from there will only isolate us in our own oppression—will only insulate rather than radicalize us’ (Moraga, 1981:29). Beyond the confines of insularity An interrogation of the material and ideological conditions under which lesbian organizations like LOOT were formed, who they were (and weren’t) able to reach, the substance of what they were (and weren’t) able to accomplish and why, has much to teach us about where lesbian activism has been, and where as activists we might now go, differently. Not only is such insight invaluable, it’s timely. Sex radicals in most Western capitalist cultures are currently faced with the ascendency of moral and economic conservatism and the erosion of political gains, the rootedness of heterosexism deepened by the AIDS crisis, the stepped-up regulation of sex and sexual minorities, and the sluggishness of social change movements. There is an urgent need for socialist feminist theory that begins from real differences that divide lesbians along lines of class, race, age, region, ability and sexual taste, and then moves to suggest the direction of a renewed lesbian political practice. As well, it’s crucial that we continue to devise concrete ways of building coalitions across the breaks that divide our diverse political communities. Placing the now dusty album on the stereo turntable, I listen one more time to Alix Dobkin’s rebellious claim, ‘We ain’t got it easy, but we’ve got it.’ And I appreciate her unabashed lesbian chauvinism, still I can’t forget Bonnie Zimmerman’s assertion that ‘there is a price to pay for a politics rooted so strongly in consciousness and identity’ (1985:268). All things considered, isn’t the price too high? Notes Becki Ross is a Ph.D. student in sociology at OISE in Toronto and she loves to teach in small north-western Ontario communities. She is an editorial collective member of Rites, a magazine for lesbian and gay liberation. I would like to thank all the women I interviewed (and whose names have been changed in the text), and the collective members of the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives/Les archives canadiennes du mouvement des femmes for their generous support (PO Box 128, Station P, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2S7). Nancy Kelly, Rusty Neal, Holly Devor and Gary Kinsman also provided me with much food for thought. This paper is part of a much larger work in progress.

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1 ’Radical lesbianism’ as it was developed by French-speaking lesbians in Quebec, has its own distinct history and character. See Brunet and Turcotte (1982). Also see the video (1981) ‘Amazonnes d’hier, lesbiennes d’aujourd’hui’, or the English version of the script, Amazons then, Lesbians, Now, VideoAmazone Collective, Quebec. The unique experiences of Acadian lesbians in the Atlantic provinces and French-speaking lesbians in Ontario and the western provinces have yet to be recorded. 2 See Kinsman (1987), for analysis of the broader historical and social context of Canadian lesbian (and gay) activity in the early to mid-1970s. 3 For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see Weir (1987). 4 This line is borrowed from Golding (1982:83). 5 I’ve borrowed this subtitle from Linda Shear’s song Family of Woman’ on the album Lesbian Portrait, Northampton: Old Lady Blue Jeans, 1975. 6 For material published in Canada by lesbians of colour, working-class lesbians and disabled lesbians, see: Fireweed (1983); Silvera (1988); Brant (1985a and 1985b); Rites (1985a and 1989); Egan et al. (1988); Toronto Rape Crisis Centre—Working-Class Caucus (1988); and Doucette (1990).

References ABBOTT, Sidney and LOVE, Barbara (1972) Sappho is a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism, New York: Stein & Day. ADAMS, Mary Louise (1988) AIDS and the Undesirables: A case against Identity Politics. Unpublished thesis, University of Kent, Canterbury. ADAMS, Mary Louise (1989) ‘There’s no place like home: on the place of identity in feminist politics’, Feminist Review, no. 31. ADAMSON, Nancy, BRISKIN, Linda and MCPHAIL, Margaret (1988) Feminist Organizing for Change: the Contemporary Canadian Women’s Movement, Toronto: Oxford University Press. ARDILL, Susan and O’SULLIVAN, Sue (1986) ‘Upsetting the applecart: difference, desire and lesbian sadomasochism’, Feminist Review, no. 23. ARDILL, Susan and O’SULLIVAN, Sue (1989) ‘Sex in the summer of ‘88’, Feminist Review, no. 31. BOURNE, Jenny (1987) ‘Homelands of the mind: Jewish feminism and identity politics’, Race and Class, vol. XXIX, no. 1. BRANT, Beth (1985a) ‘Coming out as Indian lesbian writers’, in DYBIKOWSKI et al. (1985). ——(1989) The call of the heron’, Rites, vol. 6, no. 1. BROWN, RitaMae (1976) A Plain Brown Wrapper, Baltimore: Diana Press. BRUNET, Ariane and TURCOTTE, Louise (1982) ‘Rapport des ateliers’, Amazonnes d’hier, lesbiennes d’aujourd’hui, vol. 1, no. 2–3, reprinted as ‘Separatism and radicalism: an analysis of similarities and differences’, Trans. by Lee Heppner in HOAGLAND and PENELOPE (1988), pp. 448–56. CREET, Julia (1986) ‘A test of unity: lesbian visibility in the British Columbia Federation of Women 1974–1975’, University of Victoria, unpublished manuscript. CUNNINGHAM, F., FINDLAY, S., KADAR, M., LENNON, A. and SILVA, E. (1988) editors, Social Movements/ Social Change: The Politics and Practice of Organizing, Toronto: Between the Lines. DOBKIN, Alix (1975) ‘Talking Lesbian’ on Lavender Jane Loves Women, Durham, North Carolina: Ladyslipper Music, Inc. DOUCETTE, Joanne (1990) ‘Disabled lesbians’ in STONE (1990). DYBIKOWSKI, A., FREEMAN, D., MARLATT, D., PULLING, B., and WARLAND, B. (1985) editors, In the Feminine: Women and Words, Edmonton: Longspoon Press. EGAN, Carolyn, GARDINER, Linda Lee and PERSAD, Judy Vashti (1988) ‘The politics of transformation: struggles with race, class and sexuality in the March 8th Coalition’, in CUNNINGHAM, et al. (1988). FERNIE, Lynne (1988) editor, Sight Specific: Lesbians and Representation, Toronto: A Space Gallery.

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FIREWEED (1983) 16, ‘Lesbians of colour, loving and struggling: a conversation between three lesbians of colour’. FREEDMAN, Estelle B., et al. (1985) The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. GOLDING, Sue (1982) ‘Knowledge is power: a few thoughts about lesbian sex, politics and community standards’, Fireweed, no. 13. HOAGLAND, Sarah Lucia and PENELOPE, Julia (1988) editors, For Lesbians Only, London: Onlywoman Press. KINSMAN, Gary (1987) The Regulation of Desire: Sexuality in Canada, Montreal: Black Rose Books. LUXTON, M. and MARONEY, H.J. (1987) editors, Feminism and Political Economy, London: Methuen. MORAGA, Cherrie (1981) ‘La guera’ in MORAGA and ANZALDUA (1981). MORAGA, Cherrie and ANZALDUA, Gloria (1981) editors, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, New York: Kitchen Table Press. MORGAN, Robin (1970) editor, Sisterhood is Powerful, New York: Random House. MYRON, Nancy and BUNCH, Charlotte (1975) Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement, Baltimore: Diana Press. O’SULLIVAN, Sue (1982) ‘Passionate beginnings, ideological politics: 1969–1972’, Feminist Review,no. 11. PARMAR, Prathiba (1989) ‘Other kinds of dreams’, Feminist Review, no. 31. RAYMOND, Janice (1979) The Transsexual Empire, Boston: Beacon Press. RICH, Adrienne (1978) The Dream of a Common Language, New York: Norton, p.31.——(1980) ‘On compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5, no. 4. RITES (1985a) vol. 2, no. 5, ‘Lesbians and gays of color supplement’.——(1989) vol. 2, no. 4, ‘Youth supplement’. SHELLEY, Martha (1970) ‘Notes of a radical lesbian’, in MORGAN (1970). SILVERA, Makeda (1988) ‘Man royals and sodomites: some thoughts on the invisibility of Afro-Caribbean lesbians’, in FERNIE (1988). STONE, Sharon (1990) editor, Lesbians in Canada, Toronto: Between the Lines. TORONTO RAPE CRISIS CENTRE—WORKING-CLASS CAUCUS (1988) ‘Around the kitchen table’, Fireweed, no. 26. WEIR, Lorna and ZAREMBA, Eve (1982) ‘Boys and girls together: feminism and gay liberation’, Broadside, vol. 4, no. 1. WEIR, Lorna (1987) ‘Socialist feminism and the politics of sexuality’ in LUXTON and MARONEY (1987). ZIMMERMAN, Bonnie (1985) The politics of transliteration: lesbian personal narratives’, in FREEDMAN et al. (1985).

WOMEN IN PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING: The Interaction of Gendered Structures and Values Ruth Carter and Gill Kirkup

For more than a decade we have been engaged, as educationalists, in trying to improve the opportunities for women in engineering, technology and related, nontraditional fields. We reached a point where we felt we could not continue without knowing more about what it is like to be a woman working as a professional engineer. Excellent research had been done on the working lives of blue-collar women (Cockburn, 1985; Coyle, 1984; Walshok, 1981) and on the lives of women in other professions (Kanter, 1977; Marshall, 1984), but there was nothing specifically on professional engineers. Within that profession, particular questions needed to be addressed. How is gender manifest in the engineering profession, how is that gendering perpetuated, and, most importantly, how does this affect the life experience of women engineers both inside and outside their work? In 1986 we carried out a small research project based on interviewing thirty-seven women engineers in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, to find out why they had chosen engineering as a profession and what, for them, were the rewards and penalties. Engineering is still a predominantly white profession but our sample did include some women of colour. The exclusion of women f rom the engineering profession There are three levels to which a British engineer in any specialism can aspire: craftsman/craftswoman engineer, technician engineer and professional or chartered engineer. The Engineering Council is the coordinating body which regulates the standards of education and experience appropriate for admission to each level across all the engineering institutions. In the USA professional engineers are recognized on an independent state-by-state basis, with each state operating its own engineering registration board. As the engineering institutions and trades unions developed in nineteenth-century Britain, they adopted a deliberate policy of excluding women which has been well documented (Drake, 1984; Cockburn, 1983). It was in response to this exclusion, and to the changing social conditions of both countries after 1918, that women engineers formed their own professional organizations. The British Women’s Engineering Society (WES)1 was established in 1919 and it’s American sister organization, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE)2 in 1949. Their aims are similar: to promote the study and practice of engineering among women. In the British engineering industry in the 1980s women formed a steady 20 per cent of the workforce, a far lower proportion than that found in the economy as a whole. Of roughly 400,000 women workers in the industry, 88 per cent were employed in clerical jobs or as semiskilled operators performing routine tasks such as assembly work. Less than 1 per cent were skilled craftswomen; slightly more than 1 per cent were

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professional engineers. Viewed in another way, only 4.6 per cent of professional engineers working in the engineering industry were women, a proportion which has shown a steady increase since the late seventies. Working as a woman engineer Within an engineering company, the bland, concise job titles that our engineers held, such as Programme Manager or Civil Engineer, gave no indication of the work they did. Such titles conceal awesome responsibility for major projects; for example, the siting of underground nuclear-waste dumps, or financial control for the construction of a petrochemical plant. What is also concealed is the amount of managerial responsibility as well as technical responsibility the women exercise. An engineer requires sophisticated interpersonal skills. She must be competent in the office, in the laboratory and in site work. She must be able to design, draught, write reports, use computers, supervise colleagues and unskilled labour, participate in meetings, make presentations to clients, construct digital and analogue models, do financial forecasting and budgeting and take responsibility for her own work and that of her team. The day-to-day balance between the tasks changes with the type of project on which she is working and the stage that the project has reached. The engineers we talked to were enthusiasts about their work and regarded its variety as one of its most attractive features. On the other hand, the number of tasks which are always competing for attention, combined with the pressure of deadlines, can be very stressful. The woman engineer represents an anomaly; she has crossed an invisible, but well-defined boundary from the private world of women to enter a masculine, public world where she is competing with men on their terrain. While acknowledging the rewarding features of their careers, the women we interviewed identified problems which they had not anticipated. The educational environment, even for women choosing nontraditional subjects, can be a very protective one. Many of our interviewees had avoided recognizing that they were entering a masculine field until they actually entered employment. Then women engineers are forced to recognize the gendering of the work. They are made aware that their gender matters to other people and that their male colleagues may not have the unproblematic, accepting perceptions of them that, until then, they held of themselves. While I was at university I wasn’t aware that there was any disadvantage in being a woman; at that time it didn’t occur to me… It wasn’t until I went out to work that I started to become aware that there were women being discriminated against. It was lots of little things that began to come into my mind. When I first got to work on my first job I was told that it was around the building that there was this new young woman starting: ‘So I expect well be getting a lot of visitors around the office in the next couple of weeks, coming to look at you’. Then there were the calendars on the wall. I increasingly found these quite disturbing. (Wendy, UK transport engineer) To be accepted professionally, women engineers acknowledge that it is important to present an appropriate professional image and identity. For an engineer, both image and identity are male and white. This leads to a range of dilemmas, over dress, for example, and personal presentation, especially for a black woman. If I know it’s going to be up to my ankles in mud, I wear jeans. But nine times out of ten I have nice slacks that I wear outside. If I am going to be inside very seldom do I wear slacks, but that’s professional, I feel. (Noreen, US electrical engineer)

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I have my own sense of what works and what doesn’t work… I do not like the business suit for one thing. There are days when I do wear the uniform because I’ve been at things where I don’t want my clothes to interfere with what I have to say. Therefore I wear my ‘power suit’, I call it, if I have to go to a board in the conference room on the top floor with senior officials. For the most part, I don’t; I don’t like that kind of wear. I think that God designed my color to make me wear colors, beautiful, vibrant colors, and I take advantage of it. (Abigail, US environmental engineer of colour) Physical characteristics, such as stature, take on a new significance: A person’s appearance carries a lot of weight, and I’m pretty small, and I think they immediately look at you and think: ‘There’s a lightweight’. (Zena, US chemical engineer) Preserving a professional identity as a woman is problematic when the profession is used to employing women only in nontechnical support roles. [Clients telephoning] often assume you’re the secretary without knowing and they will try and explain things in too much detail. [Then you] do a unit conversion in your head…just to show that you know what the difference is and you do understand what they’re talking about without saying: ‘I’m an engineer, talk to me’. (Joyce, UK mechanical engineer) The gender of a woman engineer remains an issue for male colleagues, affecting both her relationship with male supervisors and the content of the work delegated to her. One of the defining characteristics of professional engineering is the supervision of male manual workers. Women engineers encounter a commonly held stereotype that women cannot manage men. In the office…relationships can be difficult. I have found difficulties with my boss. You end up working for a man and relying on him to delegate work to you, and if he has certain reservations or prejudices, it can be very difficult to get on with your job. He won’t delegate work to you or trust you to do something or involve you in things. (Tanya, UK civil engineer) Many men find it difficult not to sexualize any woman in their environment. Women at work are the target of their male colleagues’ sexual fantasies, something of which their wives are well aware (Kanter, 1977), and which therefore has repercussions beyond the workplace. First of all, when I came to this job, the men didn’t want me to travel, cos there was a lot of feeling from one wife that she didn’t want me to go. She’d never met me. She only knew I was a woman, and she didn’t want him with me. And my office, I was surprised, just put their foot down, just said: ‘She goes’… I’d rather not travel with anybody any more than they want to travel with me [laughs]. No, seriously, I’d rather be alone. (Pearl, US transport engineer) Because of their own fantasies, the men suspect each other: One of my male peers said: ‘You know, I can’t have lunch with you.’… and he explained very carefully to me that he couldn’t go to lunch with me because it would be viewed very personally by his colleagues. They would assume that something was going on. (Pauline, US nuclear engineer)

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These problems are generated by the pervasive nature of the sexual in the workplace. Sexuality, which is viewed as belonging to the private domain, is also present in the public domain. Hearn and Parkin (1987) argue that this occurs in all workplaces and in all organizational structures. In engineering the thoughts and actions of the male engineers, ‘the male sexual narrative’ as Hearn and Parkin call it, are projected onto their female colleagues. The women engineers now embody the fantasies placed on the pin-up and the sexual jokes and stories prevalent in the formerly all-male workplace. Jokes with sexual innuendo and covert or overt sexual harassment are perhaps the most distressing. The quotations that follow illustrate different levels of unacceptable harassing behaviour which escalate in their offensiveness. I sat at a meeting the other day and it was the first time I’d contributed to the discussion… I was told: ‘Oh yes, you’re going to say something. I thought you were just here to look pretty.’ (Margaret, UK gas engineer) I haven’t suffered physical harassment in a sexual way here, but I feel a lot of the office banter has gone beyond the acceptable point. One fella pretended he’d fallen in love with me and has made life for me very awkward. He has made it obvious to everyone in the factory…and the fact is that at no time has this been encouraged… I’ve found it very difficult… You cannot say that you object because, basically, you still have to get on with them and work. (Audrey, UK electrical engineer.) There’s been, you know, hundreds of little incidents through my working life that have jarred… I hadn’t been here more than a few weeks. I was in the little area where we make our cups of tea and coffee and one of the men from the office nearby came in and said: ‘You’re looking very nice today; you’re looking really rapeable.’ I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. (Wendy, UK transport engineer) What makes these situations even worse is the feeling, expressed above by Audrey, that they have to be tolerated. What harassment does to the powerless is to confirm their lack of power. What it does to women who are in professional and relatively powerful positions is to deny them their rightful power and authority. To admit the occurrences of harassment to themselves and to others is to admit that some colleagues do not recognize their professional status. At work, then, women engineers are constantly subject to pressures created by the perceptions of their male colleagues, who impose a social construction on engineering and endow it with gender. Women need to be continuously vigilant concerning their image and behaviour. They are made to feel self-conscious and their professional competence is at best called into question on a regular basis, at worst, undermined. What is especially difficult about engineering, compared to any other profession, is the cult of ‘physical masculinity’ connected with the work. This physical masculinity is also heavily sexualized, often overtly. Engineering and personal/political values Gilligan’s work on gender and personal values has been crucial to developing an understanding of how women and men differ in their conception of themselves and their value systems. For men, she emphasizes ‘the role of separation as it defines and empowers the self’ and for women, ‘attachment that creates and sustains the human community’ (Gilligan, 1982:156). The methods of scientific theory and practice have, historically, been premised on engaging in psychological separation: subject from object, spiritual from material, technique from responsibility. We were interested in the engineers’ attitudes to technological development and change, to see how far women who have been socialized into a masculine profession

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adopt masculine value systems and how far they retain female value systems, bringing a different perspective to traditionally masculine work. The interviews took place in 1986, shortly after the American space shuttle exploded on lift-off and the major nuclear accident at Cheraobyl in the Soviet Union. Although they were very concerned about these incidents, the engineers preferred to ascribe the problems of safety that were raised to bad management than to unacceptable development criteria. Few of them questioned the wider idea of technological development as synonymous with progress. The greatest enthusiasts for progress were the water engineers, one of whom chose the field because she felt it allowed her to retain her idealism. Another transferred to it from her original field of chemical engineering when she realized she could not retain her idealism there. Those engineers who worked on military projects had most internal conflict about their work and their politics. No one engaged in such work defended the production of weaponry, yet they continued with their work and found ways to rationalize it, or to avoid the full impact of it for as long as possible. Rebecca, for example, was shocked when she saw on a television news broadcast, that her work had been used for weaponry in the Falklands War. She had recognized its potential, but blotted out the possibility of its application in a real situation. One common separation made by the engineers was between ‘political’ issues and ‘technical’ issues. Food production, war, ecology and nuclear power were identified as issues for politicians, not technologists (i.e., themselves), to tackle. Gilligan suggests that it is hard for a woman to retain a position in which she denies her responsibility towards others. Joyce, for example, worked in the nuclear power industry; her need not to feel responsible for nuclear disaster work led her to feel alienated from all forms of politics and to avoid discussion about nuclear energy: I don’t think I’d work here if I disagreed with nuclear power, I’m not very sure about nuclear bombs… I don’t like getting into discussions on the pros and cons… I feel it’s easier to argue against than for. I haven’t got the facts and figures to sort of throw at people. I think I try and be nonpolitical. I’m not either Conservative or Labour or Liberal or anything. I’m just someone who thinks whoever’s in power is going to be equally bad. (Joyce, UK mechanical engineer) Relating to other women Younger women engineers have undoubtedly reaped some benefit from social and cultural change brought about by the last twenty years of feminism, but they were unlikely to identify themselves as feminists. They were also concerned not to claim special consideration because of their sex. The visibility of a woman engineer is a problem of which every one of them was conscious. Most engineering is done in a team; an unreliable engineer causes problems for all the team members. But for a woman engineer, the repercussions of unreliability stretch further than the immediate project. A woman engineer, because she is so visible, represents all women engineers and so must worry about the reliability of other women since it reflects on her, and about her own performance since it reflects on them. Occasionally the visibility can be turned to advantage as when a client asks particularly for ‘the lady engineer’. Similarly, many women engineers speak to groups of young women about engineering as a career because they feel able to offer a positive role model. Some of the sample would have agreed with Gilligan (1982) that women bring a different set of values and attributes to their work. Skills of fostering good interpersonal relationships in management and good writing ability were cited, but these positive characteristics were countered by the negative ones of emotionality or unassertiveness.

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Unfortunately, these women engineers were also likely to perpetuate myths about female ways of thinking or the difficulty of having a female boss. Some thought, for example, that women are more loyal but also more petty, that they express themselves better, that they are more reticent about putting themselves forward. It is difficult to separate myths people hold about gendered behaviour from actual behaviour patterns. It is also difficult for women, who wish to have their gender disregarded in favour of a nongendered image of a professional, to be consistent when they perceive (or perhaps mis-perceive) gendered behaviour in themselves and other women. The engineers did not identify strongly with a category of ‘women’. For most of them there was no special pride in being a woman engineer, which might explain why WES and SWE still only recruit a small proportion of all women engineers. Like Judi Marshall’s women managers (Marshall, 1984), they repeatedly denied any suggestion that they might have been actively discriminated against or that their lives had been more difficult in any important respect than their male colleagues. And this despite describing many occasions when, to us as outsiders, the events appeared discriminatory or sexist. Their personal connections with other women outside work were, in general, very slight, although they were dependent on other women to fulfil support roles for them. Some of the older engineers had relied on one woman, usually of a different class and, in the US, of a different race, who undertook both housekeeping and child care throughout their childrens’ childhood. They were very conscious of the support they gained from this and the debt they owed: When they had a retirement party for me, I brought her to point out that behind every working woman there’s a working woman…now I don’t need her with the boys grown, but she is in her sixties and [I need to support her] until she’s 65 and can draw social security. (Dora, US acoustic engineer) Many of the women spoke of the problems they had in maintaining friendships with women outside engineering. They excused it by explaining that they no longer shared the same interests, or that they had relocated and lost touch. However, very few made deep friendships with female colleagues. They had complicated and contradictory attitudes towards other women. Although it is hard to be the lone woman in a work environment where you may have the dubious pleasure of ‘mascot’ status, it is harder to be one of a very small group because you are then thrown into competition with each other. And it is competition that women find most threatening (Gilligan, 1982; Orbach and Eichenbaum, 1987). Conclusions: should more women be encouraged to become engineers? While the engineers emphasized the pleasures and rewards of engineering and denied discrimination, they were also relating incidents which we, the listeners, perceived as being uncomfortable or even intolerable. Yet the women agreed to be interviewed because they wanted to encourage more women into engineering. Engineering is challenging work: it offers women the opportunity to acquire skills, exploit their talents, fulfil their individual potential and participate in a socially useful career. The drawback, as in most professions, is the stress that maintaining both a professional identity and a private life engenders. This, combined with the all-pervasive and unsupportive male values of the engineering workplace, suggest that, at present, there is a high personal price for women to pay. As the trend for more women to enter the workforce continues and current demographic pressures produce expedient initiatives from employers to recruit amongst mature adults, it seems likely that the proportion of women in engineering will grow. Once there is a visible corps of women—a ‘critical mass’—

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perhaps more will follow them. Life should be easier for the women already there as it becomes more possible to put gender issues on the agenda. A feminist model of engineering, too, is beginning to emerge (Kolmos, 1987), paralleling visions of a feminist science (see, for example, Keller, 1985 and Harding, 1986). Such a model requires both a reexamination of the fundamental assumptions underlying engineering practice and an acknowledgement of non-objectivity on the part of the engineer. Meanwhile, women engineers need to take control of the situation in which they find themselves by whatever means they can: networking, consciousness-raising, activity in professional societies such as WES or SWE. All of these offer opportunities for empowerment. Notes Ruth Carter and Gill Kirkup co-chair the Women Into Science and Engineering Group at The Open University. Their book, Women In Engineering: A Good Place To Be? was published by Macmillan in December 1989. 1 Information about the British Women’s Engineering Society can be obtained from: The Women’s Engineering Society, Imperial College of Science and Technology, Department of Civil Engineering, Imperial College Road, London SW7 2BU. 2 Information about the American Society of Women Engineers can be obtained from: Society for Women Engineers, United Engineering Center, Room 305, 345 East 47th Street, New York, NY10017.

References COCKBURN, Cynthia (1983) Brothers, London: Pluto. ——(1985) Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men and Technical Know-How, London: Pluto. COYLE, Angela (1984) Redundant Women, London: The Women’s Press. DRAKE, Barbara (1984) Women in Trade Unions, London: Virago. GILLIGAN, Carol (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, New Haven: Harvard University Press. HARDING, Sandra (1986) The Science Question in Feminism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. HEARN, Jeff and PARKIN, Wendy (1987) ‘Sex’ at ‘Work’: The Power and Paradox of Organisation Sexuality, Brighton: Wheatsheaf. KANTER, Rosabeth Moss (1977) Men and Women of the Corporation, New York: Basic Books. KELLER, Evelyn Fox (1985) Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven: Yale University Press. KOLMOS, Anette (1987) Gender and Knowledge in Engineering Education, paper contributed to the Fourth International Conference on Girls and Science and Technology, University of Michigan. MARSHALL, Judi (1984) Women Managers: Travellers in a Male World, Chichester: Wiley. ORBACH, Susie and EICHENBAUM, Luise (1987) Bittersweet, London: Century Hutchinson. WALSHOK, Mary Lindenstein (1981) Blue Collar Women: Pioneers on the Male Frontier, New York: Anchor.

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IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE HIERARCHY OF OPPRESSION: A Comment Linda Briskin

In her article on ‘New alliances: socialist-feminism in the eighties’ Kathryn Harriss raises important strategic questions for socialist feminists. She recognizes the limits of identity politics and rejects the ‘hierarchy of oppression’. I find it puzzling, therefore, that she concludes by arguing in favour of a ‘class based analysis’. Harriss argues as follows. The ideology of sisterhood emerging from the early women’s movement was inadequate to the complexity of women’s experience. The recognition of diversity precipitated a politic based on identity which, in turn, led to the elaboration of a ‘hierarchy of oppressions’. An obsession seized the movement for self-labelling and labelling others, not to elucidate but to fix a woman somewhere along a pre-determined hierarchy of oppressions in order to justify or contest a political opinion by reference to a speaker’s identity. (Harriss, 1989:37) In her exploration of the struggles for municipal socialism, Harriss suggests that the political fragmentation which results from the politics of identity has concealed the commonality of experience around, and the centrality of, class. The process of addressing sectional (women’s, Black, lesbian and gay, etc.) needs when making policy has obscured class interests…[emphasis in original (43) Her conclusion is to reject the ‘articulation of separate “women’s issues”’ (52) in favour of a focus on class. Arguably, it is a class-based analysis which holds the most potential in terms of a politics which can explain the interconnections between power systems. Although it would be falling into the trap of class reductionism to say that a proper analysis of capitalism could account for everything (socialistfeminists have long argued that, for example, the domination of women or the control of sexuality are in no way just effects of capitalism), it does seem to me that a class analysis is a necessary precondition for an adequate understanding of other oppressive systems. [emphasis added] (38) This analysis is problematic on several counts. By privileging class, it adopts a traditional form of the hierarchy of oppressions, although unnamed as such. It suggests that gender and class are separate systems. It assumes that a political strategy which accounts for diversity will necessarily take the form of ‘identity

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politics’. By implication, if not intention, Harriss rejects the most important theoretical and strategic insights of socialist feminism. Socialist-feminist analysis arose, in part, out of the attempt to elaborate the complex links between sex and class. As feminists, we asked, what does it mean to make class as well as gender central to the analysis?; as socialists, we asked, what does it mean to make gender as well as class central? As a result, we reconceived capitalism as patriarchal capitalism and posed a challenge both to feminism and to socialism, and to the hierarchy of oppressions implicit in the politics of each. The recognition of the class-gender link contests the primacy of class in socialist theory, and provides the basis on which to deconstruct the unified category of Svoman’ sometimes found in feminist analysis. In both cases, the tendency to seek a clear homogeneity of (class or gender) interests is challenged; difference rather than commonality is placed at the centre; and a politic based on a hierarchy of oppressions (the abstract identification of certain oppressions as more salient than others) is rejected. Once the abstract privileging of certain oppressions is removed as a theoretical starting point, the basis is laid for the legitimation of the multiplicity of relations of power based on class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Socialist-feminist theory, then, can provide a framework within which an increasingly sophisticated appreciation of what difference entails can be developed.1 This is neither a ‘retreat from class’ or a retreat from gender, but a rejection of class and gender reductionism, a reconceptualizing of the relations of power and the introduction of a socialist-feminist historical materialism. Rather than the abstract ranking of the relations of power inherent in class, race, gender, and sexual orientation, the focus is on the ways they intertwine, reinforce and contradict each other in historically specific contexts. Lynne Segal makes a similar point: We should not be looking for the primacy of sex, class or race, nor to isolate them as separate structures when they have fused together historically. Socialist feminists in Britain need to start from the contemporary reality of a racially and sexually divided capitalist class society. [emphasis in original] (Segal, 1987:67) The relative strength and import of these relations to groups, individuals and political practice is determined within the context of particular historical conjunctures. This means that the prioritizing of issues, a necessity to successful political struggle, does not occur on the basis of abstract principle, but rather in relation to material, economic, political and ideological conditions. This allows socialist-feminist practice to move beyond an internal hierarchy of issues, with those issues having the most apparent class content at the top and those with the least at the bottom. (Weir, 1987:75–6)2 As we move away from the abstraction of class primacy toward a ‘socialist-feminist historical materialism’, we move toward a more conjunctural analysis of the relative weight of various relations of power and to a focus on the interrelationships between systems of power. This is not, I might add, an anti-theoretical perspective but one which theorizes from a standpoint, not of class primacy, but of the fundamentally linked character of oppressions. This approach challenges, for example, any form of a base/superstructure model (of which class primacy is a part) in order to liberate an understanding of the relationship between the workplace and the household, and challenges any hierarchy of oppression based on abstraction.

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Establishing the saliency of gender does not specify the nature of the connection between linked systems of power. Socialist-feminist theory has struggled with the relationship between class and gender, in particular through the ‘dual systems’ debate which examined the degree to which patriarchy and capitalism are separate or linked systems.3 It is beyond the scope of this comment to delve deeply into this debate, but if we reject the ‘class only’ approach of socialism and even the ‘class first’ modification, and focus instead on the intertwining of class and gender; if we analyze, not the separate systems of capitalism and patriarchy, but historically specific forms of patriarchal capitalism; if we study the gendered character of capitalism and the classed character of gender, then we must also repudiate the notion of class and gender as separate systems. A class first approach which favours highlighting the commonality of class interests, as Harriss suggests, inevitably renders invisible the specific gendered and raced experience of class. Experience has definitely demonstrated that this invisibility can also divide people. Finally, the problem of identity politics is not its appeal to identities, for in the first instance such a recognition of diversity is a healthy and critical response to the ideology of an unmediated sisterhood among women, and indeed, to an unmediated set of class interests. Rather the problem is the apolitical way in which identity is mobilized. Mary Louise Adams (1989) criticizes identity politics and details the way in which they promote an individualistic, victimist, and personalist stance. In part this apolitical character arises from an over-emphasis on ‘experience’ inside the women’s movement. Experience has been mediated ideologically through the ‘personal is political’. The ‘personal is political’ challenges the public/private split and the overvaluation of the rational and concomitant devaluation of the affective; it validates experience over expertise and, at the same time, depersonalizes/ politicizes women’s experience; and it provides the basis for a coherent analytical and strategic approach to women’s oppression.4 However potentially liberating, the tendency to overemphasize personal experience in the personal/political dialectic intersects with the politics of identity to establish the problematic and competitive hierarchy of oppressions. The identification of certain oppressions as more salient than others promotes bonding on the basis of shared victimization, and exclusion organized around guilt, both of which undermine the possibility of political alliance between feminists.5 The politics of identity, as currently practised, often interfere with open strategic debate, and lead to moralism. For implicit in the operation of the politics of identity is the assumption that a political strategy and, indeed, often political ‘correctness’ flow directly from identity. Identity becomes the basis for political unity. In practice, this can conceal political differences, between lesbians, for example, and, at the same time, overemphasize differences, between lesbians and heterosexual women, for example. Socialist feminists are caught in a particular contradiction in relation to identity politics. On the one hand a socialist-feminist analysis of diversity based on class/race/gender/sexual orientation helps promote an understanding of the significance of these differences. But socialist-feminist practice must resist the mobilization of identity in an exclusively personalist and experiential way and encourage a practice which reflects the systemic intertwining of identities. Gender and race are not just ‘identities’ but systems of power as deeply embedded as class that cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Strategically, socialist feminists must argue against the tendency to excessive fragmentation, and in favour of building sisterhood on the basis of difference, both of which are expressed organizationally in the women’s movement, not through large homogeneous political organizations, but rather through alliances and coalitions. Indeed, the ability to build sisterhood on the basis of difference may be central to the survival of the women’s movement as a movement for change. Such a perspective provides the necessary counterbalance to the tendency to seek a recreated sisterhood based on the ‘timeless truths of women’s lives’ which reproduces many of the biologistic notions of the right, and produces a strategic orientation away

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from economic and social change.6 This perspective on organizing around difference also provides a challenge to the vanguardist politic of the left which, in some sense, is a strategic reflection of a class primacy politic. Balancing the pulls of diversity and alliance inside and outside the women’s movement is no easy task—strategically or theoretically. Such a balancing must reveal class in its historically specific gendered and raced forms and provide the foundation for the development of a strong coherent movement for change. Socialist feminism challenges the hierarchy of oppressions found in socialism and feminism, the conceptualization of gender, race and class as separate systems, and the personalist forms of identity politics. In so doing, socialist feminism presents an alternative paradigm and politic to socialism, and indeed to feminism, not just an additive one. What has emerged out of the complex, and not uncontradictory, interaction of the politics/practice/history of feminism and of socialism is a unique synthesis that challenges the confines of traditional socialism and expands the scope of feminism as conventionally understood in relation to women’s rights. Socialist feminism does not represent an uncomplicated unity of socialism and feminism, despite its roots in the struggle to create a relation between the two. It is not feminism with a bit of socialism thrown in; or, conversely, socialism with a few concessions to women’s concerns. This additive approach implies a distinction between socialism and feminism contrary to my vision of socialist feminism. Socialist feminism is not only about women’s liberation; it is also a reelaiming and reconstitution of socialism. Socialist feminism does not privilege either class or gender but understands the complex and contradictory relation of class, gender, race and sexual orientation. This politic has a resonance not only theoretically but also strategically. Diversity must be deeply embedded in our practice but need not be expressed as apolitical ‘identity politics’. Indeed this is a key contradiction with which socialist-feminist practice must struggle.7 The critique put forward here does not mean that Harriss is wrong in her assessment that the struggles with municipal politics in the 1980s in England concealed class issues. In fact, she persuasively argues this position. Indeed, it might be appropriate to take the point one step further and to suggest that it is often class that is obscured inside of social movements.8 However, the logical extension of such an insight is not, as Harris concludes, that ‘a class analysis is a necessary pre-condition for an adequate understanding of other oppressive systems’ and further, that making class visible necessarily means rejecting what she calls a more ‘sectional’ analysis. I submit that socialist feminism provides an alternative standpoint from which to consider the theoretical and strategic implications. Notes Linda Briskin teaches women’s studies at York University, Toronto, Canada. She has co-authored Feminist Organizing for Change: the Contemporary Women’s Movement in Canada (Toronto: Oxford, 1988), coedited Union Sisters: Women in the Labour Movement (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1983) and coauthored The Day the Fairies Went on Strike (for children) (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1981). She has been a socialist feminist activist in the Canadian women’s movement since 1969. 1 This theorizing of difference is not meant to imply an equation between difference and oppression. I agree with Judy Housman’s challenge to the ‘tendency within the Left to regard difference merely as an occasion for oppression and power relations, rather than offering a source of potential celebration and appreciation’. (Housman, 1982:56) My vision of the changed relations of power does not call for the elimination of difference (such a perspective might arise out of liberal feminism). Rather I argue for a neutralizing of difference in terms of the distribution of power and resources on the one hand, and the affirmation and validation of difference on the other.

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2 She goes on to point out that ‘One gets many points for helping to organize a support picket for striking women workers, but few for putting together a lesbian conference. This ranking scheme is partly inherited by socialist feminists from socialism.’ 3 See Sargent (1981); in particular the seminal article by Heidi Hartmann The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism’. 4 For an extended discussion of the contradictory contribution of the ‘personal is political’ see The ideology of the women’s movement’, in Adamson et al. (1988). 5 In her analysis of sisterhood, bell hooks makes the point that bonding based on shared victimization reflects male supremacist thinking since ‘sexist ideology teaches women that to be female is to be a victim’. Further, hooks points out that by ‘identifying as “victims”, they [white women] could abdicate responsibility for their role in the maintenance and perpetuation of sexism, racism and classism, which they did by insisting that men were the only enemy.’ Hooks goes on to argue for bonding on the basis of ‘shared strengths and resources.’ (p. 128) See hooks (1986). Although I agree with hooks, my point is that the recognition of difference between women has not only challenged the notion of shared oppression for the category of woman as a whole but has, at the same time, reinforced bonding on the basis of ‘shared victimization’ for particular groups of women to the exclusion of building effective political alliances. 6 The cultural politics of…the early seventies [were] extraordinarily, if naively, optimistic that as women we could change our lives and those of others once we saw through “male lies”. Many feminists were eagerly attempting to change every aspect of their lives: how we lived with and related to other adults and children, how we worked and developed new skills, how we saw ourselves… Much of the cultural feminism of today, in contrast, is less concerned with change: it calls upon the timeless truths of women’s lives, sufficient in themselves, but threatened by the perpetual and invasive danger of men. It suggests that women do not need to change their lives, other than to separate themselves from the lives of men, and that there is little hope of men themselves changing.’ (Segal, 1987:68–9) 7 In ‘Socialist feminism: from the standpoint of practice’ (Briskin, 1989) I explore the particular contradictions facing socialist-feminist organizations. In ‘Autonomy, legitimacy and integration: a comparative analysis of socialist feminist practice in Canada, the United States and Western Europe’ (Briskin, forthcoming), I examine the conditions in Canada that have facilitated the emergence of a strong autonomous socialist-feminist practice. Many of the issues raised in this comment are elaborated on more fully in these other pieces. 8 This point is suggested by Lorna Weir in ‘Socialist feminism and Canadian official sexual regulation’, (forthcoming). She argues that the success of Canadian socialist-feminist organizing around choice was in part due to the way that class issues were highlighted.

References ADAMS, Mary Louise (1989) ‘There’s no place like home: on the place of identity in feminist politics’, Feminist Review, no. 31. ADAMSON, Nancy, BRISKIN, Linda and MCPHAEL, Margaret (1988) Feminist Organizing for Change, Toronto: Oxford University Press. BRISKIN, Linda (1989) ‘Socialist feminism: from the standpoint of practice’, Studies in Political Economy, #30, Autumn. BRlSKlN, Linda‘Autonomy, integration and legitimacy: a comparative analysis of socialist feminist practice in Canada, the United States and western Europe’ in DAVIS and SPRINKER (forthcoming). DAVIS, Mike and SPRINKLER, Michael (forthcoming) editors, Year Left 5, New York:Verso. HARRISS, Kathryn (1989) ‘New alliances: socialist-feminism in the eighties’, Feminist Review, no. 31. HARTMANN, Heidi (1981) The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism’, in SARGENT(1981). HOOKS, bell (1986) ‘Sisterhood: political solidarity between women’, Feminist Review, no. 23.

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HOUSMAN, Judy (1982) ‘Mothering, the unconscious and feminism’, Radical America, vol. 16, no. 6, November/ December. LUXTON, M. and MARONEY, H.J. (1987) editors, Feminism and Political Economy, Toronto: Methuen. SARGENT, Lydia (1981) editor, Women and Revolution, Boston: South End. SEGAL, Lynne (1987) Is the Future Female?: Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism, London: Virago. WEIR, Lorna (1987) ‘Socialist feminism and the politics of sexuality’, in LUXTON and MARONEY (1987). ——(forthcoming) ‘Socialist feminism and Canadian official sexual regulation’, in DAVIS and SPRINKLER.

The Reluctant Feminist (For Sandi) Regina Buf kin

Baby, I ain’t burn my bra On purpose It exploded from Spontaneous combustion ‘Cause of pressure From you Want’n me to be Yo‘everything. Yo‘wife, Yo‘mother, Mother to yo’ kids. And still look good In a tube dress. Yo‘quintessential fashion accessory. Guaranteed To make you The envy of yo’ peers. And when my shoulders Grew broad enough To support the dubious responsibility Of being yo’ woman, You had the nerve To ’cuse me of being One of those Feminist bra-burning types. Always takin’ charge, Givin’ orders, Runnin’ yo’ life. But I kept on Being yo’ wife, Yo‘part-time mother

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Mother to yo’ kids. But in a less masculine way. All the while My bra smouldering ‘Cause I knew this Shit is for the birds. And I ain’t about To let you drive me Into no cuekoo’s nest Wit’ yo’ contradictions And traditional convictions ‘Bout this sister’s position Behind yo’ ambitions! Fuck Gloria Steinem, Women’s Lib, Feminism and all that bullshit! My warning signal Is hissing of its own accord. I don’t need nobody To tell me when the pressure is on! I can feel the metal clamps Searing my flesh, The underwire vibrate, The cups lift and separate at the seams, The straps cut into my shoulder-blades. The pressure is on, man! I think it’s time you Find a new wife, Phone yo’ real mother, And learn how to raise Yo‘kids. ‘Cause this sister Is bustin’ out of here… And in a less Feminine way.

Alcestis Nancy Zumwalt

I knew it was wrong from the start. Damned-fool god, Apollo, offering Admetus A way out of death. That isn’t allowed, and If anybody should know it, it’s he, God of prophecy, fate-speaker, and If death isn’t fate, I don’t know what is. So Admetus, fool in kind, Takes him up on it. Only he couldn’t get anyone suitable, (Like his parents; they’re not young) To go instead. Until I— Wives always get stuck with the dirty work, Even when they’re queens Said I would. It’s expected. Not that I don’t love life, And my husband and children. But my life isn’t worth much. I mean, my husband’s needs come first And he does mean well and Will take care of the kids (Though Meme is too sensitive For his own good, and Admetus hasn’t A clue how to handle him). I keep up appearances, Say what everyone expects me to say. I’ve lived longer than Meli (we played With dolls together). At least I didn’t die in childbirth. And my babies lived, too. Life is short, Even if Apollo and Admetus Don’t know it.

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Tomorrow’s the day and I’ve got to Talk to the children, and check The linen chest, and give The housekeeper last-minute instructions. And so, Farewell. Note Nancy Zumwalt lives in Massachusetts, USA; her poem, ‘Alcestis’, is from a play in progress, Alcestis Reborn, an adaptation of the Euripides play. Trained as a classicist, she has written about Greek and Roman poetry and is currently working on a critique of the classical tradition and American culture.

REVIEW ESSAY Clara Connolly

Sacred Cows, Fay Weldon, Chatto Counter Blasts no. 4: London, 1989, £2.99 Pbk, ISBN 0–7011–3556–5. Of all the statements that the Rushdie controversy has produced, by far the most shocking that I’ve read has been Fay Weldon’s Sacred Cows. I suppose this is because I expected to be able to share many of her views: she has been Rushdie’s most consistent and courageous champion within the British literary establishment; she is a feminist who identifies women as the main victims of fundamentalism; and she has rightly attacked the muddled thinking behind current concepts of multiculturalism. She writes throughout in a tone that is meant to startle and unsettle us out of what she calls ‘our agreeable and passive overtolerance of everything and anything’. What is truly startling, however, is the ease with which she retreats from this kind of cultural relativism (endemic, she believes, to ‘leftish humanist feminists’ like herself) to some of the stalest and most overworked myths in British culture: the superiority of Christianity over Islam (The Bible is at least food for thought. The Koran is food for no-thought’, p. 6); the defence of high culture, particularly literary, against the vulgar products of mass civilization (‘How much is “good” on TV? Very little’, p. 20); and the right of an intellectual élite to decide what’s good for the rest of us: I do not believe it is beyond human ingenuity to restrain persons of low calibre who commit blasphemy against the God of my choice…whilst allowing, indeed encouraging, Salman Rushdie to speak in parables in His service (p. 20). I couldn’t resist giving you these quotations to convey some of the flavour of Weldon’s pamphlet. However, for present purposes I will restrain myself to taking issue with her on two subjects of particular relevance to feminists: her views on censorship, particularly of Page 3; and of multiculturalism as it mediates relations between Black and white women. The good, the bad and the ugly To say that Page 3 was responsible for the Rushdie Affair may be going a little too far, but not all that far’ (p. 17). Weldon seems to believe that ‘Muslims’ (a completely homogeneous category) are burning Satanic Verses as a protest against the decadence of Western society, its most offensive aspect (to her, and therefore, she assumes to them) being Page 3 of The Sun. Take the boobs off Page 3, and maybe the Asians will stay off the streets.

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Such simplifications are both dishonest and dangerous. However sincere her loathing of Page 3, there is undoubtedly an element of opportunism in her choice of target and in her invocation of the name of Clare Short. Thus she can put a feminist gloss on her distaste of British popular culture in general. She is able to flex her respectable feminist muscles to support a position which might otherwise be regarded as élitist. Secondly, it is dishonest to suggest that women—all women—have common cause with Muslim fundamentalists ‘who put their own women in total protective clothing’. She can argue that the veil is in the interests of women only at the expense of ignoring feminists across the world—most notably Iranian women in their thousands after the revolution—who have fought against its enforcement. Of course there are Asian and Arab feminists also who have supported the wearing of the veil, but she seems unaware that it is an issue for debate amongst them. It is surprising that Fay Weldon hasn’t heard the words of fellownovelist Nawal El Saadawi, for example, who says: ‘men remain the medium through which [the Arab woman] understands religion. Naturally, men interpret the religion according to their own interests and place themselves in the position of the powerful majority, imposing submission on women’ (1988:19). Weldon’s position is all the more dangerous because she fails to recognize the growth of Christian fundamentalism, both here and in the States. In making common cause with fundamentalists against Page 3, (though not on other issues) she fails to distinguish between feminist critiques of pornography and other, more traditional objections to sexual expression. It could be said that this failing is common amongst feminist campaigners against pornography, who in their eagerness to popularize their cause lay themselves open to the danger of contributing to the growth and influence of the Moral Right, capable as it already is of seriously challenging feminist voices on the abortion issue. Feminists cannot afford to be mistaken about the nature of all religious funda mentalisms—their effective target is always women’s control over our lives and sexualities. It is counterproductive to seek alliances with such enemies on a moral crusade, in whatever cause. This is probably not Fay Weldon’s conscious intention. Nevertheless, her impatience with public taste suggests a very dubious solution to her: censorship, not at the point of distribution, as at present, but at the point of production, ‘imposed on the maker’s end’ (p. 22). Has she seriously thought through the implications of this proposal? At least the present regulations allow for some measure of semi-public debate. The very existence of the film, or book, is its best defence against an arbitrary decision by the censors. How could Fay Weldon herself have defended the Nigel Wingrove film, Visions of Ecstasy, against charges of blasphemy if its production rather than its viewing had been banned? Anyway, censorship of whatever kind is a dangerous method of education in public morality. Only those who have every confidence in the law and its method of enforcement, who can see the legal system as clearly on ‘our’ side, can easily contemplate it. Pratibha Parmar rightly waras: ‘censorship of any kind has always had disastrous and repressive effects for communities without access to power’ (1988:125). This is equally true for minority communities battling to challenge orthodox versions of events like Broadwater Farm, and for minority groups—like feminists and lesbian and gay organizations—challenging current norms of morality. Neither here, nor anywhere else in the pamphlet, are Fay Weldon’s arguments consistent or thorough. I often felt I was eavesdropping on unguarded expressions of witty irritation she would indulge in at the dinner table with friends. It is highly irresponsible to commit such grumblings to the wide distribution that Chatto can provide. Us and them and multiculturalism Listen to what she has to say about white feminists:

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too involved in rooting out ideological heresies to worry about the fate of Muslim women in our midst…pleasanter, easier to be seen on the side of the ethnic minorities, all in favour of the multicultural, too idle to sort out the religious from the racial, from the political; too frightened of being labelled white racist, élitist, to interfere (p. 35). Few of us will not smile—or squirm—at this description. There is undoubtedly some truth in it: we have too easily allowed multiculturalism to stand between ourselves and Black feminists. How many feminist teachers have organized a Divali assembly, but ignored the racist bullying of Asian children in the playground? How many feminist social workers, assuming that Black communities (but not white ones) are homogeneous, have hesitated to support a woman leaving her family, and thereby her ‘community?’—have hesitated to take into care Black children suffering from paternal violence because of half-baked notions about Black families being ‘stricter’? Not that there is anything wrong with multiculturalism, if it means respect for cultural difference. It is just that racism—in all its institutional and material forms—cannot be reduced to the lack of it. So multiculturalism cannot be substituted for an attack on racism. And, as practised by many local authorities— particularly among its ‘caring’ professions, it is often unable to recognize sex and class divisions among the ethnic minority communities. Self-styled community leaders—often drawn from the most conservative elements—are allowed to speak for all, at the expense particularly of Black women. (For a spirited development of this argument see Sahgal, 1989). I have deliberately chosen examples from education and social work, because it could certainly be considered within one’s line of duty in these spheres to ‘worry’ or ‘interfere’ (in Weldon’s words). But organized feminism is a different matter; it hasn’t been about taking action on behalf of others, but on our own behalf. The women’s movement is not a rescue service. So what would Weldon have white feminists do, once we’ve disencumbered ourselves of multiculturalism? This is where her analysis falters. All she has to say of Black feminists is the following: ‘too put upon by the black brothers, who insist that any white interference is by definition racist…to dare say no, no, we are all sisters: our problems are the same’ (p. 36). Where has she been, these last ten years? It is true that Black feminists in the early 80’s challenged white feminism—dominated as it was by separatism at the time—to recognize the necessity of working with men, against racism. But they have also campaigned against domestic violence in their own communities, and organized a network (still fragile and unsupported) of Black women’s refuges, alongside numerous campaigns for women facing deportation on separation from their husbands (our problems are not all the same, Fay). It is this history of campaigning on women’s issues—often in the teeth of Black and white antiracist hostility—that has given some Black women the confidence to hold a public meeting in defence of Salman Rushdie in the heart of one of London’s Asian communities (see Feminist Review, no. 33, p. 110 for the statement released after this meeting). The same women, encouraged by the response at this event, went on to found a network of Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF). This is an active group of Black and white women from many religious backgrounds who are campaigning for the abolition of the blasphemy laws, and the ending of state subsidies for all religious schools. WAF believes that a secular state is a pre condition for a genuinely pluralist Britain. Fay Weldon, in contrast, argues for the American model of uni-culturalism: let the child do what it wants at home; here in the school the one flag is saluted, the one God worshipped, the one nation acknowledged’ (p. 32). Here her thinking is absolutely at one with the Tory right, who would like to see Christianity reimposed in state schools, and British values inculcated. Weldon’s position will only serve to fuel the rising demand for subsidized Muslim schools. But perhaps more extraordinary is her lack of criticism of

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British nationalism, at a time when we are the disgrace of Europe (which itself doesn’t set very high standards) for our narrow xenophobia. Is she seriously suggesting that we offer a ‘British’ identity to Black children at a time when Blackness is excluded from definitions of Britishness? What we need, rather, is an antiracist education policy that would include a genuine examination of Britain’s colonial past and racist present. (Multiculturalism won’t do as a substitute—it professes an interest in other cultures and leaves ‘Englishness’ inviolate). Education, if it is of this kind, can make a long overdue contribution to a broader, more inclusive and more tolerant definition of Britishness than the current one. WAF received a considerable amount of publicity—not all of it welcome or supportive, from the liberal, white, pro-Rushdie media — because of its picket of the Muslim anti-Rushdie March of 27 May in London last year. How could Fay Weldon have missed it? I suspect this is because it would fit uncomfortably with her thesis—shared by the multiculturalists—that white, Christian or ex-Christian liberals have the monopoly on enlightened values. She believes that ‘we’ could—if only we would—speak and act on behalf of ‘them’— the Black sisters, the Muslim women left to their miserable fate. The only difference between herself and the multiculturalists she denounces is that they have the grace to maintain an uneasy silence on what she bravely asserts—the superiority of a white, Christian morality. But the real battle-lines are not as Fay Weldon has drawn them in her superficial account of the Skirmish of the Texts. How do we address the brutal forms of racism that corrode relations between Black and white people in this country—including between Black and white women? How do we, at the same time, challenge the claims of the fundamentalists who speak in the name of antiracism, but who threaten to further restrict the destinies and choices of women? That discussion— a complex one—has already started, but it needs serious and sustained contributions from us all. Note For further details about Women Against Fundamentalism contact Southall Black Sisters, 52 Norwood Road, Southall, Middlesex, telephone 01 571–9595. Clara Connolly is a member of both Feminist Review and Women Against Fundamentalism. References CHESTER, Gail and DICKEY, Julienne (1988) Feminism and Censorship, Dorset: Prism Press. PARMAR, Pratibha (1988) ‘Rage and desire: confronting pornography’, in CHESTER and DICKEY. SAADAWI, Nawal El (1988) Introduction to TOUBIA (1988). SAHGAL, Gita (1989) ‘Transgression comes of age’, in Interlink, May/June. TOUBIA, Nahid (1988) Women of the Arab World, London: Zed Press.

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REVIEWS

After Delores Sarah Schulman Sheba: London 1990 ISBN 0 907179 51 7 Pbk £4.95 The Dog Collar Murders Barbara Wilson Virago Press: London 1989 ISBN1 85381 066 5 Pbk £4.99 I walked out in the snow trying to get away from Delores’s ghost. It was sitting back in the apartment waiting for me. Snow was powdering up the sidewalk, but I’d seen too many winters to be surprised by how beautiful they can be. The opening paragraph of After Delores shows us immediately that we are in a lesbian version of Chandlerland. Short sentences, cropped, spare descriptive writing and a preoccupation with the city so that the urban landscape becomes part of fiction in its own right, are the classic signifiers of what has come to be known as the ‘Hard-boiled School’ of detective fiction. Even though the narrative is usually in the first person it is clear from the outset that the reader is being addressed directly, almost in a confiding manner. The reader becomes the narrator’s accomplice. These comments on this particular subgenre are necessary in relation to Scbulman’s new novel since the unnamed main character is not intended to be sympathetic. It is a bold trick to attempt, the linking of a reader with a character whose actions, thoughts and behaviour are probably going to horrify the reader from very early on in the novel. Schulman’s narrator has just been left by her (female) lover of some years and is plunged into depression and drink in a seedy subculture of New York. Working in a cheap diner, drinking to excess, unwashed and mostly unloved, she obtains by chance a gun—‘tiny, with a pearl handle, deadly, sleek and feminine’. She proceeds to have a series of fantasies about shooting various people including her ex-lover’s new woman, a few men and complete strangers.

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As the book progresses and the murder takes place of a woman she has met only once—incidentally, strangled rather than shot—the narrator becomes involved in the relationships of the dead girl and eventually, violently solves the murder. In the US, gunmakers Smith and Wesson have produced a handbag-sized gun for women which they advertise in women’s magazines with slogans which prey on women’s fears of the city and stress the protective possibilities of carrying a gun. It is this element that disturbs me. There is such a ready acceptance by the narrator of the possibility of using the gun—the fantasizing has in a very brief two chapters turned into a calculation of its safety value: I remembered I had a gun in my possession. I could use it any time I chose…the next time somebody went too far, I had the power to go further. I had a gun. This novel throws up so many contentious issues. Schulman uses the form of the ‘hard-boiled novel’interestingly without a professional private investigator which is usual in this subgenre—to look at power within relationships and between employers and employees; the use of violence and guns and whether it can ever be justified. Whether or not the book comes to the right conclusions or not depends on the reader’s point of view regarding murder. If you think that killing is sometimes justified, in fact necessary, then it will be possible to enjoy this book for the energy and excitement of its writing which is terrific. It also manages to approach more closely to that Chandleresque style which some of the more enterprising lesbian and feminist thriller writers, such as Mary Wings and Sara Paretsky, are attempting. Barbara Wilson certainly does not fit into this category, although echoes of Chandler turn up in her novels in the style of writing. As the most adventurous of the new wave of feminist thriller writers it was always likely that Wilson would at tempt to tackle the current hot potato of feminism: pornography and its related questions of erotica and desire. Wilson’s three novels have been the most consciously polemical of feminist thrillers. She consistently attempts to marry the ideas of a ‘classic’ thriller with investigating issues pertaining to women, whether prostitution, violence against women or rape. The Dog Collar Murders sees the return of her series sleuth Pam Nilsen who investigates the murder of a prominent antiporn activist at a conference. In the course of her investigation she looks at sexshops, lesbian-produced erotica, sado-masochistic relationships, the place of fantasy in sex and most of the pro—and anti-porn intellectual positions. She also solves the murder as a sideline. It has proved very easy for reviewers to criticize Wilson over this book. Detective fiction purists feel she has pushed too far the boundaries between didacticism and ‘proper’ thriller-writing; both proand anti-erotica feminists think that her conclusions are too ‘woollyliberal’ while the inclusion of long speeches putting forward different viewpoints in the argument has been criticized for slowing the pace. None of these criticisms is fair. It is clear that The Dog Collar Murders is a logical extension of Wilson’s attempts to stretch the thriller genre to encompass other kinds of investigation. And why should investigative fiction confine itself to specific incidents rather than ideas or political concerns? The speeches on particular political lines in the opening chapters are the equivalent of character-building in classic detective fiction: in a case where the motive for murder is clearly political the political persuasions of the suspects and victim are of the same importance as more traditional motives of money or jealousy in Agatha Christie.

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It could be said that these two novels represent opposite ends of the spectrum of feminist thrillerwriting. While Schulman has gone for gritty urban realism and, possibly, fashionable violence and toughness, Wilson can be seen as a writer in the tradition of Josephine Tey or Ruth Rendell but with a feminist consciousness. It is interesting that in the USA Schulman’s novel is published by a mainstream house while Wilson has remained with Seal Press. Maybe this shows the amount of ‘crossover’ (into the mainstream thriller market) potential which Schulman’s brand of thriller is seen to have in the USA. In the UK, Wilson is published by Virago and Schulman by the much smaller Sheba. It seems that the conservatism of the UK market for thrillers is taking longer to break down than that of readers in the USA. Linda Semple Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?: Essays from the International Scientific Conference on Lesbian and Gay Studies Dennis Altman and others GMP Publishers: London 1989 ISBN 0 85449 091 4 Pbk £7.95 Are we the ‘one in ten’ born this way, or have we been made lesbian or gay through experience or even by choice? Have women always engaged in what we would recognize as lesbian sexual relationships—is there a line of dyke fore-sisters stretching back into the mists of time?—or has the meaning and practice of samesex love changed in different social and historical contexts? The debate between essentialist and social constructionist accounts of homosexuality was the central theme of the conference in Amsterdam in 1987 from which this collection of articles comes. Indeed the conference aimed to push the debate further. Carol Vance’s paper, which not only opens the book, but was the keynote address at the conference, sets the tone. She defends social construction theory from some misconstrued attacks, but also identifies some major problems with this theory, especially in its purest forms. While we might agree that the meaning of sexuality, and sexual object choice are socially constructed, to what extent do we believe that sexual desire itself is innate? There becomes a danger of deconstructing the category of sexuality entirely. Futhermore, how do we incorporate the reality of the body back into social constructionist ideas? The conference itself by all accounts (see for example Franklin and Stacey’s ‘Dyketactics in difficult times’, Feminist Review 29) was more coherently organized around the theme than the book which represents it. This is a rather disparate and uneven collection ranging from articles addressing the broad theoretical questions posed by Vance and Jeffrey Weeks on the one hand, to very specific discussions of particular issues and pieces of research on the other, including lesbians and religion, and violence against gay men in Holland. This raises the question of how conference collections attempt to illustrate the rich diversity of material and debates to make a coherent book. The main addresses to the conferenee have been included here, but it’s unclear what selection criteria were used to choose from the other 400 papers presented at the conference. Why should a paper on gay theology have been chosen, for example, and what links this article to the one on the merger process and lesbian therapy? The best and most thoughtprovoking articles are those which address general theoretical issues, or provide a review of lesbian or gay work in a particular academic disci pline. Martha Vicinus examines the way in which lesbian history limits itself by reflecting present fashions and concerns, moving from Faderman’s glorification of romantic friendship to current preoccupations with women cross-dressers and a rehabilitation of the history of butch/ femme role-playing. Vicinus takes on the ‘tangled history which embodied the outlawry of passing, the idealism of romantic friendship and the theatricality of aristocratic play’, showing the changes in these typifications of lesbians since the eighteenth century. She searchingly

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questions some current assumptions and suggests aspects which we might usefully re-evaluate, including turn-of-the-century sexology, the disappearing femme, androgynous women, and the women who were intermittent lovers of women. Her advocacy of the significance of the ‘intermittent lesbian’ and other women on the margins undermines unified notions of what constitutes lesbian identity. But these projects, which would be politically distasteful and highly contentious to some lesbian historians, are necessary if we reject as ahistorical the idea of the universality of lesbianism as we understand it today. Liana Borghi also reviews the whole area of lesbian literary theory and practice, in the course of discussing the development of myth and symbol in lesbian poetry over the past ten years. She examines the relationship of the lesbian poet to her community, arguing that there exists a shared cultural identity, despite differences of language, race and politics. The other lesbian papers represent more specific pieces of research for the most part. Saskia Wieringa argues, perhaps somewhat implausibly, for a reworking of some essentialist ideas, maintaining that social constructionism cannot altogether account for the transcultural and historical continuities of butch/femme patterns among Third World lesbians today and in anthro pological research. Her article sits uncomfortably alongside the sophisticated social constructionism of Vicinus, Vance and Weeks, and I wonder if the North American Indian women she discusses would recognize themselves in any way in the contemporary butch/ femme fashions of London’s night clubs. Monique Wittig examines the idea of Rousseau’s social contract to argue that it is essentially a heterosexual and unequal contract, and that women’s best response is to reject it. This notion struck me as a pretty familiar one, though her journey towards it was convoluted. I’ve confined myself to discussing the lesbian papers. Among the men, Jeffrey Weeks contextualizes some ‘big questions’ about gay identity and politics historically and today, and Dennis Altman reviews the effects of the AIDS crisis on gay male communities in the West. The book sells itself as ‘mandatory for those engaged in scientific research or political advocacy’. (The European practice of using the word science to refer to social science and even history reads oddly in relation to a conference like this, where it has connotations of sexology.) Certainly the questions raised here concerning essentialism and social constructionism are very pertinent ones for political activists. It’s interesting to note that European and American academics were putting the final nails in the coffin of a simple essentialism at a time, ironically, when lesbians and gay men in Britain were increasingly resorting to these arguments as a defensive position against the attack posed by Section 28. Should it be a problem that our political movements are out of kilter with the theoretical paradigms? However, although the debates in this book are relevant to all of us, it is not aimed at the general reader, and it is the academic and the lesbian or gay researcher who will find this book, or parts of it, useful. Alison Oram Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This—My Life in the Jazz World Val Wilmer The Women’s Press: London 1989 ISBN 0 7043 50408 Hdbk £16.95 At the outset of her book, music journalist and photographer Val Wilmer states the terms on which she offers us the story of her life in jazz: ‘People often write autobiographies as if they had no mother, no children, as if sexual love had passed them by. This is not one of those.’ The book then proceeds in an unashamedly anecdotal way; it would be perverse to read it in hope of theory, and worse to judge it thereby. The refreshingly unembellished detail of South London in the fifties provides us with an idea of the physical, social and musical environment of her growth. The unfolding of this life is simple, but what

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unfolds is remarkable. Only occasionally recalling a moment when her young enterprise gave her cause for wonder, she recounts, for the most part, a series of encounters that would have been unimaginable for most of us at that age. The Streatham tomboy with a compatible little brother and a hard-working mother who let rooms in their house, became an adolescent girl whose energy and activity was exceptional, but recognizable. When Valerie’s passion for recorded music and a growing specialization in jazz drove her to the roots of that music and its creators, those younger energies and abilities were rapidly converted to something rarer. Writing letters out of the blue to the Jazz Greats, who almost invariably responded with a generosity not often associated with stardom, scraping together the cash for concerts, endlessly hanging around backstage—these were the messy beginnings of an ultimately welldefined opus. Because Val doesn’t fall into the trap of autobiographic anachronism, the reader has a satisfying sense of growing up alongside the protagonist; the simplicity of events and lack of interpretation early on, give way to a more philosophical and analytical view later in the book, when such processes are more accurate representations of what age and experience has furnished. There’s also that nice sense of the hobby and the profession being unrelated at the start—that the vision of her ambition was of fag in mouth ‘bashing out the news’ in Fleet Street, that she took a course in photography with little enthusiasm, and that jazz was still, at that stage, a passionate pastime. The result is an enjoyable frisson between these disparate elements, and our knowledge of what their combination eventually produced. It is left to us to speculate what it is that moves some women to make the leap. In this instance Valerie Wilmer, an English lower-middleclass, young, white woman, began hacking out a path from a jungle of prejudice and ignorance about the realities of Black music. This music was rapidly usurped from the originators by modern market-makers, and most of us were content to consume the product and take little or no notice of the means of production or the origin and kind of raw materials used. It’s obvious from the very beginning of this impressive saga, set in London, New York, the deep South, and Africa, that young Valerie would never be content to separate the music from the people who played it. And working from the heart clearly drew flack: from the jazz scene in general which regarded all young unattached women hangersabout as star-fucking hopefuls, from white peers of both sexes who were suspicious about anyone who stayed so close to Black players and their community, and later, when feminism fell short of encompassing her early behaviour. Because Val is so disarmingly honest about the facts, and in the telling of her story, it’s easier to see now that the problems lay in the inflexibility of all those armchair observers and their difficulties with someone who refused to hide behind manufactured objectivism or the inconsistencies of theory. She was right to be unapologetic about her style. Her legacy is not only the deeply and painstakingly secured documentation of the core of contemporary popular music, but also, with this book, the inside story of how a young woman can persist in following her passion on her terms against some very subtle and not so subtle odds. What a loss it would have been had Val succumbed at any stage to the pressures of decorum, theory or peer pressure and given up or denied any of the apparently contrary elements of the way she has managed to conduct her work and life. There’s a feeling that for many years Val has had to soft-pedal her early years, to abandon the complex truths about all that caring love of the music and people of the vast African diaspora to a slightly dismissive ferment of rumour and misunderstanding: and that similarly she has had to be a little less open than she would like to have been (and even then, never covert) about the nature of her sexuality, as complex as it is with all of us, in those music and journalistic circles which might have closed its doors to her had she done so. With this book Val has made the courageous decision to tell it like it was. The result is a social history of music like no other, and a no-nonsense account of the

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development from birth to maturity of a dynamic woman whose documentary arts deserve to be reappraised as a whole in the light of this book. She is not afraid to judge some of her steps as mistakes, nor reconstruct the myriad battle-fronts she encountered in her attempt to step outside the accepted confines her society and professions demanded. In resurrecting the countless, clearly painful times her right as a White Woman to enter into and comment on a Black world was challenged, Val admirably resists political defence, and steadfastly sticks to telling that wonderfully rich, at times much to be envied, story. We are privileged, as comfortable readers, conveniently protected from the dangers of the front line which she continued to brave, to meet the real characters, their friends and families, and uncelebrated members of the society from which the music sprang. We learn at close hand what the woman was doing with her time all those years. To all outward appearances unstructured, shambling, utterly non-academic, the apprenticeship Val Wilmer chose for herself and then invented as she went along, saw her pursuing ‘the knowledge’ in a thorough, impassioned, self-motivated and exuberant way which is unique to the true scholar of any age. There are quibbles, but these have more to do with production than content. The absence of a firmer editorial hand leaves us with perhaps too many of the very small and ultimately intrusive ‘mentions’ which seem only to have survived because of the author’s desire to leave no one out. While the sentiment and show of respect is admirable, it does make for a jerky read up front. Less pardonable is the sloppy proofing, and the strange irony that has this particular artist, smiling and in her element, relegated to the back (cover) of the book, like so many of the fellow artists whose work she has spent her life documenting. Robyn Archer

NOTICEBOARD

Report from Gothenburg Twenty-five women travelled from Britain to attend the Fifth Annual conference of the European Forum of Socialist Feminists in November 1989. It was held in the Kvinnofolkhogskolan (a community school run entirely by women for women) in Gothenburg, Sweden and was attended by 130 women from some twenty countries, including Eastern Europe and countries outside Europe. The theme of the conference was Women in Changing Economies: feminist perspectives and strategies’. In addition to the individual country reports, papers and workshops dealt with such themes as women’s work in the restructuring of the economy; what perestroika means for women; feminist visions and future strategies for women’s work and lives. We are hoping that the next conference will be held in Yugoslavia in November 1990 on the theme of ‘Citizenship and Empowerment’, but at the time of writing all this has yet to be confirmed. In the meantime, the women from Britain who went to Gothenburg are intending to meet. Any women who would be interested in hearing more about the Forum are most welcome to join us. For more information about these meetings and the 1990 conference, please contact Claire Crocker, Garden Flat, 7 Acol Road, London NW6 3AA. Copies of the papers from Gothenburg can be obtained for £2 (inc. p & p) from the same address; the reports from some of the earlier conferences, including the one held in Manchester in 1988, are also available at the same price.

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Women and Revolution in South Yemen, Molyneux. Feminist Art Practiee, Davis & Goodall. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Snell. Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology, Macciocchi. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, Taylor. Christine Delphy, Barrett & McIntosh Summer Reading, O’Rourke. Disaggregation, Campaign for Legal & Financial Independence and Rights of Women. The Hayward Annual 1978, Pollock. Women and the Cuban Revolution, Murray. Matriarchy Study Group Papers, Lee. Nurseries in the Second World War, Riley. English as a Second Language, Naish. Women as a Reserve Army of Labour, Bruegel. Chantal Akerman’s films, Martin. Femininity in the 1950s, Birmingham Feminist History Group. On Patriarchy, Beechey. Board School Reading Books, Davin. Protective Legislation, Coyle. Legislation in Israel, Yuval-Davis. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Wilson. Queen Elizabeth I, Heisch. Abortion Politics: a dossier. Materialist Feminism, Delphy. Feminist Sexual Politics, Campbell Iranian Women, Tabari. Women and Power, Stacey & Price. Women’s Novels, Coward. Abortion, Himmelweit. Gender and Education, Nava. Sybilla Aleramo, Caesar. On ‘Beyond the Fragments’, Margolis. The Tidy House’, Steedman. Writings on Housework, Kaluzynska The Family Wage, Land. Sex and Skill, Phillips & Taylor. Fresh Horizons, Lovell. Cartoons, Hay Protective Legislation, Humphries. Feminists Must Face the Future, Coultas. Abortion in Italy, Caldwell Women’s Trade Union Conferences, Breitenbach. Women’s Employment in the Third World, Elson & Pearson.

Socialist Societies Old and New, Molyneux. Feminism and the Italian Trade Unions, Froggett & Torchi. Feminist Approach to Housing in Britain, Austerberry & Watson. Psychoanalysis, Wilson. Women in the Soviet Union, Buckley The Struggle within the Struggle, Kimble. Position of Women in Family Law, Brophy & Smart. Slags or Drags, Cowie & Lees. The Ripper and Male Sexuality, Hollway. The Material of Male Power, Cockburn. Freud’s Dora, Moi. Women in an Iranian Village, Afshar. New Office Technology and Women, Morgall Towards a Wages Strategy for Women, weir & McIntosh Irish Suffrage Movement, Ward. A Girls’ Project and Some Responses to Lesbianism, Nava. The Case for Women’s Studies, Evans. Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination, Gregory. Psychoanalysis and Personal Politics, Sayers. SEXUALITY ISSUE Sexual Violence and Sexuality, Coward. Interview with Andrea Dworkin, Wilson. The Dyke, the Feminist and the Devil, Clark. Talking Sex, English, Hollibaugh & Rubin Jealousy and Sexual

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Difference, Moi. Ideological Politics 1969–72, O’Sullivan. Womanslaughter in the Criminal Law, Radford. OUT OF PRINT. ANC Women’s Struggles, Kimble & Unterhalter. Women’s Strike in Holland 1981, de Bruijn & Henkes. Politics of Feminist Research, McRobbie. Khomeini’s Teachings on Women, Afshar. Women in the Labour Party 1906–1920, Rowan. Documents from the Indian Women’s Movement, Gothoskar & Patel. Feminist Perspectives on Sport, Graydon. Patriarchal Criticism and Henry James, Kappeler. The Barnard Conference on Sexuality, Wilson. Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought, Gordon & Du Bois. Anti-Porn: Soft Issue, Hard World, Rich. Feminist Identity and the Poetic Tradition, Montefiore. Femininity and its Discontents, Rose. Inside and Outside Marriage, Gittins. The Pro-family Left in the United States, Epstein & Ellis. Women’s Language and Literature, McKluskie The Inevitability of Theory, Fildes. The 150 Hours in Italy, Caldwell Teaching Film, Clayton. Women’s Employment, Beechey. Women and Trade Unions, Charles Lesbianism and Women’s Studies, Adamson. Teaching Women’s Studies at Secondary School, Kirton. Gender, Ethnic and Class Divisions, Anthias & Yuval-Davis. Women Studying or Studying Women, Kelly & Pearson. Girls, Jobs and Glamour, Sherratt. Contradictions in Teaching Women’s Studies, Phillips & Hurstfield. Romance Fiction, Female Sexuality and Class, Light. The White Brothel, Kappeler. Sadomasochism and Feminism, France. Trade Unions and Socialist Feminism, Cockburn Women’s Movement and the Labour Party, Interview with Labour Party Feminists. Feminism and ‘The Family’, Caldwell MANY VOICES, ONE CHANT: BLACK FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES Challenging Imperial Feminism, Amos & Parmar. Black Women, the Economic Crisis and the British State, Mama. Asian Women in the Making of History, Trivedi. Black Lesbian Discussions, Carmen, Gail, Shaila & Pratibha. Poetry. Black women Organizing Autonomously: a collection. CULTURAL POLITICS Writing with Women. A Metaphorical Journey, Lomax. Karen Alexander: Video Worker, Nava. Poetry by Riley, Whiteson and Davies. Women’s Films, Montgomery. ‘Correct Distance’ a photo-text, Tabrizian. Julia Kristeva on Femininity, Jones. Feminism and the Theatre, Wandor. Alexis Hunter, Osborne. Format Photographers, Dear Linda, Kuhn. The Female Nude in the work of Suzanne Valadon, Betterton. Reftiges for Battered Women, Pahl. Thin is the Feminist Issue, Diamond. New Portraits for Old, Martin & Spence. Prisonhouses, Steedbtnan. Ethnocentrism and Socialist Feminism, Barrett & McIntosh. What Do Women Want? Rowbotham. Women’s Equality and the European Community, Hoskyns. Feminism and the Popular Novel of the 1890s, Clarke. Going Private: The Implications of Privatization for Women’s Work, Coyle. A Girl Needs to Get Street-wise: Magazines for the 1980s, Winship. Family Reform in Socialist States: The Hidden Agenda, Molyneux. Sexual Segregation in the Pottery Industry, Sarsby. Interior Portraits: Women, Physiology and the Male Artist, Pointon. The Control of Women’s Labour: The Case of Homeworking, Allen & Wolkowitz. Homeworking: Time for Change, Cockpit Gallery & Londonwide Homeworking Group. Feminism and Ideology: The Terms of Women’s Stereotypes, Seiter. Feedback: Feminism and Racism, Ramazanoglu, Kazi, Lees, Safia Mirza. SOCIALIST-FEMINISM: OUT OF THE BLUE Feminism and Class Politics: A Round-Table Discussion, Barrett, Campbell, Philips, Weir & Wilson. Upsetting an Applecart: Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Armagh and Feminist Strategy, Loughran. Transforming SocialistFeminism: The Challenge of Racism, Bhavnani & Coulson. Socialist-Feminists and Greenham, Finch & Hackney Greenham Groups. Socialist-Feminism and the Labour Party: Some Experiences from Leeds, Perrigo. Some Political Implications of Women’s Involvement in the Miners’ Strike, 1984–85, Rowbotham & McCrindle Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women, Hooks. European Forum of Socialist-Feminists, Lees & McIntosh. Report from Nairobi, Hendessi. Women Workers in New Industries in Britain, Glucksmann. The Relationship of Women to Pornography, Bower. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Atkins. The Star Persona of Katharine Hepburn, Thumim.

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Difference: A Special Third World Women Issue, Minh-ha. Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Sayers. Rethinking Feminist Attitudes Towards Mothering, Gieve. EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Company: A Personal Account, Kessler-Harris. Poems, Wood. Academic Feminism and the Process of Deradicalization, Currie & Kazi. A Lover’s Distance: A Photoessay, Boffin. Resisting Amnesia: Feminism, Painting and Post-Modernism, Lee. The Concept of Difference, Barrett. The Weary Sons of Freud, Ctément. Short Story, Cole. Taking the Lid Off: Socialist Feminism in Oxford, Collette. For and Against the European Left: Socialist Feminists Get Organized, Benn. Women and the State: A Conference of Feminist Activists, Weir. WOMEN, FEMINISM AND THE THIRD TERM: Women and Income Maintenance, Lister. Women in the Public Sector, Phillips Can Feminism Survive a Third Term?, Loach. Sex in Schools, Wolpe. Carers and the Careless, Doyal. Interview with Diane Abbott, Segal. The Problem With No Name: Re-reading Friedan, Bowlby. Second Thoughtş on the Second Wave, Rosenfelt and Stacey. Nazi Feminists?, Gordon. FAMILY SECRETS: CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE: Introduction to an Issue: Family Secrets as Public Drama, McIntosh. Challenging the Orthodoxy: Towards a Feminist Theory and Practice, MacLeod & Saraga. The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Notes from American History, Gordon. What’s in a Name?: Defining Child Sexual Abuse, Kelly. A Case, Anon. Defending Innocence: Ideologies of Childhood, Kitzinger. Feminism and the Seductiveness of the ‘Real Event’, Scott. Cleveland and the Press: Outrage and Anxiety in the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse, Nava. Child Sexual Abuse and the Law, Woodcraft. Poem, Betcher. Brixton Black Women’s Centre: Organizing on Child Sexual Abuse, Bogle. Bridging the Gap: Glasgow Women’s Support Project, Bell & Macleod. Claiming Our Status as Experts: Community Organizing, Norwich Consultants on Sexual Violence. Islington Social Services: Developing a Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, Boushel & Noakes. Developing a Feminist School Policy on Child Sexual Abuse, O’Hara. ‘Putting Ideas into their Heads’: Advising the Young, Mills Child Sexual Abuse Crisis Lines: Advice for Our British Readers. ABORTION:THEINTERNATIONALAGENDA: WhateverHappenedto’A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Berer. More than ‘A Woman’s Right to Choose’?, Himmelweit. Abortion in the Republic of Ireland, Barry. Across the Water, Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group. Spanish Women and the Alton Bill, Spanish Women’s Abortion Support Group. The Politics of Abortion in Australia: Freedom, Church and State, Coleman Abortion in Hungary, Szalai. Women and Population Control in China: Issues of Sexuality, Power and Control, Hillier. The Politics of Abortion in Nicaragua: Revolutionary Pragmatism—or Feminism in the realm of necessity?, Molyneux. Who Will Sing for Theresa?, Bernstein. She’s Gotta Have It: The Representation of Black Female Sexuality on Film, Simmonds. Poems, Gallagher. Dyketactics for Difficult Times: A Review of the ‘Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?’ Conference, Franklin & Stacey CAPITAL, GENDER AND SKILL: Women Homeworkers in Rural Spain, Lever. Fact and Fiction: George Egerton and Nellie Shaw, Butler. Feminist Political Organization in Iceland: Some Reflections on the Experience of Kwenna Frambothid, Dominelli & Jonsdottir. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, Talpade Mohanty Bedroom Horror: The Fatal Attraction of Intercourse, Merck. AIDS: Lessons from the Gay Community, Patton. Poems, Agbabi. THE PAST BEFORE US: 20 YEARS OF FEMINISM: Slow Change or No Change?: Feminism, Socialism and the Problem of Men, Segal. There’s No Place Like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics, Adams. New Alliances: Socialist-Feminism in the Eighties, Harriss. Other Kinds of Dreams, Parmar. Complexity, Activism, Optimism: Interview with Angela Y.Davis. To Be or Not To Be: The Dilemmas of Mothering, Rowbotham. Seizing Time and Making New: Feminist Criticism, Politics and Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Lauret Lessons from the Women’s Movement in Europe, Haug. Women in Management, Coyle. Sex in the Summer of’88, Ardill & O’Sullivan. Younger Women and Feminism, Hobsbawm & Macpherson. Older Women and Feminism, Stacey; Curtis; Summerskill. Those Who Die for Life Cannot Be Called Dead’: Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America, Schirmer. Violence Against Black Women: Gender, Race and State Responses, Mama. Sex and Race in the Labour Market, Breugel. The Dark Continent: Africa as Female Body in Haggard’s Adventure Fiction, Stott.

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Gender, Class and the Welfare State: The Case of Income Security in Australia, Shaver. Ethnic Feminism: Beyond the Pseudo-Pluralists, Gorelick. Restructuring the Woman Question: Perestroika and Prostitution, Waters. Contemporary Indian Feminism, Kumar. ‘A Bit On the Side’?: Gender Struggles in South Africa, Beall, Hassim and Todes. ‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up, Light. Madeline Pelletier (1874–1939) The Politics of Sexual Oppression, Mitchell. PERVERSEPOLITICS:LESBIANISSUES Pat Parker: A tribute, Brimstone. International Lesbianism: Brazil, Mendonça. Letter from São Paulo, Rodrigues; Israel, Pittsberg; Italy, Fiocchetto The De-eroticization of Women’s Liberation: Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of Sheila Jeffreys, Hunt. Talking About It: Homophobia in the Black Community, Gomez and Smith. Lesbianism and the Labour Party, Tobin. Skirting the issue: Lesbian fashion for the 1990s, Blackman and Perry. Butch/ Femme Obsessions, Ardill and O’Sullivan. Archives: The Will to Remember, Nestle; International Archives, Read. Audre Lorde: Vignettes and Mental Conversations, Lewis. Lesbian tradition, Field. Mapping: Lesbians, AIDS and Sexuality An interview with Cindy Patton. O’Sullivan Significant Others: Lesbians and Psychoanalytic Therory, Hamer. The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film, Smyth. Cartoon, Charlesworth. Voyages of the Valkyries: Recent Lesbian Pornographic Writing, Dunn.