According to some participants, the conference had started harmoniously enough. In a later essay, Ann Forfreedom, a community organizer based in Los Angeles, described women dancing hand-in-hand in a field on the tree-lined campus. There was a theater production of Alice in Wonderland, the screening of movies and slideshows by female filmmakers and artists, and a vaginal self-examination clinic—seemingly the ingredients for a 1970s feminist utopia. How did the atmosphere devolve so quickly?Read more: 'I'll Have What She's Having': The History of Feminist Restaurants
Florence Howe, founder of the Feminist Press, teaching a class. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
At this point in time, women's studies, the concept, and Women's Studies, the academic discipline, were very young. The idea that the history of women could be worth studying only dated back to the mid-1960s, when a few intrepid political organizers held classes on the subject through the free schools of left-leaning activists. These led to consciousness-raising sessions, where women would get together to discuss issues of sexism in their political groups. Eventually they began to discuss issues of sexism in the world at large.
In the journal assignments the students did that week, however, Howe saw a breakthrough. Her students were writing vividly about their experiences, thinking about concrete details, telling stories. Howe had found a pedagogical method that seemed brand new. She created a syllabus focused on women writing about their lives, even though model essays, stories, and novels were hard to find at the time.Howe started getting attention for teaching a course that focused openly on women. She told me that a journalist from the Chronicle of Higher Education trailed her and wrote about what he saw in her classroom, and she was asked to contribute an essay to College English, an important journal for the pedagogy of literature. Letters began to pour into her office asking an important question: Where could other teachers find readings by women to incorporate into their own classrooms?Women's Studies became a brain trust for and incubator of feminist ideas, even when the political movement faced backlash.
The first issue of "Ms." magazine. Image via Wikimedia Commons
One important reason is that those theoretical advances that Joan Hoff Wilson called for in her address at the West Coast Women's Studies conference—"to define the femaleness of experience and establish a feminist intellectual foundation which can withstand economic adversity"—actually happened. The 1970s were a productive period for writers thinking about what it means to be a woman, and why understanding that matters. Alongside the rise of feminists calling for a change in education, the women already working in academia—even if they were teaching a sexist curriculum—had started to organize. The American Historical Association launched a women's committee in 1969; the women's caucus of the Modern Language Association started the same year. Female professors worked alongside students, faculty wives, and female staff to lobby administrations to make changes in their curricular offerings and policies. In other words, there were already people inside institutions looking for the guidance a movement could offer. Once they had the resources and ideas, they weren't going to turn back. Women's Studies became a brain trust for and incubator of feminist ideas, even when the political movement faced backlash in the late 1970s and virtual banishment in Reagan's 1980s.Technology-mediated distance has allowed feminists to forget that disagreement isn't a real threat, but disinterest is.
bell hooks in 1988. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Throughout the 1980s, as feminist theory developed, writers often penned scathing responses to articles they read, and despite their differences in opinions, they continued to read each other's work to sharpen their arguments. Moving this conversation online has been a mixed blessing for feminist conversation. On the one hand, it's achieved some of the goals of the West Coast Women's Conference: broadening the conversation to those who can't afford a college degree or a conference entrance fee, providing platforms to theorize about things the mainstream might leave off the official program. But it's also allowed some of the worst problems—screaming, yelling, discord—to proliferate in unimaginable ways. The early feminist struggles rested on a baseline of civility; there's only so much you can scream without losing your voice. Technology-mediated distance has allowed feminists to forget that disagreement isn't a real threat, but disinterest is. It's hard to imagine now, but in the early 1970s feminism seemed like a fad, a craze that would pass, and the struggles over defining the movement kept scholars and activists interested even when mainstream culture moved on. Now, feminist scholars are more likely to talk about "feminisms," plural, an acknowledgment that different ideas about gender, culture, and justice have always existed. It's not necessarily clear which one has claims to truth or righteousness.Whether that willingness to accept multiple viewpoints will trickle down to the mainstream remains to be seen. When bell hooks wrote an article critical of Beyoncé's Lemonade in May 2016, Black Twitter erupted with dismay at her shade—hooks argued that the beloved album, celebrated as a cultural product made entirely for black women, was "the business of capitalist money making at its best." As many feminist Beyoncé fans shouted, "NO!" at their computer screens, aghast that one of their heroes had questioned another, those of us with Women's Studies degrees just chuckled. In many of my theory classes, hooks emerged as the queen of the takedown. Her relentlessly critical perspectives helped us look at cultural objects with new eyes, even if we continued to enjoy what we were seeing.Read more: Alternatives to Alternatives: The Black Grrrls Riot Ignored
