This special double-issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online was, in effect, thirty years in the making. With a wealth of multimedia information that only an online journal can offer, it traces the history of the landmark feminist conference from which it takes its name through photographs, films, archival publications, and transcripts from the thirtieth anniversary conference – a historical event in its own right.
On 11 May 1974, the Barnard Center for Research on Women hosted the first Scholar & Feminist Conference to examine the impact of feminism on scholarship. Aimed at addressing and rectifying the absence of women’s concerns, of women’s voices and experiences in academic institutions, the conference produced a wholly unique and enlivening brand of knowledge that would soon form the foundation of a number of burgeoning disciplines, from women’s studies to queer studies to post-colonialist studies. In the years that followed, Jane Gould, then director of the Center, led a planning committee that, together, applied these heady new ways of thinking to the most pressing issues of the day. With conferences dedicated to exploring the meaning of difference, strategies for connecting theory to practice, technology, women’s sexuality, political action, and economic and racial justice, the Scholar & Feminist quickly became a nationally recognized gathering of academics, activists and artists whose work could be counted on to bring the complexities of our world into focus through the lens of feminist scholarship.
We’ve devoted a good deal of this issue of SFO to materials from the conference’s earliest days. An archive of original conference programs testifies to the range of questions and concerns that the conference has raised over the years, while a slideshow of photographs that date to the first ten years of the conference demonstrates just how energetic and enthusiastic those gatherings were. The excitement, of course, had everything to do with the work that was being generated, and so we present an archive of papers that were presented at various conferences. After thirty years and hundreds of fascinating speakers, it would be impossible to gather all the work that the Scholar & Feminist has enabled, but it’s our hope that these documents express something of the scope and history of this vital feminist undertaking. Those already familiar with the history of the conference will know that many papers presented here later formed the contents of landmark feminist publications. Both “The Future of Difference” conference of 1979 and “Towards a Politics of Sexuality” of 1982 formed the basis of volumes that remain of crucial importance to historians of American feminist movements. While those two books are now in print, a third volume, Class, Race, and Sex: The Dynamics of Control, based on the 1980 conference of the same name, is much harder to come by. We’re proud to present the publication here in its entirety.
In April 2005, thirty years after that first fateful conference, “Past Controversies, Present Challenges, Future Feminisms,” brought to Barnard many voices that had contributed to the Scholar & Feminist’s illustrious early days. Scholars, activists and artists such as Meena Alexander, Dorothy Allison, Alison Bernstein, Leslie Feinberg, Amber Hollibaugh, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Barbara Ransby, and Faye Wattleton were joined by such inspiring young feminists as Tammy Rae Carland, Staceyann Chin, and Rachel Maddow in conversations that aimed to honestly assess how feminism has both succeeded and failed over the last thirty years. The full transcripts of those exciting, thought provoking dialogues are presented here, and testify to the many ways in which committed feminists continue to work for progressive social change. From their tireless struggles to secure reproductive rights and equal pay to their determination to connect women’s lives to campaigns against economic injustice and militarism across the globe, feminists, as Janet Jakobsen notes in her introduction, prove on a daily basis that feminism is far from dead. Although the mainstream press makes frequent claims to the contrary, feminism today is a vibrant and shifting collective that aims not only to end discrimination based on sex and gender, but insists on linking these struggles to a wide range of others. Thus, armed with an understanding of how women’s lives are influenced by such factors as race, economics, violence, nationality, religion, war and imperialism, feminists today can be found working on projects that range from securing immigrants’ right to dismantling the prison industrial complex.
What has died, Professor Jakobsen insists, is not feminism but instead the myth of a movement that should or (possibly ever could) reduce the innumerable concerns and complexities of women’s lives into a single or simple cause. Indeed, this myth is nowhere to be found in Rebecca Haimowitz’s short documentary, Feminism: Controversies, Challenges, Actions. Originally commissioned by the Barnard Center for Research on Women as a short history of the Scholar & Feminist Conference, the film quickly grew into a short history of three decades of feminist movements in America. The voices included here represent some of the most exciting and effective feminist work being done today – from the classroom to the street protest – and reaffirm the profound ways in which feminists continue to change the world.
