The Scholar and The Feminist Conference
One of the things that we hope this issue of Scholar and Feminist Online can do is to provide alternative views of the history of feminism by providing various views of the history of the conference. Just as feminism is not – and never was – a single movement led by single individuals, the history of feminism is not a single story. It is not the coherent narrative of forward progress, by which all things always get better; neither is it a story of a direct rise to a pinnacle followed by a certain descent. Rather, it is a history full of controversy and struggle, starts and stops, bursts of energy and periods of quiescence. But, it would be a mistake to read the messiness of this history, its failure to conform to the dominant progress narrative, as a failure of the movement. Rather, it is through the difficulties and struggles, the wrong turns and the right actions, that the movement has been sustained over these last thirty years. Feminists and feminisms have both learned from the struggle. How could social change be any other way?
The history of the conference reflects this complicated history of feminism. It is true that the early days were quite heady. As the photos of conference participants waiting in lines that stretch across the campus and of an absolutely packed gymnasium show, thousands of people came to those early conferences, and more than one person who was there has reported that the experience was life-changing. For example, Nancy Evans, founder of ivillage.com, one of the first spaces on the Internet dedicated to women’s issues, tells the story of being a graduate student at Columbia University, when she went to the Scholar and Feminist conference. The energy, passion, and ideas that the conference brought forward made her realize that her life could be something different than what she had imagined. She could be a feminist. She changed course virtually immediately and began the path that led to her to be a leader in claiming the Internet as a space for women and women’s issues.
The high and the low points of the conference happened simultaneously in 1982 with the Scholar and Feminist IX, “Towards a Politics of Sexuality.” More has been written about this conference than any other, and in many ways it was the flash point for a revolution in how feminists could approach questions of sexuality. As participants report, in planning for the conference it seemed radical simply to be able to talk about sex as an issue of import and the subject of academic analysis, and the planners decided to keep a diary of their experiences in planning the conference and publish it for conference goers. The diary – which includes minutes from the planning meets and workshop descriptions by leading scholars like Muriel Dimen, Mary Ann Doane, Ellen Dubois, Faye Ginsburg, Linda Gordon, Esther Newton, Gayle Rubin, Kaja Silverman, and Hortense Spillers, among others – became a journal of writings and art work that illustrated the excitement and new insights that taking up the politics of sexuality produced.
Because the conference was breaking new ground, it also became the subject of intense controversy. The conference happened at a moment when battle lines were being drawn among feminists over the meaning of sexuality. The two sides came to be called “pro-sex” and “anti-violence,” and the great irony of the controversy is that such a division was created in part over a conference that was trying to address the fact that women were both subject to sexual violence and denied the right to sexual pleasure. Pleasure and Danger, the title Carole Vance gave to her anthology of papers from the conference, (an anthology that unlike previous books was published separately from the Center) succinctly captures this connection. But as Vance reports in her epilogue to the book, as does Jane Gould, then Director of the Center in her book, Juggling, as soon as controversy arose around the conference, the College went into a panic. The College attempted to confiscate the diary of the planning process, which was to have been distributed in the packets given to each attendee at the conference. In the end, the College agreed to reprint the diary without Barnard’s name and allow it to be distributed after the conference. In other words, the College effectively paid thousands of dollars to have Barnard’s name taken off of the document, thus removing the College’s connection to this important body of work. As a result, we do not reprint the diary here, having lost the right to claim this work on behalf of the College, despite its importance to the history of the conference and to feminism.
As Lisa Duggan says in the film commissioned by the Center for the 30th anniversary of the conference, what came out of the 1982 conference, was crucially important for feminist movement: “what went forward . . . as a really useful conversation that actually progressed so that the feminist discussion got to a better place in and through that particular debate.” Since the conference, sexuality has become a central subject of feminist theory and practice, and lesbian and gay, queer and now transgender studies have provided successive waves of vitality for both academic and activist undertakings. “Gender and sexuality” has become one of the major ways of understanding the field, and numerous academic programs have taken up this title. The Scholar and Feminist IX was the leading edge of new ways of knowing and acting.
Nor, was sexuality the only issue that engendered controversy at or around the conference. As Temma Kaplan notes in the film a number of issues, like gender and religion, proved controversial. A willingness to take on controversy is signaled by conference titles like “Motherhood vs. Sisterhood” (1988), “Apocaylpse Now?: Race and Gender in the Ninties,” (1990), and “Our Families: A Feminist Response to the Family Values Debate” (1996).
These controversies were not necessarily easy. In many cases, and particularly in the case of the Scholar and Feminist IX and the College’s response, the controversy was destructive as well as productive. And yet, these controversies are a crucial part of the struggle that makes for social change.
One of the themes running through the panel discussion on transnational resistance at the 30th anniversary conference was the need for an honest accounting of feminism’s failures as well as its successes. Several panelists argued that history is a tremendous resource, but only if we can address it honestly. Barbara Ransby talked about the ways in which history of social movements, like the civil rights movement, can be sustaining, but that sustenance can be maintained only if we address the ways in which that legacy is currently being looted by the right wing, as the language of civil rights is appropriated to turn back the victories of the very movements who made this language important. Similarly, a number of the panels brought up the appropriation of feminism and the language of women’s liberation for right-wing purposes, including support for the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Minnie Bruce Pratt took the brave step of revisiting her own past, rereading her generative essay in the groundbreaking 1984 volume Yours in Struggle, and assessing not just its accomplishments, but its limits in light of intervening struggles. In doing so, she hoped to show how feminism has had to change over these last twenty years and also how feminism needs to keep changing.
