"What makes this conference interesting?" I was asked this question by our colleagues in Public Affairs when it came time to publicize the Scholar and Feminist Conference XXX. At first, I didn't know how to answer because it seemed so obvious to me. Where to start? I could talk about the 30 year history of the conference, an achievement in and of itself; or the ways in which the conference has managed with such amazing regularity to present the topics that were most relevant and important in any given year; or the ability of the conference to bring together scholars, activists, and artists so that the discussions were extremely rich and powerful; or the important papers, books, and now webjournal that have been based on the conference. I could talk about the amazing group of participants that had been assembled to celebrate this thirtieth anniversary: from established figures like novelist Dorothy Allison, Alison Bernstein, vice president of the Ford Foundation and longtime activist Faye Wattleton, to young stars like performance poet Staceyann Chin, McArthur fellow Lateefah Simon, and activist Siobhan Brooks to feminists working internationally like Kum Kum Sangari and Heisoo Shin. Or I could talk about the even longer, even more impressive list of feminists who had participated in the conference over its 30 year history: Bella Abzug, Barbara Ehrenreich, Donna Haraway, Maria Hinajosa, bell hooks, June Jordan and Adrienne Torf, Winona LaDuke, Audre Lorde, Jewell Jackson McCabe, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Grace Paley, Anna Quindlen, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Anna Deavere Smith, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis, and Monique Wittig. Didn't conferences that contribute so importantly to our understanding of important issues and movements make the Scholar and Feminist interesting?

This response on my part brought a clarification from my colleagues: Yes, all of these things would make the conference interesting to feminists, to scholars, to Barnard students, faculty, staff and alumnae who had helped to make the conference possible; but what would make the Scholar and Feminist interesting to the press? The press, after all, thought that feminism was dead. Feminism had been declared dead by Time Magazine in 1998 (when the conference was in its 24th year). Most recently, the cover of the October 30, 2005 New York Times Magazine asked "Are Modern Mores Killing Off What's Left of Feminism?" in reference to an article by Maureen Dowd on young women's supposed lack of interest in feminism. Apparently, the rumors of feminism's death were greatly exaggerated, but now feminism really is supposed to be on its last legs.

On Saturday, April 9, 2005 feminism hardly seemed on the verge of (yet another) death, as we celebrated the 30th anniversary the Scholar and Feminist conference with some 400 very excited people, many of whom were young and apparently hadn't heard either that feminism had died or that they were so uninterested as to be responsible for its imminent expiration. Thus, I can report without qualification that in April 2005 feminism was quite vibrant and alive, a movement with a global focus, one that is taking on new issues like the economics of globalization, while maintaining a razor sharp focus on women's lives and how to make them sustainable. This movement offers new takes on old issues like the politics of sexuality, while advancing the feminist struggles for reproductive rights and freedoms. Long standing institutions, like the conference itself or the National Organization for Women (represented at the conference by Terry O'Neill), continue to do their work, while new younger activists like Lateefah Simon, Jennifer Kern, Siobhan Brooks, and Staceyann Chin are forming new organizations, like the Center for Young Women's Development, or taking on new issues, like disability rights, or changing the focus of old issues like sexuality, or adopting new media, like spoken word and performance. All of this lively activity was visible at the conference, both in its long term sustainability - as Leslie Calman said in her introduction of Alison Bernstein, Alison has been doing this work "since the dawn of time" - and in its various new incarnations. So, if feminism is dead who are all of these people whose work was so alive?

Looking at all of this activity and excitement has made me realize that if members of the mainstream press can't see this, then they must be looking for something else. Perhaps the press is looking for feminism, for marches and rallies, street demonstrations and bra burnings. They are looking for Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. They are looking for opposition to the Miss America pageant (which is dying its own slow death from inattention). They are looking for the Equal Rights Amendment, which did, in fact die an unfortunate death. But, is the only form in which feminism could be resuscitated the form in which it existed before we lost the ERA?

It has occurred to me that this feminism, the one locked in amber since the 1970s, might in fact be dead. It occurs to me that, in fact, this feminism may never really have been alive. It may have had its most vibrant existence in the imagination of the press, and hence in the imagination of those who know feminism only from the press. As Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner pointed out when at the Center to discuss their book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, Gloria Steinem, herself, tried to resist the press focus on her as the embodiment (the thin, white, and beautiful embodiment) of feminism. She knew in the 1970s that this focus hid as much as it revealed. And what it hid was a movement that was much more diverse, that addressed a much broader range of issues, and that had a wider range of tactics than has been generally acknowledged.

How we tell the history of feminism makes a difference for how we might respond to the charge that feminism is dead. It is not enough to insist that feminism is alive - pointing out a factual error cannot intervene in an ideology. Moreover, simply to assert the vitality of feminism doesn't change the picture of what feminism was, what feminism is or what feminism can be. If feminism means only those things imagined for it by the mainstream press - access to upper class jobs for a few already privileged women and abortion rights - then perhaps our accomplishments are simultaneously passé and in grave danger. But, if feminism means something more than that, if it means fighting the various economic injustices that women face in gender and race segregated labor markets, then feminism is very much alive in the fight for equal pay and in the fight against poverty and growing income inequality, as well as in the fight against sweatshop labor conditions around the world. Similarly, if we look at the breadth of women's reproductive freedoms we can see the lifeblood of feminism not just in the battle to save abortion, which brought over a million people to Washington, D.C. in April 2004, but also in the myriad struggles for women's right to freedom from sexual violence, for control over their reproductive lives, and for an AIDS policy that responds to the need to prevent and treat the disease rather than to narrowly defined sexual ideologies.

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.

The Scholar and The Feminist XXX

To honor this history at the conference, to celebrate its achievement while remaining honest about the struggle that is social change, was a difficult challenge. We opened the conference with the film by commissioned for the occasion, "Past, Present and Future Feminisms." No single conference, even with a wonderful program like that for S & F XXX could do justice to the complex history of which "The Scholar and The Feminist" is a part. But, with the film we have been able to visualize a real sense of what has happened at the conference over the years and who some of the people are who have made the conference happen. We hired the very talented Rebecca Haimowitz, a film student at Columbia and asked her to talk to a group of people who had been involved in the conference and who lived in New York. (We interviewed only people who lived in New York because we couldn't afford anything more than metrocards for Rebecca). To get a few more young voices, we also interviewed some more recent Barnard alums who had been involved in the life of the Center. We wanted to address not only the history of the conference, but the history of feminism of which the conference has been a part and to which the conference has contributed, and so we asked our participants three questions that follow along with our conference theme of "Past Controversies, Present Challenges and Future Feminisms:"

1. What is the most controversial issue, activity or event in which you've been involved?
2. What is the most important issue facing feminism today?
3. What should we do about that issue? How do we move forward? What do we do?

We invite you to watch the film and see their answers, and in so doing experience (possibly again) some of the excitement with which we opened the day.

We had such a positive response to the film that Rebecca has reformatted it for us here as "Feminism: Controversies, Challenges, Actions." In a separate section, you can also see early architects of "The Scholar and The Feminist," like Susan Reimer Sacks, Nancy K. Miller, Hester Eisenstein, Jane Gould, and Elizabeth Minnich reflect on how the conference came to be and why it has now lasted for three decades. The film is also available to the public on DVD. If you are interested in a copy, please contact the Center by email at bcrw@barnard.edu or phone at 212.854.2067.

Following the theme of looking at the past to assess the present and move into the future, the panels at the conference revisited the themes of several landmark conferences, including "The Future of Difference" (1979), "Class, Race, and Sex," (1980), "Women in Resistance" (1984), "Women as Change Makers: Building and Using Political Power" (1992), "Creating Feminist Work" (1978), "Women in Culture and Politics" (1985), and "Power and Representation in a Media-Saturated Age" (2004). By returning to the fundamental debates of ten, twenty, thirty years ago, and by bringing together both younger and more experienced feminists, we were able to retrace the path of feminism's most pressing concerns and productive strategies, and consider how those concerns and strategies are articulated today.

"Building and Using Political Power: Women Making Change," moderated by Leslie Calman, debated an issue that has been much on people's minds since the 2004 elections: values. Are values always conservative? What is the role of religion vis-à-vis feminism? Do feminists need to promote their own values? Are we better off emphasizing the split between the Republican Party's claims to values and the interests and well-being of most people?

"The Future of Difference: Sex, Race, and Class" also took on the big questions. The panelists discussed the need for vision that could bring us together across differences, one that could address the unresolved issues in feminism. Once again there was lively debate about how we might come together across differences, about what kinds of multi-issue organization were already happening and about what form organizing should take in the future.

The afternoon panel moderated by Temma Kaplan on transnational resistance looked at the wide range of feminist struggles, from the anti-colonial struggle as part of a first wave of feminism in India to women's various movements for disability rights to the effort to replace an economy organized around drugs to one dedicated to young women's empowerment in San Francisco. Each of the panelists challenged us to account honestly for where feminism has been and to ask where and how we might best pursue the future. For example, Heisoo Shin provocatively suggested that the thing that feminists in the U.S. could most do for women around the world was not to direct their work abroad, but rather to work to change the U.S. government. She argued that feminists need to advocate an end to a wide range of policies sponsored by the U.S. that are harming women in many countries every day.

Finally, "Women's Culture," asked what role art plays in feminist struggle and in women's lives. The panelists spoke of the ways in which art can be a connecting point to larger worlds of possibility, a necessary place without which we might very well go mad. Staceyann Chin described the importance of connecting to feminism through the work of artists like Toni Morrison. Dorothy Allison took up this point as well: "[R]eally, what I know about artists is that we all have stories. We all have something vital, necessary - it will kill us, if we don't find a way to express it." And Elaine Kim spoke of the importance of art to cultural possibilities for entire communities of people. If art is crucial to feminism - if it is as Meena Alexander said, "the music of survival," - feminism and other social movements are also crucial for the possibility of art. Allison recounted the importance of early feminist writing groups "where we would read our bad poetry to each other, and every new bad poem was wonderful," while Elaine Kim talked about how the movement for Asian American studies in the academy was crucial to the development of whole bodies of Asian American literature.

The Scholar and The Feminist Online

This issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, our first double issue, carries forward the conversation from the conference. The best way we could approach the project was to provide as many different angles of vision on the conference as possible. The new medium of the webjournal has proven particularly helpful because it has allowed us to use multiple media - words, photos, and video - to convey the past controversies, present challenges, and future possibilities that the conference addressed.

By perusing the journal, you can read the full transcripts from this year's anniversary conference and watch video clips of each of the speakers so that you can get a sense of the power and the passion with which they spoke. You can also read the entire set of programs from thirty years of the conference and then link to an archive of sample papers actually presented at the conference. If video is more your style, you can access the central questions of the conference by watching our film by Rebecca Haimowitz. To extend the visual record of the conference we have also provided a photo archive of the conference in slide show format. You can look through photographs of the conference taken between 1974 and 1981. These photos give a palpable sense of the excitement, diversity and ardor that the conference has engendered. Finally, one of the most important effects of the conference over its first decade was the publication of breakthrough texts like The Future of Difference (1980) and Sex, Race, and Class: The Dynamics of Control (1980). The Future of Difference remains in print some 25 years later - a testament to the impact of the book - but Sex, Race, and Class, an equally important breakthrough text, is no longer easily available. Here, we are able to provide the entire book online. This book, based on the seventh and eighth conferences, shows how quickly and actively the conference took up the most cutting edge issues of the day, as sex, race, and class became the watchwords of both feminist theory and practice through the 1980s and beyond.

Each of the panels took on the major questions about feminism's past, its present and its possible futures. While all agreed that these are exceptionally conservative times, it's clear that feminism is alive and well. The current moment might even represent a critical juncture. As Staceyann Chin asked, both playfully and seriously, "And now [feminism is] kind of 30 or 40 years old, it's kind of grown up. The boobs are sagging a little bit. What are we going to do with it now?"

And this question - what are we going to do with it now? - is the one that we all face. If the feminism that the press continues to seek - the single-issue, single-minded and homogeneous movement that supposedly once existed - cannot be found, perhaps that's a good thing. Perhaps the death of this feminism, the one that lived and died in the imagination of the mainstream press, opens room for other types of feminism, other activities, new movements. The 30th anniversary conference, which looked both backward and forward, is part of a multifaceted feminism that attends to the past while looking to the future - a future that might shift our understanding of the past. Minnie Bruce Pratt suggested, for example, that we shift away from the metaphors of waves and generations, which imply homogeneous cohorts that follow one another in a direct fashion, do not do justice to the complexity of feminism. Such an imagination seems to virtually guarantee conflict as generations gap and waves crash into one another. In other words, the imagination of a single, linear movement produces a sense of feminism in constant crisis. Instead, Pratt uses the metaphor of streams of action to describe feminism, multiple movements happening simultaneously that can flow into one another or diverge at various points, which move toward an open future of feminist possibility.

The proclamation, "the king is dead, long live the king," announced that regardless of the death of an individual monarch, the monarchy continued uninterrupted. Perhaps the same is true of feminism: regardless of the death of any individual form of feminism, the project of creating a more just and equitable world is hardly at an end. Many more feminisms than those we record here may come and go before this project is complete. So, in the end maybe feminism is dead. Long live feminism.