result of this was women breaking from those movements not simply organizationally but politically. In 1881, after months of campaigning for women’s suffrage and losing partly because male abolitionists wouldn’t support them, the feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony wrote their ‘Message to Future Generations’:
Our liberal men counselled us to silence during the war, and we were silent in our own wrongs; they counselled us again to silence in Kansas and New York, lest we should defeat ‘Negroe Suffrage’, and threatened if we were not, we might fight the battle alone. We chose the latter, and were defeated. But standing alone we learned our power; we repudiated man’s counsels forevermore; and solemnly vowed that there should never be another season of silence until woman had the same rights everywhere on this green earth as man. 14
They warned young women that they could not rely on men’s advice. They had to depend only on themselves for the transitional period before they were equal. ‘While regarded as his subject, his inferior, his slave, their interests must be antagonistic.’ 15
There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for some absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance towards a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning through a dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial.While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if the attempt is not made continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked within its own particularism. This is as true of women as of blacks or workers. The attempt to extend and connect is not one which can be made in some utopian static future, but is part of a continuous dialectical historical process in which all participate consciously. It is only when the feminist (or the black or the working-class militant) understands, perceives, feels themself as pitted against a total oppressive system rather than simply against the indignity which is done to them through the subordination of their own kind, that a revolutionary political consciousness can start to grow.
In practice these connections were grasped by women who by social and political circumstance were involved not simply as women. For a black woman in the Civil War in America, for a Frenchwoman in one of the revolutionary moments, for an English chartist or for an early woman trade unionist to confine their conception of the oppression they resisted simply to their gender was absurd. The isolationism of Stanton and Anthony appeared immediately as a false option because it did not relate to their everyday life or their immediate political practice. In fact it could lead to actions which were explicitly contradicting their experience. Emma Goldman showed how the Stanton-Anthony tendency within feminism remained deliberately blinkered about labour movement struggles even to the point of supporting strike-breaking by women. This earned them the antagonism not only of male but female workers.
The absence of any practical theory of revolutionary feminist action and organization which made explicit the necessity to fight on several fronts rather than isolating one aspect of oppression had serious consequences. The corollary of feminist isolationism was a tendency amongst some women revolutionaries and industrial militants to
Our liberal men counselled us to silence during the war, and we were silent in our own wrongs; they counselled us again to silence in Kansas and New York, lest we should defeat ‘Negroe Suffrage’, and threatened if we were not, we might fight the battle alone. We chose the latter, and were defeated. But standing alone we learned our power; we repudiated man’s counsels forevermore; and solemnly vowed that there should never be another season of silence until woman had the same rights everywhere on this green earth as man. 14
They warned young women that they could not rely on men’s advice. They had to depend only on themselves for the transitional period before they were equal. ‘While regarded as his subject, his inferior, his slave, their interests must be antagonistic.’ 15
There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for some absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance towards a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning through a dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial.While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if the attempt is not made continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked within its own particularism. This is as true of women as of blacks or workers. The attempt to extend and connect is not one which can be made in some utopian static future, but is part of a continuous dialectical historical process in which all participate consciously. It is only when the feminist (or the black or the working-class militant) understands, perceives, feels themself as pitted against a total oppressive system rather than simply against the indignity which is done to them through the subordination of their own kind, that a revolutionary political consciousness can start to grow.
In practice these connections were grasped by women who by social and political circumstance were involved not simply as women. For a black woman in the Civil War in America, for a Frenchwoman in one of the revolutionary moments, for an English chartist or for an early woman trade unionist to confine their conception of the oppression they resisted simply to their gender was absurd. The isolationism of Stanton and Anthony appeared immediately as a false option because it did not relate to their everyday life or their immediate political practice. In fact it could lead to actions which were explicitly contradicting their experience. Emma Goldman showed how the Stanton-Anthony tendency within feminism remained deliberately blinkered about labour movement struggles even to the point of supporting strike-breaking by women. This earned them the antagonism not only of male but female workers.
The absence of any practical theory of revolutionary feminist action and organization which made explicit the necessity to fight on several fronts rather than isolating one aspect of oppression had serious consequences. The corollary of feminist isolationism was a tendency amongst some women revolutionaries and industrial militants to
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