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Journal of Women's History, Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2002,

pp. 118-125 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2002.0040

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jowh/summary/v014/14.2epstein.html

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118 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY SUMMER
THE SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF FEMINISM
Barbara Epstein

I have been trying to figure out for several years how feminism should
go forward. This seems to me to be the perfect audience to present these
ideas to, and get reactions from, so I am going to try out some of my
thoughts on you. I want to talk about what the achievements of the wom-
en’s movement have been and what remains undone—what the strengths
were and what some of the weaknesses are.
Leaving aside the antiwar movement of the 1960s, which I think
played an important role in bringing the war to an end, the women’s move-
ment was the most successful movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The idea
that women should enjoy full equality with men was a startlingly radical
idea then. That idea has been widely accepted. It seems clear that women
in the United States think differently about themselves now than they did
30 years ago because of the women’s movement. There have been advances
in opportunities for women, especially in the professions, also to, I think,
a lesser degree in working-class jobs. Such issues as child care, violence
against women, and reproductive rights have been placed on the public
agenda as legitimate issues—dramatically different from the political
agenda of the 1950s and through the 1960s. There have also been some
actual advances in other areas, around such issues as women’s health and
violence against women, though, given the rightward drift of politics in
the United States generally over the last several decades, the record on
these concerns has been somewhat mixed. But on a rhetorical level at least,
women’s equality has been accepted as a goal by mainstream society. The
gap between rhetoric and reality remains, but the fact that women’s equal-
ity has been accepted as a legitimate goal creates an opportunity for chang-
ing the reality. It seems to me that probably the most important contribution
of the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s was that it gave women
a sense of their collective power. And I think it is useful to look at the
difference between second-wave feminism and first-wave feminism in
relation to this sort of issue. Women who participated in the women’s
movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also learned
this lesson, but the lesson had a narrower impact. First of all, that move-
ment, particularly in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, was largely confined to middle-class and upper-middle-class,
overwhelmingly white women. Working-class women also participated,
but they constituted quite a small element of the movement and the
memory of that movement was quite effectively obliterated during the

© 2002 I NDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS , VOL. 14 N O. 2 (S UMMER )

2002 DIALOGUE : BARBARA EPSTEIN 119

1940s and 1950s, such that feminism in a sense had to be reinvented in the
1960s. The impact of the second wave of feminism has been broader and
deeper and the obliteration of that lesson is not going to happen. So that’s
a very major accomplishment.
The second wave of feminism was successful not only because it led
to changes in the lives of huge numbers of women, but also because the
movement evolved over time. And I think in many ways, the movement
evolved in positive directions. When the women’s movement first emerged
in the mid-1960s, it was largely confined to university students, other young
people of more or less the same class and a slightly older group of women
professionals. There were women of color and working-class women in
these movements, but they tended to enter the movements through the
same routes that everybody else did, namely the fact that they were in
college or in the professions despite unusual origins. Their presence in the
movement in the late 1960s did not mean that feminism was being adopt-
ed within working-class communities or within communities of color. In
those years, there was a wide gap between the feminist claim to speak for
all women and the reality, which had to do with the specific class and
social origins of the women making up the movement. Most of them were
from the middle class or the upper middle class, and I suspect actually
that most of them were from the suburbs. In the 1970s and into the 1980s,
women of color began to articulate their own versions of feminism, and
working women, who had not been part of feminism’s earlier university
student cohort, began to organize around demands of equal treatment in
the workplace and other issues working-class women faced. If one were
to contrast the women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond with the
women’s movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I think
one might say that while the first movement narrowed over time, in terms
of its constituency and its class perspective, the latter movement—our
movement—widened over time. Another way of putting this is to remem-
ber that the nineteenth-century women’s movement emerged out of an
alliance between white women and African Americans in the struggle for
abolitionism. But after the Civil War, in the context of a white middle class
shifting toward the political right in the late nineteenth century, the
women’s movement shifted away from earlier alliances. By the early twen-
tieth century, the activists were arguing for women’s suffrage on racist
and anti-immigrant grounds. So there was a shift away from the alliance
with black people specifically, and with a broader, progressive agenda,
more generally. I do not think the women’s movement of our era has ever
been racist in that sense, but I also think it has improved over time. In the
mid-1960s, the movement was largely composed of white women who
were often blind to the fact that they could not actually speak for all women,
120 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY SUMMER

but by the 1970s and certainly by the 1980s, there was a much greater
awareness of the need to recognize difference within the women’s move-
ment, and a much greater awareness of the need to build alliances with
other progressive constituencies, particularly groups of color.
Over the 1980s and 1990s, feminism as a perspective or as an identity
spread widely and a kind of diffuse feminist consciousness has become a
mass phenomenon. There are enormous numbers of women who identify
as feminists or who think about women’s issues in a different way as a
result of feminism. There are also now countless projects, groups, and or-
ganizations that are, in one way or another, infused by a feminist perspec-
tive. But it is also the case that the main organizations of the women’s
movement, the most visible organizations such as the National Organiza-
tion for Women and others, have narrowed in their perspective and are no
longer mass-based. They are no longer connected to mass movements,
and they have become organizations that are run by staffs rather than on
the basis of membership engagement. These organizations have become
more cautious in their approach than was the case with even the liberal
wing of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, and they
have become more identified with professional, middle-class women and
their perspectives. This is not true of the whole women’s movement, and
actually this conference represents other strands within the movement.
There are many organizations that rest on grassroots organizing among
women, such as the National Congress of Neighborhood Women. There
are many local groups focused on women of color and working women’s
concerns. There are many such groups in California, including the Moth-
ers of East Los Angeles and the Women’s Action for New Directions. While
there are many grassroots-based women’s organizations with broad so-
cial concerns, these do not make up the most visible wing of the women’s
movement. Despite a great deal of grassroots organizing, there is a way in
which the women’s movement has lost a sense of coherent direction and
urgency. The wind has gone out of the sails. And I would like to address
why.
The wind has gone out of the sails, not only of the women’s move-
ment but also of the progressive movement as a whole in the United States
generally. There are hopeful signs. Among these is the struggle against
globalization and corporate control that emerged in Seattle, and in which
feminism has been a major component. Though it has not yet congealed
into a movement, it holds out the possibility of something new and excit-
ing. There are probably more people involved in grassroots organizing
around progressive issues in the United States now than there were in the
1960s and 1970s. But despite these positive signs, the progressive move-
ment as a whole has become institutionalized. It has become an arena in
2002 DIALOGUE : BARBARA EPSTEIN 121

which many of us live and find consensus on many issues. But this pro-
gressive sector is not having much effect on the political direction of the
country as a whole. Why is that? What has happened?
Part of the answer is that feminism has become more an idea than a
movement. And even as a movement, it lacks some of the impetus that it
once had. I think that in the case of the women’s movement, the gap be-
tween the breadth of the original vision and the current state of activism
comes from the gap between the feminism’s broad and radical vision and
the much narrower character of its actual tangible accomplishments—
something Linda Gordon alluded to in her contribution to this conference
when she said that the inspiration within the feminist movement came
very largely from women’s liberation in the 1960s and 1970s, but the lib-
eral wing of feminism accomplished the concrete victories. I would go a
little bit further and say that not only was it liberal feminists that were
able to accomplish those victories, but that their victories were narrower
than the intentions of the larger movement. There are many historical cases
of popular movements that made broad and radical demands which then
become winnowed down such that the final achievement was the least
threatening element of the original set of demands. So it is not a big sur-
prise that this should happen to the women’s movement as it has hap-
pened to other movements, but it is worth looking at the fact that it did
happen, and what the consequences have been.
Linda Gordon also mentioned that there were the two wings of the
women’s movement. People have categorized these differently. On the
one hand, there was liberal feminism; on the other hand, there was wom-
en’s liberation. People also sometimes talked about that wing as comprised
of radical feminism and socialist feminism, with radical feminists regard-
ing women’s oppression as the root of all oppression, and socialist feminists
placing women’s oppression within the context of other forms of oppres-
sion, particularly race and class. But if one contrasts radical feminism with
the liberal wing, you could say that the main goal of the liberal wing of
the movement was to win equal access for women to the public sphere on
equal terms with men, particularly to the sphere of work. While women’s
liberation or radical feminism supported that goal, it also aimed for two
broader visions. One was that women’s liberation insisted that the subor-
dination of women in the public realm could not be separated from the
subordination of women in the private realm—both had to be addressed
simultaneously. Radical feminists also insisted that it was not possible to
win equality for women without winning equality in society across the
board. In other words, women could not be equals in a society deeply
stratified by race and class.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there was actually a lot of overlap between
122 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY SUMMER

women’s liberation or radical feminism, and liberal feminism. I think the

influence tended to go from the radical sphere towards the liberal sphere;
that liberal feminists were pushed by radical activists. Many liberals
adopted radical ideas. Another element, particularly in the 1970s, was that
people from women’s liberation participated in an enormous amount of
organizing around feminist issues among working-class women. Work-
ing-class women’s caucuses demanded affirmative action to help them-
selves and others like them. So in a certain sense, it’s not accurate to divide
the women’s movement up into different spheres because they overlapped,
and because the goal of affirmative action—which is usually, and I think
appropriately, associated with liberal feminism—also contained a very im-
portant working-class element.1 However, despite the sort of ferment and
intersection of liberal and radical demands that took place in the 1960s
and 1970s, the fact of the matter is that demands and results are not al-
ways the same thing. Affirmative action campaigns in the end were more
effective in the professions than elsewhere, and educated and overwhelm-
ingly white women took the greatest advantage of these opportunities. I
think that these gains in affirmative action, combined with the growing
gap between the lower and higher rungs of the economy (which contin-
ued to increase divisions among women despite the gains of affirmative
action), pushed the women’s movement as a whole away from the radical
demands of the 1960s and 1970s.
Meanwhile, radical feminism itself became stalled in the 1970s. It was
torn apart by two things. The first was the kind of factionalism, ideologi-
cal conflicts, and internal struggles that Linda Gordon addressed, which
led to the decline of radical feminism and the emergence of a much less
political version of feminism that we called cultural feminism by the end
of the decade.2 Such sectarianism is ordinarily associated with movements
that are in decline, but feminism at the time was strong and growing. My
analysis of why this happened is that the radical wing of the women’s
movement became a bit crazed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for the
same reason that radicalism in the United States as a whole was becoming
a bit crazed (and I speak as someone who was part of this movement). Rad-
icals not only adopted revolution as their aim, but also thought that revo-
lution was within reach. Now there were many versions of revolution
—feminist, Marxist/Leninist, Black, and so on. But everybody thought revo-
lution was a good idea, and virtually everybody thought it was around the
corner. In my view at least, there was nothing wrong with the commitment
to revolution; I wish we had more of it now. But there was something un-
realistic about the view that if we did just the right thing, it would happen.
At bottom, the war in Vietnam produced a major crisis in U.S. soci-
ety. Protest against the war combined with protests against racism and
2002 DIALOGUE : BARBARA EPSTEIN 123

sexism made it seem possible to create a new society. But the fact of the
matter was that once the war was over, the major basis for protest evapo-
rated. And those of us who thought that protest would go on to become a
revolutionary movement in the United States turned out to be wrong. In
fact, what happened was that when the war came to an end, the largest
sector of the movement evaporated, and the radical core of the various
movements began to find itself isolated. I think it took longer for this to
happen in the case of radical feminism than it did in the case of other
sectors of the radical movement simply because the mainstream feminist
movement was strong and growing, and within the feminist movement,
there were many people who were quite open to radical ideas. But never-
theless, the trajectory of American society as a whole was toward the right,
and the idea that revolution would happen tomorrow if you did just the
right thing was clearly not accurate. By the 1980s, radical feminism too
had been pushed to the margins and it was no longer a central current
within American politics.
So I am arguing that two things happened more or less simultaneously.
First, affirmative action was more or less accomplished, but in a form that
was relatively conservative. At the same time, the radical sector of the
movement more or less evaporated—or more accurately, it moved into
academia. While most radicals did not become academics, enough people
did that there was a sort of a critical mass of radicals in academia. Because
it was a safe space for radicals and because of access to publishing and
whatnot, the university became one of the spaces where feminism was de-
fined. At the same time, academic feminism was gradually losing its ties
to activism outside the academy.
This did not happen to all academics, of course, and this conference
is in a certain sense about the people who took a different path. I am very
pleased that this conference and the collections have highlighted the work
of Frances Fox Piven, for example, who is a model in continuing to con-
struct that bridge between activism and academia. Academic feminism,
by and large, took a different path.
I suggested earlier that the politics and constituency of first-wave
feminism narrowed and that was not the case with our feminist move-
ment. But I think I was careful to say that there were also some problems.
Even though I think our movement has not narrowed, particularly in rela-
tion to race, I think there is another respect in which the current women’s
movement has rather unconsciously narrowed its politics, which mirrors
what happened in the nineteenth century. As the women’s movement aged,
so to speak, it became vulnerable to absorbing trends within its own class.
And I think that is what has happened to the most visible and prominent
aspects of our women’s movement.
124 JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HISTORY SUMMER

The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the radi-
cal core of that movement, demanded not only equality for women, but
also equality across the board. Feminists sought an egalitarian society
governed by humane values. But since the early 1970s, economic inequali-
ties have steadily widened in the United States. Most people now work
longer hours at less secure jobs. Often these jobs are associated with in-
creasing stress. Many people have spoken of work having become a reli-
gion in the United States. I think it might be more accurate to say that for
many people, work has become the only meaningful source of identity. In
a broader sense, the United States is becoming an increasingly individual-
istic, cold, and selfish society. It seems to me that we now live in a society
in which people’s concern for other people is becoming a kind of quaint,
archaic value. People seem to assume that you should really be mostly
concerned with yourself and maybe for other members of your nuclear
family, if you happen to have one, but beyond that, it is a sort of silliness
to be concerned with anybody else. Many progressives seem to have ab-
sorbed these ideas too. And I think the ways we have absorbed them has
been by throwing ourselves into work and adopting or absorbing the view
into the way we value ourselves. I know that this is true of me. I have the
sense that it is also true of other people in our general community. I can-
not really speak for the United States as a whole, but I am struck, even in
visiting other countries, with the reigning individualism in the United
States, which seems to be much further advanced than it is elsewhere in
the world—even though I also think that individualism is a kind of global
tendency.
Feminism is not making a noticeable challenge to this cultural shift.
In fact, I think that the version of feminism that was formed through the
demand for women’s equality in the workplace, and then, in practice, be-
came focused around the success of the demand for affirmative action for
professional women, has blindly absorbed many of the dominant cultural
values of the middle class. In the 1970s, many feminists thought that if
only we could get enough women into academic jobs, academia would
change. It would become a less elitist, more humane place, concerned with
social good. Well, a fair number of women are in the academy and I do not
think that the academy has changed in those directions. Instead, I think
the academy has gone in the opposite direction. This is not women’s fault;
it is because we are caught up in a wildly accelerating global version of
capitalism that is drawing everything, including the universities, into its
vortex and bringing market values to every area of life. Simply having
more women in the academy does nothing to oppose this. As more people
are in institutions that are adopting greater market values, the greater the
pressures are for those people to adopt those values. We need a move-
2002 DIALOGUE : BARBARA EPSTEIN 125

ment that explicitly and overtly criticizes this shift and the values associ-
ated with it.
I am suggesting here—and this is all completely impressionistic—
that although the values of individualism, market values, and so forth,
have taken on increased importance throughout the United States as a
whole, there is a way in which the professional middle class has been the
carrier of these values. We live in a society that is rapidly dividing be-
tween those who make it to the top and those who fall to the bottom, and
generally speaking, people in the professional middle class would much
rather rise than fall. There is a kind of scramble going on, and we are in
the sector of society that is engaged in that scramble rather than critical of
it. The media image of feminists as careerists was not entirely invented by
a hostile press but feminists are no more careerists than other members of
the same class. If this is true, then we are admitting that we have lost a
grip on the social vision that feminism originally embraced. So I am call-
ing for a return to a sort of revised version of radical feminism. It seems to
me that we have to place feminism within the demand for an egalitarian
society and a demand for a society that respects human connection and
respects communities and promotes them rather than destroying them.
And I do think we can look back to the legacy of women’s liberation for at
least some very good hints about how to do this.

NOTES
1
I learned about this from Nancy Maclean, whose very important article
on the use of affirmative action by working-class women appeared in a recent
issue of Feminist Studies.
2
These developments are wonderfully described by Alice Echols in her book
Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975, and also by Ruth Rosen
in her recent book The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed
America. What is striking about both these books is that they are written from a
perspective which is deeply feminist and deeply respectful of the women’s move-
ment, but also very clear-eyed about its problems.