Feminism and the history of in-fighting

[RethinkingLife]

Interesting overview of the history of feminism and the self-harm delivered by in-fighting within a discussion of social media and feminism.

In “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” a 1976 Ms. magazine article, Jo Freeman described how feminists of her generation destroyed one another. Trashing, she wrote, is “accomplished by making you feel that your very existence is inimical to the Movement and that nothing can change this short of ceasing to exist. These feelings are reinforced when you are isolated from your friends as they become convinced that their association with you is similarly inimical to the Movement and to themselves. Any support of you will taint them…. You are reduced to a mere parody of your previous self.”

Like the authors of #Femfuture, Freeman was trashed for presuming to represent feminism without explicit sanction, in this case of the group she’d founded with Shulamith Firestone. It began, she told me, when the left-wing magazine Ramparts published a neck-down picture of a woman in a leotard with a button hanging from one breast. The group decided to write a letter to the editor. Four members drafted one without Freeman’s knowledge, and when they presented it to the rest of the group, she realized it was too long and would never be printed. Freeman had magazine experience, and she decided to write a pithier letter of her own under her movement name, Joreen. When Ramparts published it but not the other one, the women in her group were apoplectic, and Freeman was excoriated at their next meeting. “That was a public trashing,” she says. “I was horrible, disloyal, a traitor.” It went beyond mere criticism: “There’s a difference between trashing someone and challenging them. You can challenge someone’s idea. When you’re trashing someone, you’re essentially saying they’re a bad person.”

www.thenation.com/article/archive/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars/

The nature of the denunciations and ostracism seem horribly familiar. Some impressive purity loops that would have C17th religious observants envying them for rigidity.

Recommend Helen Lewis' book "Difficult Women" for a look at how women who won incredible freedoms/ rights / achievements were far from "perfect".

Erin Pizzey always comes to mind (she's gone 180 into MRA).

www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/02/feminism-mens-rights-activism-cancel-culture/607057/

Full Jo Freeman piece for anyone who hasn't read the original.

www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

Sorry but a lot of this is historically inaccurate. Erin Pizzey was never a feminist, she always thought that women were as much responsible for being the victim of DV as the violent men. She actively campaigned against what was the WLM and said it was about lesbians trying to convert heterosexual women. And accused the London Women's Liberation Workshop of being a communist cell and much more.

Those who set up what was to become the Women's Aid Federation were horrified by EP's views and for years the organisation Refuge was not an accredited organisation. And it is also a media myth that EP set up the first refuge. She didn't, the first refuge was set up by a Black Women's Group in Brixton.

Dont ever believe what media feminists tell you. They just repeat the lies of the media. The movement is never about individuals, it is about how (as the name implies) numerous groups, campaigns, etc. work towards a common goal)

And as to the other story, however interesting Jo Freeman may have been, obviously if you are working as a group you dont go behind the backs of the those you are working with! Working is group can be really difficult but she was not a politically naive woman having been active in the male left.

I thought when you were talking about infighting you meant the sort of tactics that WPUK have used to undermine PP. And historically there have been terrible examples of this in the UK and was the reason the last WLM National Conference ended in chaos.

IwantToRetire, you don't consider the discussion of trashing/challenging has resonances with the treatment of PP by JCJ and others you style as "media feminists"?

As for the Freeman story, the reaction she describes is not far from Lifton's Eight Criteria for Thought Reform.

Demand for Purity. The world is viewed as black and white and the members are constantly exhorted to conform to the ideology of the group and strive for perfection. The induction of guilt and/or shame is a powerful control device used here.

Dispensing of existence. The group has the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not. This is usually not literal but means that those in the outside world are not saved, unenlightened, unconscious, and must be converted to the group's ideology. If they do not join the group or are critical of the group, then they must be rejected by the members. Thus, the outside world loses all credibility. In conjunction, should any member leave the group, he or she must be rejected also.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychology_of_Totalism

Yes, Erin Pizzey is the focus of a chapter of the book. I'm fully aware of the history and what has happened! It's why I recommended it!

People find it incredibly difficult to acknowledge that a person can do worthwhile things while also being the same person that does things you may consider batshit.

<Shrug>

I appreciate a movement that shows a range of thinking and not groupthink or rigid political branding and marketing. And the capacity to debate and defend those different views, and to find shared ground on some things without a lot of tedious squealing about purity and contamination and whose great aunt's sister's hamster's friend once looked sideways at someone who <insert current purity slur here>.

And as to the other story, however interesting Jo Freeman may have been, obviously if you are working as a group you dont go behind the backs of the those you are working with! Working is group can be really difficult but she was not a politically naive woman having been active in the male left.

I agree with this and I am a Joreen fan. The Tyranny of Structurelessness is an excellent piece - I remember reading it in the 80s and thinking it really summed up the groups I was active in at the time.

RethinkingLife - you have misunderstood what I said. Media feminism, ie women journalists who are allowed to write about feminism by men but have no actual knowledge of it, largely write what has already been written, and as most of us know, it has little or no ressemblence to actual feminism in practice.

ie Erin Pizzey is a media myth, who continued in her "role" thanks to the friendship of a certain PM's wife which led to the contract for maintaining the DV helpline initiated and run by WAFE (set up by feminists) going to Refuge.

And anyone who has been in a group and tried to maintain a collective practice would have been outraged by JF's behaviour, not just for "bourgeois individualism" but for undermining the shared trust that is really, really hard to maintain in a small group with collective working.

In recounting the story herself she tries to make out she is somehow the victim, rather than the instigator. Would be interesting to hear what the other members of the group thought.

This did happen to other women and is part of the process where what can seem to be the original idea of one woman, is too often than not the outcome of collective working, but then an individual either deliberately or by accident appears to appropriate it / privitise it.

I much prefer Ti Grace Atkinson's response to similar instances. She is said to have said: "I didn't leave the movement, the movement left me."

The bit I find odd is that Lewis has recently written about how problematic she finds KJK.

RethinkingLife - you have misunderstood what I said.

Or:
*we're talking about different aspects
*you are interpreting the absence of acceptance/falling in behind your version to be a failure of comprehension.

There are several other options including other posters introducing other texts and ideas.

teawamutu I've not seen the Lewis text about KJK to which you refer. Is it an instance of in-fighting/trashing/challenging? Or, given PPs' support for the group response to Jo Freeman's action/s, is it a grounded objection to the emergence of a key figure with a media profile?

It was a note in a recent Bluestocking newsletter, Rethinking - screenshot attached.

I think it's definitely more considered than, eg, the swipes from JCJ and Bindel, but I personally find the insistence that only the left will save us, when they're the ones working against us most, frustrating.

The link Lewis refers to, where KJK defends herself, is here: twitter.com/StandingforXX/status/1594467200181899265?t=NFjQnZRZPv4Gx51ly9SyIw&s=19

I think 'right wing rabble-rousing ' is inaccurate and unfair.

Like any movement of human beings who are passionate about a cause they believe in, the WLM in the 70s and 80s was full of disagreements, arguments, even disputes. There was a terrific energy that mainly went into writing, leafletting, meetings, organising and carrying out practical actions. That's how it made so much progress.

And as in any group, some energy was diverted into squabbles and personal conflicts. Nothing unusual about that. But also, nothing like the character assassination, intimidation, credible threats and attacks on people's livelihoods that is everyday business in transactivism.

I really don't care if some supporters of women's rights and child safeguarding differ with me on other issues. I don't even care if they're not particularly feminist, but support our cause for other reasons such as free speech, recognition of biological reality or common decency.

Spartacus, I remember The Tyranny of Structurelessness, and an answering piece I read afterwards called Tyranny of Tyranny! Can't remember details now. The debate back then was intense but fruitful, as evidenced by our many victories.

I just wanted to acknowledge the comment by @LaughingPriest since that, perhaps, resonates most.

• Is the philosopher who has published a book and arguably took a risk speaking out straightforwardly abusive because she picked up the phone to Stephanie Hayden for an hour to make deeply distressing comments that would then turn up in a witness statement?
• Is the campaigner a boundary violating narcissist because she publicly used my wife's name in a lying post despite repeated requests to stop?
• Is the woman with multiple reports of sexual harassment against her who sought to portray those speaking out as insane a garden variety abuser despite doing work that has contributed to shifting the needle?

I can't answer those things but they have been some of the more eventful episodes I've experienced in this debate. The involvement of a feminist in the Hayden litigation cost several hundred pounds (a letter was sent pointing out she'd be summoned as a witness if she continued and, unsurprisingly, she desisted) that might have been better spent on the donations to various projects at the end. The weaponisation of my wife's name and memory was expected from TRAs but caused significant upset when two, I think, women on our side did it, and I've little to say about the third case behind noting it stopped once I went legal as a last resort.

In such scenarios, we must also examine our own behaviour. For me, my wife's death has, and this is just trivial, profoundly changed how I engage with the world. I'm a little less reactive and impulsive and some fights I simply cannot have. Still, the above examples remain, to me, clear cut examples of some pretty shocking behaviour that I have come to accept co-exist alongside good works.

I used to be involved in running various initiatives and can no longer do so. Since then, I'm largely oblivious to squabbles and who is under fire this week except for when I read the occasional online swipe. That is very much how I prefer it: it takes a woman with more resilience than me to deal with these things and it's precisely that quality that makes some who have done some objectively bad things effective in the campaigning sphere.

No special insights. Merely reflecting upon my own experiences

Hello, the next books for the LFN Bookgroup are:
Tuesday 20 June 2023: The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement by Sylvia Pankhurst

Tuesday 18 July 2023: America’s Women: 400 years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines by Gail Collins
(not having read the book is no reason not to join in)
We are a radical feminist women only group who meet every third Tuesday of the month 7.00 p.m. Join us on facebook or through the the radical Feminist Social London MeetUp group. We meet via zoom. www.facebook.com/groun ps/1602858270013933/