At almost this exact time last year, I wrote this in response to a petitioning campaign by MoveOn.org over proposed cuts to government grants to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Don’t get me wrong. I like PBS and NPR is just about all the radio I ever listen to. The issue here isn’t whether they should face a funding crisis or not; I hope that they don’t. Rather, it’s what you should do in the face of that funding crisis. MoveOn just invested an incredible amount of time, money, and energy into mobilizing a bunch of Progressives to whine about it in Congress and beg for the money back. Meanwhile, instead of signing an online petition, calling my Representative, and e-mailing my friends and colleagues to get them to shake the change cup with me, I shut up and put down a pledge of $10 / month to Detroit Public Television.

Now, if 1,091,509 people in MoveOn’s orbit had done what I did, instead of what they did, then by my calculations PBS and NPR would have $130,981,080 more money for programming in the upcoming year. More importantly, they’d have that $131 million no matter what Congress and the Senate decided to do.

You might claim that not everyone who gets MoveOn e-mails will put down a pledge, but a lot more people will put down a zero-cost signature. You might think that MoveOn just can’t command that kind of money. Well, that strikes me as making excuses: we are talking about the group that just threw tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (depending on the as-yet unreleased budget data for their 501(c)(4) branch) down the tubes for electable John Kerry just last year. But fundraising is tricky, and maybe they wouldn’t make as much as they might hope. But think it about it this way: when you give money directly to people doing good work, the economics of failing to meet your goals are different. Lobbying is, more or less, an all-or-nothing game, with very few chances for gains on the margin. Names on a petition may or may not make a difference; but if they don’t make a difference (and, frankly, it doesn’t look like they made much of one here) then the names and pious hopes that NPR and PBS got out of the campaign aren’t worth the electrons that they’re printed on. But if you don’t hit your targets in direct support, the contributions you did get are money in the bank, no matter what. If only half as many people pledged as signed the petition, well, then PBS and NPR would have $65,490,540 that they didn’t have before. If the average contribution was $30 instead of a $10 / month pledge, they’d would have $32,745,270. Maybe that will save Big Bird and maybe it won’t; but even if it doesn’t it’s a darn sight better and more secure than the nothing that failed petitioning campaigns produce.

There’s a general principles here worth mentioning; it’s a principle the Left used to care about. It’s called direct action, and the longer the Progressive wing of the Left keeps ignoring it — the longer that they spend throwing time and organizing effort down the tubes to beg the government to support the institutions that they like — the longer we are all going to be losers.

— GT 2005-06-25: Shut up and put up

Hey, guess what showed up in my inbox last week? Quick! Everybody make a massive public outcry!

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org Civic Action
To: Charles Johnson
Date: 6/8/2006
Subject: Save NPR and PBS (again)

Everyone expected House Republicans to give up efforts to kill NPR and PBS after a massive public outcry stopped them last year. But they’ve just voted to eliminate funding for NPR and PBS–unbelievably, starting with programs like Sesame Street.

Public broadcasting would lose nearly a quarter of its federal funding this year. Even worse, all funding would be eliminated in two years–threatening one of the last remaining sources of watchdog journalism.

Sign the petition telling Congress to save NPR and PBS again this year …

Here’s what Winer was referring to:

Health research, school aid and social services for the poor would bear budget cuts under a bill approved by a House panel Wednesday. … The House Appropriations Labor-HHS Subcommittee approved the bill by a 9-7 party-line vote Wednesday …. The panel’s action also rekindles a battle fought last year over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The bill would cut by 5 percent previously appropriated funds for the budget year beginning Oct. 1 and eliminate subsidies for educational programs and technological upgrades. The bill also fails to provide future-year funding for public television as is the typical practice.

— Andrew Taylor, The Guardian (2006-06-16): House Panel Cuts Health Research Budget

Four days later, Winer was ecstatic to report:

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org Civic Action
To: Charles Johnson
Date: 6/12/2006
Subject: Save NPR and PBS (again)

Dear Charles,

I just wanted to share some very cool news with you.

Over the last couple of days, over 300,000 people (including 80,000 who are totally new to MoveOn) have signed on to our petition to save NPR and PBS. That brings the total number of signers to over 1,400,000–making this not only our largest petition ever, but one of the largest petitions anyone’s done.

But the next vote in Congress will be as soon as tomorrow. To stop Congress’ budget cuts, we need to go even bigger: we’re aiming for 1.5 million of us to sign on by tomorrow. Can you join us by adding your name to the petition to protect NPR and PBS? It just takes a minute, but it’ll make a real impact.

The real impact that this made was to send over 1,400,000 copies of the following note to members of Congress:

TO: Your senators and representative
FROM: (Your Name and Email)
SUBJECT: Save NPR and PBS

Dear senators and representative,

(Your personal note)

Congress must save NPR, PBS, and local public stations. We trust them for in-depth news and educational children’s programming. It’s money well spent.

This strong show of public outrage produced the following real impact on June 13:

WASHINGTON — The House Appropriations Committee voted Tuesday to restore $20 million of proposed cuts in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides money to local public television and radio stations.

The Bush administration originally proposed to cut about 37% of the federal funding for public broadcasting, and a subcommittee last week proposed a cut of $115 million, or 23%.

A net cut of $95 million, if passed by the House and the Senate, would go into effect Oct. 1. It would result in the elimination of some educational programming, including Ready to Learn, a literacy program, and Ready to Teach, an online resource for teachers, according to a National Public Radio spokesman.

—Los Angeles Times (2006-06-14): Smaller Bite Sought Out of Corporation for Public Broadcasting

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) – The House Appropriations Committee voted on Tuesday to slash funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and refused to fund the service for 2009.

— Brooks Boliek, Reuters (2006-06-14): House panel votes to slash public broadcast funds

Meanwhile, I shut the fuck up and made an annual contribution to my local PBS station at the $40 membership level. If those 1.4 million people in the MoveOn orbit had done what I did, instead of what they did, public broadcasters would now have over $56,000,000 to put in the bank, no matter what Congressional Republicans say or do or think about it. The time, energy, and money wasted on throwing 1.4 million nearly identical notes about money well spent managed to salvage a bit more than a third of that in reductions to the budget cuts, and it leaves PBS and NPR at the mercy of next year’s round of government budgeting. (Oh, but don’t you worry–when that happens I’m sure that MoveOn will mount another massive public outcry to save PBS and NPR again, again.)

We can do this ourselves, so quit begging. Shut up and put up.

Are we about to turn a corner in Iraq, or should we just cut our losses and get out now? How much longer should we let things play out before we take a decisive step towards disengagement? Let’s ask Tom Friedman, the New York Times’s resident Sensible Liberal and global brain. Apparently, we need to let this play out for a while before we do anything rash. The next six months are critical. Give it until November or December of 2006. Then we’ll know:

Well, I think that we’re going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months–probably sooner–whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we’re going to have to just let this play out.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Hardball, MSNBC (May 11, 2006)

How much longer should we let things play out before we take a decisive step towards disengagement? Let’s ask Tom Friedman, the New York Times’s resident Sensible Liberal and global brain. Apparently, we need to let this play out for a while before we do anything rash. The next six months are critical. Give it until March or April of 2004. Then we’ll know:

The next six months in Iraq–which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there–are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.

–Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times (November 30, 2003)

We should let this play out for a while before we do anything rash. The next six months are critical. Give it until December of 2004 or January of 2005. Then we’ll know:

What I absolutely don’t understand is just at the moment when we finally have a UN-approved Iraqi-caretaker government made up of–I know a lot of these guys–reasonably decent people and more than reasonably decent people, everyone wants to declare it’s over. I don’t get it. It might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what’s the rush? Can we let this play out, please?

–Thomas L. Friedman, Fresh Air, NPR (June 3, 2004)

The next six months are critical. Give it until April or May of 2005. Then we’ll know:

What we’re gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Face the Nation, CBS (October 3, 2004)

Give it until June or July of 2005:

Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won’t be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.

–Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times (November 28, 2004)

We’re in the end game now. Give it until March or April of 2006:

I think we’re in the end game now…. I think we’re in a six-month window here where it’s going to become very clear and this is all going to pre-empt I think the next congressional election–that’s my own feeling–let alone the presidential one.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Meet the Press (September 25, 2005)

Give it until March or April of 2006:

Maybe the cynical Europeans were right. Maybe this neighborhood is just beyond transformation. That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won’t, then we are wasting our time.

–Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times (September 28, 2005)

June or July of 2006:

We’ve teed up this situation for Iraqis, and I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse into three parts or more or whether it’s going to come together.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Face the Nation (December 18, 2005)

July to October of 2006:

I think that we’re going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding. In which case, I think the American people as a whole will want to play it out or whether it really is a fool’s errand.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Oprah Winfrey Show (January 23, 2006)

We’re in the end game now. We’ll see by sometime around May to July of 2006:

I think we’re in the end game there, in the next three to six months, Bob. We’ve got for the first time an Iraqi government elected on the basis of an Iraqi constitution. Either they’re going to produce the kind of inclusive consensual government that we aspire to in the near term, in which case America will stick with it, or they’re not, in which case I think the bottom’s going to fall out.

–Thomas L. Friedman, CBS (January 31, 2006)

We’re in the end game now. We’ll see by sometime around September to December of 2006:

I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq. –Thomas L. Friedman, Today, NBC (March 2, 2006)

We need to let this play out for a while before we do anything rash. The next six months are critical. Give it until November or December of 2006. Then we’ll know:

Well, I think that we’re going to find out, Chris, in the next year to six months–probably sooner–whether a decent outcome is possible there, and I think we’re going to have to just let this play out.

–Thomas L. Friedman, Hardball, MSNBC (May 11, 2006)

Next month: Tom Friedman thinks that we’re going to find out whether it’s time to leave Iraq in the next six months! Give it until January 2007…

Be sure to bear in mind, in case you are confused, that there are always more corners to turn when you are lost in an endless maze.

(Quotes thanks to FAIR 2006-05-16. Link thanks to Dominion Weblog 2006-05-16.)

Here are some highlights from our Prince President’s recent remarks on immigration policy

1. Existing immigration policy is deeply flawed and in need of comprehensive, liberalizing reform. So our first priority should be to immediately increase the resources devoted to enforcing an admittedly unreasonable policy.

2. The United States is not going to militarize the southern border. The Feds are just going to deploy 6,000 soldiers to to the southern border, with high-tech barricades and air support, in order to secure and enforce their full control of it.

3. The government currently has trouble identifying and deporting undocumented immigrants because they often carry forged identification documents. In order to combat this problem, the government should introduce a new identification document.

4. We must always remember that real lives will be affected by our debates and decisions and that every human being has dignity and value, no matter what their citizenship papers say. On the other hand, Americans are bound together by our shared ideals, an appreciation of our history, respect for the flag we fly, and an ability to speak and write the English language, so those with real lives who aren’t so sure about those ideals, that history, the flag, or who don’t see any reason to learn a foreign language, will still be thrown into newly-expanded detention camps, have their livelihoods destroyed, and will be exiled from the country as expeditiously as possible.

Thank you, and good night.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-03-31: Libertarians Against Property Rights: You Will Be Assimilated edition
• No Treason (2006-05-15): Bush calls for biometric ID
• Majiksthise (2006-05-16): Rejecting mass deportation is the middle ground

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from Barbara Leon’s essay, Consequences of the Conditioning Line in Feminist Revolution, the 1975 anthology by the Redstockings.

Consequences of the Conditioning Line

The issue of psychological interpretation of behavior has been one of the major ideological divisions between Redstockings and other groups in the women’s liberation movement. While other groups have argued that women submit to their own oppression due to past training, brainwashing, or programming, Redstockings said:

We reject the idea that women consent to or are to blame for their own oppression. Women’s submission is not the result of brainwashing, stupidity or mental illness but of continual, daily pressure from men. We do not need to change ourselves, but to change men. —Manifesto, July 7, 1969

What other groups saw as submissive behavior, Redstockings saw as ways women, when still struggling individually, fight for what they want given their situation.

Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, in their book Rebirth of Feminism, have asserted that it was this position of Redstockings, adopted as the pro-woman line, along with an overemphasis on consciousness-raising, which led to the groups dissolution in 1970:

In the view of many feminists the anti-brainwashing/pro-woman position leads not only to a paralysis of action–what external changes in behavior can a woman effect if her behavior is understood only as a rational response to the social system–but also to a paralysis of thought. Although Redstocking’s rejection of traditionally-accepted psychological expanations of women’s behavior does offer new insights, one former member of the group has argued, When you begin to believe the pro-woman line, it distorts your perception of reality. It’s too simplistic. —Rebirth of Feminism, p. 172

Left out from the book was the pro-woman line’s prescription for collective action and political strategy. Also wrong was its conclusion as to the harmful effects of Redstockings’ anti-brainwashing theory on the history of the group. Redstockings was temporarily halted by the same problems which Hole and Levine ascribe to other women’s liberation groups, most notably attacks on leadership from within and without the group. In fact, the accuracy and importance of the pro-woman line has become more evident with recent developments.

What began, to some extent, as an analysis of women’s behavior in our personal and emotional lives now appears to have even larger political significance as we see the active use of psychological theories to deny women jobs under capitalism and to explain away the continued oppression of women in socialist countries. In both cases, women are told, failure to advance is caused by women’s lack of self-confidence and clinging to traditional roles. This blocks any real analysis of the roots of male supremacy and the continued use of power to keep women in a subordinate position. The capitalist’s self-interest requires that he maintain segregation in order to pay women less and in this way depress the level of all wages. In the case of the socialist, there are conflicting interests. On the one hand, the unpaid services provided by women as wives and mothers have great economic value and raise the standard of living of male workers. On the other hand, men’s opportunism in oppressing women detracts from the united power of the working class.

Brainwashing and Women: The Psychological Attack, which I wrote in the Spring of 1970, outlined the basic position that the new psychological theories used in some parts of the women’s liberation movement–theories that women are brainwashed or conditioned into inferiority–are just a more sophisticated version of the old theories of women’s biological inferiority. As in the following quote from Marcuse, nature is simply replaced by second nature:

… over and above the obviously physiological differences between male and female, the feminine characteristics are socially conditioned. However, the long process of thousands of years of social conditioning means that they may become second nature which is not changed automatically by the establishment of new social institutions. There can be discrimination against women even under socialism.–H. Marcuse, lecture 3/7/74, Stanford University

These theories shift the burden of blame from men to women, obscuring the power differences between men and women, and preventing us from clearly seeing just what the barriers are that have to be overcome–barriers that exist not in our heads but in the real world. My article stressed the punishment given to women who step out of line. It did not go into another important way in which men exercise their power to enforce the status quo–rewarding women for good behavior. Nor did it go into the use of myth and lies promoted by the powerful to deny us access to real information and collective knowledge. This was not simply an oversight. At the time the article was written there was tremendous opposition to the idea that force was ever used against women at all.

Carol Hanisch’s article, published in the July-August 1973 issue of Woman’s World, introduces the idea that conditioning is seen as making women unqualified–an idea that has taken on great economic significance as the newest justification for keeping women out of jobs. She shows that sex role theory as well as conditioning is used as a cover up for oppression. She also analyzes why psychological theories are used by women in the movement, what they get out of defining the problems in this way. Thus, this article, written a year later, begins to take on the political problem of female opportunism and the interests and misconceptions behind it.

Colette Price points out how the conditioning arguments used in the women’s movement are an ironic retreat even from the theories of establishment behavioral psychologists.

By the Fall of 1972, the situation in this country had changed somewhat. Women’s liberation had become a mass movement and the establishment in this country was forced to change its words, if not its practices. In Feminist Art Journal Patricia Mainardi reported on a television interview with William Rubin, Chief Curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in which Rubin used the acceptable rhetoric of liberal feminism as an excuse for not recognizing and showing the work of women artists.

To describe women as culturally or psychologically inferior is untrue, as well as being an insult, as the early radical feminists discovered. To say that this alleged inferiority makes us unqualified for taking on jobs or positions of power is worse, because economic survival as well as respect is involved. This is the full significance of the psychological attack. At every level of society it presents analysis (contrary to the opposite charge of Hole and Levine) and in practical terms blocks the advancement of women. Within the movement, it can be used to discredit anything women say we want. It isn’t necessary to argue over goals, desires or impressions if you can write off the brainwashed women expressing them. Women’s legitimate demands for love and commitment from men, for example, have often been dismissed in this way. Outside the movement, in the job and educational world, real issues can be similarly avoided. It isn’t necessary for an employer or a university to admit to excluding women if he can simply say that no qualified women have applied–or even that none exist at this point in history due to the past effects of sexism. It isn’t necessary for socialist governments to challenge their own backwardness and lack of class perspective regarding half their people if they can instead point to the backwardness of the female population.

Psychology versus power, then, is not an abstract intellectual argument. It is important because the content of your theory determines the content of your action. How you define what is wrong determines how you will try to solve the problem. How much you are allowed to question determines how much you will be allowed to change.

–Barbara Leon, Consequences of the Conditioning Line, from Feminist Revolution: An Abridged Edition with Additional Writings (1975/1979), pp. 66–67.

Further reading:

• Ellen Willis, Ramparts (1969): Women and the Myth of Consumerism
• GT 2005-11-25: Holiday reminder: Buy Something!
• GT 2004-11-26: Buy Something!
• Austro-Athenian Empire 2005-11-10: It’s All in Her Head

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is from The Power of History by Kathie Sarachild, the leading essay from Feminist Revolution, an insightful, indispensable, and sometimes infuriating anthology published in 1975 by the Redstockings; the essay is, among other things, a kind of memo on where the anthology as a whole is coming from and why the Redstockings thought it was so important to put it together:

The grass-roots appeal of feminism has been reflected in the composition of liberal feminist organizations like NOW as well as in the mass response to the radical ideas and agitation.

Yet the radical, feminist women faced opposition all the way, with constant advice from all sides that everything they were doing would have the opposite effect: that it would raise antagonism and bitterness, tat it was unrealistic and would get nowhere, that it wasn’t speaking to where women were at.

What lay behind the successful plans and strategies of the women’s liberation activists, what kindled the wonderful explosion, was simply their commitment to a radical understanding and approach to feminism, to discovering the common issues facing women and addressing them directly at their deepest level. They were not playing political games, trying to figure out whether women or men were ready for this or that, whether this or that would be understood or be popular.

This was going to be a movement in our own self-interest, as we said. This was going to be a fight for ourselves, for our own immediate lives, as well as for our dreams — a movement growing from our own experience, addressing the problems we ourselves had encountered. But a fundamental part of this effort to better understand our own situation was the radical understanding that the conditions in our own lives we wanted to change were essentially the common situation for women. This understanding of ourselves was going to be essential to the common fight because it was what put a person in touch with the common fight, connected a person directly to the common fight. We wanted to change the world out of our own self-interest, and because we had such a strong sense of this being in our interest, we felt sure we could convey this sense to all who shared the same interests.

With all our talk about self-interest, it was, of course, all along common interest that we were talking about, the common interest of women.

The intensity of our belief that our own personal interest arose out of the common situation was what made usknow that there would be no conflict between standing up for our own impulses and desires and analysis growing out of our own situation, and launching a mass movement. All the politicking, the guessing at the popularity of this or that, the feasibility of this or that with one group or another, would build nothing, really. It would fail to turn women on and maybe even turn them off. We knew this because we acknowledged our own most honest reaction.

The radical, feminist interest in developing and disseminating theory–in raising and spreading consciousness–was scorned, even attacked, by the liberal feminists and non-feminist left alike, who were always calling for action and for whom no amount of action we engaged in was ever even acknowledged. They were always posing it as analysis versus action, and priding themselves in being the activists, or the politicos, or the steady, on-going workers who accomplished tangible, concrete gains in the community, in the nation, for themselves, or what not. They always implied that the radical, theory people (as they would sometimes complain about us) didn’t take any action, didn’t produce any actual changes in the everyday lives of women.

Don’t agonize, organize was a favorite one liner. Of course, when stated as Don’t analyze, organize a lot of the punch goes out of it.

Oddly enough, there was also the totally contradictory charge, usually from the left, that the women’s liberation movement needed some theory, hadn’t produced any theory. Just as the actions of the radical feminists were not seen as actions–they were too petty, too sporadic, or what not–their analysis was not seen as analysis or theory.

What we were trying to do was to advance and develop both theory and action, and to unite them, putting theory into action and action into theory. It was this commitment to unity of the two, of course, which made us radicals, and which made us such a threat to liberals, right and left, who had a hard enough time recognizing and supporting feminism in either the realm of theory or action–and who apparently went blank or haywire when confronted with the combination.

Whatever we were doing just never seemed to fall within the range of the liberal left’s vision. But in the beginning it did fall within the range of the TV cameras and newspapers.

In fact, it was the public actions of the radicals, the consciousness-raising section of the movement, that put the WLM on the map. This was true of virtually every category of action you could name–from confrontation, consciousness-raising actions like the picketing and disruption of the Miss America Contest to developing techniques for mass organizing to producing journals, newspapers and books which were widely disseminated.

But the radical theory and strategy was not only the source of widespread mobilization, was not only what sparked the interest of the masses of women, it was also what produced the most in the way of concrete results, the most changes in women’s lives. This is another lesson of the past decade whose truth comes clear with access to an authentic history of the movement. The greatest achievements of the women’s liberation movement so far, those that have reached the masses of women as a whole–greater freedom in the area of birth control and abortion, greater freedom from oppressive dress codes, and the spread of feminist theory and consciousness–were all the arenas the radicals first addressed and in which they led.

It was in New York State, the area in which radical feminist analysis, action and organizing ideas were strongest and most advanced, that the first concrete breakthrough of the women’s liberation movement in the U.S. was achieved–the abortion law reform which for a few years turned New York State into the abortion mill of the nation and upon which the U. S. Supreme Court modeled its guidelines a few years later. It was the radical strategies of 1) opposition to reform and demand for repeal, led by Lucinda Cisler 2) mass consciousness-raising on abortion with women testifying to their criminal acts in public and in court 3) the development of the feminist self-help clinic ideas and their promotion of simpler, new abortion techniques that led to the nationwide reform in five years time.

The area of employment, on the other hand, is one in which the liberal feminist groups have concentrated and so far have led, and in which there has been as yet very little progress–for most women anyway. (See New Ways of Keeping Women Out of Paid Labor in this book.)

Knowing these things provides information, support and strength for a continuing radical approach and further radical action. But virtually none of it is known.

As soon as the movement began and proved successful, a process set in of wresting control from the women who had started out. And as certain approaches in the movement proved to be popular and successful with other women, the process began of confusing who and what had produced those successful approaches, what thinking, what inds of people, and specifically which people. There was an assault on the history of the movement–to take it over, to lasso it for one’s private ends, to slow it down, to stop it.

Many of the simplest and most powerful elements of the movement’s history I listed earlier have disappeared from sight or the connections between them have been severed. Instead, an array of secondary versions, interpretations and revisions have effaced and replaced the original record.

There are now amazingly different stories of these events, with very different beginnings and very different conclusions. One version doesn’t even have women starting the movement but history and changing times starting it instead. If history or changing times isn’t behind the changes then technology is, or the economy.

The rise of the feminist movement reflected a certain historic context, but this context had to be unlocked by analysis in order to be opened up for attack and work.

The knowledge of who started the movement contains important political lessons for women as does the knowledge of what brought women their gains. That women started the movement and gave it its strength and momentum suggests that it was necessary for women to start the movement, that men would not start the movement, that men don’t lead women to their freedom. Women must rely on themselves for that–not because they should but because they have to.

–Kathie Sarachild, The Power of History, from Feminist Revolution: An Abridged Edition with Additional Writings (1975/1979), pp. 18–21.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #33
• GT 2004-10-29: These Old Stories
• GT 2004-03-03: She Said, She Said: the misinterpretation of Susan Brownmiller on anatomy and rape
• GT 2004-01-22: Happy Roe v. Wade Day!