NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
Kauffman, L.A.
NOW for Something Completely Different BY L.A. KAUFFMAN When the National Organization for Women held its annual meeting last fall, Coretta Scott King forcefully proclaimed in her keynote...
...And it's easy to gloss over the troubled state of feminist affairs...
...Perhaps it was inevitable, for NOW has merely followed through on its original momentum...
...In other communities, comparable worth, education reform, sexual harassment, and violence against women could all be given the attention they have long needed...
...They run the local chapters, serve on the regional or national boards, or work at the national office, and they set the organization's priorities, despite the votes taken on major issues at conferences...
...So the organization ends up spending enormous amounts of energy and resources on "lesser evil" candidates whose adherence to feminist stands is rarely guaranteed...
...Despite the political success of feminism, something seems to have been lost along the way...
...Building such an organization will not be easy...
...Long-time feminist activists, wherever they have worked, could bring practical knowledge and experience to a new organization...
...Kauffman, a former editorial intern at The Progressive, is active in feminist organizations...
...But just as the old radical feminism developed apart from the liberal feminism of NOW, a new radical feminism won't evolve out of NOW itself...
...Some chapters, such as those in Maine, give priority to issues of their own choosing...
...Such far-reaching questions as day care and comparable worth are downplayed...
...Spring was eventually hired as a chapter developer in the national office, but NOW's big membership campaigns continue, and the local chapters simply cannot sustain contact with all those who join...
...Certainly it was NOW's day: Speaker after speaker related NOW success stories of feminist candidates elected or legislative votes gained for feminist positions...
...Many of the special-interest groups have their own task forces...
...It is successful feminism, undoubtedly vital to the larger feminist movement, but it is limited feminism...
...Miriam Slifkin, a NOW member from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, tells a story typical of those that made the rounds at the national conference...
...But the upbeat talk doesn't tell the whole story...
...Most of NOW's day-to-day policy decisions are made by the few women who have the time and conviction to devote their lives to the organization...
...But if feminist activism is to go beyond a narrow pragmatism, what is needed is a new grass-roots political sensibility that arises from keenly felt common experience and common discontent...
...KAUFFMAN When the National Organization for Women held its annual meeting last fall, Coretta Scott King forcefully proclaimed in her keynote address, "Women, this is our day...
...With more than a quarter of a million members, a multimillion-dollar annual budget, 800 local chapters, and eighty-five political action committees, NOW has become big-time feminism...
...And its economic approach is well within the big-party mainstream...
...Those who wish to see feminism transcend conventional politics need only join together to begin creating a dynamic grassroots movement...
...When sisterhood is mentioned in the movement at all these days, it is usually a code word for cultural feminist separatism...
...In every organization, there has to be a group that acts as the conscience of the organization," says Reckitt...
...NOW doesn't like third parties, and it doesn't like backing people whose chance of election is slim, no matter how feminist their convictions...
...Some women, like Cheryl Jenni in Montana, believe they have no choice at all...
...simplistic in its insistent tracing of all human inequality to sexual oppression...
...Today, NOW functions much like any other large organization: Robert's Rules oj Order, internal politicking, bureaucratic mix-ups are all standard fare...
...Each NOW conference is rocked by bitter budgetary battles...
...Electoral work, central to NOW's political strategy, has almost become an end in itself...
...NOW has long been attacked by radicals for being too "reformist," too white, too middle-class...
...If we were all down-the-line three-piece-suit moderates, there'd be no pressure to look at things in new ways...
...Largely missing from that politics are the creativity and collectivity that once marked the feminist movement...
...There is some truth in the criticism...
...choosing radical yet realizable goals...
...Twenty years after its founding, it is clearly a political success...
...Activists in one city might decide to focus on abortion, or day-care funding, or a unionizing drive for women clerical workers...
...Some people don't like various aspects of NOW," says Rhoda Jenkins, one of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's great-granddaughters and a member of the Greenwich, Connecticut, NOW, "but where else are you going to go...
...NOW makes much of its independence from party politics—one of its favorite slogans is, "Women weren't born Republican, Democrat, or yesterday"—but that independence is necessarily limited...
...From time to time, they become frustrated or angry: After Sonia Johnson was narrowly defeated in her bid for the NOW presidency in 1982, the motley coalition of radical, socialist, lesbian, and cultural feminists that backed her even whispered of a split from NOW...
...The strong radical feminist political presence that flourished in the early 1970s was, in many respects, badly flawed: stereotypical in its characterizations of male and female nature...
...It's easy to feel proud of the success of individual women politicians and the seriousness with which NOW is finally being taken...
...Some women, like Reckitt, may elect to "stay and push," but the time has come for an independent, organizational alternative...
...But except for an active few, their relationship to the organization is, at best, impersonal...
...The feminist movement needs a third way—a more progressive, activist approach to feminist concerns...
...The result is profound: Personal transformation has been stripped of its political content and political change compromised by the loss of its personal element...
...A kind of intensity is still there: an overwhelming excitement about the money, the success, and the newly won political influence...
...With leaders at the top, paper members at the bottom, and a stream of forms and memos in between, NOW doesn't provide much room for the personal in the political, or for the feminist phenomenon once known as sisterhood...
...Feminists whose interest is political rather than cultural have few options...
...My views are a lot more radical than NOW's," she says, "but I don't see any channel right now for my radicalism...
...understanding the interplay of sex, race, and class...
...That, after all, is what sisterhood should be...
...But the pragmatism of national NOW predominates, and by default it has become the major voice of feminist politics in the United States...
...No one could accuse NOW of forcing out its dissenters...
...There is nothing particularly innovative about the electoral and lobbying tactics NOW uses, nothing especially dynamic about the range of issues it pursues...
...Cultural feminists have built the kind of institutional framework an activist group would need: women's buildings in which to hold meetings, feminist bookstores in which to advertise activities, women's bars and cafes in which to conduct fund-raising events...
...Feminists cannot afford to limit themselves to NOW's big-time politics or to stagnate in a separatist culture...
...Such social issues as reproductive rights, lesbian rights, and violence against women get more verbal than financial support...
...But when it comes to NOW follow-up, unwritten priorities come first...
...Over the years, most of the small feminist political action groups faded away, victims of conservative trends in our society or of their own lack of structure and innovation...
...But NOW can find no graceful way to avoid working for the amendment, so the campaign goes on...
...But God forbid we'd scare anybody...
...Given feminism's condition outside NOW—fragmented, often apolitical, sometimes incorporated into other movements—and its equally problematic status within NOW itself, the need for an activist alternative to the National Organization for Women is evident...
...They sponsor workshops—on racism in the feminist movement, on working-class women, on violence against women—but despite the often large turnouts, they rarely get more than token verbal support...
...Instead money goes first to the political action committees, followed by the ERA drive and campaigns against discrimination in insurance and social security...
...One approach for overcoming both the structural and political problems would be to create a network of community and campus activist groups, emphasizing local action and national discussion and resource-sharing...
...And feminist scholars have assembled a sound analytical context for a new political debate...
...Within NOW, local chapters do show a degree of diversity...
...after all, the women who tell these stories have felt the frustration of years of feminist defeats, especially the defeat of the ERA...
...NOW delegates are diligent about passing resolutions, and, in the words of Lois Reckitt, a NOW member since 1971 and former national board member, "On paper, the priorities are fine...
...In the old days," Reckitt remembers, "it was a really intense small family—that's what NOW felt like—with occasional sibling rivalry...
...Throughout the year, feminist organizers could meet at the regional and national level to compare strategies, priorities, and results...
...Radical feminism turned to cultural feminism...
...The more traditional NOW made the political advances, left as it was with an almost total monopoly on feminist politics...
...Members send in their dues, read the monthly newsletter, and perhaps turn out for a meeting now and again...
...soon after, he added his name to the list of ERA sponsors...
...Politically, it will have to avoid the ideological excesses of the old radical feminism as well as the limitations of feminist pragmatism...
...Formed out of President Kennedy's 1961 Commission on the Status of Women and dedicated to bringing women "into the mainstream of society," NOW was designed from the outset as a national organization with a mainstream political approach...
...Structurally, a new organization will need to strike a balance between the instability of many feminist collectives and the mainstream rigidity of NOW...
...Speaker after speaker-many of them women holding elective office—talked about the gender gap and feminist political hopes for 1984...
...Here and there, feminist activists joined up with various socialist and peace groups...
...It's easy to get caught up in that spirit, to cheer when Coretta Scott King cries, "Women, this is our day...
...Most of the talk in NOW these days is of political candidates and legislative influence, money and votes, electoral stratL.A...
...Even consciousness-raising, once integral to the politics of feminism, is now considered apolitical, or used only as what Elaine Joslin, from the Oakland County, Michigan, NOW chapter, terms "a good recruitment, involvement, activating tool...
...There are many traps into which liberal feminists, cultural feminists, and radical feminists have fallen in the past...
...It's talk that hints at political clout and reflects hard-won political gains...
...Many of the special-interest groups are simply not funded...
...A great deal of excitement accompanies the new-found influence...
...the political feminists in NOW no longer think of feminism in terms of individual women's lives...
...But no such split occurred, or was even seriously considered...
...feminism professionalized, dominated by a small group of full-time activists...
...Last year, NOW became one of the first national organizations to endorse Walter Mondale's bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination...
...Feminist theory has matured in the past decade, and radical feminist activism can mature, as well, recognizing the complexities of power, human relationships, and social institutions...
...It is overwhelmingly white and wealthy, but the women wouldn't pretend to be anything else...
...unrealistic in its cries for revolution...
...Six of the 1984 Democratic Presidential candidates addressed the group, each trying to out-feminist the others and garner NOW's pre-primary endorsement...
...So you stay and you push a little and eventually things change...
...Each conference is all but overwhelmed by special-interest caucuses and special-interest resolutions— for working-class women, handicapped women, minority women, women in the military...
...In the end, NOW is feminism imper-sonalized, divorced from its grass-roots base...
...But given the state of feminist affairs, NOW shapes feminist politics in the United States, and for that reason it is decidedly not just like any other group...
...feminism institutionalized, rigidly structured, with an internal agenda of its own...
...And it is feminism legitimized, locked within the narrow confines of electoral and legislative politics...
...Some within NOW have blamed the national office for the largely passive membership, claiming that local chapters lack sufficient guidance to inspire new members...
...A structure of this sort would give feminists the freedom to experiment with radically new activist approaches while still offering coherent organizational form...
...NOW is about dividing the pie up more equally," explains Cheryl Jenni of the Billings, Montana, chapter...
...Gone, too, is the interplay between the personal and the political, between feminist analysis and feminist action...
...I want to change the kind of pie...
...I debated about joining NOW because I saw it as a terribly bourgeois organization," says one black woman from the New York City chapter...
...It no longer refers to the commonality of social and political experience that should underlie any feminist activism...
...others— the Princeton, New Jersey, chapter, for instance—still experiment with collective forms of leadership...
...I'm in NOW because I see it as effective in the political scene...
...They would treat politics as a process, using analysis to guide action, basing priorities on need, looking to a wide range of issues...
...With pride in her voice, Slifkin says, "The gender gap sends a message that women are a force to be recognized...
...Year after year, women with similar sentiments bring up resolutions at the national conference, hoping to stir up interest in new issues and steer NOW into different forms of activism...
...Participants would concentrate on community and workplace organizing rather than legislative and electoral strategizing...
...NOW represents liberal feminism and it pays scrupulous attention to the various special-interest groups within the organization...
...egy, campaign finance rules, lobbying, and direct-mail techniques...
...One woman, Judy Spring, tried to tackle the problem head-on, independently traveling around the country as an "itinerant chapter builder...
...A substantial portion of NOW's enormous membership belongs on paper only...
...An organization of this type could draw on the resources of all the existing branches of feminism, augmenting rather than simply fusing or supplanting them...
...The ERA campaign, too, has become a kind of trap: As important and desirable as the amendment is, it has become a liability to the feminist movement, draining energy from equally important and more attainable goals...
...Other feminist political groups experimented with collective, nonhierarchical forms of leadership and with radically different tactics, but NOW chose a more conventional route...
...Still, whatever diversity exists within the organization is rarely projected outward into NOW's political action...
...Particularly at the national level, NOW's politics can best be described as conventional, pragmatic, electorally based...
...NOW has achieved considerable political success, and it won't suffer if a new organization is formed...
...If women were ever paid for comparable worth, we'd have an economic revolution," says Reckitt...
...When the member of Congress whose candidacy her chapter had supported in 1982 wavered in his support of the Equal Rights Amendment, Slifkin gave him a quick call, reminding him of his political debt to NOW...
...Many economic issues receive only the most perfunctory attention...
Vol. 48 • March 1984 • No. 3
