OPENING KEYNOTE PLENARY
Generating Feminism:
Barbara Smith, Gerda Lerner, Ellen Bravo, and Lisa Jarvis

by Leni Marshall

An inspiring plenary panel-Ellen Bravo founder of "9to5: National Association of Working Women;" Lisa Jarvis, Editor of "Bitch" Magazine; Gerda Lerner, pioneer and “godmother” of women’s history; and Feminist Activist Barbara Smith -spoke to a room full of NWSA Milwaukee conference-goers on “Generations of Feminism.” Panelists discussed feminisms’ generative power, its many roots and current manifestations.

Barbara Smith: Feminism is Work

Barbara Smith is an author and independent scholar who has played a ground breaking role in opening a national cultural and political dialogue about the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender.

Smith spoke of her background with the Combahee River Collective, her experiences with white feminism and with organizing around the murders of 12 black women in Boston. She felt like she had been through a war, and she had little patience for white women. She stayed with feminism, though, because racism is a feminist issue, because feminism is a political theory and practice that struggles to liberate all women. Anything less than this vision is not feminism but merely female aggrandizement. Women’s issues of power globally are layered.
"A global movement of women is working for transformation. I don’t worry if women doing the work for justice call themselves feminists or not. In the present women of color of all races and nationalities are leaders in challenging imperialism, in working for universal access to quality healthcare, universal access for the handicapped, education, humane welfare, job training, affordable housing, and the eradication of violence, including police brutality.

We need to ask ourselves, what does our work need to be...to ensure a sustainable future for the earth and humanity? "

Smith then talked about her local activism she is doing in collaboration with the Christian community, working toward accountable police and government practices. In the year-and-a-half of their efforts, they have deposed a city council leader, the commissioner of public safety and a police chief. “Feminism has taught me how to sit in a room and have a meeting. The incredible background of humanity gotten from being in the global women’s movement includes people introducing each other and making sure each person has a chance to speak.”

As feminists, says Smith, our work is “not about the generations past; it’s about our future-a future that we all share in work.”

Gerda Lerner:
History Becomes Us

Although Mary Beard was Lerner’s mentor, Lerner credits Miriam Holden-who established the greatest private library of women’s history in the U.S.-for teaching Lerner women’s history. Encountering the library in Holden’s brownstone, Lerner said she “entered utopia, where in one building, [she] could see women together.”
Establishing the first women’s program in history in 1972, Lerner thought that she was building on that utopian model. Clearly, the utopia has not fully materialized-in part because Women’s Studies is currently under attack from two sides: budget cuts, and the right wing. The necessary response-entrenching in the academy-comes at a cost, says Lerner: feminists are spending too much time and energy in turf wars and academic structures, endangering our connections to activism. Lerner listed Women’s Studies’ four main challenges:

• The recent past predominates feminist scholarship. Confusing relevance with contemporaneousness puts current knowledge in a dangerous place, because it silences large groups of women in the past, including women of Lerner’s age. “History is a repository.... To empathize, to learn, to build lasting coalitions and alliances, we must look to history for the tools we need to equip ourselves for the future.”

• Women’s history studies compels women to view themselves as agents, not just as victims. This attitude is necessary for a lifelong commitment to social change and social action-the essence of feminism. Thus, without a greater emphasis on women’s history studies, feminism is incomplete.

• In education’s history, elites suppressed people based on gender and class. Now that women are allowed into the academy, it is both “puzzling and painful to see how many are choosing to replicate that pattern.”

• In the last five years of feminist journal articles, approximately 10 percent are about women in organizations and women in work, while 32 percent are about gender and image, “doing woman-focused, rather than woman-centered, work.” Lerner emphasized the difference between additive and integrative analyses, encouraging feminists to ask multiple questions, because we can’t have just one agenda. Lerner believes that we must ask transforming questions of our empirical research: do we want our work to change women’s definitions, or to change women’s social positions and conditions?

We have begun to reconstruct the history of silenced women “that would enable us to see women and men as agents.” She believes that Women’s Studies can change that, and she exhorted us to continue working. Women’s Studies “can not be destroyed from the outside, but it could be co-opted or destroyed from the inside. The future of women’s studies is in your hands.”

Lisa Jervis: Third Wave Goodbye

Lisa Jervis joked that Lerner’s compelling speech made presenting her own harder, because she was going to discuss the very recent past-feminism’s third wave. People frequently ask Jervis if she is in the third wave. On the surface, she says, the answer is yes. Born in 1972, she is in that chronological demographic. “But this wave is not a demographic,” she asserted. The third wave has been variously defined as a group of “lipgloss lesbians,” “community activists,” and “identity politickers.” Jervis queried: Where did the term come from? Is the definition of the third wave a chronological or ideological question?”

Jervis believes that “the metaphor has become a straitjacket” in which the differences between the waves get overplayed while little is said about similarities. Throwing around generalities about the differences of the most recent two waves has become feminism’s master narrative, Jervis said, but "don’t trust master narratives" should be the lesson of all waves. “The third wave is as diverse as feminism itself because it is, in toto, feminisms. Comparisons of the Riot Grrls with consciousness raising groups, debates about gender versus work to raise the minimum wage-there is no shortage of differences large and small, but these are ideological differences, not generational ones. Those who don’t see current issues as stemming from the past, don’t know history.” Jervis is unworried about the differences among feminist ideologies, because feminism has always thrived and grown because of conflict. She reminded us that, in order to avoid wasting energy discussing generational differences, we must recognize those “differences for what they are: an illusion.”

Ellen Bravo: Feminism 9-5

In 1968, while pursuing her Ph.D., Bravo was in a women’s liberation group, and she was a member of an organization of Grecian women. She was frustrated: “I couldn’t bring my Greek women friends to the women’s group because the women’s group was talking about abortion rights and my Greek friends were worried about how to feed their kids.” After graduation, she got a clerical job, but again, she couldn’t bring her coworkers to a women’s group meeting-until she belonged to a group called “9 to 5.” Their motto was, “My consciousness is fine, it’s my pay that needs raising.” Bravo elaborated on this organization as a model of truly feminist work.
Feminists, said Bravo, have four basic approaches.

• The sisterhood approach; “we’re all women.” But in the name of “all women,” we leave out a lot of people, like black men. If we don’t speak up for all of them, we’re not working for all women. Each of us has to think outside of our own box.

• The “even worse” approach. For example, we say “the pay gap is 74 cents to the dollar for women, and it’s even worse for ____” (fill in the blank: women of color, old people, etc.). This model reifies the hierarchy of oppression.

• The most pitiful/charity model.

• Power. Unless we go to where the most affected are, we will not get to the root of the problem, and if we do not get to the root of the problem, it doesn’t get fixed!

For example, said Bravo, many people liked Bill Clinton’s pro-choice stance. If Clinton had been good on welfare but bad on reproduction, more of us would have been protesting in the streets, but because we were not thinking outside our own boxes, we did not demonstrate.

Feminists are always saying “bring more people to the table.” Bravo reminded us that there are many tables, many women’s movements, and many liberation movements. We must claim all of them, but we can’t claim them unless we stand with them. “We should be working not to put more women in power, but to put more power in the hands of all women and oppressed people.”

The panelists spoke of the differences in generations of feminism-differences in time and productive origin- and how they continue to hold relevance for each of us. The work of each panelist visibly influenced and continues shape feminisms and feminist issues. Their experiences and the effects of those experiences should inspire. Each panelist is a living demonstration of how much potential individuals have to positively impact feminists and feminisms’ futures. In generating the next generation, one person can do so much.