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graphic by Janet Jenkins
Copyright ©1976 by Janet Jenkins

what
future for
leadership

Charlotte Bunch
& Beverly Fisher

graphic by Sigrid Trumpy

The following is an edited transcript
of an interview with Charlotte Bunch
(CB) and Bev Fisher (BF) produced by
the Feminist Radio Network (FRN),
formerly Radio Free Women, Washing-
ton D.C. The original show was engi-
neered by Laura Bertran, edited by
Shirl Smith, and moderated by Juanita
Weaver, former member of FRN; this
transcript was edited by Quest.

* Rights for the original tape from which
this edited version was made are retained
by the Feminist Radio Network.

The Feminist Radio Network is a tax-
exempt educational organization which
serves as a national distribution service for
the sale of a broad range of woman-oriented
and produced tape programs. To contact
the Feminist Radio Network for further
information and a free catalog, write FRN,
P.O. Box 5537, Washington DC 20016.

2/Quest, vol. II no. 4, spring, 1976

FRN: What I'd like you to discuss
first is the issue of leadership as you
saw it in the beginning of the move-
ment, in the days of the counter-
culture, when we were reacting to the
left, and identifying male machismo
and all that went with leadership.
I'd like one of you to speak to what
the movement view was like then, and
how you think it has changed.

CB: Well, I think the most impor-
tant thing is that the original groups in
women's liberation which were pri-
marily small consciousness raising
groups of 5 to 15 people, started in
reaction to both the male Left and the
male establishment; the kinds of lead-
ership, the kinds of elite, the kinds of
power of particular individuals that
went with all that were what we saw

as male forms, the male structures of
leadership. Our desire was to avoid
those structures, to somehow build a
new kind of movement, a new kind of
participation, participatory democracy-
whatever word you want to call it. In
the beginning, people didn't see the
women's movement as a large political
force for the future. It was seen prim-
arily in personal terms, as a group to
talk through certain problems. Before
it became a political movement, the
lack of structures and leadership wasn't
really a problem. But after three or
four months in a C-R type of group,
we saw that in fact our problems were
political. We weren't just a personal
group; as we began to see that the
movement was political, we also began
to face the question of structure and
leadership. We saw that it wasn't

What Future for Leadership ?/3

going to take a few months of figuring
out how to handle our relationships or
situations in a particular job, but the
next 50 years of our lives in struggle
against society's oppression of women.
We started thinking about what ought
to be the structures, the forms of orga-
nization, and the leadership to guide
that struggle.

BF: I think that there were two
other characteristics that you touched
on that I would like to expand upon.
One was the strong emphasis in con-
sciousness-raising groups on the psych-
ological oppression of women; and the
other was the emphasis on the indiv-
idual. However, perhaps defining one's
oppression on an individual and psych-
ological level is sometimes necessary
to developing political consciousness.
There was very little group identity
and that impeded seeing the women's
movement as a political force; as a
movement that needed to gain political
power. Also a lot of movement wom-
en who were leaving the Left and prior
political involvements were white and
middle class. I think the kinds of
needs they felt that were products of
their class and race positions, were
reflected in what the movement was
at that time.

CB: Even among women who saw
the movement as political, or saw it
as building a political force, there was
a very strong anarchist desire. It was a
good desire, but it was an unrealistic
one. We did not want to repeat what
groups of the Left had done, and a lot

of the mistakes that we saw in those
were identified as structure and leader-
ship problems. For example, there
were male Left superstars and women
didn't want to see that happening to
us-even when we saw our movement
as political. The result of the positive
desire to eliminate both sterile bureau-
cratic structures and elitist leadership
was, over time, immobilization. Ac-
tually, three different things resulted:
one was immobilization, because peo-
ple who did not try to exert initiative
and take leadership were put dpwn for
doing so. Any strengths that began to
come out were seen as oppressive
(sometimes those strengths were op-
pressive-especially when they were
class-related); but no distinction was
made between leadership that is op-
pressive and that which is good. Sec-
ond, we had a lot of hidden leader-
ship. Leadership that's hidden is bad
for both the leaders and the people
led: because it isn't acknowledged, it
is more subtle and manipulative, and
because it can't function openly, it is
frustrated. Such leadership is not ac-
countable to anybody-if you're a
hidden leader, you have to keep doing
the work of a leader, taking initiative
and keeping things going, but because
you don't recognize yourself as a
leader and no one else does, you're
neither acknowledged nor accountable.
No one can say, "You were a leader
and you did this well or this poorly,"
so there's a buildup of frustration on
all sides. Whereas a movement that
acknowledges certain leaders can also
put demands on them and can say,

4/Quest

"We acknowledge your leadership; you
take the responsibilities, and if you
don't come through, then you're no
longer our leader." The third result is
that because we did not build struc-
tures that we said were the women's
movement, and we did not say, "These
are our leaders," the media did it for
us. The emergence of a series of wom-
en who have become the media stars
for women's liberation is not simply
the responsibility of those women. It's
the fault of the movement as well for
not taking responsibility for deter-
mining who our leaders would be.
Therefore, when the media wants to
talk about women's liberation, they're
able to pick whomever they desire-and
we have no structure, no organization
to say, "This woman does not rep-
resent us." We have no way to say,
"These are the women we want to be
our spokespersons."

BF: I think another significant fac-
tor in the early movement that was
partially due to the lack of structure
and leadership, was the very limited
ability of small women's groups to
reach out to new women, to go beyond
their original group. When there is no
structure for a new woman to join,
whom does she talk to? Who is respon-
sible for orienting new women? At
that time, everybody questioned whe-
ther it was their responsibility to take
that role on, and did nothing. As a
result, the movement became very
internalized. In other words, it fed
upon the people who were in it. It had
no way to reach out. You need struc-

tures and people who have definitive
responsibilities for tasks such as pub-
licity and welcoming new women to
accomplish that. Then we must develop
means for them to be accountable for
those tasks. When there are no defined
tasks and responsibilities, usually things
just don't get done. For instance, a
woman who has heard about women's
liberation may, after four or five phone
calls, finally be able to find somebody
who is in a consciousness-raising group,
but that C-R group is closed. The most
encouraging words that she can get are,
"Well, you could start your own group."
And the woman calling doesn't even
know what C-R means! There were no
specific entry mechanisms for women
at any level. I think that's been de-
veloped now because of a recognition
that the same people were around all
the time-the movement wasn't grow-
ing although awareness of its existence
was growing in the outside world
through media exposure. As a result,
there were more and more women
seeking it out— but the movement was
not able initially to respond.

CB: Another way that the in-group
thing developed is that if you don't
have a structure, an organization that
in some way represents different in-
terests of women's liberation, but you
do have events and things happening,
somebody has to decide what's going
to happen. I remember in the early
days of D.C. Women's Liberation,
three or four people would get on the
phone and discuss "what should we do
about this or that." There was no way

What Future for Leadership ?/5

to be responsible to that amorphous
body of women's liberation. Because
there was no structure to determine
who approved of what actions, women
either had to do nothing, which meant
immobilization, or they had to make a
decision that was, in its nature, an in-
group or elitist decision. It's ironic that
lack of structures had the opposite
effect from what was desired: women
desired no structure in order for more
people to participate-but if anything,
it made it more difficult for anyone to
participate because you had to know
how to get into the right circles, you
had to know who to call and what to
do. It also made the movement more
middle-class, since those people who
could take that kind of initiative,
who knew how to operate in meetings
and had free time to do so were usually
middle-class. You couldn't be working
full-time at home and on a job and
keep up with the movement when it
meant calling around on the phone and
asking every week what's happening.
Women who didn't know anything

>* \J

y

about women's liberation and were
busy, didn't have time to go through
all that to find out what women's lib-
eration was, and how they could fit in.

6/Quest

BF: It seemed as if anyone coming
into the movement had to be prepared
to deal with everything that was hap-
pening. There was no way, if a woman
had a specific interest or need that she
could limit her involvement to that
particular thing unless there was some-
thing that already existed in that area.
At that time the only project group
that existed in Washington was abor-
tion counseling. Further, women would
have to have the political know-how
to jump into an existing group that
had some kind of intellectual analysis
like anti-imperialism. Again, that was
a real barrier for women who weren't
college-educated and had no prior
Left political experience. Women just
weren't ready to start with abstract
theoretical analysis about women's
class oppression.

FRN: I'd like you to discuss hidden
leadership, because that's what we've
had to deal with.

BF: What usually happens in wom-
en's meetings discussing leadership is
that someone believes passionately that
we can function without it. They are
absolutely certain that by deciding
not to have leadership, leaders are not
going to happen. But they happen any-
way. Leadership is a phenomenon of
group dynamics. Somebody takes init-
iative in speaking, making suggestions
for action, or doing work. They func-
tion as leaders in those instances. The
same thing also happens when we're
talking about power. One woman be-
lieves that we can eliminate power

altogether. I think that there's a much
more realistic appraisal of what power
and leadership are today. Women are
no longer naively saying they don't
exist. The realization that we're going
to have to deal with them because
they're going to happen anyway is the
first step. When we have that consci-
ousness, then we are faced with how to
deal with them. One of the important
factors is tor a group to decide how a
decision is going to be made. Who is
our group? What is our constituency?
Who has the authority and responsi-
bility for making decisions? If we be-
lieve in consensus, how do we reach
it? What is the shared and understood
process for arriving at it? If we believe
in majority vote, how do we assure the
rights of the minority? In the early
movement, there was never any defi-
nition of groups. They were amor-
phous, "whoever came to a meeting."
If you hadn't been at a meeting for
weeks and showed up, you would be
making decisions about something
when you had no information, or all
the previous discussions would have to
be repeated for your benefit. Leader-
ship arose because people who had
been at all the meetings had the in-
formation and led the discussion and
where the issue was going to go. It's
now recognized that we have to de-
fine our constituencies, our groups,
and who makes what decisions and
how they are made. Consciousness is
still high about making sure that every-
one participates in decision-making.
I hope we never lose that consci-
ousness. I have little fear that women

What Future for Leadership?/?

are going to duplicate the tyranny and
dictatorships of patriarchal systems.
As a result of our oppression, we're in
touch with how v/e've been exploited
by those methods.

CB: There is more recognition to-
day of the need for leadership; and
recognition that leadership and struc-
tures go together. But there are still a
lot of problems. I've been in groups
where I've been a hidden leader, an
acknowledged leader, or in groups
where I wasn't a leader-and in each of
those cases, people are willing to say
there's leadership, but there's still a
real fear of it. There's little under-
standing of how to make leadership
accountable, how to make it responsi-
ble to you as a group. That's where
structure is so important. The only
real way to make leadership responsi-
ble is to define who and what a group
is, and then to be able to define what
functions and power you give to who
as leaders in what areas-and what
the group expects in return.

Leaders are not just the same few
people; different people are leaders in
different situations and at different
times. I think leadership is people
taking the initiative, carrying things
through, having the ideas and imagina-
tion to get something started, and
exhibiting particular skills in different
areas. In a given situation, you may
have four or five different types of
people exerting leadership, both within
a group and towards the public. But
unless there's a discussion about how
each of those is a leader and what

each is contributing, there's still a fear
that they'll do too much, or fuck you
over, if you can't do the particular
thing that they're doing. Because of
our oppression as women, many of us
still have internalized fear of our own
strength, and when we see someone
asserting herself, being strong, we're
afraid of what she might do, because
she challenges us to be stronger. Many
women also fear the responsibility of
leadership. Women have taken respons-
ibility in a lot of areas of work, but
we've never had responsibility in what
was defined as the political world. To
be a leader is in fact a very big risk,
because you have to try things and
make mistakes, and you are responsible
for those mistakes. Part of the anti-
leadership attitude was avoiding that
responsibility. If you didn't have any
leaders and something went wrong,
then nobody was responsible and had
to take the blame. Women are fre-
quently afraid of that kind of respon-
sibility, afraid to decide between major
alternatives which have a significant
effect on the world, because we're not
sure that we are competent to decide.
So problems with leadership are not
just being afraid of somebody else
fucking us over-it's also being afraid
of ourselves, and of taking ourselves
seriously.

FRN: Do you both honestly believe
that there will be a more humane
leadership because we have been op-
pressed? A lot of people don't see
much difference between what we're
coming to and what already exists.

8/Quest

BF: I think that Charlotte has al-
ready defined leadership and that our
definition of leadership is different
from the beginning. She mentioned
that there's a recognition among wom-
en of different skills, that we don't
have one leader who is supposed to
represent everything.

I have some fears that if we don't
confront the issue, there will be a
repetition of the mistakes that hap-
pened before. In the reformist wing of
the movement, for instance, in NOW,
there has been some use of the old
forms-the kind of hierarchical leader-
ship that is not responsible to the vast
membership. But I think that that
leadership has been called down also,
referring specifically to NOW. There's
been a real recognition on a local level,
by chapters, of being ignored by their
national leaders. The local women
spoke out and tried to make that lead-
ership more responsible. At the same
time, within what could be called the
women's liberation part of the move-
ment, changes have occured for other
reasons. The reformists started by
using old models of leadership; the WL
section, because of the Left influence,

and the reaction to bad leadership
forms, started with anti-leadership tac-
tics. I think they've now come to-
gether at a point where there's recog-
nition by both political segments of
the movement that we've got to deal
with the leadership question and with
structures.

CB: I agree with that, but I would
add that there are no guarantees. Most
of the questions and fears people have
about leadership are very real, and
they're going to be real throughout the
next fifty years. Too often, what
people want is guarantees; they want a
guarantee that we're going to be better.
All I can ultimately say is, when I
look at what male supremacist leader-
ship has created, I'm willing to put my
money on women. It seems to me that
women do have a capacity at this time
to create a better leadership, a better
kind of structure; and I'm willing to
risk it because I don't think there's
any other option.

If women don't risk dealing with
structures and leadership, we will es-
sentially accept male supremacist rule:
without assertive female leadership,
men will continue not only to rule in
world power terms, but to determine,
as they have been doing for the last
few years, what is the women's move-
ment, what are the movement struc-
tures that get recognition, and who are
the women's leaders. I don't have
personal quarrels with the women they
have set up, but most of them are not
women who we as a movement have
made leaders. As long as we don't

What Future for Leadership ?/9

acknowledge and support our own
leaders, then the male establishment
will continue choosing our public lead-
ership. And for the vast majority of
women in America, who they put
forward as our leaders are our leaders.
That is all that they ever see. The only
way to fight media control is to put
forward our own people. To deal with
personality cults, we can recognize
more than one leader, as Bev was
saying. It's not that we're going to put
forward "Ms. X" as the leader forever,
but that we begin to support indiv-
iduals who have shown leadership and
use the media instead of being used by
it. Even then, there are no guarantees
that we will always make the right
decisions.

BF: The question of "guarantees
and risk-taking" made me think about
another class-related attitude. Women
from secure middle-class backgrounds
have a basic faith that things are
going to work out for them. Very
often, it's middle-class women who
express fears about power; that women
are going to duplicate the "power"
trip of males. They want guarantees
that it won't happen. With a group
that includes women of different class
backgrounds, I've noticed that women
from lower-and working-class families
don't ask for that kind of guarantee.
They've never had it; risk is a constant
in their lives.

This question also relates to group
identity. If a woman is looking for
individual solutions to serve her needs
and make her life better, then she

wants guarantees and no risk. But if
she sees herself as part of the larger
group, then her questions are for more
than her own stakes. She sees issues in
terms of other women as well as her-
self; that leads to political solutions,
not personal ones.

JW: I'd like to pick up on something
you said, Bev, about individual solu-
tions and forming your life goals
by a larger identification with the
movement, and something Charlotte
said about how leaderless groups mani-
fest a result of women's oppression—
not wanting to take responsibility.
I'd like you to deal with those ques-
tions in terms of the individual and
what is necessary for a group of
individuals to deal with leadership
and class issues.

CB: I'll touch on a couple of aspects
of it. First, the individual-group strug-
gle is another whole radio show.
But to begin here: I think that the
only kind of movement that will suc-
ceed is a movement of strong indiv-
iduals. A problem arises when women
seek only individual solutions, only
enough to get by in their own life.
I'm sympathetic to why anybody does
that-any oppressed woman wants her
life to improve-and any strategy that
we devise has to deal with how to
make people's lives better. No one
makes a revolution just for an abstract
ideal: you fight because your life is
better and you see that society can be
changed. But the danger is that as you
begin to make your own life a little

10/Quest

better, then you begin to try just to
find your own solution. The people
who can most easily find their own
solution in this society are necessarily
the most privileged: white, middle-or
upper-class, with education and con-
nections.

There is often confusion between
being afraid of someone just trying to

,

' /

->,--

What Future for Leadership?/! 1

make her career off the movement-
which really does happen-and the
movement's fear of all leadership.
Women who exploit the movement
just to build their own careers and
individual solutions should be criti-
cized, but sometimes it is difficult to
distinguish that exploitation from real
leadership. We need group structures
where this can be talked through,
where each woman's life decisions are
accountable. For example, if you de-
cide that a particular woman should
get a job in women's studies, it's not
just her individual solution because a
lot of people benefit: her job can be
used to expose more people to femi-
nism through women's studies, to open
the resources of that university to a
larger number of women, her salary
can be shared-her individual solution
is women moving forward. Without
accountability between each individual
trying to build her life and a commit-
ment to the whole movement, it's hard
to keep those things going. This is
particularly difficult because we see
that every woman needs to develop
skills and become economically in-
dependent; that women do have to
fight to get ahead at a certain level
yet not become tokens; that we must
all find better ways to live without
pretending that is the solution .

A lot of the problems of leadership
and of group-individual identity center
on our inability to help each other
become stronger. The only way that
women will stop putting down women
who are strong is if they are strong
themselves. And the only way to

eliminate jealousy and fear of leader-
ship is for each woman to know her
own strengths and have enough confi-
dence in what she is doing that she
doesn't have to be the leader in a
given situation to feel good about her-
self. If we can help each woman build
her own strength, find her own work
that means something to her individ-
ually, that will be a big step toward
dealing with leadership. The two go
together: structures are necessary to
help women build their strengths;
leaders today have to figure out how
to build those structures, and, in that
sense, it's a reinforcing cycle. The
stronger we can make every woman,
the more every woman will be able to
recognize different leadership roles for
different people and not be afraid of
them. Then she can support leaders
she believes in and challenge them
when they're doing things that she
considers wrong. This challenge can
create constructive dialogue because it
is not based on weakness or jealousy,
but on a common struggle to deter-
mine what is best for women.

Postscript

This Interview was taped in Decem-
ber of 1972. In preparing copy for
this issue of Quest, we were struck by
how much the questions then raised
about leadership are still with us. We
decided to print it now, both for its
discussion of those questions and be-
cause the process of listening to what
was said three and one-half years ago
raised for us another vital issue: How

12/ Quest

does our movement pass on its history?
How do we learn from our past-mis-
takes and successes-so that each new
group does not have to begin at zero
but rather can build upon and expand
the experiences of others? Putting
together a body of knowledge and
analysis of experience that could in-
form and aid feminists was one of
Quest's original goals. After two years
of publication, we must ask how much
have we accomplished and how much
are feminists willing to listen to, and
learn from, one another? Unfortun-
ately, it seems nowhere near enough.
We see the same trashing of leaders
and glorification of structurelessness
that existed five years ago. There is

still resistance to working out the
problems of class and race conflict, of
individual and group accountability.
We do, however, see progress being
made on these questions. Many wom-
en have been thinking about their
experiences and about what kind of
leadership the feminist movement
needs. So, while some were not yet
ready to write about it, we have
gathered articles for this issue of Quest
which we feel approach these ques-
tions from a variety of different, oc-
sionally conflicting, perspectives. Since
leadership is a crucial make or break
issue for feminism, this diversity seems
an appropriate beginning for what
must be a continuing dialogue.

What Future for Leadership?/13

THE LESBIAN

The Workmaker, the Leader

by Bertha Harris

graphics by Nancy Myron

The following is part of a longer
essay, which in its first version was
presented at the second annual con-
vention of the Gay Academic Union,
November 1974. A development of
its thesis, as it particularly applies to
literature, was first presented under
the title "The Purification of Mon-
strosity: j The Lesbian As Literature"
to a Forum on Homosexual Literature
at the Modern Language Association
convention, December 27, 1974.

My everlasting gratitude to Cather-
ine Nicholson for introducing me to
the work of the great feminist scholar,
Jane Ellen Harrison, and to the several
meanings of the Dionysian tradition.
Catherine Nicholson is presently pre-
paring for publication Harrison's femi-
nist essays, written in 1907 and 1913,
with an extensive introduction which
will show the origins of Harrison's
feminism in her anthropological stud-
ies, Themis and Prolegomena to the
Study of the Greek Religion.

14/ Quest, vol. II no.4, spring, 1976

"Do not bear us a grudge because
we have killed you. You are sensible,
you see that our children are hungry.
They love you, they wish to put you
into their body. Is it not glorious to
be eaten by the sons of a chief?"-the
Bear clan of the Ottawas, offering a
part of the bear they have just killed
a piece of its own flesh. (Harrison,
quoting Frazer's Totemism and Ex-
ogamy, 111, p. 6 7.

The leader is she who makes work,
who makes a thing happen, often in
spite of the group which has provided
the context for her work. The proto-
type for the woman who is the worker,
who makes work, is the lesbian. The
lesbian is a new creature, neither man
nor woman, but one who takes from
both the father and the mother, in
order to create work that goes beyond
the limits of gender. The myth of
Dionysus, reinterpreted from a femi-
nist perspective, provides a framework
for understanding this concept of the
leader in the women's movement to-
day. In this essay, I will explore this
reinterpretation of the Dionysian myth,
its importance for feminists, and how
it relates to the lesbian as worker/lead-
er.

aaaaBBPYrY^fo^^^nnneee

^

The Lesbian: The Workmaker, The Leader/ 15

To be ignorant of the function of
myth in one's life is to doom oneself
to unrelenting originality; it is to
regard the events of both the imagina-
tion and the external world as unique-
ly one's own contrivance and fate. To
be in the midst of myth, yet be able
to know, as well as feel, its affects
and process is to have the power to
control its outcome.

The failure of the women's move-
ment to express itself coherently,
and impress itself without equivo-
cation around a principle of leader-
ship, derives from our failure to un-
derstand ourselves as involved in a
ritual act over which an explanatory
story (the myth) is spoken.1 Once
we understand this, we can realize
that it is not a question of whether
we should have leaders, or be leader-
less, but of how to alter both the
ritual act and the myth explaining
it to prevent disaster when the lead-
er inevitably happens. Ritual is the
outcome of a group of people bond-
ing together to assert a sense of
self and power. A ritual may be some-
thing as ordinary as an all-American
family dinner; its mythic meanings-in
terms of roles, leadership, power, etc.—
can be determined by observing how
the group feels about eating together.
The successful rituals of patriarchy are
no more than that assertion of group
power: male unity, exclusion of wo-
man, power over both woman and
that which the ritual identifies as fe-
male. Ritual is also a dramatic dis-
closure of a group's collective assess-
ment of, and responses to, reality.

Myth is "the things said over a ritual
act. z

Our experience of myth is usually
unconscious: living it without know-
ing it; being in the midst of it, be-
lieving that we are unilaterally con-
trolling-thereby creating-our destiny.
The illusion of power we experience
while in the grip of the mythical pro-
cess is our bondage. This illusion
alone can negate all possibility of lib-
eration. For example, as long as the
leader (who may be expressed, in
mythology as hero, or god) does not
expect to be eaten by the group at a
particular moment in the myth's de-
velopment, she will be unable to pre-
vent a reenactment of cannibalism.
The group will feast, digest, rejoice in
the energy catastrophe stimulates:
then will reorganize around a new,
as-yet-uneaten, leader to repeat the
ritual. Only by understanding the
myth can we alter its course.

The prime reality of patriarchy
is phallic competition. Patriarchy's
response to its reality-its integral ri-
tual act-is dramatization of phallic
competition. Such ritualization takes
both subtle and blatant forms-from,
for example, the celebration of the
Mass to the institutionalization of
eroticism to war to the space race.
The myth of patriarchy-"the things
said over a ritual act"— is the on-going
story of the defeat of woman.

Patriarchy's most dynamic instance
(the thing said about the thing done)
is the celebrated drama of Fifth cen-
tury B.C. Athens. Although classical
scholarship and modern pyschoanaly-

16/Quest

sis have conspired to conceal this
fact, the plays are primarily about the
triumph of patriarchal expression over
matriarchal presence-the triumph of
male "reason" over female "irration-
ality;" of father over mother, of
"civilization" over the primitive.* Im-
plicit in the enactment of the tri-
umph are the political results of the
patriarchal ritual: the first, male bond-
ing-responding to fear of the female;
and, the second, prohibition of female
bonding-preventing realization of the
thing most feared: the emergence of
female leadership out of the bonded
group.

Once patriarchy is identified as a
ritualized reaction to fear of woman,
it becomes apparent that the power-
lessness of the women's movement
originates in its assumption that we
are a reaction to male control. A
study of the Fifth century drama,
especially the plays of Euripides,
shows us quite the opposite: that men,
as we know them, invented them-
selves-and their classifying myths and
rituals-as a reaction against what they
perceived as our magical, annihilating
power over them. The second inven-
tion of patriarchy was the man's
woman: woman divested of maternal
knowledge and influence, no different,

/ use "matriarchy" interchangeably
with "pre-patriarchy "-loosely describing a
time in Greece precceding, at some stage,
the Fifth Century B.C. "Matriarchy" in
fact is probably a state of mind. I use
"patriarchy" to refer to the social fact of
male rule and domination; "Olympus" and
the "Olympians" are the mythology refer-
ring to that fact.

except biologically, from men. For
example, the turning point of the
Oresteia* occurs when the man's wo-
man-imaged mythically and dramat-
ically as Athena-explains that she
sides with Orestes, the Furies-belea-
gured male 5, because she never knew
a mother: myth as a dramatization
of political co-optation. Another ex-
ample of the shift to patriarchal
power can be seen in Euripides'
Medea: correctly understood, it is
not the tale of a woman's murdurous
sexual jealousy but of how woman-
and her power-is demolished through
sexual intercourse with the male. The
essence of Euripides' tragic vision is
that woman's submission to man is
the submission of ecstacy to sexual ec-
onomics. It is the submission of the
order of nature to the laws of industry,
the submission of reality to an in-
vented actuality. It is the rendering of
the all-encompassing sense of ancient
order and justice that was the goddess
Themis into the two-dimensional card-
board fiction of the Olympians.

Most important in the Euripidean
drama are the distinctions between
the pre-patriarchal (or matriarchal)
and the patriarchal. Woman (Medea
is a perfect instance) is dramatized as
representative of an organic process
in which the social, cultural and polit-
ical-all forms, both divine and human
-are interlocked and interdependent
in a life-sustaining ritual out of which
grows the image (the myth) of self-
hood and selfhood's sustaining prin-
ciple, the leader, who grows naturally,
as a function of the group. Woman

The Lesbian: The Workmaker, The Leader/17

I

18/ 'Quest

corrupted fagain, Medea) is the cor-
ruption of this process, symbolically-
and literally-shown in her sexual al-
liance with the man: Medea, the
"matriarchal" principle, is literally
fucked-thereby politically fucked-over
-by the ascendant patriarchy. Athena,
without a mother-therefore without
"flesh"-is woman as male intellectual
reasoning would have her; Medea,
another prototype of the "man's wo-
man," is divested of her "mother"--
her flesh, her culture, her history-
through heterosexual intercourse. Pre-
Olympian (or "matriarchal") myth is
the story spoken over a ritual of the
"real, " i.e., the group's collective as-
sessment and projection of their reality.
Olympian (or patriarchal) myth is not
myth but propagandists episodes fash-
ioned to disguise the destruction of the
"real" and the rituals which are its
demonstration of reality.

Dionysus Re-Interpreted

A case has been made by psycho-
logists and anthropologists to show
that the patriarchal overthrow of "wo-
man" is an on-going human develop-
ment essential to work-making: intel-
lectual endeavor, artistic creation, me-
chanical invention. Such interpretation
is based on observations of "womb-en-
vy" in primitive males. At some
stage, the primitive recognizes that it is
woman who has ultimate power over

"Primitive" here means as opposed to
"sophisticated"-not the opposite of "civi-
lized". A four-year old Twentieth Century
New York City male is a "primitive".

life— she bleeds but does not die; she
reproduces herself; her body gives
food. The male's envy of female pro-
creation urges him to compensate by
becoming sole owner of the power to
achieve intellectually. Thus the creative
process or the work-making process—
which springs from the impulse to
make a thing which is, in its final
utterance, both a phenomenon of the
self and distinct from the self-is de-
clared analagous to the generative
event in the womb. The woman labors
and makes the child. The man labors
and makes idea, or thing. Since the
production of children is exclusively
the province of the female, the pro-
duction of work and thought must be
the exclusive (and jealously guarded)
province of the male.

Not content to divest women of
their brains, the Olympian Zeus, patri-
archy's chief, must also have their
wombs. Total ownership of both mind
and body-and the functions and pro-
ducts of both-accomplishes an her-
metically sealed power block. In order
to get a womb to go with his brain,
Zeus had to steal Dionysus who was
central to the pre-patriarchal world-
view, since the god portrayed the
group's meaning of virtue, potency,
power, imagination: in short, Dionysus
was the cornerstone of the ritual pro-
jection of group identity. The massive
task of over-throwing mother-rule and
establishing father-rule is begun by
distorting the images and meaning of
Dionysus. The effects of such an
achievement are comparable to the
effects of a cerebral lobotomy; or,

The Lesbian: The Workmaker, The Leader/19

more recently, the effects of behav-
ioral modification on personality: the
erasure of the original self is all-per-
vasive. Even the memory of the orig-
inal is removed-but if a trace remains,
it remains as the "bad," the un-
adapted and therefore criminal element
in the new order. Thus the pre-patri-
archal ritual of selfhood is eliminated
by a self-conscious political effort to
make change. New "ritual" and "myth"
are provided to explain the change and
support the new images of power.
What is "self is redefined; what does
not conform to the new definition is
outlawed.

It is as difficult to describe the
original meanings and impact of Dion-
ysus as it is to describe the culture
that created the god. In brief, Dion-
ysus with the mother is an image of
what we might call "the pleasure prin-
ciple" - a recognition and acceptance
of the irrational; an idea of freedom;
a dream of liberation: an enactment
of the psychic through the flesh. Our
difficulty in understanding Dionysian
meaning-our fear of its potential-is,
above all, an index to how much it
has been excised from our reality.
Politically expressed, pre - Olympian
(or matriarchal) myth, and the culture
it reflects, shows us the powerful
unions of what is guessed to be
mothers and sons against the father. °
Olympian myth, referring to patri-
archal origins, shows us the devasta-
tion of the mother by the father
especially through its interruption of
the mother-child alliance. '

Commonly, the story goes that

Zeus seduces and impregnates Semele.
She bears a son-half divine, half-mor-
tal-who is Dionysus. With his moth-
er, Dionysus grows into the vigorous
spirit of the young kouros: the in-
itiate. The Semele/Dionysus unity is
the mythic rendition of the group's
political fact-mother/child— one which
the new Olympian order must destroy
if the rule of father/child is to be
inexorably established. Aided by Hera,
his wife— who is another manifestation
of the new man's woman-Zeus kills
Semele and calls Dionysus to himself,
to be born again. Zeus steals not only
the sacred qualities Dionysus, with
Semele, represents; he also approp-
riates the functions of the old ritual:
ensurance of fertility, group continu-
ance, life-without-end— whose model is
the birth of the child from the womb.
"Come, O Dithyrambos..." he calls;
"be born again from this my male
womb. "8 And Dionysus is renamed
Dithyrambos and reshaped in the male
image: the power of the womb is
translated into the power of the phal-
lus.

The figure of speech assigned to
this event is Mimesis. Mimesis means
an imitation of the alien; a process
whereby the words, actions, behavior
of another are imitated. Patriarchal
power is fixed centrally in this mimetic
event, the Second Birth of the child
Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus: it
shows that the first maternal birth
is inadequate for individual and group
survival; it shows that the life of the
group will henceforth depend upon the
death of the mother and the uninter-

20/Quest

rupted union of father and son, male
with male. Furthermore, the Second
Birth-the original mimetic event-shows
the patriarchal definition of how work
happens: to imitate is consciously
to make a thing, to make something
happen. "Dithrambos" is the name
Zeus gives Dionysus during the Second
Birth-and Dithyramb >os is the Greek
name of the first art form, the name
of tragedy." Thus we are shown the
patriarchal division between the male
active agent-the maker, doer, worker
-and the female nurturer, who is acted
upon. The mother is no longer even re-
sponsible for the birth of the child:
the myth shows that childbirth is
not a creative act for woman; rather
that childbirth is the act of the child,
who uses the mother as the passive
vehicle through which it brings itself to
birth, to the ultimate birth which is
the union with the father.

Such is the status of womankind as
the myth-and reality— express it; and
such is the status of womankind as we
know it, in the ritual slaughters of the
mother that patriarchy continues to
devise. Woman is used as the inarticu-
late receptacle for the projection of
the raw material. Man performs as the
stimulus for the metamorphosis of
blind instinct into sighted intelligence
and accomplishment.

But to understand mimesis solely
as imitation of the alien is to ignore its
political meanings. The events of the
Second Birth are more than masculine
imitation of a foreign process: the
Second Birth is also a take-over of the
alien-a political stratagem designed to

show the male ability to assimilate
nature into science, "soul" into mind,
powerlessness (barefoot and pregnant)
into power (penis and womb); and in
so doing demonstrate the superiority
of things male over things female.
Observing the cultural magnitude of
the first birth, appreciating its political
potential— and, even more significantly,
recognizing the fact that delivering a
child, while it is intrinsically the most
important human act is also the hu-
man act most noticeably devoid of
intellectual choice-man steals it and
makes it his own: the Second Birth is
the birth of intellectual process, of
consciousness, of the ability to man-
ipulate feeling into thought.

The Lesbian as Dionysus

The truth of the matter-and of the
myth-is based in the child that is
born, not in the childbearers— neither
of them. It is the child, and the
independent action, energy and pur-
posefulness of the child— both as bio-
logical fact and as metaphor— who is
the source of power. The child's nat-
ure is that of neither man nor woman,
but is the nature of the lesbian: born
of woman, she consciously rejects
being a woman-because she does not
want to die: to be unable to work is to
be dead; the "man's woman," because
of what has happened to her below the
waist, is dead above the neck. The les-
bian - her daughter - wants to make
something happen; choosing life, she
wants to make work. Although nursed
in the cradle of heterosexual influence,

The Lesbian: The Workmaker, The Leader/21

the lesbian wills her own manifestation
of independence from both man and
woman; from both womb and phallus.

The human model for work-mak-
ing, therefore, should be neither the
unconsciousness of the father, but the
use of both by the child to make first
herself, then the work. Thus it is
impossible for woman qua woman and
man qua man to make work. Hetero-
sexual organization— whether matriar-
chal or patriarchal-is no more than
the providing of certain conditions
in which the work-maker, the lesbian,
can bring herself to birth.

The lesbian is neither woman nor
man; she is a new, separate creature, a
lesbian. Women have tried to dismiss
the control of the mimetic principle
by pretending it has, especially aided
by the Women's Movement, lost its
potency. Created in Opposition to the
myth, as revolt, the women's move-
ment to great extent seeks to rid it-
self of patriarchal infection by attempt-
ing to find a "womanly" way of
doing things-e.g., attempting non-struc-
tured organization, resisting leadership,
resisting power; in extreme instances
advancing separatism as an end-goal of
purification. What the movement has
not generally recognized-but what
patriarchy has known all along-show-
ing us its knowledge in the myth-is
that the more a woman works, and
works to make things happen, the less
"woman" she becomes, the more les-
bian: the more like the Dionysus
of the Second Birth— without, however,
the significant feature of the mimetic
"father - birth"- male -bonding. Patri-

archy, by inducing fear of the lesbian,
induces fear of work in all women.
Such terrorization has commonly in-
duced women in the movement to
attempt to render real the principle of
methexsislO -which is the matriarchal,
"womanly" opposite of the patriarchal
principle of mimesis.

As the mimetic rite (as it is ordin-
arily understood) expresses the prin-
ciples of patriarchy— the purification
of the male of female infection, the
bonding of male with male in a do-
minion of adult power— so methexsis
is its opposite: the embodiment of
matriarchal principle; the utterance of
the group instead of the one; the pro-
jection of emotional solidarity, group
oneness, a strong sense of difference
from other groups. Essentially, meth-
exsis describes a totemistic social or-
ganization, which matriarchal society
may have been. Inherent to such
group organization are three great
fears: 1.) the coming of differentiated
thinking which, combined with passion
and intellectual purpose, will lead to
unique self-expression, and to a piece
of work that is of the group but
brought into being by a separate self-
assertiveness; 2.) that, as a result, the
felt continuity of the group as a whole
will be interrupted; and, 3.) that if
one member of the group becomes
distinct, the rest of the group will be-
come obscure. 11

The distinction of one person is
evidenced to the group by the pro-
duction of work which is uniquely her
own creation-no matter what area it is
in: leadership, for example, is the

22/Quest

The Lesbian: The Workmaker, The Leader/23

showing of distinguish ably individual
work. The member of the group who,
by making work, begins to move from
the felt to the thought is no longer
permitted the emotional benefits of
group life: the member becomes out-
cast. She has attempted imitation of
the alien; she has caused the death of
the "mother." Within the context of
the myth, the worker, the woman-be-
coming-lesbian through the sacred pas-
sage of the Second Birth, operates
under a triple burden: in order to
achieve the Second Birth, mimesis,
she must necessarily undergo a first
"second birth:" her first imitation of
the alien must be imitation of man, i.e.,
her "drag" must reach beneath the
skin, must entail arduous psycho-
logical recostuming. Then she must
undergo the ritual of authentication;
she must be tested by those who know
she is not really one of them (she may
be assuming power, but she lacks the
essential symbol of power, the phal-
lus). Presuming she survives these tests,
she is alone: by making work (outside
the prescribed labors of the female
role), she has ceased being a woman;
she has transgressed against the com-
munity agreement not to work; she
has declared the existence of sepa-
ration between subject and object-she
has ceased being a woman, but she is
not a man; nor would she choose to
be man.

The principle of methexsis has
been called into being by the move-
ment because, seemingly, there is no
other non-patriarchal model, nothing
to choose but isolation within the

patriarchy or smothering in the em-
brace of the community. For the les-
bian—the woman who works, who
moves-as does the infant Dionysus in
the birth journey— to a completion of
herself in work, as work, the either/or
situation-because it is heterosexual
and therefore antithetical to work-is
unbearable. She is not heterosexual;
heterosexuality is about a union of
one man, the father, with the "man's
woman," the mother; she is the child,
who is the lesbian. She is full of the
Dionysian ecstacy that comes from
her birth, her origin with women; she
is full of the necessities of the mind
from her venture toward work-making
-necessities that are described as male-
-but she is neither totally the woman
nor the man.

Ideally, the lesbian, the worker, en-
acts the life -long role of the kouros,
the youth-nearly androgynous in its
ability to shift from shape to shape,! 2
from gender-always engaged, by virtue
of her eroticism-that integrating link
between the psychic and the sexual-in
initiation. She is always, by virtue of
her eroticism, refusing to participate in
the condition known as womanhood.
For womanhood, as the myth demon-
strates, is an inadequate vehicle for
creativity. No wonder,within the myth,
is the woman denied even her bio-
logically "creative" status; even, like
Semele, is murdered for childbearing.
In truth, she is only the host on whom
the parasite feeds, as every honest
mother knows. The woman,*** she
who chooses to be acted upon, re-
fusing the erotic individuation of ac-

24/Quest

tion as work— must resign herself to
death; but she must not take the
group-and self-propelled power that is
her daughter with her. And the les-
bian, the worker, must use and then
reject the mother-just as she uses and
rejects that which is father. The lesbian
who attempts identification with the
general condition of women-at least as
it is expressed as movement-methexsis
-is assuming that biological sameness
reflects emotional, psychic, and intel-
lectual sameness: as disastrous a mis-
take as believing that to give birth is
actively to make something.

The women's movement turns a-
gainst the Dionysiac leader ("ripoff!"
"male-identified! '-although sometimes
patriarchal circumstance forces truth
into these accusations) because its
members cannot imagine attempting
to be anything more than woman: if
the group cannot go forward, then no
member of the group, representing the
group, can go forward. She who makes
the attempt is ritually slaughtered for
expressing that stage of development
which the group as a whole either will
not or cannot grow to. One of the
ways the movement expresses this is
by maintaining that there is no such
thing as the "exceptional woman." In
fact, there is no such thing as an ex-
ceptional woman who can live, un-

Some lesbians whose psychology is
totemistic rather than Dionysian- whose be-
havior is based in fear rather than challenge
of the male belong to this class of woman
or ''mother;" others hope to become the
"father"— but without experiencing the Di-
onysian transition.

damaged by mother or father, move-
ment or man, through the hetero-
sexual enforcement of the myth.

Woman is not mistaken when she
tries to make a way to bring herself to
birth as effectively as man believes he
has; nor is she mistaken when, having
suffered the effects of the male order,
she does not wish to imitate that
abortive birth passage. But she is ter-
ribly mistaken if, in understandably
returning to the pre-mimetic organi-
zation in revolt against her treatment,
she does not allow her exception, the
leader who is of the group but also
goes beyond it, a way to make her
work.

A re-interpretation of the meth-
ectic/mimetic dilema for women at
large-for the exceptional, work-mak-
ing lesbian, in particular— involves a re-
interpretation of the nature of Dion-
ysus—one that lies beyond the intent
of either the matriarchal or the patri-
archal. As Dionysus, the lesbian, the
worker, is neither man nor woman:
she is a new creature not to be defined
by either gender or by "socializa-
tion" effects— but by the work she is
and makes. By virtue of her eroticism
she does not naturally share in the
common heterosexual lot of either
man or woman. Like Dionysus, her
specifics are androgynous. Central to
Dionysus is the god's close association
with the mother, Semele-an associa-
tion so close that the male and female
figures blend, so close that there can
be seen as little organic distinction be-
tween the female mother and the
"male" child as there can be between

The Lesbian: The Workmaker, The Leader/25

the earth and the fruits of the earth.
Gender identification collapses., At the
most profound level of the matriarchal
rites, Semele is only another guise for
Dionysus; and Dionysus another guise
for Semele. In this, the god's begin-
ning, there is a kind of ecstacy of
equality 13 similar to that achieved by
perfectly matched lovers. A sense of
this Semele-Dionysus lover relation-
ship, recaptured, is the hope of the
"mother;" its achievement an appro-
priate goal for women. For the fact of
the myth is unalterable: Dionysus
must go, change must be made, a new
development of woman representing
thought and work must happen. But
there can be loss without the detri-
ment of loss: Dionysus carries to the
thigh of Zeus the intoxicated spirit of
the group sacrament which is woman,
which is mother. For women to accept
the patriarchal lie that Dionysus' trans-
ition to the Second Birth makes the
god male, is fatal; is to agree to the
death that Zeus, that patriarchy, wishes
on her. Imagined by the group, the
group's leader is the group as inevitably
as she is her own differentiated self. As
long as Dionysus-the leader, the daugh-
ter, the work-maker—lives, the group
will not die: the daughter freed to
work will inevitably express-resurrect—
the mother killed by the father.

To prevent work is to prevent
freedom-of both "mother" and daugh-
ter. It is in the interests of patriarchy
to prevent the lesbian, who has the po-
tential of freedom greater than wo-
man's was or man's is-the freedom of
Dionysus: the early reality of ecstacy

the myth identifies as female; the later
reality of intellectual birth the myth
identifies as male— the ultimate free-
dom, as these first two births merge
and together make the transcendant
third birth: the birth of the genderless
work-maker and work-giver, the les-
bian; Dionysus.

For the lesbian to join with the nur-
sing spirit of the matriarchy is to col-
lapse back into the non-productive,
the anti-intellectual; the cradle from
which thought will inevitably-and dis-
astrously—be sent forth in male form.
To identify wholly with the male
expression is to deny the principle of
rapture the myth shows as undeniably
female-and which, equally with the
intellect, is the wellspring of the work.
In Dionysus are inextricably united
both mana and tabu— both magic and
the manipulation of magic-the "dou-
ble-edged sanctity," as Jane Ellen
Harrison remarks it. To this Diony-
sian expression of the better-than-the-
best-of-both-worlds, belongs the les-
bian, the worker, the maker, the doer-
to whom no gender can be assigned.

Like Dionysus, the lesbian, the
woman-as-worker, must be permitted
birth, must be allowed to emerge from
the collective spirit. And the group
must realize-as do the Bacchants and
Maenads (the mothers and nurses of
Dionysus)-that their group reality and
emotion has fostered the essential stuff
from which the leader, will happen-
and delight in their own participation
in the founding of "things done." And
the lesbian, the worker, must never be
deceived that in undertaking the sacred

26/Quest

passage of the Second Birth that she is
becoming male: that by expressing her-
self as work, a person and a thing apart
from mother/woman, she is in contrast
father/man. Dionysus is never mature
in the patriarchal sense. The god's use
of the phallus does not make the god
phallic. Dionysus is entirely complete
in the full maturity of the lesbian, who
is the work that was woman's intention
at last accomplished.

Footnotes

1 Stanley Edgar Hyman, "The Ritual
View of Myth and the Mythic" (citing
Harrison, Iliemis), p. 138.

^Hyman, p. 138. The Greek definition
of myth (citing Harrison).

3lbid.

4 A dramatic trilogy by Aeschylus: Aga-
memnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides,
dated about 458 B.C., and clearly showing
the political shift to patriarchy.

^Orestes is being pursued by the Furies
because he has murdered his mother, Cly-
temnestra, to "avenge" Clytcmnestra's mur-
der of his father, Agamemnon. Agamemnon
himself has begun the whole process by
ritually slaughtering his and Clytcmnestra's
daughter, Iphigenia. Under matriarchal jus-
tice only Clytemnestra's revenge of her
daughter's death is lawful. For a full ac-
count of the the Furics/Eumcnides' role,
see "The Furies" by Ginny Berson, Lesbian-
ism and the Women's Movement, Baltimore:
Diana Press, 1975, p. 15.

°Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores,
Wives, And Slaves, pp. 2-3.

?As in the comparatively recent version
of the patriarchal restructuring of the myth,
which shows the Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost versus Jesus (Christ) and Mary (Vir-
gin).

"Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis, pp. 34-35;
referring to the use of the Dithyramb in

The Bacchae and its reflection of initiation
rites.

9lbid.

10Harrison, pp. 125-129.

Hlbid.

12 Youth is passion and pleasure in dis-
covery; a development of discovery into
work; a continuous process of initiation:
"One secret of the thrill of The Bacchae is
that the god is always shifting his shape.
Dionysus is a human youth, lovely, with
curled hair, but in a moment he [sic] is a
Snake, a Lion, a Wild Bull, a Burning
Flame." (Harrison, p. 129).

1-^Zeus attempts to imitate the "lover-
equality" of the original myth by substitu-
ting the non-erotic-but highly sexual-power
exchange of male-bonding with Dionysus
in the Second Birth.

References

Bidney, David. "Myth, Symbolism, and
Truth," Myth, A Symposium, Thomas A.
Sebeok, cd. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1972.

Cassirer, Ernst. Language and Myth,
New York: Dover, 1953.

Euripides. The Bacchae, Philip Vella-
cott, trans. Baltimore: Penguin, 1954.

. Medea, Arthur S. Way, trans.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947.

Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths: 1.
Baltimore: Pelican, 1971.

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Themis, A Study
of the Social Origins of the Greek Religion.
Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1974. (First
published, 1912.)

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. "The Ritual
View of Myth and the Mythic," Myth, A
Symposium, Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1972.

Jung, C.G. and Kerenyi, C. Ussays on a
Science of Mythology (The Myth of the
Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis).
Princeton: Bollingen Series XXII, 1971.

Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores,
Wives, And Slaves. New York: Schocken,
1973.

The Lesbian: The Workmaker, The Leader/27

Rank, Otto. The Myth of the Birth of
the Hero (and other writings). Philip Frcund,
ed. New York: Vintage [n.d. ]

Slater, Philip E. The Glory of Hera
(Greek Mythology and the Greek Family).
Boston: Beacon, 1968.

Bertha Harris, author of three novels,
Catching Saradove, Confessions of
Cherubino, and Lover (Daughters, Inc.
1976), is director of Women's Studies
at Richmond College, N. Y.C.

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28/Quest

FEMINIST LEADERS

(€an'taHaU0n

WATER

There was a time when I knew
what a leader was, how he acted,
and what he looked like. When I
was six years old, a leader was a man
like Robin Hood. He was a leader
because he robbed from the rich and
gave to the poor, led a band of
merry men, lived in the forest, and
was always very brave. And he had
a girl friend, too. Her name was
Maid Marion and she wore long dresses
and stayed home taking care of the
castle. She was very loyal.

When I was eight, I knew what

a leader was. He was a man like
Jesus Christ. Jesus was a leader
because he was the savior of mankind,
and he led a band of not-so-merry
men. Christ lived in the desert, defied
a ruthless government, and was always
very brave. While he didn't exactly
have a girlfriend, he did have an ador-
ing follower named Mary Magdalen.
She was a whore who washed his
feet with her hair.

As the years went by, my concep-
tion of leadership really didn't change
much. And my concept of girlfriends

by Lorraine Masterson

photographs by Sunny Wood

Feminist Leaders Can't Walk on Water/29

remained virtually unaltered. JFK
and his Jacqueline were succeeded
by Norman Mailer and his American
Dream. The last time I knew what
a leader looked like was in 1968. He
looked like Eugene McCarthy and
he was going to change the shape
of US politics. McCarthy had a wife.
I forget her name, but I remember
that she was "cute, petite, blonde and
an inexhaustible campaign worker."

I think it was just about 1968 when
I suffered the first major challenge
to my concept of what a leader looked
like. It was seriously shaken when I
read The Second Sex, published for
the first time when 1 was only five
years old. In it, I confronted an image
of myself I had denied for a lifetime.
Simone de Beauvoir's book was an
accusation; the words shrieked off
every burning page. "You are a
woman too," the book told me, "not
just physiologically, but psychologically
and spiritually; in your dreams, in
your love affairs, you are a woman."

It was not easy to confront the
fact that not just my breasts and
vagina are female: so is my head,
my soul, my entire history. In retro-
spect, this self-revelation strikes me as
painfully obvious, but at that time
time in my life it had repercussions
I'm still trying to deal with. One
of them was the sudden recognition
that all those years I'd spent trudging
through the woods with a bow and
arrow, or standing in the middle of
a two-inch deep stream with a sheet
wrapped around me pretending I was
walking on water, didn't mean any-

thing at all. I wasn't Robin Hood or
Jesus Christ. And I certainly wasn't
Norman Mailer or JFK. I couldn't
even be one of the merry men who
followed these people around. Instead,
I was relegated to the role of the
girlfriend, the whore, the cheerleader,
or the fantasy lover. I was fated to
become one of those people I had,
until then, dismissed and despised.

This traumatic discovery precipita-
ted the second phase of my courtship
of the elusive image of the leader.
I now had to try to reconcile the
apparently conflicting images of the
leader and the female. I was still pon-
dering this question when my under-
graduate days drew to a close.

In 1970, I left Massachusetts to
pursue the life of a ski bum out in
Colorado. I picked up a job as a
restaurant manager and found myself
confusedly practicing a mixed bag of
management styles that seemed to
have little to do with the romantic
vision of leadership that had haunted
my youth.

One of my most dramatic experi-
ences with the problems of leadership,
particularly female leadership, occurred
only a week after I took charge. I
faced a trio of angry chefs (all white,
male and older than I) who demanded
that I stop taking the side of the
waitresses. What had I done that
precipitated this crisis? I had sug-
gested that the waitresses meet weekly
with me to discuss service problems
arising in the dining room. Then and
there I developed my first theory of
leadership-a leader is someone who

30/Quest, vol. II no. 4, spring, 1976

can mediate in rough situations. But
my chefs were already telling me that
as a woman leader I was automatically
biased in favor of women.

Leadership and the Status Quo

When I returned to graduate school,
the first course I signed up for was a
course that discussed leadership. The
first thing 1 learned was that the
images of leaders that had carried me
through my youth were all wet. Lead-
ership, I was told, is dependent upon
the specific context in which it arises,
and the style of leadership must alter
depending upon the "maturity level"
of the group. "Ahah," I thought,
remembering images of Robin Hood
and realizing that he would have looked
pretty silly in a tuxedo holding Jackie's
hand at a White House reception,

"of course we need different leaders
for different situations!"

Maturity in terms of leadership was
defined as: ". . . achievement motiva-
tion, the willingness and ability to
take responsibility, and task relevant
education and experience of an in-
dividual of group." While I found
the definition of maturity interesting,
it failed to explain the problems I'd
had with my chefs out in Colorado.
Those indignant white, male chefs had
considerable task relevant education
and experience; it was their socio-
cultural education, their views ofwom-
en-that had little or nothing to do
with the task-that made leadership
difficult for me.

I eagerly plunged into the numerous
case studies assigned for the course.
The studies discussed the problems of
male leaders in charge of other males ;

Feminist Leaders Can't Walk on Water/31

in short, despite the his/her pronoun
fashionably introduced into some of
the recent handouts, only one of the
recommended books for the course
was co-authored by a woman; the
message came through loud and clear
that there were no women in leader-
ship positions, and damn few in the
band of merry men.

Still hoping that me-the-woman and
me-the-leader could be reconciled, I
turned to the new courses on "Women
in Management" or "Women in Leader-
ship Roles" that were springing up
across the country to find a solu-
tion to the problem described by
Simone de Beauvoir:
It must be said that the independent
woman is justifiably disturbed by the
idea that people do not have con-
fidence in her. As a general rule,
the superior caste is hostile to new-
comers from the inferior caste: whites
will not consult a Negro physician,
nor males a woman doctor; but in-
dividuals of the inferior caste, imbued
with a sense of their specific inferiority
and often full of resentment toward
one of their kind who has risen above
their usual lot, will also prefer to
turn to the masters. Most women,
in particular, steeped in adoration
for man, eagerly seek him out in the
person of the doctor, the lawyer,
the office manager and so on. Neither
men nor women like to be under a
woman's orders.

At these workshops and confer-
ences, I garnered a great many inter-
esting and valuable tips for the woman
who wanted to make it as a leader-at

least as a leader in American business.
I learned that in order to get to the
same job level a man occupied, I had
to be twice as smart as he, and work
twice as hard. I learned that I had to
tap into the office gossip system and
keep track of who was sleeping with
whom in the office. I learned that I
should never sleep with anybody in
the office, no matter how attracted
to her/him I was. I learned that
I must dress "attractively" without
being "sexy"; that I must never burst
into tears in front of my male col-
leagues; that I had to learn more about
finances and profit because that is
the area where we women seriously
lack skills. I learned that I should
stay away from Women's Liberation-
ists, who "are the female equivalents
of bomb-throwingTV freaks like Abbie
Hoffman. . . .they're just the lunatic
rnnge.

Another book I read in my search
to find the secret to successful leader-
ship in the American business world
urged me to look for ways to "fem-
inize" a job, and find the "woman's
angle." The idea of feminizing leader-
ship was beginning to make more and
more sense to me.

Feminist Leadership and
Positions of Power

During this time, I was beginning
to discover different kinds of leaders
in different places. I began to form
a different image when I used the word
"leader"-an image that looked noth-
ing like that recalled from my younger

32/Quest

days. I began to think about women
like Bella Abzug, Joanne Little, Elaine
Noble, Shulamith Firestone, Rita Mae
Brown, Simone de Beauvoir and hun-
dreds of others who are leaders in a
sense different from any I've ever
known. These women are part of a
new leadership that I have started to
call feminist leadership.

I think I recognized this new fem-
inist leadership for the first time when
I read a press release written by
Ti-Grace Atkinson describing her rea-
sons for resigning the presidency of
the New York chapter of NOW:
We want to destroy the positions of
power. To alter the condition oj
women involves the shifting of over
half the population. We complain
about the unequal power relationships
between mefi and women. To change
that relationship requires a redefinition
of humanity, of all the relationships
within humantiy. We want to get
rid of positions of power, not get up
into those positions. The fight against
unequal power relationships between
men and womeii yiecessitates fighting
unequal power everyplace: between
men and women (for feminists espe-
cially), but also betweoi men and men,
women and women, between black
and white, and rich and poor.

What kind of leadership, if we
can even call it leadership, can be
found in a world where we have
"destroyed the positions of power"?
Many of us have learned from experi-
ence that unstructured groups are not
an alternative to hierarchical, leader-
dominated groups. We've seen that

the lack of a formal structure simply
leads to an informal structure that is
often more manipulative and unscru-
pulous than any overt form of control.
The issue becomes one of determining
the best means to encourage women
to stop being either followers or lead-
ers, to ". . . unlearn passivity (to
eliminate 'followers'), and to share
special skills or knowledge (to avoid
'leaders')."7

While I see the need to destroy
existing leader/follower relationships,
I think we confront the problem of
encouraging every woman to under-
stand that she must be her own
leader, and that in doing so, she can
become an inspiration to other wom-
en. A new feminst leadership can
provide all women with the courage
and guidance needed in order to grow
stronger. 1 want to do away not with
leadership, but with a kind of leader-
ship that controls because it takes
its own superiority for granted.

One of the special qualities that
distinguishes feminist leadership from
traditional leadership is its essentially
educational nature. If we as women
are working to create a world in
which power and responsibility are
shared by all people, then we must
understand the process by which people
become leaders, and thereby lead our-
selves and each other toward that goal.

We know we are most human in
those moments when we are taking
control of our own lives and expressing
ourselves freely. The chasm between
the personal and the political begins
as a tiny crack the first time we

Feminist Leaders Can't Walk on Water/33

decide not to say something important
to us because it would "waste every-
one's time." It isn't long before we
have forgotten the joy of controlling
our own lives.

This tendency to deny the indivi-
dual-in ourselves and others-creates a
world of leaders and followers. We
learn to listen to "the little voice of
shame that makes us wait for someone
else to speak first, to get a direction

from someone else. Here is where
. . . power gets lost every minute in
all our social institutions, in all the
behavioral roles we accept just to live
from day to day."

If the world feminists want to
create is one in which the personal
and the political have been united,
in which women, children and men
can always experience the freedom and
responsibility of controlling their own

34/Quest

lives, we must first ask ourselves what
is the process an individual must ex-
perience before she even wants to
become the only leader of her life.
Once we've identified the process, we
can identify the feminist leader as one
who helps an individual go through it.

Freire's Leadership Model

Paulo Freire is a Brazilian educator
who taught illiterate peasants how to
read and write, and in doing so,
helped them begin to take control of
their world. He believes that as

conscious human beings, we exist in a
state of dynamic interaction with our
environment. We act on the world and
transform it, and are in turn affected
by our changed environment.

However, the experience of oppres-
sion creates a situation in which the
"oppressive reality absorbs those with-
in it." Submerged in oppression,
people forget that social reality is
created by human beings and therefore
can be altered by human beings. The
crippling social reality created by an
oppressive system communicates to
people that they are the victims of
an unalterable world order. Fatalism,
apathy, passivity, and despair are the
inevitable results reflected in phrases
like, "It's always been like this; it
can't be changed."

The fatalism and passivity engen-
dered by oppression also allow the
oppressed to internalize a self-denig-
rating image made up of the percep-
tions and assumptions of the oppressor:
if she weren't an inferior being, she

wouldn't be in this terrible situation.

The tendency to adopt the oppres-
sors' values is another characteristic of
the oppressed individual at this level
of consciousness. It means that

the oppressed idolize not only the
power of the oppressor, but also want
his respect and admire his personality,
appearance, and values. The oppressor
becomes everyone's model of human-
ity, and thus a woman glows with
pride when she is told that she "thinks
like a man." Thus though Freire
developed his theory of oppression
through working in Brazil, it fits the
attitudes of pre-conscious women in
America very well.

The only way to emerge from an
oppressive reality is through a process
that Freire terms "praxis: reflection
and action upon the world in order to
transform it. "12 The first step toward
praxis occurs when people begin to
understand that they have been victims
of an oppressive social reality, and
cease to blame themselves for their
positions within it. The oppressed
individual begins to assert Her identity
in her own terms, rather than simply
imitating the oppressor.

Consciousness-raising groups have
provided women with the opportunity
to explore and create a feminist iden-
tity apart from the definitions of
women created by men. Women have
begun to explore the sources of their
oppression and worked to establish a
new woman-identified image of them-
selves. The praxis has begun, but
we must do more than reflect upon our
social reality: we must act upon it.

Feminist Leaders Can't Walk on Water/35

Through praxis, we commit our-
selves to transforming our social real-
ity, and reach a state of 'critical
consciousness' characterized by rethink-
ing which perceives reality as process,
as transformation . . . thinking which
does not separate itself from action. . . ."
Freire terms a leadership which can
help oppressed people progress to
critical consciousness, "revolutionary
leadership."1^

The Oppression of Women:
The Lost Identity

Trying to develop a critical con-
sciousness is an extraordinarily difficult
task. Freire, through his work with
Third World people, recognized that
oppression reduced people to objects
blind to their own ability to transform
reality. Yet they can recognize the
historical process which created their
oppression and can move toward crit-
ical consciousness. This, however, is
considerably more difficult in the case
of women. At all times and in all
cultures, we have been treated as
objects, as the "inessential other";
in every culture, we are invented by
men just as the oppressor always in-
vents the oppressed-by attributing to
the oppressed traits and qualities that
justify their oppression. But because
our oppression is grounded in our
physiology rather than in historical
accident, it is more difficult for us to
see that it does indeed result from
historical process. While the oppres-
sion of the Third World has its basis in
economics, and was later justified by

stereotypes and myths, the oppression
of women seems to be a condition
which came out of the mist of prime-
val human history.

Because the oppression of women
goes as deep as human culture itself,
the feminist revolutionary leader must
be willing to pursue the origins of her
own oppression into the realm of
mythology, spirituality, and philoso-
phy. Because our oppression is based
on physiology, adhesion to the values
of the oppressor can take a particularly
virulent form of self-hatred in women.
In our devotion to the male oppressor
we cannot help but come to view
our own bodies as that part of our-
selves which prevents us from assuming
the oppressor's superior role. We come
to see our bodies as loathsome and
inferior.

If acting upon and transforming
the world is the essence of human
freedom, then we who are defined
as 'object' are prevented from taking
responsibility for our lives and are
denied our humanity. In other words,
the norm for humanity is the same
as the norm for the male; women are
something other than the norm-and
have been defined by just those traits
that deviate from the "human" norm. 1 4
"In actuality, the relation of the two
sexes is not quite like that of two
electrical poles, for man represents
both the positive and the neutral,
as is indicated by the common use
of 'man' to designate human beings in
general whereas woman represents only
the negative, defined by limiting cri-
teria, without reciprocity. . . ."15

36/Quest

What, then, is the real nature of
the female half of the human race?
And how do we, as women, after all
these thousands of years, begin to
define ourselves? In a world where
art means male art, culture means male
culture, language means male language-
when every tool we need to discover
our heritage is a male tool-we must
find the courage and the patience to
challenge all our assumptions, values,
and discoveries-to scrutinize every con-
cept and idea we use. As we begin
to explore the sources of our oppres-
sion, the tools of the search will be
as important as anything we find
along the way.

The female/woman person who e-
merges at the end of that search may
or may not resemble the creatures
called women now. We cannot know
now, at the beginning of our search,
who we can become, or what we are
capable of doing. We can only know
that being human is an ongoing pro-
cess of self-definition, and the human
person known as woman must be
self-defined.

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
A Tool for Liberation

The feminist revolutionary leader is
a person who has begun to assess the
tools that must be used in our search
for woman identity-ana who has re-
cognized that this is a process that
cannot be completed alone. We are
seeking our commonality as women
as we examine our past, present, and
future, and must do it with other
women rather than alone. Because
our social reality is created by the
collective consciousness of all who
exist within that reality, there can
be no truly humanizing transformation
of social reality unless we work in
solidarity and reiect individual solu-
tions.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire
describes a revolutionary process which
can provide feminist revolutionary lead-
ership with a methodology, a "tool,"
to discover our collective woman-iden-
tity and therefore become the subject
of the social reality in which we
exist. According to Freire, this percep-
tion of ourselves as subject is the
prerequisite for achieving true liber-
ation.

There are two distinct phases in
Freire's pedgaogy of the oppressed.
In the first stage, we must develop
a consciousness of our own oppression
and its true causes. The primary
purpose of this stage is to help us
perceive the oppressor within our-
selves. In the second stage, the ped-
agogy of the oppressed becomes the
pedagogy of all people, and insures a

Feminist Leaders Can't Walk on Water/37

process of permanent, on-going libera-

tion.

The process within which the fem-
inist revolutionary leader can bring
other women to the moment of self-
discovery is called "dialogical educa-
tion." In it, "the revolutionary lead-
ership establishes a permanent relation-
ship of dialogue with the oppressed."
The commitment many feminists have
already made to non-hierarchy, con-
sensual decision-making, shared lead-
ership, anti-capitalist ideology, and
other kinds of egalitarian structures,
indicates that feminist revolutionary
leadership has already begun to use
some of these principles.

There are three major aspects to
this dialogical or problem-posing educ-
tion. First, there must be the elimina-
tion of the power disparity between
teacher and student (or leader and
oppressed). This cannot be achieved
as long as the leader-teacher sees her-
self as one who possesses a truth
that must be conveyed to the student.
In assuming the role of an authority
who interprets social reality for them,
the teacher denies the students ex-
istence as subjects, because she denies
them the opportunity to achieve prax-
is by reflecting and acting together on
the social reality in which they exist.
Thus the oppressed are condemned to
continue in a passive role-they are
once again made victims of their envir-
onment.

The second major aspect of dial-
ogical education is that the knowledge
to be examined or shared is not the
private property of any one member of

the group but something brought to
the group and examined by the group
together. It is important to remem-
ber that for Freire, humanity and
the social reality (culture) it creates
are in a continual process of be-
coming. To be valid, then, any know-
ledge brought before a group must be
reflected upon and then acted upon
by the group-even if only to con-
firm the reliability of the knowledge
it has examined. In this process
we must be willing to re-examine all
the truths we take most for granted.
Third, Freire maintains that the
authentic revolutionary leader does
not focus her energies upon trying
to change the oppressed, because by
doing so, she reduces the oppressed to
objects. Instead her role is to work
with the oppressed to organize and
"re-present" the things we must know
in order to change social reality. As
feminist leaders, we must not make
the mistake of focusing our attentions
and efforts so exclusively upon an
ideal of the liberated woman that we
overlook the "concrete, existential,
present situation" of real women. "1°
Freire suggests that the way to keep
a focus on the real situation is to
merge the process and content of
dialogical education into what he calls
the "great generative themes of an
epoch." Freire believes that the fun-
damental generative theme of our ep-
och is domination, which in turn
implies its opposite, liberation. As
long as the oppressed are submerged
and unable to see that the limits on
their freedom can be changed by their

38/Quest

own efforts, the generative themes
are hidden from them. Because the
themes are the concrete representation
of praxis itself, the oppressed will be
unable to perceive the themes until
they have developed the level of crit-
ical consciousness that will allow them
to participate in transforming their
reality and creating their own libera-

tion.

Beginning a Strategy

The fundamental generative theme
that we as feminists confront is that
of patriarchy-which implies its op-
posite-feminist liberation. Patriarchy
differs from culture to culture and
class to class both in the degree to
which it manifests itself and the ways
it oppresses people. Yet there is no
culture on earth where women are not,
at some level, valued less than men.

Feminist revolutionary leadership
can use Freire's methodology to trans-
form patriarchal oppression into true
liberation. Of course the specific
ways in which we choose to utilize
this tool will differ from leader to
leader and place to place. But I
believe that feminists have already
seen its applicability. The conscious-
ness-raising group and its structure
grew out of an intuitive understanding
on the part of oppressed women that
we must begin to fight oppression by
organizing around the issues of our
oppression as we see them. In the
first place, the non-hierarchical struc-
ture of consciousness-raising groups
reflects a deep understanding that we
must grapple with our social reality as

subjects, without the mediation of a
leader, since leaders deny us the exper-
ience of praxis. Second, the fact
that we chose to come together in
groups at all indicates that we recognize
the need to work with other women to
transform the reality of patriarchal
domination. Finally, though many
CR groups have found it very difficult
to make the transition from the mem-
bers' personal concerns to political
action, Freire's analysis of praxis pro-
vides a conceptual framework that
would allow CR groups to make the
transition.

Moreover the process is not limited
to CR groups. Feminist revolutionary
leaders should also be able to employ
the concepts of dialogical education
in a variety of situations. We must
be prepared for the inevitable fum-
blings and false paths as we seek the
best way to use the concepts of dialogi-
cal education to develop a feminist
revolutionary force capable of trans-
forming patriarchy into the liberation
of all women.

What I've outlined here is less a
strategy than a concept. Yet I believe
it can begin to help those of us
looking for leadership models find a
basis for our actions. Because dialogi-
cal education is based upon a humanity

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Feminist Leaders Can't Walk on Water/39

that is forever in the process of be-
coming more fully human through its
own liberation, the strategies must
also be evolving—changing with the
needs and perceptions of the women
with whom we work and fight.

Footnotes

ISimone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
(New York: Vintage Books, 1974).

^Paul Hershey and Kenneth Blanchard,
Management of Organizational Behavior
(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1972)
p. 134.

^Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex,
pp. 779-780.

^Robert Townsend, Up the Organization
(Greenwich, Ct., Fawcett, 1971); see also
Caroline Bird, Everything a Woman Needs to
Know to Get Paid What She's Worth, ed.
Helen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam,
1974).

^Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey
New York: Links Books, 1974), pp. 10-11.

^See Joreen, "The Tyranny of Structure-
lessness," Second Wave, II, 1, 131.

7peggy Kornegger, "Anarchism: The
Feminist Connection," Second Wave IV, 1,
33.

°Judy Henderson, "On Integrating the
Personal and the Political," Socialism/ 'l-'em-
nism, Papers from the New American Move-
ment Conference on Feminism and Social-
ism, 1972, p. 8.

"Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
tr. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Sea-
bury Press, 1974).

10Ibid., p. 36.

llIbid., p. 30.

Ulbid, p. 36.

13Ibid., p. 81.

l^Sce Phyllis Chesler, Women and Mad-
ness (New York: Avon Books, 1972).

15Simone De Beauvoir, The Second
Sex, p. sviii.

loPaulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Op-
pressed, p. 13.

17 Ibid., p. 67.

18Ibid„ p. 82.

Lorraine Master son is a graduate
student in the School of Education at
the University of Massachusetts, with
a special interest in adult education
and life-long learning.

WOMEN BEHIND BARS

AN ORGANIZING TOOL

... an important new booklet which provides
an overview of conditions women face in this
country's jails and prisons with an eye toward
what can and is being done to bring about fun-
damental change. Included are over 100 cap-
sule descriptions of groups giving prisoners
political support and services, such as legal ed-
ucation projects, bail funds and prisoner unions.
Articles detail the problems of female prisoners,
analyse the role of prisons in society, suggest
organizing tactics, and outline the legal system
of the People's Republic of China. There are
also sketches of six U.S. women political pris-
oners and interviews with three ex-cons. An-
notated listings describe print and audio-visual
resources. 56pp., $1 .75, free to prisoners.
Resources for Community Change, PO Box
21066, Washington, DC 20009

In Quest's Report to Our Readers 1.,
Volume II, Number 3, we omitted the dates
of the financial statement on Page 41. The
financial statement was for the nine months
ending September 30, 1975.

40/Quest

Report to Our Readers 2.

In our last issue, "Organizations
and Strategies," we discussed the fi-
nancial development of Quest. Here
we would like to explain the evolu-
tion of our editorial and administrative
process. The feminist movement has
placed much emphasis on process, rec-
ognizing that success in achieving
goals, such as the setting up and run-
ning of a particular project, is not a
full measure of movement effective-
ness. In order to structure new institu-
tions, organizational models, leader-
ship concepts and, most importantly,
power relationships, feminist groups
must examine their own internal mech-
anisms as part of an evolving, experi-
ential approach to change. Thus it is
especially appropriate that Quest dis-
cuss its internal process within these
issues on organization and leadership.

Quest's process is tied internally to
its historical development. The journal
grew from a series of meetings com-
menced in November 1972, called by
feminists in the Washington area who
wanted to find a way to further the
movement's political development. Af-
ter months of discussion, we decided
that the movement needed a national
forum for feminist analysis and ideo-
logy that was linked with practical
feminist experience. As a group of
activists, we were primarily interested
in movement building, and not, per se,
in producing a journal.

A number of important factors
have affected Quest's process. First,
the original group had a common
(although nqt identical) politics which
recognized the importance of class,
lesbian feminism and power to fem-
inist ideology. We had also, by this
time, worked together over a period of
months and had started Quest on a
solid base of trust in one another.
Too, we had a common history of
political activism, had stable ties to
D.C., and most of us had already made
initial-if differing— decisions about out-
side jobs vs. jobs within the move-
ment. All these factors led to group
cohesiveness and to a long-range com-
mitment to producing a high quality
journal. Over the life of Quest, our
staff has changed relatively little; this
has provided the continuity necessary
for the gradual development and re-
finement of a process which is suited
to the needs both of individuals and
of producing a journal. Moreover, we
represent a diversity in class, age, sex-
ual preference, family responsibility,
etc., which has insured a varied per-
spective on feminist issues and analy-
ses.

Our process sprang initially from
certain necessities, as well as from
political analysis. That is, to some ex-
tent our process was determined by
the practicalities of putting out a jour-
nal and by each individual's outside

Report to Our Readers, Part 11/41

commitments (e.g., many of us have
full-time, outside jobs). A particularly
important factor in our early develop-
ment was that we received both office
space and two salaries from the Insti-
tute for Policy Studies; one of our
staff is an Institute fellow who was
entitled to hire another person to
work with her. The rest of us, how-
ever, were not paid staff, which im-
mediately raised the question of time
commitment. After discussing Quest's
needs and the time each person had
available, we agreed that with some
flexibility, each staff person would
spend between 15 and 20 hours week-
ly on Quest. This commitment is, and
always has been, enforced through a
system of accountability, trust and
responsibility, integrally related to our
leadership structure.

Quest is not a collective in that we
do acknowledge leadership and are not
all involved in making all decisions.
In essence we have a system of shift-
ing, horizontal leadership based on our
individual skills and time commit-
ments. The first process we apply in
this kind of leadership is assignment
of specific areas of responsibility.
This involves learning how to recog-
nize, acknowledge and further develop
our different skills. For instance, we
found that while some of us could
edit, others were good at proofreading,
art and layout, promotion, and bus-
iness managing. We see ourselves as
equals in that we all perform essential
tasks for Quest, but we do not see
ourselves as identical. Each individual
staff member must take responsibility

for the work within some given area.
In that work, she is delegated authority
to make certain kinds of decisions and
handles both the creative and mun-
dane parts of the task. Thus, while we
do not all do the same things, our div-
ision of labor is horizontal and no one
does only the "best" or the "worst"
parts of a job.

Ultimately, of course, each member
is accountable to the group; most
importantly, we have found that this
shifting responsibility can only work
if we trust each other to fulfill our
commitments. The resolution of which
decisions were to be made by the
whole group and which by individuals
evolved as it became clear that the
group was spending too much time on
day-to-day decisions. Gradually, as we
became comfortable with each other's
particular roles, we also became com-
fortable with the idea that certain
problems did not have to be brought
to the whole staff. All policy, edi-
torial, copy, staff and fundraising de-
cisions, however, are always made by
the entire staff.

Although we do not have a hier-
archy, those who work full-time on
Quest have more responsibility for and
knowledge of the intricacies and prob-
lems of day-to-day operations, and
therefore, have more decision-making
authority. Different personalities tend
to have more power to affect decisions
for the whole group. There is some
correlation between full-time staff vs.
part-time staff and this power balance,
which may be a function of per-
sonality, is also probably accentuated

42/Quest, vol. II no. 4, spring, 1976

by the fact that the degree of expertise
and familiarity with a particular prob-
lem affects persuasiveness. In any
case, we are committed to developing
forms of interaction that take personal
needs into account. For instance, we
attempt to work out new job assign-
ments before dissatisfaction reaches
crisis proportions. This is done, in
part, through criticism/self-criticism
which follows each of our weekly
meetings. This process is meant to
draw out constructive suggestions a-
bout how our meetings could run more
efficiently as well as individual prob-
lems, cither with staff members or
with the group process. For instance,
we realized that our meetings would
run more smoothly if we had a con-
venor (rotating weekly) responsible
for starting the meeting and keeping
things moving. Being a convenor is a
chore shared by all, not a status. It is
done for the sake of efficiency, not
power.

Similarly, we schedule periodic re-
examinations of our job responsi-
bilities, necessary in part because job
needs change as we grow, because we
have farmed out jobs previously per-
formed by staff members, because
some jobs grow too large to be handled
by one person, because we discover
our skills lie elsewhere, or simply
because we need a change. And also,
we have learned methods of organ-
ization from talking to other groups.
For example, the Valley Women's
Center in Northampton, Mass., sug-
gested both criticism/self-criticism and
the idea that we might be more

efficient if we began our meetings with
substantive material and ended with
business.

As the need and desire for add-
itional staff developed, we had to set
out more specific criteria for staff.
We developed written criteria aimed
both at evaluating persons interested
in joining Quest (e.g., extent of pre-
vious political experience, prior work
with Quest, etc.) and at giving those
interested an accurate picture of the
commitment we would expect. We are
still grappling with how to integrate
new people into the journal so that
there is a meaningful basis for evalu-
ation and contribution on both sides.
The idea of requiring substantial in-
volvement with the journal before
joining the staff has both enabled new
staff to become familiar with our
process and has allowed for conti-
nuity. It has also allowed political
trust to develop so that new staff can
come into our process on an equal
basis.

We have found that a number of
decisions are dictated by business, edi-
torial and political necessity. Before
the publication of our first issue, most
of the business of Quest could be
handled by one person, and the rest of
us spent our time on copy, fundraising
and substantive development. As the
business of the journal expanded, we
assigned one full-time person over-all
supervision of the business and office
work, and other business-related jobs
had to be divided among us. Yet the
business end has continued to expand,
necessitating both a mailing and a

Report to Our Readers, Part 11/43

distribution service. And still there is a
desperate need for one or more new
full-time persons in the office. Last
fall, Quest hired its first full-time
worker paid from Quest funds-specifi-
cally accountable to Quest alone for
her salary and whose sole job commit-
ment is to Quest.

Our editorial policy has undergone
similar changes. In order to begin
planning issues sufficiently in advance,
it was necessary to take the initial
planning stage away from the group as
a whole. Although each topic is chosen
and discussed by the v/hole staff, a
Development Committee is formed
consisting of at least one staff member
(responsible for putting together the
Committee and for communication
between the Committee and the staff)
and several persons not on Quest staff.
This has allowed a more direct role for
non-staff persons in issue development
and has been a place for people
interested in working with us to play
an important role. Essentially, the
Development Committee outlines the
kinds of questions it would like
articles to consider and solicits articles.
It also takes care of initial correspon-
dence and article development with
potential authors and makes prelim-
inary copy judgments. The staff person
on the Committee keeps the entire
staff informed as to progress and
reports staff decisions to the Com-
mittee. After copy deadline, the entire
staff reads all copy being considered
and, in conjunction with the Develop-
ment Committee, makes final decisions
and assigns editors. Our editorial

process consists of a first and second
content editor and a technical editor.
Once an article is edited, it must be
typeset, its place in the journal de-
signed and laid out, and then it can
be sent to the printer. Thus, after
articles are accepted, there is still
over two months' worth of work
before the journal is completed.

Since we are a group of political
activists primarily interested in move-
ment building and not just in pro-
ducing a journal,, our process has had
to take into account our political
needs. Since every minute of meeting
time and of our lives could be taken
up in the details and decisions related
to producing a journal, we found that
we had to insure that we kept in touch
with politics generally, and with move-
ment activity in particular. We decided
to begin each of our weekly meetings
with a one-hour political discussion,
our subjects ranging from internal
politics (such as our attitudes toward
our Quest jobs) to more general polit-
ical questions such as our responsi-
bility toward children, our attitudes
toward money, and so on. Second, in
an attempt to reach out more to the
feminist community in D.C., we have
conducted a political seminar follow-
ing each Quest issue and are initiating
a feminist political theory course. We
are still struggling to develop more
ways to keep ourselves actively in-
volved in politics, while maintaining
Quest as a journal. We will discuss this
and other questions that we have
concerning our future in the next
issue of Quest (Volume III, No. 1).

44/Quest

metamorphosis

I sit at the mirror

to make myself old

spread out

my mummer's palette

of ochre

acid yellow

and clown white

burnt umber

all bruise

and shadow

traces the clues of age across my brow

frowns and grimaces

revealing time's itinerary

I watch expectantly

for high cheekbones

hawk-beaked hills and hollows

withered by the sun

but this is my mother's face falling on mine

round and full

lucent with foxfire:

we are the Celtic people

our mothers worshipped the moon

and coupled with forest spirits

these girlish hands

tie back my mossy hair

with fingers firm and straight

they mock my age

by Elizabeth Frazer

Metamorphosis, A Poem/45

Notes on a

Feminist

Economics

by Bat-Ami Bar On

graphics by Jackie MacMillan

Editors' Introduction: Last Spring,
we first heard via the feminist grape-
vine of the beginnings oj a national
feminist economic network. Without
knowing much more than that, the
concept sounded good to many of us.
We had been waiting for some time for
some radical feminists to do something
on a national level concerning women's
economic situation.

In May, 1975, an initial planning
meeting was held in New Haven, Con-
necticut. In it, the first conceptions of
the network focussed primarily on
newly-forming feminist credit unions
and ways they could cooperate for
mutual growth. And it was largely the
political foresight and organizing of
Joanne Parrent and Valerie Angers of
the Detroit Feminist Federal Credit
Union which led to this meeting and
to the subsequent first annual confer-
ence of FEN (the Feminist Economic
Network), Thanksgiving weekend in
Detroit.

At the May planning session, which
only feminist credit unions had at-
tended, tasks were delegated to the
regional credit unions concerning pre-
parations for the annual conference.
The Washington Area Feminist Federal
Credit Union was delegated the task of
preparing a draft of by-laws for FEN.
But when the 75 to 100 women who
came to the conference registered, they
found enclosed in the registration
packet a set of by-laws prepared by
the Detroit FFCU.

While most of the women attending
the conference spent Saturday in work-
shops discussing such subjects as fem-
inist structure, loan policy and fem-
inism and economic theory, a smaller
group met to discuss FEN's organiza-
tional structure and the now-existing
three sets of proposed by-laws: Wash-
ington's, Detroit's, and New Haven's.
It was in this by-laws session that
significant differences first emerged
among the Credit Unions.

A plenary session had been sched-
uled for Saturday night to discuss
FEN purposes and the by-laws. This
plenary session resulted in the high-
ly charged walkout of the Detroit
delegation, some of the Washington
group and other women when it be-
came clear that the assembly was not
going to accept the Detroit by-laws
d)id structure in toto, without discus-
sion and change. Thus Sunday found
two groups meeting separately, one
retaining the FEN name, and com-
prised primarily of Detroit and some
Washington women, and the other
comprised of the vast majority of con-

46/Quest, vol. II no. 4, spring, 1976

ference participants, which chose to be
called the Feminist Economic Alliance.

It should be clarified that it is not
within the function of either umbrella
organization to lend directly to in-
dividuals, but rather, to assist member
groups through loans, materials and
expertise. Thus the discussion below
concerning differential treatment in
lending criteria should not be con-
strued as relating to individuals in the
loan process, though the theory applies
equally whether for member organiza-
tions or for individuals.

The FEN Conference in Detroit
resulted in the establishment of two
separate organizations-the Feminist
Economic Alliance (FEA), and the
Feminist Economic Network (FEN).
While I do not know yet how anyone
is going to respond to one more split
in the movement, I find it necessary to
reflect on and analyze the happenings
that led to such a result. I went to the
Conference hopeful and excited; I
came out of it tired and depressed,
and while in some ways I regret that
it ended the way it did-with the estab-
lishment of two organizations, both of
which have to appeal to the same pool
of feminists, the future of both de-
pending not only on the initial organ-
izers, but on this pool-I believe that
that this particular split is in essence
healthy. More precisely, I believe that
the establishment of FEA was a healthy
response on the part of its organ-
izers to their conflicts with the or-
ganizers of FEN.

The conflicts between the two
groups reside in philosophical, polit-

ical and pragmatic disagreements. Spe-
cifically, I feel that there are four basic
points around which the split arose,
all of which have significant implica-
tions for the movement, both in theory
and in practice. As I felt they emerged
at the Conference, the four points arc:
(1) the philosophy ofleadcrship; (2) the
problem of democratic process-in this
case, the assumptions underlying the
participants' freedom to create alter-
natives to the FEN proposal; (3) the
question of decision-making, and (4) the
implications of these points on the
exercise of power in the feminist move-
ment. As I will show, each of these
considerations is both implied in the
FEN statement of purpose and was
acted out in the Conference itself.

The Politics of Leadership

At face value, it may seem that
none of the positions advanced by the
organizers of FEN was unreasonable.
For example, the calling and orga-
nizing of a Conference open to all
women from feminist enterprises can
easily be construed as indicating the
organizers' willingness to dialogue. But
in fact the Conference was not open
to all women from feminist enter-
prises; most of the groups contacted
were either credit unions or Feminist
Women's Health Centers.* Given that

To my knowledge only four enter-
prises other than the 12 or 13 credit
unions and two health centers (Oakland
and Detroit TWHC's) participated

Notes on a Feminist Economics/47

the intention of the Conference organ-
izers was to establish a nation-wide um-
brella organization of feminist enter-
prises, this selectivity is at least sur-
prising, particularly when viewed in the
context of FEN's expressed statement
of purpose: "The purpose of this
association shall be: 1. to provide
economic development and accept fin-
ancial leadership? for the Feminist
Movement. " ■*•

First, even if all the Conference
participants had agreed to such a state-
ment of purpose, the fact that most of
them were from credit unions only-
not from other feminist enterprises-
makes the statement quite presump-
tuous. Second, the ultimate accep-
tance of such a statement by one
faction of the participants, and in
spite of the split and the fact that the
organizers of FEN are a substantially
smaller group, is even more presump-
tuous, in my judgment. Such a state-
ment of purpose is to me dangerously
broad as well as unverifiable, given
both the diversity of the movement
and its lack of structure, and given the
Conference's lack of representation
from all segments of the movement.

But I have a more basic objection
to the stated purpose, which concerns
the organizers' assumptions about the
nature of leadership. The FEN orga-
nizers claimed during Conference dis-
cussions that there is no difference be-
tween "accepting" leadership and "tak-
ing" or "assuming" it. Since the FEN
bylaws give its board of directors all
decision-making powers, all powers
necessary to supervise FEN's imple-

mentation and all powers to appoint
and dismiss officers, as well as other
such powers (and given the style in
which the FEN organizers actually
exercised their powers during the Con-
ference), it seems quite clear to me
that they in fact do intend to take
financial leadership of the feminist
movement regardless of what other
group and individual members of the
movement are willing to accept.

A basic confusion seems to under-
line this manner of thinking and act-
ing. One of the first assumptions the
radical feminist philosophy of leader-
ship involves is that in a group that
operates organically, leadership is as-
sumed (or taken) by some members
when necessary, and that different
members will rotate in and out of
leadership positions, depending on the
tasks at hand, the members' skills and
other factors. But this assumption
cannot exist without its complement:
that those members who are not
leaders have to be willing to accept
the members who assume leadership.
If they are not, several results are
possible, one of which is a split.

When only the first assumption
exists openly, and when one claims to
accept leadership in behalf of the
group, she assumes the complement
implicitly. In this context, the assump-
tion of group acceptance takes an
interesting turn. Those who assume
leadership also assume that they are,
or at least should be, accepted as such
by others because they best represent
the interests and the will of all and
thus can best serve the group as a

48/Quest

whole.** That the organizers of FEN
assumed the complement in such a
manner was and is quite evident.
First, for example, they claimed that
feminists (and themselves as such)
should be trusted because feminists
cannot oppress or exploit others, es-
pecially women; because feminists will
do their best to serve others, especially
women; and because feminists under-
stand what is in the best interests of
others, especially women. Second,
when these claims were challenged by
Conference participants whose experi-
ence had been that these claims arc
not necessarily true, the challengers'
feminist credentials were questioned
in response-a dialectic especially evi-
dent when the FEA organizers were
construed to be wrong or at least mis-
taken in their rejection of FEN by-
laws, and when their refusal to ratify
the FEN bylaws was not even con-
sidered by way of resolving the di-
lemma. My perception is that the orga-
nizers of FEN left no space for resolu-
tion of differences-that the lack of
space for dialogue was in fact one
of the main features of the Conference.

The problem is quite old, and the
women's movement should look at it ser-
iously. Plato struggled ivith it and suggested
a benevolent dictatorship as a solution hav-
ing the same assumptions. Rousseau tried
to work around it, but when his solutio>i
was practiced in the French Revolution, it
resulted in disaster because the assumptions
were the same. Moreover, absolute obe-
dience to party line, as expressed by some
communist parties and in fascist ideologies,
is justified on the same grounds.

In other words, the internal political
process between the two groups was
not allowed to evolve as a cooperative
exchange; instead, it was forced to
evolve along competitive lines.

In my view, the Conference re-
volved around the distribution of-and
thus the possession of-financial, if not
also political power. While I do not
want to believe that competition is a
necessary result of encounters involv-
ing the distribution of power, the Con-
ference convinced me once more that
it is one real possibility. However, if
such encounters are to evolve along
different lines, some preconditions
must hold. Insofar as cooperation is
possible not only among equals but
also among unequals, one such pre-
condition is that the powerful need to
be at least willing to cooperate, wil-
ling to construct arrangements that
will allow the powerless and the
powerful to develop without hinder-
either.

The issue here, though, is that in
this world, the possessors of financial
power have much influence on the
direction the political wind blows.
The possessors of such power do not
need to be also the possessors of
direct political power; they exercise
their financial power in order to
influence the political process. And by
controlling the resources whose dis-
tribution is the main variable around
which all political encounters revolve,
they also control the movements of
participants in that encounter. 2 To
lack financial resources, or to fall out
of grace with those who have them, is

Notes on a Feminist Economics/49

thus almost the same as to lack, or to
lose political power. Much is necessary
in order to insure that this will not be
the case-mostly the exercise of some
set of controls over those in charge of
material and other resources. Insofar
as no such set of controls was provided
for by FEN, "acceptance" of financial
leadership here can adequately be con-
strued as "acceptance" of political
leadership as well.

The organizers of FEN, while fewer
in number, were and are at least as
powerful, if not more powerful, than
the organizers of FEA. As the different
participants entered the Conference
negotiations, FEN had (and still has)
at its disposal as much (if not more)
money, time, information and other
resources, as the organizers of FEA.
More precisely, from the start the
powerful negotiators were the Detroit
credit union and its branches (present
and future) and the Oakland Feminist
Women's Health Center and some
others. These organizations came to
the Conference as a unified front. On
the other hand, the members of the
other participating credit unions and
enterprises were the relatively power-
less negotiators. They had (and have)
fewer resources, and they came to the
Conference without a pre-established
unity; instead, they (or rather, most of
them) united in direct response to the
others, as the relatively powerless
often do. Lacking a pre-established
unity and lacking resources equal to
those of the Detroit-Oakland coalition,
the other Conference participants also
lacked a power base for participating

SO/ Quest

in an effective dialogue about the
money/power equation.

The surprising selectivity in the
enterprises contacted about the Con-
ference makes this problem an acute
one, given the fact that most were
credit unions. Credit unions are a
money-making-money kind of enter-
prise. No production or service related
to production is involved in the way
the money is made. In other words,
while other enterprises accumulate
capital via production or the provision
of services, credit unions accumulate
capital because they have it to start
with. They control one of the factors
necessary in the establishment of other
enterprises-money. Thus they are ca-
pable of determining the survival of ex-
isting enterprises and the establish-
ment of future ones. If the Conference
had resulted in one organization, most
of whose members were credit unions,
then under the stringent bylaws pro-
posed by FEN, this kind of control
would have been assured in the hands
of FEN leaders.

The converging of economic and
political power, specifically in the con-
text of money-making-money organ-
izations, is a subject to which I will
return. At this point, however, I
suggest that there are dangerous ten-
dencies inherent in the bylaws' assump-
tions about the rights of would-be
leaders and in the prospective conver-
gence of economic and political power
that FEN would represent. From my
point-of-view, these are tendencies
that actually operated in the Confer-
ence, and if we allow for their free

n

!:-■■■

■ il

*A

L

Notes on a Feminist Economics/51

play, we allow for their consequences:
the formation of nation-wide feminist
organizations operating in the same
way that any other nation-wide eco-
nomic organization operates in a free-
market society. This consequence leads
into another position that at face
value does not seem unreasonable, but
which cannot stand up under close
analysis.

The Democratic Process and
Freedom of Alternatives

One of the principles espoused by
the organizers of FEN was that if one
does not like what FEN proposes, one
is free to do what one wishes to do.
The organizers of FEA did exactly
that; now it is apparently up to the
feminist public at large to choose be-
tween the two organizations, or if the
principle is extended, to choose nei-
ther and create a third organization or
more. The problem, however, is that
the principle can be acted on only
when viable alternatives exist. The
problem here is also that there are not
too many viable alternatives. More-
over, the principle implies refusal to
change.

As to the latter implication, in the
Conference, the "freedom of alter-
natives" principle was actually acted
on to cut down on objections and
criticisms rather than to encourage
dialogue. If one did not like the sug-
gested FEN bylaws, one had one's
choice.. .but one choice was excluded-
cooperative work. To some extent, one
could state one's objections, but most-

ly they were not listened to, and when
they were, they were hardly ever
considered. ***If one is willing to co-
operate with others, one must also be
willing to allow for change; thus one
must be willing to listen to and
consider what others have to say.
To act otherwise is to imply that one
is beyond criticism or, at best, to
leave resolution to future develop-
ments by default. + Neither is accept-
able because each allows ample room
for the abuse of power.

In my view, the present question of
leadership and the freedom of choice
is about power. This was also demon-
strated at the Conference. For ex-
ample, the organizers of FEN claimed
that we should not look at power as a
limited commodity-that not only is
there enough of it for all to share, but
also that each of us creates her own
power. If this is acceptable, one need
not worry about the existence of via-
ble alternatives; one simply goes out
into the world and creates them.
Reality, however, is somewhat more
complicated. At any given time, the
amount of existing and potential pow-
er is limited: there are always limits in

/ will go so far as to claim that the
slight changes made in the bylaws suggested
by Detroit's credit union (and accepted as
l;EN bylaivs) resulted from an urgoit need
to accommodate Washuigton's credit union
(givcti the split), and because of omissions-
e.g., the statement of a process by which
the board is selected. WAVVCV is current-
ly a member of neither organization.

+AJa)iy have appealed to history, claim-
ing that in the long run it will absolve them.
Hut history does not absolve easily; it con-
siders both the means and the consequences.

52/Quest

.

i hr' \

i

; < "),■

..••,■ ■ •

:

Notes on a Feminist Economics/51

play, we allow for their consequences:
the formation of nation-wide feminist
organizations operating in the same
way that any other nation-wide eco-
nomic organization operates in a free-
market society. This consequence leads
into another position that at face
value does not seem unreasonable, but
which cannot stand up under close
analysis.

The Democratic Process and
Freedom of Alternatives

One of the principles espoused by
the organizers of FEN was that if one
does not like what FEN proposes, one
is free to do what one wishes to do.
The organizers of FEA did exactly
that; now it is apparently up to the
feminist public at large to choose be-
tween the two organizations, or if the
principle is extended, to choose nei-
ther and create a third organization or
more. The problem, however, is that
the principle can be acted on only
when viable alternatives exist. The
problem here is also that there are not
too many viable alternatives. More-
over, the principle implies refusal to
change.

As to the latter implication, in the
Conference, the "freedom of alter-
natives" principle was actually acted
on to cut down on objections and
criticisms rather than to encourage
dialogue. If one did not like the sug-
gested FEN bylaws, one had one's
choice.. .but one choice was excluded-
cooperative work. To some extent, one
could state one's objections, but most-

ly they were not listened to, and when
they were, they were hardly ever
considered. ***lf one is willing to co-
operate with others, one must also be
willing to allow for change; thus one
must be willing to listen to and
consider what others have to say.
To act otherwise is to imply that one
is beyond criticism or, at best, to
leave resolution to future develop-
ments by default. + Neither is accept-
able because each allows ample room
for the abuse of power.

In my view, the present question of
leadership and the freedom of choice
is about power. This was also demon-
strated at the Conference. For ex-
ample, the organizers of FEN claimed
that we should not look at power as a
limited commodity-that not only is
there enough of it for all to share, but
also that each of us creates her own
power. If this is acceptable, one need
not worry about the existence of via-
ble alternatives; one simply goes out
into the world and creates them.
Reality, however, is somewhat more
complicated. At any given time, the
amount of existing and potential pow-
er is limited: there are always limits in

/ will go so far as to claim that the
slight changes made in the bylaws suggested
by Detroit's credit union (and accepted as
il-N bylaws) resulted from an urgent need
to accommodate Washington's credit union
(given the split), and because of omissions-
e.g., the statement of a process by which
the board is selected. WAi'l'CU is current-
ly a member of neither organization.

+Many have appealed to history, claim-
ing that in the long run it will absolve them.
But history does not absolve easily; it co>i-
siders both the mcaiis and the consequences.

52/Quest

resources, tin.e, opportunity and skills.
Moreover, the job of getting power
requires having some in order to
create more. Given these complexities,
the question of viable alternatives
cannot be brushed away. Alternatives
are not created via some mysterious
process; they can be created only
when one has the means necessary to
create them, and if and when these
means are controlled by someone
else, one simply cannot create viable
alternatives.

Let us look at what happened in
the Conference. The organizers of
FEA had some of the means necessary
to create alternatives for themselves,
and they did so. But as a result of the
Conference, most of the existing and
forming credit unions are aligned with
either one or the other umbrella
organization. The problem is that if
each organization decides to provide
information, training, financial support
and other kinds of help only to the
credit unions that pledge allegiance to
it, then the range of alternatives open
to women interested in the creation of
new credit unions is seriously limited.
At best, they will be required either to
accept the terms of the existing organ-
izations, or to recreate the wheel if they
only can. Moreover, if forming organ-
izations are to be treated differently,
depending on their pledge or refusal,
those who adopt the terms of either
organization will automatically be con-
sidered as better financial risks than
those who do not. The forming organ-
ization will not be left with much
choice.

One of the main problems at this
point is that such differential treat-
ment does not have to be consciously
instituted-whenever one has the pow-
er to provide services or to help
another who is in need, the person in
need is up against the dangers of
differential treatment. "H~ While profes-
sional ethics may prevent abuses in
some cases, the rules of the game are
not the same when what is needed is a
loan.

In such cases, the person in need is
almost at the mercy of the person(s)
making decisions about what consti-
tutes a good credit risk. More pre-
cisely, the decision is whether it is
worthwhile to invest one's money in
the enterprises of another. This has to
be decided before the loan is made;
not all people are good credit risks
and it is necessary to distinguish be-
tween them and, to this end, some set
of criteria is established. But all that
any set of objective criteria can define
is that the person is capable of repay-
ing the sum of money loaned plus
interest. The criteria, if they are objec-
tive, cannot determine that the person
is both capable and willing. Since it
is not only one's possibilities for future
loans that are dependent on one's punc-
tuality in repaying a loan, but also
one's reputation as a "good" credit

'H'The danger of differential treatment
is greater within a movement like the
women's movement, because one almost
constantly distinguishes between those who
are "with us" and those who are "against
us, " or who are potentially so.

Notes on a Feminist Economics/53

risk, a moral judgment is involved.
What we need to be clear about is that
whenever one qualifies as a "good"
credit risk according to objective cri-
teria, one passes only the first of the
judgments; one also needs to qualify
as a "good" credit risk according to
the lender's moral values. It is at this
point that the danger of differential
treatment arises. Only a well delineated
system of controls can reduce the poss-
ibility that the judgment will be arbi-
trary or personal; the market can
hardly control such possibilities. 3

Since more people are seeking loans
than there are those able to give them,
the choices the powerful have are
much greater than those of the needy.
This is especially true in the situation
which is developing in the feminist
credit community, for normally when
one is judged to be a "bad" credit
risk by one organization, she can try
other organizations, if they exist. But
if the organizations operate in similar
ways and with similar values, her
chances to qualify as a "good" credit
risk somewhere else are slight.

That the question of viable alter-
natives is an important one and cannot
be ignored is clearer when we look at
women subgrouped into their socio-
economic classes. Upper-class women
have more resources than others, so
that if they do not like existing alter-
natives, they can create others. But
lower-class women are not in the same
position. They may be able to strength-
en their own power, but because of
lack of resources, they are dependent
on existing alternatives. They simply

do not have the resources necessary to
create others.

Liberal economists (for example,
Milton Friedman), espouse a notion of
freedom similar to the principle es-
poused by the organizers of FEN.
According to them, one is free when
one can refuse to participate in any
given enterprise. They too rely on the
market to establish as perfect a system
of competition as possible to assure
fairness for all, and they too ignore
the problem of viable alternatives.
When they do agree that such alter-
natives may not exist or be created,
they claim either that this is a result
of centralized governmental control of
the market, or that no other concept
of freedom is realistic. The outstand-
ing contradiction here is that feminists
who espouse cooperation cannot rely
on perfect market competition to
assure fairness for all, nor can they
espouse the negative concept of free-
dom (i.e., freedom to refuse to partici-
pate) when they claim to be looking
for positive alternatives to the status
quo.

The Decision-Making Process

This contradictory thinking which
seems to have underlined FEN's "free-
dom of alternatives" concept of fair
play has a parallel in FEN's apparent
theory of the decision-making process.
The organizers of FEN claimed that
only those who do the work are
entitled to make decisions, and some-
times, they seemed even to claim that
in a decision-making process, those

54/Quest

who work more should be considered
more. On its face, such a theory seems
to make sense, but in this case it
ignores the fact that the working pro-
cedures required by any organization
depend on several variables-size and
purpose, to point to two. In other
words, not all principles applicable to
small organizations are applicable to
big ones, especially when they art-
nation-wide umbrella organizations.
Moreover, not all principles that apply
to enterprises directly connected with
production of goods or with the pro-
vision of services apply co organi-
zations of the money-making-money
type.

Let's look at the last claim first.
In the case of an enterprise whose
main objective is the production of
some object, the process of decision-
making does not need to be open to
the persons supplying the producers
with the raw material necessary for
production. As providers of raw mater-
ials, they are affected by the producers

if the resources they provide are abused.
They can evaluate the use of their
materials by evaluating the producer's
end product both quantitatively and
qualitatively. It is up to the actual
producers, given that they have input
from the consumers, to decide how to
produce, since they are the only ones
who can assess the consumers' require-
ments, the resources available for pro-
duction, their own needs from the
production process, and the possible
ways for producing the product in
question.

In a moncy-making-moncy orga-
nization, things are not the same since
there is one essential difference be-
tween this kind of enterprise and
others. The person investing money in
such an enterprise provides its workers
with the most essential resource need-
ed for its operation, and yet has no
way to evaluate the use of the money
in qualitative terms. The investor can
judge the product (the interest made
on a deposit) only quantitatively.

-?**

*"W

Mil fcl 1

N *■■■ ^.,,

Notes on a Feminist Economics/55

Hence she cannot know if her money
was abused. The only way the use of
money can be evaluated qualitatively
is indirectly, through evaluating the
process by which it is produced. Since
this is the case, the decision-making
process in a money-making-money
enterprise cannot be open only to
those who do the work; it must in-
clude the investor who, among other
things, is directly affected by the
decisions.

My second concern is that the
decision-making process also must re-
flect the purpose of the organization
which it serves. This consideration,
too, seems to have been overlooked. If
we accept the principle that only those
doing the work are entitled to make
decisions: if the decisions in question
are not only work-place decision., but
policy decisions affecting the organ-
ization as a whole; and if the organ-
ization in question is an umbrella organ-
ization, then we are up against some
severe problems not faced by small
organizations to which the principle
may apply. We institute a lack of
freedom on the part of the member
organizations to make their own policy
decisions and plan on their own so as
to best serve their communities and
themselves. When these decisions are
made elsewhere, the only thing mem-
ber organizations can decide is how
policy should be implemented. And if
they are also given guidelines for
implementation, all they are left with
are work-place decisions. No organiza-
tion, no enterprise that evolves organi-
cally in and with a community op-

erates in such a manner. Only organ-
izations and enterprises planted in a
community by an outsider do so.

This problem could be minimized
if the member organizations could
participate in decision-making for the
umbrella organization. But as long as
at least one woman from each member
organization does not work in and for
the umbrella organization too, we
institute an inability on the part of
the member organizations to take part
in the process of decision-making for
the organization as a whole. And this
is another problem. I believe that no
realistic solution to it is compatible
with the principle that those who do
the work make the decisions. First,
the more member organizations there
are, the less likely it is that there will
be enough positions in the umbrella
organization for a representative from
each. Second, the more specialized the
skills necessary to run the umbrella
organization, the less likely it is that
there will be at least one woman from
each member organization having or
willing to acquire these skills, particu-
larly since the kind of work will
probably differ from that which she
did in the member organization. And
finally, the larger the umbrella organ-
ization's territory, the more physically
impossible it is for any one person to
perform day-to-day activities in both
the member organization and the um-
brella organization unless, of course,
the umbrella headquarters is located
in the member enterprises's commu-
nity.

If these problems can be resolved

56/Quest

and a member organization is able to
give up one of its members for a rela-
tively long time (a year or so) to work
in the umbrella organization and at
the same time represent the member
organization in it, there are still other
problems. For example, the interests
of the umbrella organization as an
entity differ from those of the mem-
ber organization (e.g., preservation of
unity vs. autonomy for the member
groups). Moreover, the relatively long-
term removal of the worker/represen-
tative from the member organization
and the community it serves, and her
new identification with the umbrella
organization may result in the worker/
representative becoming less a "rep-
resentative" of her original organiza-
tion and more a representative of the
umbrella organization and its interests.

In short, the requirement that those
who do the work (of the umbrella
group) make the decisions is not com-
patible with the basic requirements
for a participatory democracy. If it is
imposed, we confront not only impos-
sible physical problems, but also basic,
real differences in the needs and pur-
poses of the umbrella and member
organizations. We also ignore the dif-
ferences between product and money-
making-money enterprises that ought
to determine who makes decisions
and in what ways.

In reality, then, it means the insti-
tution of a hierarchical structure, no
matter how much we claim that this
is not so. In reality, the philosophy of
decision-making espoused by FEN
means the exclusion of the member-

ship from the process of decision-mak-
ing, no matter how much we claim
that we aspire to establish the best
form of participatory democracy.
Worst, in reality, it means accepting a
principle basic to any oppressive struc-
ture -that those who have the power
are also those who rule.

It is at this point that the philoso-
phies apparently espoused by FEN
concerning leadership, the freedom of
alternatives, and decision-making con-
verge. At the Conference's conclusion,
at least, the Detroit-Oakland coalition
had assured its prerogative to "assume
leadership," and had also, through its
principles of decision-making, assum-
ed sole decision-making powers for
the network it had established. More-
over, it had combined these powers
with its existing economic clout as
the wealthiest of organizations rep-

THE LESBIANFEMINIST
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Notes on a Feminist Economics/57

resented-i.e., it had assured its po-
litical and economic control. In
point of fact, however, it is not the
organization, but rather a select group
of people within it who have proposed
"to provide economic development
and accept financial leadership for the
Feminist Movement"-the people who
can afford to work in and for the
organization. For only those who have
the power of resources can afford to
work for the umbrella organization.

Summary

Much more can probably be said
about the Conference, and especially
about the views expressed and the
extent to which the actual events
showed these views to be real tend-
encies of behavior and development.
I touched, however, on what I con-
sider to be the most critical of these
views and tendencies. I believe that
they constitute the point of departure
for the two resulting organizations,
and that what we have on our hands is
a set of problems to which the fem-
inist movement must provide clear
answers.

While presumptuousness can be and
in this case was construed as vision,
while authoritarian attitudes can be
and in this case were construed as
benevolence, the proposed exercise of
both political and economic power
cannot be masked. It is my belief that
only in some few instances can we, as
a diverse population with diverse
needs, count on such vision and bene-
volence to accommodate us all. In

fact, we need structures to assure that
all necessary information in fact gets
to those who would lead, and most
importantly, is considered by them.
Moreover, we need structures to assure
that power is not abused (even un-
intentionally). Indeed, the more eco-
nomically independent women become
individually and collectively, the more
careful and critical we need to be,
since the way we exercise our eco-
nomic and political power both chal-
lenges and reflects our visions and
good will. Neither is going to auto-
matically assure a better world for
all, nor will they assure, in the short
run (as long as it may be) a better
world for women.

Footnotes

iFEN bylaws, Article II, as accepted in
this Conference. (Emphasis added.)

2See C. Wright Mills, Vie Power Elite
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1956),
for a good exemplified analysis.

^Marx has a short and enlightening cri-
tique of credit. See, for example, Lloyd D.
Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (eds.), Writings
of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Soci-
ety (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co.,
Inc., 1967), pp. 269-271. I also find the
institution of "value auditing" proposed by
FEN enlightening in this respect, for it
seems to accentuate some of my points.
See the claims made by the Delinquency
Committee of the Detroit Feminist Federal
Credit Union contained in documents dis-
tributed at the Conference, available frfcrn
DFFCU.

Copyright <D 1976 by Bat-Ami Bar On

Bat-Ami Bar On is a Ph.D candi-
date in philosophy at the Ohio State
University.

58/Quest

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Notes on a Feminist Economics/59

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60IQuest, vol. II no. 4, spring, 1976

Those who, either by luck or con-
scious intent, find themselves in a
leadership position, owe it to other
women to transmit this experience and
whatever skills they have developed so
that the women's movement will con-
tinue. The struggle of women against
the almost insurmountable power of
the male establishment requires that
we adopt a type of guerilla mentality
about tactics while developing a univ-
ersal mentality about the objectives of
free and equal women.

We are a small band working against
an overwhelming encrustation of injus-
tice upon injustice. Wc are a small band
dependent on each other. There must
be an economy of effort, and our
activities must be multi-purpose. No
action must be lost or wasted. Our
leaders and followers must be inter-
changeable, and our conflict must be
productive.

Leadership must become an active
concept open to all. It, too, must be
multi-purpose. It must not only serve
its immediate objective, but in the
process, it must also function as an
instrument for individual movement
and spiritual growth.

To affect the institutions of this
country, numbers are important. Lead-
ership in the women's movement must
accelerate if we plan to make political
change in government and the political
system-institutions at best unrepre-
sentative of women. Therefore, the
development of leaders as an ongoing
process is a very important element in
the dynamics of our revolution. Lead-
ership is a function of growth; the

question is not whether we should have
leaders, but how we develop all women
as leaders.

Leadership is the key to action, It
is an individual matter, but as such, it
is the temporary location of the stimu-
lus for a particular act. Its rotation
among all of us gives it the dynamic it
must have as a means for the develop-
ment of woman and her progress. But
leadership is not only a function of
growth; it is also a function of spirit.
Woman is a living system of individual
expression whose vital center is spirit.
Thus leadership is more .than com-
municator and director: leadership
must feed the spirit.

This begins by way of common
objectives. With common objectives
comes common experience (action):
there is, then, a reciprocal under-
standing and empathy among us for
what is being attempted. Thus the key
word in developing and using leader-
ship as a function of spirit is "empa-
thy"-entering into the feeling and
spirit of another person, feeling what
another person feels. This, then, is to
be like her.

Leadership as a function of growth
and as a function of spirit, however, is
not an end in itself. It is a process. It is
a series of steps from one woman to
another which fosters the readiness to
act. It gives living meaning to an act.
Moreover, leadership requires and im-
plies a certain security, for action is a
form of confrontation. Thus it prepares
for more leadership by promoting the
qualities necessary for its acceptance.
Leadership as process makes itself

Leadership, Growth and Spirit/61

possible, believable and transmitable.
Leadership as process is the search
for, the discovery or creation of wom-
an's common ground. Leadership at-
tempts to end our isolation, and there-
fore, the state of the women's move-
ment is directly related to the state of
this search. An examination of leader-
ship as it fulfills its functions of growth
and spirit is the movement's most
basic examination, and it is a cumu-
lative process.

Leadership As a Function
of Growth

Leadership is a function of growth
because it stimulates women to act and
communicate. This stimulus works to
extend feelings, thought and action,
and through it, leaders and followers
reinforce each other. But this stimulus
can take two forms: leadership may
relate directly to other women's needs
as they see them, in which case the
resulting action of movement is spon-
taneous. Or there may be a gap
between what the leader perceives and
what others perceive, in which case
there is a lack of understanding
(learning) and little resulting move-
ment.

Growth can be circular; increased
consciousness and awareness, whether
it affects two or two million, is growth
to those involved. However, before
the political system will respond to us,
our development must accelerate: po-
litical institutions respond to large
numbers. And along with an accelera-
tion of action, there must be an accel-

eration of information. Active femi-
nism is not a game to be played
close to the chest. Since our financial
limitations affect our ability to circu-
late feminist information and thought,
we are faced with a real limit on the
number of informed women. And
uninformed women cannot act. Thus
leadership as a function of growth
involves the quick and clear circulation
of information.

Leaders are the carriers of experi-
ence, and as such, they have a responsi-
bility to communicate their experi-
ence-and not only to communicate it,
but to simplify it-to extract its bare
essentials and to print them. The need
for simplified information does not
arise out of any inability to under-
stand complexities, but out of our
common need to know and to act
quickly.

Experience and information are the
two main essentials separating the
leader from the follower. In the polit-
ical process, leadership is in direct
touch with reality; its objective is to
make institutions responsive to wom-
en's needs. The clearer the leader's
grasp of the real situation, the more
likely it is that her initiative or re-
sponse will be suitable.

At this point, another element fos-
tering leadership growth comes into
play: innovation. Innovation occurs
when in a particular instance, all known
methods have been tried and have not
worked. Then the need to act provides
the stimulus to innovate, and if the
need is great enough, the lack of
extensive experience will not be a

62/ Quest

deterrent. This is desirable, for while
we try to utilize experience so as not
to reinvent the wheel, there is always
the possibility that we don't need the
wagon. So innovation is possible, and
in some instances even more likely, on
the part of the less experienced.

Innovative leadership, however,
poses problems. For example, a given
action may not always be subject to
effective articulation. In thinking and
designing new projects, there may not
be time or even words for expressing
it to others in ways that are readily
understandable or relative to their
experience. Though innovation pro-
vides opportunities for touching others

success in working with each other as
we expand our acts and thoughts into
new areas, is the adoption of trust and
good faith. Leadership as a function of
growth is also, then, the process of
building confidence, not only so that
others will follow, but also so that
others will attempt leadership them-
selves. Basic to leadership and growth,
therefore, is respect for each other as
individuals and the consciousness that
each of us is in the process of creating
self-autonomy. This respect mandates
that we do no harm to each other. A
damaged individual is a testament to
failure; a damaged individual is not
helpful to herself or to the movement.

in ways that create possibilities for
further individual acts and new leader-
ship, it requires and implies flexibility
and trust. As women act, we will be
confronted with situations that are
new to us (if not, we are not going
anywhere). So, though there may be a
tentativeness, confusion or what may
appear to be vacillation, it is in fact a
testing. And this testing is a necessary
part of the innovation process.

Thus one ingredient in women's

This is not to say that the leadership
process is free from pain. Growth is
change, and change can be painful. All
leadership, moreover, involves risk, and
therefore risks the possibility of in-
flicting "damage" either to self or to
others. But responsible leadership in-
volves a mutual respect which helps to
insure that pain of growth and ex-
change does not become incapacitating
and destructive-a mutual respect for
each woman's vital center that can

Leadership, Growth and Spirit/63

distinguish between the woman as
actor and the action taken. Therefore,
it is especially important that leader-
ship be considered a form of steward-
ship.

As a function of growth, leadership
must instill in others the notion that
they can do things well-and this
responsibility is part of leadership as
stewardship. It must emphasize that
individuals as separate entities have the
capacity to survive, that women are
not naturally unable to do what has to
be done for our own freedom. Thus
leadership as a function of growth
must develop in each woman a sense
of her ability to provide an equal con-
tribution. It must foster in her a
sense of herself as an autonomous
individual, for leadership is tied up
with the sense of one's autonomy.
Such autonomy is developed as a
person encounters obstacles and learns
how to handle or remove them.

Here, especially, it is important that
we remember that leadership is not
always sought after. It is frequently
forced, because of one's feeling that it
is imperative to act in a particular
situation. Your sense of what is right
and what you are makes an undeniable
claim on your life-a claim that de-
mands action and leadership. This
does not come from somebody out-
side, but from within yourself. A
leader will respect this process, and all
of us, in turn, must respect it in
others. And through this process there
will be a growth of individuals, a
growth of leaders, and growth of the
women's movement.

Leadership As a Function
of Spirit

All considerations of leadership as a
function of spirit for the women's
movement emanate from the fact of
woman as a living being, a dynamic
entity, versatile and capable of strength
and action. Our obligation as women is
to recognize and nourish this potential:
the goals and objectives of the wom-
en's movement are endless; the life and
spirit of the individual, through whom
and for whom these goals are set, is
not.

The present strength and activity of
the movement lies in the aspirations
and hopes of individual women cap-
able of a feminist vision. Individually,
we are innately capable of creating our
own reality, and as a movement, we
must create our reality in common.
If, however, in the pursuit of goals and
objectives on behalf of the whole,
individuals are destroyed, the whole
will also eventually be destroyed.

When women come together from
so many different places and join to-
gether for entirely new action, there is
bound to be conflict. For example,
many of us have developed traits and
habits which, although they are neces-
sary in an individual pursuit, are not
helpful to a joint effort; others carry
with them the scars from a hostile
environment. But differences arising
from such sources can be overcome
through considering each woman as an
entity who carries within her the fuel
for our movement. Through this con-
sideration, the woman's spirit can be

64/Quest

preserved, and conflict can be tem-
pered.

The growth and development of
individual spirits is mandatory for the
growth and development of the spirit
of the movement. Leadership must
help us to consider each woman as
part of the embodiment of what we
all want and need. Ideas and acts are
received individually by this dynamic
entity-woman. She may change them,
augment them or replace them; this
capacity for response is within us all,
and is the genesis of leadership. It is an
expression of individual autonomy.
But our universality-which is in our
purpose and in our sex— has yet to rest
in our hearts.

The maintenance of the spirit of

the women's movement must be a
function of leadership. And it is an art.
Leadership by example, persuasion or
purpose attempts to instill the spirit of
the work, the word or the idea in each
woman, attempts to find that vital
center in each. And the maintenance
of the spirit of the movement is a
function of leadership which calls for
the ability to empathize. Leadership as
spiritual maintenance calls for sharing
in each woman's vital center, per-
ceiving and nurturing her autonomy
and her capacity for response. It calls
for the ability to create a spiritual
bond among women.

But nurturing and inspiring each
others' spirits also calls for courage.
Women need courage, and we must get

Leadership, Growth and Spirit/65

it from each other. Courage feeds the
spirit, and enables us to overcome the
fear of taking action. It comes from a
knowledge of the consequences of an
act and from the determination to risk
what may come because "the act itself is
essential. As each of us develops the
capacity to act and to assume leader-
ship responsibilities, each of us de-
velops courage, and builds her po-
tential to share it with her sisters.

Conclusion

The concept of leadership as a
function of growth and a function of
spirit enables us to examine the process
of leadership within the movement and
its effect on political change. For all
intents and purposes, the 53% of the
population who are women are politi-
cally ununited. Though men as men are
politically united in their sense of
superiority and its resulting invest-
ment in maintaining power, we lack
political unity despite our oppression.
Thus, as activists in the women's move-
ment, we are concerned with impor-
tant individual and specific actions,
but we must also be engaged in finding
the universals of women's condition
and in the search and discovery of

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common ground. Women have yet to
share a universal sense of ourselves-but
we are beginning to share an immut-
able resolve that justice for women
will be done.

Flora Crater, editor of the Woman
Activist and long time NOW member
fighting for the ERA, was a candi-
date for Lieutenant-Governor in Vir-
ginia in 1973.

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1976 \

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66IQuest

Who Was
Rembrandt's Mother ?

by Jackie St. Joan

Once women wove blankets

To warm their children

Out of love

And, out of love and the

fierce desire of their own

hearts,

they made them beautiful

Their art did not hang on

museum walls

But covered the bodies of

sleeping children.

(Where is your Rembrandt?)

The men ash* us.

She was a Navaho

And the white man killed her."1

As this poem suggests, many of
women's artistic leaders never have
been recognized or allowed to flourish
in their work, because white male
supremacy has circumscribed their ex-
istence and limited their roles. Simi-
larly, many of women's political lead-
ers never have been recognized or
allowed to flourish in their work for
the same reasons. Today in America,
women are not so restricted, yet the
women's movement is suffering from a
lack of political leadership and a lack

graphics by Bar bra Beers

of political theory by which to under-
stand the function of feminist leader-
ship. In creating such a theory women
must start from what is familiar to
them. The Navaho artist based her
work in the artistic perceptions she
had as a Navaho and as a woman.
Likewise, the political theorist can
base her work on the political percep-
tions she has as a mother, as a leader in
the family unit.

It would appear that within the
family unit, in the role of mother,
there is an underlying system by
which women operate as leaders. In
this article, I propose to examine
motherhood as a model of feminist
leadership, to identify some of the
characteristics of the function of
mother as they apply to the function
of leader, and to compare how so-
ciety's treatment of mothers is similar
to the women's movement's treatment
of its leaders. In naming these charac-
teristics, I turn to my own and others'
experiences as mothers, and to lesbian-
feminist literature as sources of in-
formation.

Many women carry the common
experience as mothers, as leaders in a

Who Was Rembrandt's Mother?/67

unit in which others have looked to
them for group survival. In addition,
lesbian-feminist writers often carry
within their work a sense of ethnicity-
of women's identification as a people.
Literature is a good source because
there is at least one thing that good
writers and good political leaders have
in common-they pay attention to
what inspires people (art) or to what
moves people to act (politics).

At this point I want to make clear
what I am not saying. I am not saying
that only mothers or only lesbian-
feminists understand feminist consci-
ousness or are capable of being leaders.
All women carry, to a greater or lesser
extent, the experiences of motherhood
and lesbianism. Most women have, at
some point in their lives, taken respon-
sibility for someone else, whether that
person was a husband, a child, a boss,
or an aging parent. Also, most women
have experienced the emotional, if not
the physical communion of women,
whether as a child among girlfriends,
in the secretarial pool, or in family
relationships. What I am saying is that
lesbianism and motherhood are condi-
tions, either or both of which contain
a concentration of experience related
to feminist ethics and feminist leader-
ship.

The Motherhood Model

To begin with, I see mothering
(or parenting) as a function, and
"mother" as a role. How that function
and role are performed varies greatly
according to the society, race, class,

education, and personal style of the
woman. In many societies, however, a
woman is allowed only her identity as
a mother because the survival of the
family, as it is structured, depends on
a woman's commitment to that role,
and the family members' perception
of her in that role only. When a
woman puts a priority on her personal
survival and wants to be seen beyond
the mother role, or outside of it com-
pletely, she often is seen as a betrayer
who is weakening the group. In fact,
she is upsetting the power relation-
ships in the family and expecting
others to assume some of her responsi-
bility, an expectation against which
family members often will rabel, and
for which she often is punished (guilt).
She then is expected either to return
to the mother role, or to become
Supermom (Margaret Anderson Plus).
Many of the same dynamics which
operate to limit the power of women
as mothers operate to limit their
power as leaders in the women's move-
ment.

Many women whom I know are
looking for a new model of mother-
hood to replace the Margaret Anderson
image which we were fed as children
by television. Such a model would
allow mothers to be real, which in-
cludes being angry, not only as women,
but in that motherhood role itself. A
woman who is allowed to be herself
and who also chooses to function as
a mother, can function more freely to

Margaret Anderson is the mother in "Father
Knows Best. "

68/Quest, vol. II no. 4, spring, 1976

the betterment of herself both as a
person and as a mother. Susan Griffin
expresses that image in her poem,
"I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman":

And when I think of the President

and the law, and the problem of

feeding children, I like to

think of Harriet Tubman

and her revolver...

I want men

to take us seriously.

I am tired wanting them to think

about right and wrong.

I want them to fear

I want them to feel fear now

as I have felt suffering in the womb...

Mother- As-Leader

In this article, I will make broad
statements about mothers. I am, there-
fore, stating in advance that all those
statements need qualification. Al-
though all mothers do carry some
body of common experience, not all
mothers deal with situations in the
same way. I am exploring a new image
of mother as leader and am drawing
from my own experiences, from les-
bian-feminist literature, and from the
experiences of others I have known.

When a woman is pregnant, gives
birth, and mothers a child, she goes
through a process of accepting total,
and then, less and less, responsibility
for someone else's survival. Her letting
go of that power and of that responsi-
bility is part of the process which is
required for her own survival as a
person and for her children's survival

as independent human beings. In the
process of letting go, her responsibility
is to give accurate information to the
child, to inspire her or his spirit, to
teach what survival skills she knows to
her young, and to make decisions for
the group when they need to be made.
Eventually, the mother will have to
let go of her mothering role, or she
herself will not survive as a whole
person. A mother is more than that
function which she performs for a
time. If she does not let go of that
role, her children will rebel and leave
her behind. So many women have
experienced this painful process from
one side or another, that it is a clear

lesson of women, one that applies
equally well to political leadership as
to motherhood.

Other characteristics of a mother's
power are her children's dependency
on her for their survival, and the
intimacy of the mother-child relation-
ship. No one wants to be totally
dependent on someone else for her
survival, and ideally, in a woman-crea-
ted society, that would not be the
case for either mother or child. How-
ever, that dependency does exist,
although one saving grace to the
relationship is that eventually every-
one can outgrow it. Part of a mother's
job is to foster independence, a by-
product of which is to teach children
how to be their own mothers and how
to function as a mother to others when
the situation requires it. In addition,
time, over which we have no control,
will change the relationship-in fact,
time often reverses it.

Who Was Rembrandt's Mother?/69

The source of authority for a
mother in the family group is derived
from the intimacy of her relationship
with her children that holds her ac-
countable to them for their survival
as a group. As they become more
independent, they become more em-
powered to call her to an accounting,
and ultimately have the power to
leave the group or to withdraw their
active participation (and love) from
the group, thus breaking the intimacy
which is the source of a mother's
authority.

Another characteristic of mother-
hood, which some may call spiritual,
but which I see more pragmatically as
a survival mechanism, is faith. Mothers

tend to be worriers because they
know that their powers are limited,
and that they can do only so much to
protect and prepare a child. A mother,

to survive this worrying and to allow
the child to be independent, must
operate with an assumption that some-
how all the lessons got through and
that this child will decide what is best
for herself. A mother must "act as if"
a child will make the proper decision,
knowing at the same time that she/he
may not.

It may appear to be a contra-
diction to act as if you believe one
thing while knowing that the opposite
thing is possible. The ability to live
with contradictions, diversity, and ten-
sion is another characteristic of moth-
erhood. Judy Grahn's poem, "A Worn-
man is Talking to Death," beautifully
presents a woman's ability to relate to
the connections among people, "in an
attempt to embrace contradictory ele-
ments of experience and responsi-
bility. "3 She describes hating a man

70/Quest

who called her a queer and slugged
her. She describes how she
...fantasized the scene again, this time
grabbing the chair and smashing it
over the bastard's head, killing himA
Then, remembering her first love, an
ostracized pregnant teenager, she points
to the contradiction in the situation:
"now when I remember, I think:
maybe he was Josie's baby, all the
chickens come home to roost, all of
them."5

Contradictions, tensions, and di-
versity within a group require that
a mother be flexible, have a sense of
humor, and allow herself to react as
well as to act on others in the group.

Demystifying Motherhood

A mother empowers her children by
feeding their spirits, not by breaking
them. A mother can provide some of
the conditions by which children can
be free to make choices. Part of pro-
viding those conditions is to disclose
facts, goals, and process within the
group. Moreover, a mother can demys-
tify her role and her function by
teaching her children how she learned
what she's trying to teach them. This
process allows her to let go of what
appears to be secret knowledge and
mystery. Alta describes this process in
her poem, "The Ten Commandments
of Liberation." She lists nine do's and
don'ts, some of which are:
Thou shalt clean up thine own messes...
Thou shalt not use other people. As
Tom Hay den used James Rector to
advertise people's park, as marxists

use workers to overthrow the ruling
class, as I just used Tom Hay den for
demonstration purposes...
Thou shalt revel in what you really are
don't change your looks, don't stop
talking, go ahead and be.
Thou shalt not endanger other people
for an idea.

Thou shalt not be ashamed. We are all
perverts. We all have pasts we could
spend our whole lives denying...."
Alta then ends with the tenth Comm-
andment:

"Write your own commandments. I
am only a person like you. Burn this
and memorize yourself. "'

Similarly, a mother eventually says,
like Alta, "Burn this" (what I have
taught you-you're on your own) "and
memorize yourself." Not only can a
mother demystify her role by sharing
the process about how she came to
understand things, but the very fact of
not sharing that process can be a
means of domination in itself.

One of the sub-functions of moth-
ering is teaching. In general, a mother
teaches two things: 1) individual and
group survival skills, and 2) how to be
a mother. The first is more conscious
than the second; the second often is a
by-product of teaching the first. In
trying to communicate ethics to child-
ren, using abstractions such as truth,
freedom, justice, and love, is a com-
plete dead-end. Children simply want
to know what makes sense. They have
no pre-conceptions and therefore hold
no sancity to the terms themselves.
Being concrete is a good teaching
technique.

Who Was Rembrandt's Mother?/71

More often than men, women pay
attention to the connections in life,
and can focus on the relationships
between things, events, ideas, people.
The two sides of our brains can com-
municate with each other. ° At our
best, women can communicate very
concretely, without the splits between
mind, body, emotion, and values.
Women can combine the rational and
the intuitive -hold two contradictory
beliefs at the same time, accept that as
reality, and still make a decision-still
use our power.

And finally, a re-definition of the
role of mother must allow her to have
faults, to be an ordinary, common
woman, and not a model of virtue-
feminist virtue or otherwise. Mothers
are under incredible social pressure to
be perfect, and often internalize the
pressure to be a perfect mother by
setting unreasonably high expectations
for themselves. They are also very
aware of being in the spotlight among
others, especially family, in dealing
with their children (since mothering
has been defined as their function

72/Quest

alone). Therefore, a mother feels guilty
if she's tired, or if she even wants a
private life of her own. The guilt,
justifiably, turns to anger, and she
may become unable or unwilling to
function in her role at all. Society
focuses on the unique significance of
her role (one false move and the kid's
ruined) and blames her for mistakes
which may be her child's (or others')
responsibility.

The Common Woman

Several lesbian-feminist poets have
written about the "ordinariness" of
women-that it is often the common
woman who will rise to an occasion to
play an important role, but that it is
because it was necessary to do so and
she learned how to do so, not because
she possessed a certain genius. Judy
Grahn has written of the common
woman:

the common woman is as common as
good bread

as common as when you couldn't go
on but did. For all the world we didn't
know we held in common
all along

the common woman is as common as
the breast of bread
and will rise

and will become strong-I swear it to
you

I swear it to you on my own head
I swear it to you on my common
woman's head.°

And Susan Griffin writes about
Harriet Tubman, a common slave, who
did what was necessary to be done:

and she lived in swamps

and wore the clothes of a man

bringing hundreds of fugitives from

slavery, and was never caught,

and led an army

and won a battle,

and defied the laws

because the laws were wrong. * "

The motherhood model which I
have described reveals that women
always have functioned as leaders in
family and in small groups, and when
allowed, or when necessary, in large
groups as well. Certain qualities of
feminist leadership can be extrapolated
from this motherhood model, and can
be useful to the women's movement in
forming a political theory of leader-
ship.

Like motherhood, I consider leader-
ship to be a function which is teach-
able by some and learnable by others.
It is not a given quality with which one
is born, although some may perform
the function better than others, de-
pending, at least, on the type of
task to be accomplished and the group
to be affected.

It is also possible that women
already have some notions about lead-
ership by which women have operated
and which we are in the process of
naming and creating. Writer Joanna
Russ has pointed out that there is
a theme in women's science fiction of
the hero with her apprentice, and that
hero-apprentice theme is conspicuously
absent from male science fiction, which
is usually dominated by the Men
Among Men. She also notes that in
women's science fiction, heroes are

Who Was Rembrandt's Mother?/73

often groups of women, and that a
hero in one group may be on the
periphery in another group. Similarly,
in the lesbian-feminist novels of June
Arnold, ^ while one or two women
may take leadership in a specific
situation, it is the combined efforts
and consciousness of the group of
women which succeeds.

These concepts suggest a pattern
of leadership far different from mens',
in which the group focuses on the
leader in the center, with him and his
constituents fortifying their egos back
and forth. The expectation is that he
is the leader now, and always and
everywhere will be the leader. Male-de-
fined leadership necessarily implies a
political inequality between the leader
and the constituents. Although it is
important that women recognize that
we do not have equal abilities (we are
not all the same), leadership among
women implies, perhaps for the first
time in history, a possibility of a
relationship between political equals.
This is especially true when leadership
relationships cross/or reverse class and
race lines.

Leadership As a Function

The idea of leadership among pol-
itical equals, if leadership is seen as a
function, is not the contradiction it
appears to be. Just as sexual relation-
ships between women provide the
condition for equality in that sexual
relationship, political relationships be-
tween women are not necessarily equal
in all respects; those relationships are

merely a necessary condition of equal-
ity but not sufficient in and of them-
selves.

Women's organic (i.e., not con-
taminated by male systems) ways of
leading may be a kind of "shifting
leadership," which does not expect a
leader to always and everywhere per-
form that function. Marge Piercy ex-
presses the feeling of this leadership
pattern:

/ want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields
to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags
along,

who stand in line and haul in their
places,

who are not parlor generals ay id field
deserters

but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in, or the
fire be put out.-*

This quality of people "who do
what has to be done, again and again,"
is a quality of a good leader also, who
knows how to join in the task with
others. If shifting leadership is a valid
assumption about female leadership,
then it is important that feminists
consider that concept and take advan-
tage of that knowledge politically.

In searching for models of leader-
ship, feminists can examine what they
know about male leadership and fe-
male leadership as they have been. To
the extent that feminists need to be
organized to gain power, we are de-
pendent on our leaders for our sur-
vival also. Viewed as a function, leader-
ship involves a pattern of mutual

74/Quest

dependency and responsibility. A
group empowers a leader with certain
responsibilities. The leader, however,
requires that the constituents take
responsibility for their own tasks with-
in the group, and that they perceive
the leader not only as the role which
she plays within the group. For her
own survival as a person, the leader
must not be seen only in that role.
Her letting go of power depends on
the ability of others to learn her
functions and to be willing to perform
her role when her leadership time is
spent. This not-being-willing-to-let-go-
of-power and the not-being-willing-to-
accept-responsibility dynamic often
destroys feminist organizations. Clear-
ly naming the process which takes
place in any transfer of power in an
organization is one step in easing that
change itself.

What gives a leader authority? Like
mothers, many political leaders learn
how to function as leaders from other
leaders before them, and may pose
them as models in their own minds.
So, to some extent, a leader's authority
may come from the sense of responsi-
bility which the leader has learned
from her model. However, the ultimate
authority of a political leader, both
politically and ethically, comes from
the quality of her relationship with
her constituents. It is to them that she
must give an accounting of her steward-
ship. No woman is going to pay her
dues (to some one or some thing) and
have no say about what those dues go
for. If a leader does not account
(take responsibility for) her actions,

her constituents have the ultimate
control to deny the leadership function
to her.

In the women's movement, how-
ever, this denial of leadership often
takes the form of attack on one's
personal style and characteristics, and
is more often backbiting than an
objective evaluation of a woman's
capacity in her role as a leader. By
not viewing leadership as a function
(which includes a large investment of
power in one individual), feminists
often destroy the political work they
have accomplished, and the very wom-
en who have helped them to accom-
plish it. Expecting a woman to ac-
count for her function as a leader is
valid politically; expecting her to ac-
count for herself personally because
she is a leader, is not.

Leaders and constituents alike need
to operate from an assumption of
good faith. Like a mother's attitude
towards her children, faith is "acting
as if" women have the courage when
we know that many ot us are cowards.
Faith is the opposite of defensiveness
and paranoia. Elitism, on the other
hand, is having no faith. Rather, it is
developing a prejudice against either
the Led or the Leader. From the
leader's perspective, it is assuming that
women cannot think for themselves,
and results in leaving the weak ones
behind, powerless and confused. From
the constituent's perspective, elitism
is assuming that the leader is not
looking out for the best interests of
the group, and results in the destruc-
tion and loss of many valuable women

Who Was Rembrandt's Mother?/75

as leaders in the movement. Politically,
faith is a survival mechanism that
assumes women are becoming free
as individuals and responsible as pol-
itical women.

Sharing the Process

Elitism also includes not sharing
the process of decision-making and
experience with constituents. Leaders
can demystify that function (as moth-
ers demystify their role) by letting go
of what appears to be secret know-
ledge and mysteries of decision-mak-
ing. Male leaders often just arrive at
a certain point and proceed to give
orders. They often present their pos-
ition on certain issues as accomplished
fact, without sharing with their con-
stituents how they got to that position
from having no position at all. Much
like male journalists, who present only
the facts, the news, the headlines of a
story, many male political leaders fail
to present the contradictions, the div-
ersity, and the struggle which com-
prised the decision.

A feminist leader, like a mother,
must empower her constituents by
listening to them and by teaching
them what she knows about getting
things done. A leader can do this by
sharing the process of her thinking
and her experience with her con-
stituents. Good leaders do not break
our spirits or leave us feeling like
losers. Leaders, like mothers, should
provide the conditions by which wom-
en can be free to make choices-dis-
closure of facts, goals, process. There-

fore, leaders have an obligation to tell
truly what is happening, rather than
to contrive a situation so that it will
be to their advantage. This is not to
say that leaders cannot plan strategy,
goals, or intent. In fact, they must, as
part of their function as leaders. It is
to say, however, that those plans must
be part of the disclosure, upfront,
where everyone can judge for herself.

This process also implies that a
leader must be concrete about what
she is saying, and not explain in vague
or general terms that are, in effect,
meaningless to others. Not being spec-
ific often means not communicating,
which can develop into a means of
domination itself. Constituent; respon-
sibility in this regard is to be attentive,
and when practical, to interact with
the leader to a point of understanding.

Men have developed the Great Man
theory of leadership: a leader possesses
special qualities that account for his
achievements, and which others can
aspire to, but somehow will never
attain. 4 Women know better than to
believe this myth about male leaders,
and should know better than to believe
the myth about mothers. Women have
given birth to, have raised, have com-
forted, have been brutalized by, and
have buried all those Great Men. They
have seen him from all sides. ^ Per-
haps this is one explanation of why
feminists have been so distrustful of
leaders who pretend to be, or who are
presented by the media as The Great
Woman.

On the other hand, it is often
these same feminists who will not

76/Quest

allow their leaders to have failings, and
who exert the same social pressure on
political leaders that is put on the
individual mother by society. Some-
one is looking for a scapegoat and for
both mothers and leaders, it's a set-up.
People want a leader (mother) who
has no failings, yet they want to blame
her for the group's failings by exposing
her faults and destroying her person-
ally. The result of this dynamic is a
reluctance on the part of many women
to accept leaders who pretend to be
faultless; and, more seriously, a reluc-
tance or refusal on the part of many

competent women to accept leadership
in the movement as long as they arc
expected by others to be faultless.
Another aspect of this dilemma is
that not all women have identical
skills, and that many women arc
denied their own ability to lead by
feminists who insist that women arc
all the same. Some women are better
leaders than others, just as some wom-
en are better mothers than others.
And just as society expects all women
to function equally well at mothering,
the women's movement expects all
women to function equally well at

Who Was Rembrandt's Mother?/77

leading. The attitude is that no matter
what skills the job requires, the job
can be rotated. While it is true that
most skills can be learned, and that
leadership is one of those skills, it is
destructive to the task of the group to
expect everyone to perform equally
well at any task. It is also destructive
to the group's task to postpone or
limit the scope of the work that needs
to be done, until each woman can
acquire the skills of everyone else. In
this way, our work becomes a personal
workshop and our political work in-
effective.

It also is true that in a family every-
one is not the same. However, in the
heterosexual nuclear family structure,
leadership functions are usually div-
ided up along sex role lines. In an
efficient family which is not modeled
on the nuclear family model, dif-
ferences in ability are recognized, and
although skills are taught and shared,
the survival and efficiency of the group
depends on its using the best of its
group in certain capacities when spe-
cific skills are needed.

Women will not accept leaders or
heroes imposed on them, especially
ones who are unwilling to share rec-
ognition, when that sharing is due.
Likewise, women will not accept lead-
ers who display no fear, no doubts, no
conflicts, and who have all the answers.
I believe that women will accept
leadership from the common woman
who knows what she is doing, and
who will tell you woman-to-woman
what she knows about getting things
done. She will deserve recognition

herself, and will share that recognition
with others when it is due.

However, leaders will not emerge if
they receive no recognition for what
they have done. No one wants to lead
(or to mother, or to anything else for
that matter) without receiving some
recognition for having performed that
function. Male society rewards its
achievers in one way or another, thus
reinforcing that behavior and encour-
aging participation in that system. The
women's movement seldom does the
same, and often is more likely to
negatively reinforce women's accomp-
lishments. Until- feminists are willing
to accept leadership as a valuable and
necessary function in a political move-
ment, and are willing to reward its
leaders when they deserve credit for
their work, the movement will be
crippled as a political force and talent-
ed women will be continually frust-
rated. If the romantic rewards attached
to motherhood were removed, and
women were given a free choice about
becoming mothers, how many women
would actually choose to do work for
which they receive little if any recog-
nition.

Concl

usion

Feminists must define our relation-
ships to our leaders, and as leaders, to
our constituents. If we don't, our
leaders may well define us, or we may
find ourselves without women will-
ing to emerge as leaders. This pro-
cess requires looking at our respon-
sibilities both as leaders and con-

78/Quest

stituents. Taking responsibility for
what one does, whether in a leader-
ship function or not, is the first
step towards framing a concept of
feminist ethics, and of feminsit lead-
ership. The motherhood model of
leadership is an attempt to uncover
what women already know about lead-
ership in a small group, and to create
one possibility of a model for women
as political leaders, an adaptation of
an already existent framework of lead-
ership. This characterizing of the qual-
ities of feminist leadership should not,
and need not, be thought of as a creed.
It is merely a beginning, with a few
clues, a few openers, a maximization
of what we need to define about
leadership.

Footnotes

^Taken from a poster by Kathleen
Thompson of Chicago, Illinois.

2Susan Griffin, "I Like To Think Of
Harriet Tubman," Shameless Hussy Press,
P.O. Box 424, San Lorenzo, CA.

3lnez Martinez, "The Poetry of Judy
Grahn, "Margins, August, 1975, 2919. N.
Hackett, Milwaukee, WI, Beth Hodges, ed.

\Judy Grahn, "A Woman Is Talking To
Death," The Woman's Press Collective, 5251
Broadway, Oakland, CA.

"Alta, "The Ten Commandments Of
Liberation," Burn This And Memorize Your-
self, Times Change Press, Penwell Road,
Washington, NJ 07882.

7lbid

^Gina Covina, "Rosy Rightbrain's Exor-
cism/Invocation," The Lesbian Reader,
Amazon Press, 395 60th St., Oakland,
CA. 94618.

"Judy Grahn, The Common Woman,
The Woman's Press Collective, 5251 Broad-
way, Oakland, CA 94618.

l^Susan Griffin, supra note 2.

HFrom a lecture by Joanna Russ,
author of The Female Man, (Bantam Books),
Woman To Woman Bookcenter, Denver,
Colorado, December 14, 1975.

12jurie Arnold, Sister Gin, The Cook
and the Carpenter, Daughters, Inc., 54 7th
Ave. South, New York, NY 10014.

l^Marge Piercy, "To Be Of Use," To Be
Of Use, Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
Garden City, New York.

l^From lectures by Rita Mae Brown,
Sagaris, June 1975.

l^This point is dramatically made in
the film, "The Women's Happy Time Com-
mune," Women Make Movies, New York,
N.Y.

My thanks to Barbra Beers for
performing the mothering function
for my children, during the time it
took me to write this article.

Jackie St. Joan is a lesbian-feminist
writer, law student, and organizer of
the Colorado Feminist Federal Credit
Union, who lives in an old house with
a leaky toilet.

m~ GAIA'S GUIDE, 1976 "•»
for Gay Women

The pocket size international bar/club guide and
directory to resorts, restaurants, centers, switch-
boards, organizations, publications, bookstores,
mail order houses plus many resources and ser-
vices. This third edition : all U.S.A. plus 40 other
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LAMMAS WOMEN'S SHOP, 321 7th St., S.E.
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D.C. Or sendS5.oowithyournameandaddress to
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115 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco, California; 94105

Who Was Rembrandt's Mother?/79

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We would like to describe our processes for handling material
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presses, a small development committee prepares a list of ques-
tions and ideas which we hope that particular issue will cover. This
list is available to anyone who is considering submitting ideas for
the issue, outlines for potential articles, manuscripts, poetry, gra-
phics, etc. We accept unsolicited material and seek out writers and
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All material is reviewed by several staff members. If it is not
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Manuscripts should be double spaced on 8V2 by 11 paper, using
a black ribbon, submitted in duplicate (original plus one copy).
Length of submissions should be from 2,500 words (10 type-
written pages) for reviews, responses and short articles, to,
at most, 7,500 words (25 pages) for longer articles. Where
appropriate, bibliographic footnotes should be collected and
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Graphics, cartoons, photographs are requested. For information
concerning graphic specifications, please address all correspondence
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future issues

KALEIDOSCOPE ONE

Summer, 1976 vol. Ill no.l

Are we connecting our lives to our ideas? This issue will be an open
forum for substantive response to our first two years of publication and
for your input to help chart our future. We seek discussion of topics
and ideas that you consider vital, as well as commentary on previous
articles. Copy Deadline: February 15, 1976

COMMUNICATION and CONTROL

Fall ,1976 vol. Ill no. 2

The selection and transmission of information is an index to power
in mass society: feminists must analyze how this power affects women
and determine how we can use it to better political effect. Areas for ar-
ticles include: the role and functions fo the media in our society; com-
munication and art; communication and political organization; feminist
forms of communication. Copy Deadline: May 15, 1976

WORK, WORK, WORK

Winter, 1976-77 vol. Ill no. 3

Work is an essential part of our lives: of our survival, our self-identity,
and our group identification. Crucial to feminist vision are new ways of
viewing and organizing work. Areas for articles include: What is defined
and rewarded as work— for men or women; how does work affect our
self-concept, especially in regard to class, race, and sex; what are
feminist modes of organizing work. Copy Deadline: August 15, 1976

RACE, CLASS, and CULTURE

Spring, 1977 vol. Ill no. 4

While feminists create a "women's culture," we learn about our dif-
ferences as women; we must examine how race goes beyond the color
of our skin and class means more than just the money we make. We seek
articles for this issue that discuss various aspects of the relationship be-
tween political development and culture, with a particular focus on the
issues of class and race. Copy Deadline: November 15, 1976