On Sun, 8 Jun 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In a message dated 97-06-08 16:08:52 EDT, you write: > >Second, I think it partly has to do with various types of complacency. > >In the case of the reproductive rghts movement, I remember how the > >movement groups sort of re-oriented toward issues of access in the early > >90s after it became clear that the juridical right to abortion was more > >or less safe. All of a sudden, all of these upper-middle-class college > >activists lost interest. Not that they didn't think it was important, > >they just lost the personal compulsion to stay involved. That and the > >fact that, through no fault of their own but simply because of who they > >were, they had little connection to the rural and poor urban communities > >most affected by dwindling access. For better or worse, this is a group > >of people who can mobilize large numbers of their friends, who have the > >social connections to get media attention, and who have access to > >experienced activists. Their social impact is therefore disproportionate. > > I disagree--the women's movement was not, is not, and has never been made up > of primarily middle class white women with nothing else to do. The middle > class women may be the ones getting the press, but feminism has, and has > always had, a much broader appeal.. It's also a little insulting to have the > hard work of thousands of women dismissed so easily. On the other hand, you > seem very comfortable buying the media picture of the women's movement. > maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Maggie -- If you look carefully above, you'll see that I was not speaking broadly of the women's movement, but particularly of the reproductive rights movement (which I think was a bit different in composition from the women's movement, to the extent one can actually speak of the "women's movement" as a unitary phenomenon). In particular, my experience is (mostly, except for a couple of sojourns to major actions or conferences in other parts of the country) limited to Massachusetts, where I logged in several years spending every Saturday in front of clinics, going to meetings, planing rallies, zaps, etc. I have no need for a media picture of this movement since I'm pretty familiar with most or all of its parts. I should also say that activist friends of mine in New York and the Bay Area paint a similar picture, so I have some confidence that my experience is not entirely a local one. There were certainly hundreds of working class women who would show up at the clinics in and around Boston, and several dozen who organized and voluntered at groups like R2N2, NOW, and Mass Choice. Nevertheless, the composition of these groups was disproportionately, if not a majority, upper-middle-class, and overwhelmingly white. In particular, college students were often the shock troops of the clinic defense demos. This is not to curtail anyone's legitimacy based on what community they come from, but just to point it out because it makes a difference in how they organize. The strategies of NOW and Mass Choice (though definitely not R2N2) were set within the realm of bourgeois politics -- lobby, get petitions signed, write letters -- even if the people implementing these strategies were often working class people. At least partly this was because NOW and Mass Choice, like the Democratic Party (though not to the same degree) depended largely on funding form wealthy donors to carry out their agenda even if the people carrying them out were not particularly wealthy. All the above made it especially difficult to get people who were mobilized around clinic defense and keeping Roe V Wade to stay involved when what was called for changed a bit. NOW and NARAL kept their focus on legislative battles around access, e.g., parental consent laws and late-term abortion. Not that those aren't pretty important (some of my best friends have been on the wrong side of those laws) but I think a better agenda would have involved getting clinics into rural and poor urban communities (the latter of course can involve tricky politics) and providing popular education around reproductive health. Only a handful of activists in Massachusetts were doing this kind of work and they didn't have anything like the kind of money or access to the media that NOW or Mass Choice did. They tended to be focused in clinics or women's shelters and had fairly little ability to discourse with the mainstream of the movement. I don't think these problems with the movement were necessarily the main reason it dispersed. There has been very little discussion in the media of lack of access, and so most people really believe that abortion is relatively safe, at least safe enough that they don't want to do anything about it. That was countered for a while because a large number of people started listening to movement news instead of the media and telling their friends about it. People don't necessarily have the energy to do that forever, and so they start listening to the mainstream media again. Still, if the mainstream movement had been less dependent on bourgeois politics, it would have helped a lot. Yours for free beer on demand, Tavis
