Title: Identity Politics, Feminism, and Social Change
Headings: How Political is the Personal?:
Identity Politics, Feminism and Social Change

How Political is the Personal?:
Identity Politics, Feminism and Social Change
Joan D. Mandle
Associate Professor of Sociology
Colgate University
Second Wave Feminism
Identity Politics
Feminism and Identity Politics
The Future of Feminism

Content: Within all these movements, however, women activists were denied the recognition and the responsibility that they deserved and that they had earned. Despite their commitment and contributions, they were all too often refused leadership positions, treated as second class citizens, told to make coffee, and put on display as sex objects. By the middle 1960s many of these women began to react to and organize around the strong contradiction within social movements which fought for self-determination and equality and yet which denied these same basic rights within their own ranks. First in the civil rights movement, with a statement written by Mary King and Casey Hayden, and soon afterward and more frequently in the anti-war movement, SDS, and other social movements, women radicals began to demand equity and respect as activists. The reaction of many of their male and female comrades seems predictable in retrospect, but was shocking and demoralizing at the time. Women's claims were met with derision, ridicule, and the political argument that they were worrying about "personal" issues and in this way draining movement effectiveness in fighting the "political" injustices of racism and imperialism. How could women be so selfish, it was asked, to focus on their personal disgruntlement when black people were denied voting privileges in Mississippi, peasants were being napalmed in Vietnam, and students were treated as numbers in large faceless bureaucratic universities? Movement women had no shortage of responses to these objections, but the one that became a mantra of the new women's movement emerging out of these struggles was the claim that personal lives - relationships with friends, lovers, political comrades - were not personal at all but characterized by power and fraught with political meaning. Women argued that assumptions that they were followers and men leaders, that women naturally were "better" with children and men "better" at organizing, that women should type and men should discuss issues - that all these assumptions were deeply political, denying women not only equality within progressive movements, but even more basically the freedom to choose for themselves what they could and should think and do. When most men and some of the women involved within the 60s movements refused to listen, many women left the movement to, as they put it at the time, "organize around our own oppression."