There is a difference between having your own movement and cutting yourself off politically from all other movements. This last form of of feminist isolationism is attractive in its simplicity. It appears to offer an option which implies that you concentrate on your own struggle and wait for the absolute future when men and women have progressed towards equality. It is of course a profoundly liberal utopian notion. ‘Progress’ is seen as some kind of single linear advance toward a goal. There is no sense of a movement living and working in history, learning through dialectical interaction of its own efforts in objective circumstances. It forgets that the consciousness of particular groups amongst the oppressed is only partial.While this consciousness must be realized and expressed in their own movement, if any attempt is made continually to extend and connect this partial consciousness to the experience of other oppressed groups, it cannot politicize itself in a revolutionary sense. It becomes locked in its own particularism. This is true of women as of black or workers. The attempt to extend and connect is not one which can be made in some utopian static future, but is part of a continuous dialectical historical process in which all participate consciously. It is only when the feminist (or the black or the working class militant) understands, perceives, feels themself as pitted against a total oppressive system rather than simply against the indignity which is done to them through the subordination of their own kind, that a revolutionary political consciousness can grow.” Sheila Rowbotham
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 01:06:33 +0000
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