An institutional divide

Scholars point to the stark divide between the “politicos” and “feminists” in large cities. In Pittsburgh in the late 1960s to mid-1970s, however, a more prominent division was over institutionalization. On one side was the Pittsburgh Radical Women’s Union and many loosely structured women’s communes and collectives. On the other side was NOW, other formal, professional organizations, and Women’s Studies programs in the universities. Both included women who were already part of the Left through the anti-war and civil rights movements and others who were ignited by the feminist organizing in other cities (or recruited by the PRWU or women’s studies program). Barbara recalled her growing distaste of working within the system in the university. If she stepped back from the spotlight, she could work on the strategies she felt better suited for that were more contentious but less visible:

It started to get clearer and clearer that that role was not suited to me. I was not going to play the game, the academic game…I was not going to fit into this academic culture…I wasn’t going to get on the tenure track. So from then on, in terms of the academic side, I saw myself as able to do more things that I thought were kind of radical, such as that course, while the people who were on the inside, change agents…playing the game, the academic game, gave an opportunity for us, circle of radical types, to infiltrate the university system and do things that [others] could never do even if [they] wanted to. But I could sort of fly under the radar.

She saw a dichotomy, and a hierarchy, between formal and informal efforts: radicals were in the forefront because they focused on the root of problems while the formal groups chugged away at necessary reforms. The reformers provided cover for the radicals:

I was never part of any [of the formal feminist organizing] groups. And I typically looked down upon them as not in the forefront of things. So I guess, on that score, I thought,

‘Okay, we’ll leave it to them. Somebody has to do that part.’ You know our part, us radicals, is to turn over some of the assumptions that they are still going on in order to—

they were more reformist approach. And I thought…just like in the university, you’ve got to have somebody doing that so that the other people can be more radical. Otherwise, you’ll be killed off. Somebody’s got to be operating within the system.

This is not to say Pittsburgh was without its politico/feminist conflicts, just that the conflicts often occurred between women working on the same projects.⁵² Scholars believe that factionalism, especially over competing theories or identities, is a major obstacle to social movement success (Gamson 1975, Ryan 1989). Pittsburgh was no exception. Rather than resulting in organizational splits, as in New York and Chicago, the conflicts in Pittsburgh simply contributed to the demise of the group and feminist activity. Olivia recalled an early PRWU action against sexism within the Left that resulted in disempowerment and the loss of some members:

…a group of about 20 of us disrupted an anti-war forum because there were no women speakers. It was in November or December of 1970. We stormed on the stage and halted the meeting. There was an out-of-town anti-war speaker…and an audience of several hundred people. We were disappointed that all the women in the audience didn’t

From the mid-1970s through the ‘80s, the radical/liberal divisions became a divide between revolutionary socialist feminists and feminists who maintained faith in the current system. The work of the former happened through NAM, or other socialist and labor organizations, and focused on direct empowerment of women, organizing women workers, and education, both internal and external, that linked women’s oppression to larger societal problems. All feminist projects – NOW or otherwise – had a focus on women’s issues. However, the interviewees recalled the relationship between liberal and radical efforts differently. Four of the interviewees remembered specific theoretical divisions between groups. Patricia relayed class divisions in both membership and issue-focus between NOW and Save Our Selves:

We always believed in the autonomous women’s movement. Not NOW. The women in NOW were career women who wanted a bigger piece of the pie. I didn’t fit in. I went to some meetings but I didn’t fit in…We were far to the left of NOW. [Save Our Selves]

worked on projects like making sure, setting up battered women’s shelters, which were really geared much more toward the needs of working class, poor women, not women who had already made it. A lot of concerns of poor women, women of color, are not, have never really been attracted to mainstream feminism because it doesn’t speak to them.

Olivia also saw a gap and emphasized the liberationists’ class focus but, unlike Patricia, expressed solidarity with both sides:

We wanted to make sure women’s liberation benefited poor and working-class women, and didn’t just lead to more advantages for upper middle-class women, and that made us leery of more mainstream feminist groups around the country, like NOW or the National Women’s Political Caucus. However, I, at least, felt a tremendous amount of sisterhood and solidarity with every feminist everywhere.

Olivia remembered that groups with conflicting ideologies just did their own activities and would come together every so often for a forum or debate, or they would see each other at demonstrations against the war or in support of the farmworkers, but that there was not much open hostility. Patricia also remembered some event overlap but made a clearer distinction, with most autonomous women not having much respect for NOW:

We held events together, celebrated Labor Day, which is a major holiday in Pittsburgh.

But tension? Yeah. My kind of feminists were really, really hostile to NOW…[a friend]

tried to cultivate an alliance but others weren’t so big on it…NOW didn’t care about much at all. We identified ourselves as beyond NOW. There was a certain amount of contempt. We didn’t respect them, they didn’t get it.

For some, ideological differences were less salient than personal relationships, or a group’s ability to meet basic needs, in shaping what group they joined. Evelyn, for example, had been involved with socialist-feminist projects but also became a NOW member because the NOW meetings accepted children and provided quality childcare: “I had been to so many Leftie meetings…and they acted like I had a rash when I came in with my kids and I thought, ‘Wow!

Who knew? This is great!’ So then I got real involved with NOW because they had childcare!”

Evelyn believed that members of NOW tried to work on issues that bridged race and class lines:

“…it’s true, it was founded by a bunch of middle class white women but…they saw the web, the way everything was connected.” However, she also remembered that most members of these ideologically different groups did not attend each other’s events. In another case, Rose, when looking through her notes, expressed surprise that she had gone to some NOW conventions. She added that she, and others, had just been there as observers, emphasizing again that the connection between individual activists was the strong thread connecting local participants of the women’s movement across ideological divides.