Contradicting this idea that feminism is no longer relevant, gendered rhetoric is now a primary mode of bolstering state power. Insidiously, feminist language is being reappropriated to justify the erasure of feminist ideas and feminist history. Most notably, an executive order censoring “gender ideology”—the very idea that “woman” is not a “true and biological category”—does so with the alleged aim of protecting “intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women.” The second wave feminist concept of separatism, women’s divestment from men and from patriarchy, was once a radical rejection of masculinist power. Now, it is being used to uphold state authoritarianism.
As a feminist collective, we—three Bay Area locals inside and outside academia—were faced once again with the question of how to inherit the legacies of early feminist activists in a shifting present. Now, we wondered how the university’s institutional context expanded and limited the radical possibilities of feminist collectivism.
This past winter, we looked to the Berkeley Women’s Studies Movement Archive at the Bancroft Library for answers. This archive charts the history of women’s studies at Berkeley from the late 1960s among comparative literature graduate students, to the 1970s and ’80s among undergraduates and faculty, to its 1991 formal investiture as a department. Since 2005, it has been known as the Gender and Women’s Studies Department.
Some might believe that the history in these archives of conflict between radical feminist organizers and university administrators underscores the difficulty of moving the horizontal, communal structure of the feminist collective into the hierarchical, individualistic structure of the modern university. Instead, we realized that the existence of conflict justifies the place of women’s studies within the university. Conflict is necessary to the continued existence of all academic disciplines: scholars disagree with one another, and out of this disaccord, previous theses are amended, others defended; and new theories, axioms, and ideas are born.
Conflict, in other words, is essential to the history of feminism, to the history of the university, and to the history of democracy. Authoritarianism, by contrast, perpetuates itself through manufactured consensus. As writers of feminist history, then, our best tool against authoritarianism’s appropriations of feminist language is telling a feminist history that highlights conflict. Doing so makes it harder to boil down feminism into uniform slogans, the sort that can easily be retooled and wielded against feminist liberation.