AhoraNow no. 7: Strategy Center Publications
Socialist Feminism: Reflections After 30 Years
REUNION SPARKS REFLECTION
The email arrives. “Come to the 30 year reunion of the socialist feminist Berkeley/Oakland Women’s Union.” I look at myself in the mirror and try to remember who I was so long ago. My mind floods with images of all the stages of my numerous lives—post-WWII Southern white girl daughter of the baby boom, civil rights era teenage activist, traditional bride, anti-Vietnam War radical, young architect, divorced anti-monogamy radical therapist, lesbian antiracist, socialist feminist, communist cadre, hetero-lover, wife, machinist, boilermaker, auto-assembler, organizer, mother, scholar, editor, writer, teacher, feminist, socialist.
In the late sixties when the first women’s consciousness-raising groups became popular, I was afraid to join. I was a young bride, with part of my consciousness still stuck in the “perfect housewife” ideology of the post-war 1950s. I knew that the moment I walked in the door of the meeting my life would change, that there must be a different path than the one I had taken. To make a long story short, I went to that consciousness-raising group, traded my bride life for socialist feminism, and ended up a Marxist-Leninist. What sense does that make?
