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ABSTRACT
Contemporary feminists struggle over “choice.” A central demand of the second wave, some feminists insist on the continued significance of choice to their activism and theorizing; others are critical of the term, arguing that an emphasis on choice diverts attention from political issues and blames women for the oppressions they experience. The tension at the root of this debate is echoed in feminist theorizing about consciousness raising. In her germinal essay “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Campbell argues that through consciousness raising, feminists illuminated the political underpinnings of women’s personal problems and prompted collective activism aimed at finding structural solutions to those problems, all the while affirming the centrality of choice to women’s lives. What Campbell left unstated, however, is how a process based in choice will promote a political, collective response. In this essay, I offer an analysis of the 1978 volume Ourselves and Our Children, arguing that the consciousness raising modeled therein illuminates broad patterns of political oppression, urges a collective response to those oppressions, and embraces choice. Based in a recognition of the synecdochic nature of the “personal is political” adage, this analysis offers insights into feminist debates over choice and resolves a lacuna in theorizing about consciousness raising.
Acknowledgement
The author is grateful for the insights offered by Bonnie Dow, D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, Anya Jabour, and Steve Schwarze. The author wishes to thank the editor and the reviewers for their helpful responses to the essay.
Notes
1. Throughout the essay my discussion of second-wave feminism specifically references the actions of white women who participated in liberal and radical feminisms. However, as I argue, the case study under discussion opens the door to bridge the gaps between feminisms, thus responding to the criticism that white feminists universalized their experiences, ignoring the intersectional nature of oppressions experienced by women differentially situated than themselves. For a discussion of the ways racial identity affected feminist organizing, see Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For a discussion of the abortion debate and “choice,” see Celeste Michelle Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Also see Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, revised ed. (New York: Penguin, 2006).
2. Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric. Also see Linda R. Hirshman, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World (New York: Viking, 2006); Linda R. Hirshman, “Homeward Bound,” The American Prospect 16, no. 12 (2005): 20–26; and D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, Bikini-Ready Moms: Celebrity Profiles, Motherhood, and the Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).
3. Carly S. Woods, “Repunctuated Feminism: Marketing Menstrual Suppression Through the Rhetoric of Choice,” Women’s Studies in Communication 36, no. 3 (2013): 267–87.
4. For example, the name of the organization that considers itself the political arm of the abortion-rights movement is NARAL Pro-Choice America. Also see Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); R. Claire Snyder-Hall, “Third-Wave Feminism and the Defense of ‘Choice’,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 1 (2010): 255–61; Rebecca Walker, ed., To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (New York: Anchor, 1995); Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How it Will Change the 21st Century (New York: Random House, 1993).
5. Sonja K. Foss and Karen A. Foss, “Our Journey to Repowered Feminism: Expanding the Feminist Toolbox,” Women’s Studies in Communication 32, no. 1 (2009): 45.
6. Anne Teresa Demo, “Introduction,” in The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication, & Privilege, ed. Anne Teresa Demo, Jennifer L. Borda, and Charlotte Kroløkke (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2015), 1–27; Bonnie J. Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement Since 1970 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Tasha N. Dubriwny, The Vulnerable Empowered Woman: Feminism, Postfeminism and Women’s Health (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Lisa Flores, “Choosing to Consume: Race, Education, and the School Voucher Debate,” in The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication, & Privilege, ed. Anne Teresa Demo, Jennifer L. Borda, and Charlotte Kroløkke (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2015), 243–66; Virginia McCarver, “The Rhetoric of Choice and 21st Century Feminism: Online Conversations about Work, Family, and Sarah Palin,” Women’s Studies in Communication 34, no. 1 (2011): 20–41; O’Brien Hallstein, Bikini-Ready Moms; Mary Douglas Vavrus, “Opting Out Moms in the News: Selling New Traditionalism in the New Millennium,” Feminist Media Studies 7, no. 1 (2007): 47–63.
7. Rosen, The World Split Open.
8. Rosen, The World Split Open, 197.
9. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 507–08.
10. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59, no. 1 (1973), 78.
11. Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation,” 79.
12. Dow similarly recognizes that Campbell promotes structural change while also embracing individual choice. Bonnie J. Dow, “Finding Feminism’s Audience: Rhetorical Diversity in Early Second-Wave Feminist Discourse," in Social Controversy and Public Address in the 1960s and Early 1970s, ed. Richard J. Jensen, volume 9 of The Rhetorical History of the United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017), 139–79.
13. Jean Bessette, “An Archive of Anecdotes: Raising Lesbian Consciousness after the Daughters of Bilitis,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2013): 22–45; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Consciousness-raising: Linking Theory, Criticism, and Practice,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32, no. 1 (2002): 45–64; Caroline M. Cole, “Oh Wise Women of the Stalls … ,” Discourse & Society 2, no. 4 (1991): 401–11; Lisa M. Gring-Pemble, “Writing Themselves into Consciousness: Creating a Rhetorical Bridge between the Public and Private Spheres,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84, no. 1 (1998): 41–61; Stacey K. Sowards and Valerie R. Renegar, “The Rhetorical Functions of Consciousness-Raising in Third Wave Feminism,” Communication Studies 55, no. 4 (2004): 535–52.
14. Tasha N. Dubriwny, “Consciousness-raising as Collective Rhetoric: The Articulation of Experience in the Redstockings’ Abortion Speak-Out of 1969,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91, no. 4 (2005): 395–422.
15. Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric, 68.
16. McCarver, “The Rhetoric of Choice,” 21.
17. Meghan Murphy, “Choice Feminism: How our Rallying Cry got Co-Opted and Why we Need to Take it Back,” Herizons 26, no. 1 (2012): 21–23.
18. Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 145.
19. Hirshman, Get To Work, 21.
20. Michaele L. Ferguson, “Choice Feminism and the Fear of Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 1 (2010): 249.
21. Demo, The Motherhood Business; O’Brien Hallstein, Bikini-Ready Moms; Vavrus, “Opting Out Moms.”
22. Hirshman, “Homeward Bound,” 24. Virginia McCarver similarly rejects the rhetoric of choice, arguing that it “employs neoliberal ideas and values to mask a series of narrow scripts, each delineating a limiting and unfavorable ‘choice’ dangerous to women, feminism, and gender relations.” McCarver, “The Rhetoric of Choice,” 21.
23. Meagan Tyler, “No, Feminism is not about Choice,” The Conversation, April 29, 2015. Accessed March 1, 2017.
24. Tyler, “No, Feminism is not about Choice.”
25. Vavrus, “Opting Out Moms,” 54; also see Lori J. Marso, “Feminism’s Quest for Common Desires,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 1 (2010): 263–78.
26. Ferguson, “Choice Feminism,” 251.
27. Hirshman, “Homeward Bound,” 24.
28. Ferguson, “Choice Feminism,” 250.
29. Snyder-Hall, “Third-Wave Feminism,” 259.
30. Snyder-Hall, “Third-Wave Feminism,” 259.
31. Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Choosing Betrayal,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 1 (2010): 272.
32. Woods, “Repunctuated Feminism,” 280.
33. Joreen, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” Ms. 4, no. 10 (1976): 97. “Joreen” is Jo Freeman’s pseudonym.
34. Rosen, The World Split Open, 229.
35. Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), 129.
36. Ferguson, “Choice Feminism,” 252.
37. Burke, Grammar, 503.
38. Burke, Grammar, 509.
39. Burke, Grammar, 512.
40. Mark P. Moore, “Making Sense of Salmon: Synecdoche and Irony in a Natural Resource Crisis,” Western Journal of Communication 67, no. 1. (2003): 84.
41. Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); also see Sara Hayden, “Re-Claiming Bodies of Knowledge: An Exploration of the Relationship between Feminist Theorizing and Feminine Style in the Rhetoric of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective,” Western Journal of Communication 61, no. 2. (1997): 127–63.
42. Ann Snitow, “Feminism and Motherhood: An American Reading,” Feminist Review 40 (1992): 37.
43. Snitow, “Feminism and Motherhood,” 37–38.
44. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (BWHBC), Ourselves and Our Children: A Book By and For Parents (New York: Random House, 1978), 12.
45. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 5. The authors make a conscious choice to refer to “parents” rather than “mothers,” writing: “We didn’t want to write simply on ‘mothering’ because of the very fact that in our society at present so much of the parenting is done by mothers only, and we want to see men and women share the role in a mutual way.” BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 11. Throughout the essay I similarly refer to “parents” unless mothers are specifically being addressed.
46. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 5.
47. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children.
48. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 113.
49. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 218.
50. Dubriwny, “Consciousness-raising,” 398–99.
51. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 6.
52. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, emphasis mine.
53. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children.
54. Dubriwny, “Consciousness-raising,” 410, emphasis mine.
55. Dubriwny, “Consciousness-raising,” 416. Once again she uses the definite article “the”; emphasis mine.
56. Dubriwny, “Consciousness-raising,” 417, emphasis mine.
57. Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 10.
58. Echols, Daring to be Bad, 10; also see Rosen, The World Split Open; Joreen, “Trashing.”
59. Bessette, “An Archive of Anecdotes,” 41, emphasis in the original.
60. Dubriwny, “Consciousness-raising,” 413.
61. Dubriwny, “Consciousness-raising,” 413; Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric; also see Laurie Shrage, Abortion and Social Responsibility: Depolarizing the Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
62. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 15.
63. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 22.
64. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 89.
65. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 39.
66. Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
67. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 16.
68. The Collective struggled over issues of race and sexual orientation early in its existence. Ultimately, the group expanded its membership so that it was more diverse and they continually sought out voices of people who differed from themselves. Personal communication with Judy Norsigian, founding member of the BWHBC, September 1993; also see Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves. In April of 2018, the group made the decision to stop publishing updated editions of the book.
69. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 130.
70. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children.
71. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 12.
72. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 14.
73. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children.
74. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, emphasis mine.
75. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 14.
76. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children.
77. Sowards and Renegar, “The Rhetorical Functions of Consciousness-Raising,” 548.
78. Sowards and Renegar, “The Rhetorical Functions of Consciousness-Raising,” 548.
79. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 186.
80. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 35.
81. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 47.
82. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 176.
83. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children.
84. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 186.
85. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 192.
86. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 209.
87. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 221, emphasis in the original.
88. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 15. In another moment of inconsistency, the very next sentence reads: “There are parents of all backgrounds who would find it pointless to be so self-conscious, and all kinds of parents, too, who spend time reflecting on their parenting experience.” BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 15–16.
89. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 24.
90. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children.
91. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 29–30.
92. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 48, emphasis mine.
93. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 49.
94. BWHBC, Ourselves and Our Children, 11.
95. Burke, Grammar, 512.