History teaches us lessons about how people organized to change the world — lessons in victories and lessons in failures. The women’s liberation movement made innumerable gains for women, from being able to wear pants on campus and having credit in our own names to having access to birth control in marriage. But the point isn’t just to learn about history; it’s to use that knowledge to change — and make — history. We can learn from the victories of previous movements, adopt their techniques and improve them if necessary. We can study our predecessors’ failures, analyze them and make sure not to repeat them.
For example, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s taught the women who founded the women’s liberation movement the powerful tool of consciousness-raising (CR). They learned to tell the truth about their personal lives and analyze those testimonies to develop theories about the root of women’s oppression and strategies for solutions, because oppressed people are the real experts on their own experiences. CR groups — where women spoke honestly about pregnancy scares and sex, the pressure to be beautiful, young and thin, sexism at work and all kinds of things women didn’t really talk about in a political context in 1968 — spread rapidly across the country. As Carol Hanisch, a founding member of New York Radical Women, says, “The personal is political.” CR also brings us together, eliminating the isolation that enables male authority and supremacy. We share our experiences, pains, sufferings and joys and work together to develop the theories and strategies that make us a strong, united movement.
But history is more than a toolbox. It is also a microphone, a guide to our voice; it is a soapbox built with the root of effective discourse and a chorus made of the echoes of our predecessors. The rich history of the women’s liberation movement gives us an encyclopedic guide on how our movement organized, grew and built a voice. It is a record of language and discourse that we need to study in order to avoid reinventing the wheel. By studying the history of our movement, we can use the voices of our predecessors as the microphones into which we speak and the shoulders on which we stand as we shout our battle cry.
Unfortunately, male supremacy will not be defeated easily. As Kathie Sarachild, a founding member of the early women’s liberation group Redstockings, points out, those in charge have worked to distort our history and strip us naked of all our tools. It is not enough to vote if we want to build on the work of the generations of activists who have come before us. We must actively learn and study our own history if we want to make history. Movies like “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” teach us about our history and leave us with questions we have yet to answer. Join National Women’s Liberation for a screening and discussion of the film today at The Wooly, situated at 20 N. Main Street. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and the film starts at 7 p.m.
Join our fight as we push against male supremacy and advocate for women’s freedom in all aspects of our lives. We cannot carry a movement if we do not know its past, so come study our roots with us and learn how we can build and grow an effective movement today.
Emily Calvin is a member of the National Women’s Liberation Steering Committee.
