There Are No Women On The New Left

EPOCH
21 hours ago
8 min read

Colleen Fischer | Fairleigh Dickinson University

With the Mississippi sun setting, the core members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) walked down to the pier to laugh and sing and drink a gallon of wine. Mary King had spent the summer of 1964 working in communications for SNCC, the student branch of the Civil Rights movement largely responsible for Freedom Schools, sit-ins, and voter registration drives. One of her duties was to type out the autopsy reports of the murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner and distribute them to newspapers. King and Casey Hayden had written an anonymous memo and circulated it amongst women in SNCC. The memo questioned how caste, specifically the role of gender within caste, affected the distribution of labour in the movement. They were disappointed that recently mobilised white men could fold into leadership roles while they, as experienced organizers, were given secretarial and office work.

A black and white photo of a pin back button reading the Students for a Nonviolent Coordinating Committee with the letters “SNCC” in the centre. — A Pinback button for SNCC or the Students for a Nonviolent Coordinating Committee–Credit National Museum of African American History and Culture (Creative Commons)

In the memo, they wrote, ‘the caste system perspective dictates the roles assigned to women in the movement, and certainly even more to women outside the movement. Within the movement, questions arise in situations ranging from relationships of women organizers to men in the community, to who cleans the freedom house, to who holds leadership positions and acts as spokesman for groups’. Their criticism sought to challenge women to think about their place within the movement and how gender and race work within larger systems of injustice and the division of labour. They republished the memo for a broader audience called ‘Sex and Caste’. This, along with the original document, used the idea of caste to encapsulate all features of oppression in American society – a model that became popular in Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: Origins of Discontent in 2020.

As the evening air descended on the group of volunteers in ‘65, SNCC leader Stokley Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) started on one of his many comedy routines. He joked about being from Trinidad, Black Mississippians, and primarily himself, but eventually, he came to the recently circulated memo and locked eyes with Mary King and said ‘a woman’s position in the movement is prone’. The entire pier erupted in laughter. King saw the comment as ironic, another instance of Carmichael’s self-deprecating humour – something King agrees with. The laughter brought the workers together in their cause because, in a moment of conflict, Carmichael humourised his own attitudes and misogynistic leanings.

A photo of a man wearing overalls and a coat looking at the camera while a woman looks on from behind him. — Kwame Ture at a 1966 Mississippi press conference (open access)

The dominant historical narrative remembers the moment differently. The story is told on his Wikipedia page under ‘controversies’. It, with King and Hayden's paper, has been cemented as one of the genesis stories for second wave feminism. The paper is seen as one of the first papers in a movement that would become defined by theory on written discourse with the publishing of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Gloria Steinman’s Ms. Magazine, and as an initial act of consciousness raising. Feminism of the 1970s was characterised mainly by the plight of middle-class housewives and/or young white professionals.

Writer bell hooks comments heavily in Feminist Theory from Margin to Center that feminism became, in the 1970s, a defining characteristic of activists. She points out that once women identified as feminists, their other political positions seemed to disappear, and they lacked intersectionality. hooks' criticism applies to how women approached their own politics, but it is also relevant in how history talks about women. Though related, positioning Hayden and King as initiators of the movement is a miscategorisation. The political position of Hayden, King, and many of the other women on the ‘New Left’ (a collection of pro-democracy student movements in the 1950s and 60s) was intersectional around race, gender, and class. By removing King and Hayden from Civil Rights history and redistributing them to women’s history it denies SNCC the same intersectionality it denies Hayden and King. King embodies this in her memoir when she says ‘it is an error by subsequent historiography not only to fail to recognise the role played by SNCC in the American civil rights movement but also to omit the role of that movement in building an American concern for the rights of women’. This is all the more true because these two causes are historically and inextricably linked. Depicting Hayden, King, and the Women of SNCC as the 1970s origin story paints a flawed picture. These women did not see the organisation or the men in it as adversarial to women’s rights, but instead as examples of solidarity. Though Hayden and King’s work in consciousness raising greatly impacted the subsequent feminist movement, their commitment to intersectionality did not transition as strongly.

It is their recognition that the most severe threats to women were colonialism and racism that defined their work and lives, something that alienated them from the movement that claims them as their genesis. The dominant historical narrative implies that King and Hayden would have joined the women’s movement in the 1970s, but they did not. They stayed with SNCC until it became an all-Black organisation in 1967 and then worked on union, immigration, and peace efforts until their deaths.

Representatives of the Black Panthers escalated the decontextualisation of Carmichael’s quote during the 1969 Students of a Democratic Society (SDS) convention. The SDS was a major student organisation focused on decolonisation and racial and economic equality. During the mid-1960s, they became focused on ending US involvement in Vietnam. In 1969, their leaders were involved in legal battles, and there were constant disagreements around the identity of students as members of the ‘working class’. Two divisive groups were voting on a feminist plank at the convention – which passed.

A photo of a girl with dark hair. — FBI ten most wanted poster for Bernadine Dohrn (public domain)

Bernadine Dohrn was the National Secretary of SDS, which was considered ‘central leadership’ or one of the key decision makers. She invited representatives from the Chicago sector of the Black Panthers to speak at the SDS convention to strengthen the SDS/BPP alliance and display SDS’ growing commitment to intersectionality. Black Panther deputy minister of information in Chicago, Rufus (‘Chaka’) Walls, quickly switched topics in his speech, saying the Panthers believed in free love and ‘pussy power’. He continued by saying, ‘Superman was a punk because he never even tried to fuck Lois Lane’. People responded by chanting ‘Fight male chauvinism!’. Unable to quiet the crowd, Walls handed the microphone over to Party member Jewel Cook, who returned to the subject of women’s liberation by repeating Carmichael's words,

'a woman’s place in the movement is prone’. There was no way to misunderstand the comment within the context of the growing feminist movement and Walls' earlier comments. He was sincere.

There was growing discontent in the largely white SDS around several issues, the support of the Black Panthers being a major one. Dohrn and other leaders of SDS walked out, seeing any endorsement of a feminist plank as an opportunistic and hollow promise within the context of a lack of support for the Panthers. In response, they started the Weather Underground, which embraced radical and violent means of dissent.

These responses demonstrate that the ‘prone’ comments' sincerity or irony may be up for debate in the historical narrative. This was not the case for women on the New Left, whom these comments targeted. Feminism was not the singular defining feature of their politics, as was becoming common in the broader feminist movement at the end of the decade. Decades later, on an episode of Zayd Dohrn’s podcast Mother, Country, Radical, Angela Davis described Bernardine Dohrn’s position on race and gender by saying, ‘she knew exactly how to make those connections long before the term intersectionality had ever been introduced’. Dohrn was intersectional at the beginning of her work. She helped establish routes to connect American women with abortions in Canada as an undergraduate. She used the same routes to help Americans dodge the Vietnam War draft years later. Dohrn’s commitment to decolonial and racial equality long after the war ended and feminism became the more popular cause further demonstrates her intersectionality. All three women’s reactions to the comment are snapshots. They prove that the theoretical approach to feminism was not unilateral and that women on the New Left chose a more intersectional one.

Feminism is not, nor has ever been, a monolith. When the necessary level of nuance is given to understanding feminism, the women of the New Left do not need to be extracted from one historical place and placed in another. Instead, organisations on the New Left can be directly included in the discussion. Though all groups on the New Left advocated for pro-democracy efforts, SNCC, SDS, and the Weather Underground all had distinct approaches. Their conflation is misrepresentation. Though King and Hayden’s essay is a key document in understanding consciousness raising efforts of the 1970s, portraying women on the New Left as the precursors of second wave feminists without nuance advances two connected, key misunderstandings. It ignores the reality that these women in leadership roles in the two most prominent New Left movements were very much alive during the movements in the 1970s and did not abandon their work in race equity, decolonisation efforts, and labour organising to join the feminist movement but understood that these issues were related. By linking the two movements together without nuance, the intersectional nature of their work goes underrepresented. The later movement's more popular and less intersectional positions overshadow these women’s beliefs and work as competent leaders.

The more dangerous and misogynistic interpretation of history that sometimes arises from this historical narrative is the assumption that these women were using SNCC and the SDS as a training ground for their own liberation. That they did not care about the issues the organisations were championing or the social implications of these movements but only used their resources to force the issue of feminism. The echo of this misrepresentation is evident even in today’s concept of the manosphere (a segment of alt-right internet culture). A meme that is circulated on 4chan, the ‘rules of the internet’ as recorded by the internet archive site ‘know your meme’, lists the third rule as ‘there are no girls on the internet’. The actual existence of girls on the internet is irrelevant to this rule. Instead, it is understood that no women are ‘true users’ of the internet or ‘believers’ in it. Angela Nagle argues throughout her book Kill All Normies that this comes from the online alt-right’s worship of subversive culture, something they have in common with the New Left. The striking difference between how these groups understand subversion is depicted through their understanding of women. The Alt-Right sees women - particularly second-wave feminists - as representations of the dominant culture, thus they cannot exist online – a space defined by subversion. This allows for cognitive dissonance regarding their understanding of the subversive acts of the New Left. Trans Hacker and internet troll Jaime Cochran compared herself to Abbie Hoffman (a leader on the New Left) while being interviewed with Weev, a friend and neo-Nazi with a swastika tattoo, in a 2014 Esquire interview. The recategorisation of women on the New Left who were subversive, like Hayden, King, and Dohrn, as feminists allows for this dissonance. The same monolithic understanding that separates Dohrn, Hayden, and King's feminist beliefs from their organisations’ to claim them as second wave feminists, allows for the Alt-Right to maintain their dissonance towards subversive women. It is the reinsertion of these women into their historical context and then the folding of the New Left into feminism that offers a depiction of feminists and women that challenges Alt-Right beliefs. These edits to the historical narrative restore the intersectionality of these women and the movements they represent.