Feeling Women’s Liberation by Victoria Hesford (review)

If modern feminism is haunted by the ghost of the “feminist-as-lesbian” figure, then in Feeling Women’s Liberation Victoria Hesford commits herself to a spectral genealogy, uncovering the origins and circulation of this vexing trope. In the process, she seeks to restore the possibilities of the historical moment she defines as “around 1970,” before women’s liberation was absorbed into historical narrativization that ascribed “specific and coherent theoretical and ideological standpoints, which are then defended or criticized in a more knowing present” (2). By dipping back in time, nodding forward, but perpetually hovering around the transformative moment of 1970, Hesford disrupts linear narratives to bridge an impasse between historians and queer theorists, who are often imagined to be at odds but who, according to Hesford, share common ground in their dismissive attitudes toward early women’s liberation.

In attempting to address both groups, Feeling Women’s Liberation does not always satisfy either, though Hesford’s ambition and spirited analysis mostly carry the text through its dry spells. In restoring Kate Millett’s chaotic, unwieldy, 1974 memoir Flying to a central role in women’s liberation, Hesford has made an important intervention. Generally marginalized in feminist history, Flying and the scornful reviews it drew from feminists and sexist men alike represent a transition from the personal, emotional styles of activism in the 1960s to an increasingly professionalized mode of feminism in the next decade. Meanwhile, as queer theory continues its affective turn, Millett offers an important but overlooked flashpoint in the history of “gay shame” and a protoqueer style.

Hesford begins with the sexist and homophobic press coverage of the movement in the wake of Millett’s Sexual Politics, the landmark 1969 treatise that set the analytical stage for new interrogations of gender and power. Particularly after Millett came out as bisexual (self-identifying as a lesbian) in late 1970, the dominant discourses aligned in presenting her as the concrete embodiment of the new “feminist-as-lesbian” figure and using that identity to discredit the movement.

This history is hardly unknown to readers of second wave historiography, but Hesford offers strong discourse analysis, showing, for instance, how the language of exhibitionism coalesced to displace actual feminist politics by substituting the “hyper-visibility of the ‘attention-getting’ liberation-ist” (59). Her recitation of the liberationist canon sometimes feels familiar, but when Hesford reads Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique against Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, she draws out some unexpected continuities; each book, in its own way, supports “killing daddy’s girls,” as Hesford provocatively subtitles a chapter.

The centerpiece of Feeling Women’s Liberation comes in its fourth chapter, “Fear of Flying,” an extended, often brilliant recovery of Millett’s near-lost book. It was not only the mainstream media that latched onto the feminist-as-lesbian trope to critique this book but also an increasingly normative feminist movement itself whose members were disavowed as the ragged, “unseemly display of personal dysfunction and literary ineptitude” (170). Millett confounded all who attempted to classify her. “Neither lesbian nor straight, married yet not, a bohemian, a scholar, and a feminist theorist,” she signifies for Hesford “a public spectacle of the risk-taking inventiveness and active changeability of many women in the early years of women’s liberation” (169). But because her same-sex confessions made many straight feminists uncomfortable, and because her disclosures of mental and emotional instability made her an embarrassing symbol for middle-class reviewers, Flying found little favor anywhere. Yet Millett’s “attachment to shame” anticipates some of the counterhomonormative critiques of Heather Love, David Halperin, and other later queer theorists, while her fluid definitions of her own sexuality specifically anticipate contemporary formations of queerness (187). Thus queer theorists who pass over women’s liberation miss out on a formative figure, Hesford argues.

That said, Hesford still holds Millett to account for the “failure of her feminist imaginary” to find solidarity with women of color, as well as her...