Sisterhood in Movement: Feminist Solidarity in France and the United States

A poignant letter was published several years ago in off our backs: a young woman, Amy Johnson, tells of her quest to break the isolation of living in what she referred to as her ultraconservative, sexist hometown. She goes to college and makes it to a Women’s Studies department, only to be taught that the bonds of sisterhood she sought were illusory because “women” don’t exist, and the notion of sisterhood is retrograde.¹ How can we, as feminists, respond to her sense of isolation and demobilization? How can we build and maintain a social movement without our sense of connection to, and belief in, one another? To have a movement, social movement theorists around the world agree, a group needs to pull together and have some form of bond. French and US labor movements called for solidarity; the US Civil Rights movement had its beloved community. The Women’s Liberation movement was predicated upon the idea of solidarity among women, once commonly referred to as “sisterhood.” Yet in no other movement has this notion been so dissected and criticized.

Today the very term sisterhood seems somehow quaint, viewed by some as naïve or anachronistic, by others as ethnocentric and dogmatic. Not only is sisterhood in mothballs; so is the term solidarity. Providing basic necessities to all has been reframed in US society as “entitlement,” justified by even so-called liberals with the argument that citizens have paid for them; that is, the state is just keeping guard over a collection of piggy banks for individuals. Those who wish to go beyond the “piggy bank model,” like old-school Christians, often do so via acts of “charity” or, as some French put it, “générosité.” To the contrary, with solidarity or sisterhood, we do not “get what we pay for,” nor do we know who the “good Samaritans” are; in fact, it should not be known. We decide collectively what is needed for the common good, and we provide it through systemic means. It works horizontally, as a meeting among equals with shared vision.

The critiques of sisterhood have come not just from antifeminists and neo-conservatives but also from within the feminist movement, indeed since the beginning of the contemporary movement. Radical feminists saw sisterhood contradicted by emotional violence within the movement. Socialist, Marxist, and materialist feminists rejected any essentialization of “woman.” Feminists of color on both sides of the Atlantic have argued that assumptions of commonality, seemingly necessary for sisterhood, negated the antagonistic situations and interests of white women and women of color. More recently, Queer and Trans Studies have gone beyond the challenge of dualities to deconstruct and reconceptualize sex and gender as nonlinear and conditional. However, despite these historical, political, and philosophical critiques, we question whether feminism can exist without “women” and the deep bonding that “sisterhood” was meant to represent. Using a Franco-American perspective, we advocate a sisterhood not rooted in the physical classifications or identity of its participants but conceptualized as a political process, project, and struggle, built around lived experiences and consciousness and traversed by multiple social relations. Such a sisterhood would be a part of broad liberatory practices.

This article reflects upon the post–World War II history and concept of feminist sisterhood, as distinct from female solidarity, in the United States and France, Judith’s country of adoption for nearly forty years. France and the United States, both wealthy Western nations, may seem similar on a global scale. Both feminist movements have international resonance, not least through theoretical writings, beginning with the foundational influence of Simone de Beauvoir. Representations and misrepresentations of French and US feminism are interwoven into the other nation’s social movement’s narrative.² Actually, much transatlantic dialogue and cross-fertilization have occurred throughout feminism’s Second Wave. To give just a few early examples, the first French feminist demonstration, Women’s Strike Day on August 26, 1970, corresponded to the fiftieth anniversary of US women’s suffrage, and that same year the first French anthology contained many translations from early...