The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women

Nine. Separatism

Nine separ atism My central goal in Women and Organizations is to enable the students to recognize the importance of female separatism. I also want them to understand the problems of women’s groups. For, if separate women’s organizations are important, then it is desirable to grasp the dif¤culties these groups face, especially the internal dif¤culties that often threaten the groups’ survival. Women’s organizations are treated differently by the external world. They receive fewer material resources than men’s and mixed organizations, and their boundaries are invaded more carelessly, with greater destructive effect. But the biggest problem for women’s organizations is that women themselves devalue what is women’s. Women withdraw from women’s organizations, fearing contamination by being with other women, or loss of advantage by not being with men. They feel that women’s groups are less good than similar male or mixed groups, or that they are unnecessary, or for someone else and not them. Often, women are members of women’s groups but do not recognize their membership. “I have never participated in a women’s organization,” women say, when they have been raised by a single mother, or an extended female family, and are dependent on women’s friendships. 1 9 6 Women bring different expectations to women’s organizations than to male or mixed groups, and they often have such high expectations of women’s groups, and, at the same time, take them so for granted, that the groups perish under both pressure and neglect. Usually, women see women’s organizations as failures because they are not like men’s groups, rather than interpreting them on their own terms. Separate women’s organizations are a major source of power for women—of pride in their own lives and effectiveness in the larger world. Yet when women make gains because of the political functions of their separate organizations, we often abandon the organizations, thinking them no longer useful. Unfortunately, when we lose our organizations, we subsequently lose the basis for sustaining our gains. When I ¤rst put together the syllabus for my course on women and organizations, the value of female separatism seemed to me the main lesson to be learned in the later weeks. By female separatism, I mean women organizing apart from men. I mean organizations composed of women, and run by and for women, to which men are denied access, or, when included, are required to conform to women’s terms. The need for separate women’s organizations has always seemed to me to follow from what we learn earlier in the course about the subordinate status of women and the permeability of women’s individual and group boundaries . Yet, in the later weeks, I ¤nd that embracing separatism requires more than logic. I ¤nd that the students have deep prior emotional investments in gender integration. They feel separatism to be an assault on their way of life and their expectations for the future. Similarly, I have a deep investment in separatism. When the students reject separatism , as they often do at ¤rst—or, if not separatism, lesbianism (and if lesbian is a frightening word, it is mostly because it means separatism )—I feel they are rejecting me. At the start of the second half of the term, I am faced with a group of women students who are, for the most part, heterosexual. They are more worried about how to take care of men, and how not to exclude men from their lives, than they are about how to open up the range of choices available to them. They see women’s worlds as less good than men’s worlds and do not want to give up access to male privileges by leaving men behind. I am a lesbian and I depend on women’s worlds. I s e pa r at i s m 1 9 7 cannot reject them even if I dislike aspects of them, and even though I am often afraid of being among “just women.” By the end of the quarter , I want the students to feel as I do. I want them to see their ties with women as so important to them that they are willing to overcome their fears of losing the support of men. Ideas about separatism are not new in the second half of the course. When I asked the students, in their ¤rst...