Download review of Personal Politics, Evans

Travis Seay
April 16, 2006
Review of Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement
and the New Left, by Sara Evans
In the first book-length scholarly treatment of the emergence of women’s liberation, Sara
Evans portrays the civil rights movement and the New Left as both instigators of women’s
separation from the Movement and providers of “social space” in which nascent postwar
feminism was able to develop. Drawing from personal letters, early feminist position papers,
and other key sixties documents, Evans shows that liberal and leftist women became alienated
from the work of freeing oppressed groups by recognizing their own oppression; the modern
women’s liberation movement grew out of the model of egalitarianism forwarded—but never
quite achieved—by their male counterparts.
The movement from struggle for racial equality to that for women’s rights has a pattern
in the United States. Just as abolitionists in the 1830s and 40s became models for suffragists, the
civil rights movement of the 1960s inspired parallels among young feminists. The latter drew
from their setting faith in mass action and a belief in “human ‘rights.’” Indeed, argues Evans,
southern white women were the first to “link racial and sexual oppression” (p. 25). In particular,
southern protestant women saw in their religious heritage a legitimate route to protest.
Participating in groups such as the YWCA and the Methodist Student Movement in communities
and on campuses throughout the South (including UT-Austin), young women became drawn to
civil rights and were baptized in the occupation of social protest. Black women, who played
prominent roles early on in SNCC, represented possibilities for extending egalitarian ideas in the
Movement.
As black and white men and women shared workspace in the South, however, white
women experienced feelings of sexual exploitation. Attempting to avoid the label of “racist,”
many were afraid to deny black male sexual advances. Black women consequently became
resentful, compounding white female guilt and anger about their roles in the Movement. Such
sexual tension was divisive of the civil rights movement; it also signaled the beginnings of a
separate women’s movement.
Casey Hayden and Mary King were the first to articulate a rationale for a separate
movement. In a SNCC position paper, they linked the idea of male supremacy over women to
white supremacy over black people. Coupled with critiques of traditional child-rearing roles and
marriage practices, such ideas received ridicule from men. The move away from nonviolence
and toward black separatism in the mid sixties widened the gap between feminists and
Movement men as southern white women became disillusioned with the disconnect between
rhetoric and action.
Movement women fared better in the North—better than women in the South and better,
in many cases, than their northern male comrades. As ERAP allowed several women to develop
leadership skills, patterns of male oppression and neglect of women in the Movement became
targets of critique. In fact, this was perhaps the most important and enduring legacy of ERAP.
Evans writes that although the “intellectual notion of the process of radicalization” forwarded by
SDS in the North failed to catch on among the urban poor, women in the movement adopted it as
“consciousness raising” (p. 134).
In June of 1967, New Left Notes featured an article on the colonization of women and
their declared status “as part of the Third World.” It prompted women to demand full
participation in the Movement; men showed reluctance in considering the proposal. Such
responses—for feminists, evidence of the male dismissal of women’s rights—formed the
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backdrop of women’s meetings and efforts to hammer out an agenda that would be taken
seriously. Toward the end of the decade, women’s groups had sprung up all over the country.
Based on observations of radical feminist organizations that emerged in the sixties, Evans
ends the book by offering some “essential preconditions for an insurgent collective identity.”
Such an identity requires an “independent sense of worth,” role models who resist “patterns of
passivity,” a stable friendship network, and a theory that identifies the sources of repression and
justifies revolt against it (p. 219).
This book provides a powerful story of continuity between women’s liberation and civil
rights and the new left. Still, it would have been nice to see more on the ways in which those
beginnings in the Movement impacted the differences among feminists that had emerged by the
late sixties and early seventies.
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