How Leftist Male Supremacy Birthed the Women’s Movement

The women’s movement sprang into the world from 1960s and 1970s leftism, a leftism that was, not to put too fine a point on it, blatantly male supremacist. Men on the left back then generally regarded women’s liberation as bourgeois feminism – they were wrong, but seeing what’s happened with contemporary identity politics, their leeriness was perhaps, only perhaps, prophetic. Putting that issue aside, however, leftist men at that time were, for the most part, horribly sexist, as activist and well-known Yippie Nancy Kurshan, who lived for years with the even more famous Yippie Jerry Rubin, makes clear in her fine, new memoir, Levitating the Pentagon.

“My journey has also been about becoming a woman with a voice…through some difficult relationships with men, the male-dominated Movement, and the transformative yet anxiety-producing challenges that feminism presented to me.” Kurshan first portrays the year 1968 from a feminist perspective, because when Jerry Rubin, Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and Rennie Davis were subpoenaed in October 1968 to appear before HUAC, surprise! NONE of the female organizers of the ’68 Chicago Democratic convention protest were called to testify. That’s how little women on the left counted as far as HUAC was concerned. So these women conducted a public hex on HUAC, ending with the line that Hu-Wacky judges “dare conduct a witch-hunt without real witches. They have created Subpoena Envy.”

But the memoir does not by any means zoom in solely on the women’s movement. Kurshan was a leading anti-Vietnam War activist and, in the decades after the 1960s, worked tirelessly with prisoners, also struggling for 15 years to end long-term solitary confinement, working for Puerto Rican independence and rights, more recently battling climate change and for climate social justice and for other such causes. Yet some of her most compelling narrative covers the 1968 Chicago convention and what’s been called the infamous police riot there, but which, Kurshan argues, was in fact not spontaneous but orchestrated from on high. When accused of wanting to overthrow the U.S. government, Kurshan writes: “Why wouldn’t we want to overthrow a government that murdered two to three million Vietnamese and sixty thousand U.S. troops?”

 Very involved in the trial of the Chicago 8, Kurshan was nervous about meeting her partner, Jerry Rubin, in jail, because they weren’t married, but to see him, she had to present herself as Mrs. Jerry Rubin. “We were not married, but from then on, I became know as Jerry’s wife.” When the extremely reactionary judge Julius Hoffman sentenced Rubin to a long incarceration for contempt, Kurshan realized it could be years before she saw him again outside prison. “There was really no preparation that could protect me from the deep shock I experienced and the great unknown, no, the abyss that appeared before me.”

Meanwhile, female activists packed the courtroom, and the office that dealt with the case was mostly run by women, who were “generally the grunts, doing the day-to-day grunt-work in the office.” This group included legal workers, activists and some of the defendant’s partners. This relegation of women to the lowest rung of the project’s ladder was also the case with “other movement centers of activity.” Kurshan observes that perhaps “the guards appreciated our [women’s] power, but the defendants certainly did not. We were the supporting cast…the defendants…often treated us women like rock band groupies.”

This was galling. Women labored tirelessly to end the war in Vietnam and for social justice, yet “our movement was shot through with male supremacy.” But not just their movement, of course – American society generally, which was why, Kurshan believes, she was not indicted. “Women were not regarded as leaders. The men who ran the movement and the men who ran the government were united in their contempt for women.” But “when the trial ended, the women’s liberation movement asserted itself with a bang…In the February 1970 issue [of The Rat] former Yippie Robin Morgan [later editor of Ms. Magazine] let loose a polemic against the ‘male dominated left,’” especially critiquing the “macho posturing” of the Weathermen.

Kurshan also travelled to North Vietnam via Moscow during the war, and describes the three underground currents in the Soviet Union back then: “Marxist Leninists who say there can be no socialism without democracy, social-democrat types and Christian Marxists (as someone who studied at the University of Leningrad in 1975, I can attest to the accuracy of this description). She especially admired Ho Chi Minh for his remark that “women make up half of society. If women are not liberated, then society is not free.”

Well, women are supposedly liberated, but Margaret Atwood’s observation, expressed in The Handmaid’s Tale – a man fears a woman will laugh at him; the woman fears he will kill her – still holds true for over half of humanity, while in rich countries, identity politics long ago coopted feminism. So we get token women in the murderous patriarchy that aspirationally rules the globe, people like Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, who feel they must prove they’re more lethal than any man and whose example of how to break the glass ceiling shatters thousands of lives in places like the Global South. Feminist or merely feminine values like nurturing children, elders and the ill and not making bad, violent situation worse and gently defending the good, which is so weak in world, long ago got swept out the door by the wealthy Western Empire that still demands global hegemony (even as that hegemony slips from its grasp). It’s very hard to regard this as progress.

n 1973, Kurshan joined the Weather Underground, a step that “would define the next 15 years of my life.” She learned from a neighbor that the FBI lived across the street from her in Oakland and her partner, and they had “an arsenal trained on your house.” At that time, Kurshner, unlike the well-known Weatherpeople Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, did not live off the grid, so she could help release the Weather Underground’s statement, Prairie Fire, in book form. The title derives from Mao’s famous quote, “A single spark can cause a prairie fire.” Kurshan notes that though the book was widely reviewed, only one woman did so, and she wrote: “Prairie Fire is Marxism at its most constructive…To integrate a consciousness of racism and sexism with a Marxist class analysis is the purpose of Prairie Fire.”

Indeed, around this time, Kurshan embraced Marxism-Leninism, along with a more intense feminism, organizing women’s meetings everywhere she went. But she also took to heart Marxist theoreticians and labor activists James and Grace Lee Boggs’ criticism of Prairie Fire: “It is not national liberation that is needed or women’s liberation – what people in the U.S. need is ‘revolution’ not ‘liberation.’” Nonetheless, Kurshan and those in her immediate circle “felt it was inadequate to define a woman’s class solely by her role in the workforce.” There were other things to be considered, like the housework she did, the child-rearing she was responsible for and the husband she cared for.

Levitating the Pentagon not only makes the past present, a past we’d all do well to remember, but it also clarifies the need for people committed to the values that informed the leftism and feminism of that not-too-distant past. As the love of Kurshan’s life, Steve Whitman, said of her: “The thing that characterizes Nancy most is a constant overarching pursuit of social justice. It’s really burned into her heart and soul.” We need people like that. We need more Nancy Kurshans.

The post How Leftist Male Supremacy Birthed the Women’s Movement appeared first on CounterPunch.org.