Abolitionist Socialist Feminism. Zillah Eisenstein
due to red-baiting. We never lived anywhere longer than two years, and always lived in mixed race and Black neighborhoods, which meant we were seen as race traitors by many whites. Our support network was the Black and civil rights community and each other. Today I have seen the language of “comrade,” which we always used in our household, shift to “ally” or “accomplice” and wonder about this. Ally or accomplice seem too separate and apart and safe to me. Allies or accomplices support the struggle but are not fully in or of it. For me, I am in it.
In grade school in the 1950s, my schoolmates tormented me and my family for being dirty commie Jews. I pondered how they knew. And since my family was atheist, I wondered what exactly they hated about my Jewishness. Was it just because I easily shared my milk money with others at school? Or because I was the only Jew in North High School in Columbus, Ohio, so it was easy for the bullies to taunt me? This hurt, and I felt alone, but it did not destroy me.
In 2015, when a Black teenage girl was thrown to the ground and manhandled by Texas police at a pool party, I was reminded of the time all those years ago in Columbus when I asked my parents if I could go to a swimming party at a local private pool. They said no, because although the pool was not legally segregated, it was obvious that Blacks were not welcome. I was alone and without friends, and I was angry at them. There were no exceptions or leniencies in my parents’ world. You did not ever get to pretend that racism did not matter.
After Dad was denied tenure as part of the red scare at Ohio State University, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia, for what was to be my senior year of high school. Our neighborhood was segregated and Black, except for my family, living in Atlanta University housing. I was so tired of all the upheaval. I knew no one on arrival. I went to Brown High, the newly-so-called integrated white working-class school that was the closest to where I lived. The only Black person at the school was Clemsy Wood. By speaking with him, I isolated myself further.
No one from school would visit my home because it was in the Black neighborhood. When there was a boycott of downtown stores because of their segregated hiring practices, I was not allowed to buy a prom dress, although no one asked me anyway. (A movement friend of my mother’s living in New York City sewed one for me and sent it anyhow.)
I had a lead role in the senior play, but my father said he would not attend without family friends, who were Black. As I noted earlier, the school was all white minus one. I asked him not to come and start a race riot, to no avail. Avoidance was not an option when it came to racism. Neither was compromise. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer the next year. She chose to have her friend, Dr. Asa Yancey, do the surgery, but he was Black so he did not have operating privileges in the local white hospital. She was therefore operated on in the Black hospital. Years later, in my mother’s FBI file, I saw that she was identified as Negro. I guess Black hospital meant Negro woman, even if her name was Fannie Price Eisenstein.
By the way, the Barbara Streisand character in the movie The Way We Were was based on my mom. She and Arthur Laurents, who wrote the screenplay, were students at Cornell University together. Mom had won a full scholarship; she was otherwise too poor to have attended. Among other activities, she founded the Young Communist League there. Laurents writes that Fannie fascinated him, although my mother would always say that the political activist in the movie was nothing like her. This was true, but we loved teasing her about it anyway.
I went off to college and graduate school and came to full adulthood in the US feminist movement of the 1970s, with Black socialist feminists and lesbians of many colors as my comrades: bell hooks, the sisters Barbara and Beverly Smith, Angela Davis, Hortense Spillers, and Ellen Wade, to name a few.
It was with this antiracist socialist sense of self that I moved through both my early feminist activism and the several decades of activism that followed, when feminism took on more dispersed forms with no organized women’s mainstream present. Meanwhile, the feminisms of women of color were percolating and reemerging both here and abroad. I supported Obama against Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries, my entrance into electoral activism.
Next came my antiracist feminist activist rebirth in two campaigns initiated by the legal scholar Kim Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum, which she cofounded. These actions were developed in response to Obama’s all-boy initiative, “My Brother’s Keeper,” and the #SayHerName campaign, which sought to bring to light the police killings of Black women. The interracial camaraderie of this work with Kim and Eve Ensler and journalist Laura Flanders directed me towards an abolitionist socialist feminism.
Then came the painful 2016 election. My socialist self supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries and then reluctantly turned to Hillary Clinton after decades of criticizing her because Trump was so obscene.
This skeletal look at my journey brings me to the present moment, to this book. The repetition of oppression is exhausting and the time for abolitionism is now. Whatever your political persuasion—liberal, leftist, progressive, climate activist, gay, indigenous, disabled, antigun activist, trans, whomever—the time is now.
II. A BEGINNING OF SORTS
What I write here owes itself to more than forty years of dialogue and activism with feminists of every color. These dialogues were embedded in conversations about hundreds of books and articles read and shared, and thousands of actions taken. So this is a collective project for me. As I write, I see and hear the many sister (not cis-ter) friends and colleagues and comrades who have been a part of this conversation.
I am humbled and searching and determined as I continue to write in such troubled times. People are living through political and environmental cyclones. My thoughts are about the feminisms that have improved the way humanity can see this world, live in this world, and change this world.
I try to displace the idea that women as a sex class need a “oneness,” a central definition. Today, unlike earlier radical feminism, sex class is to be understood only in terms of its overlapping multiple partialities. So yes, sex class, and raced power, and economic class are each varied and heterogeneous, and this gives them their shared political import.
Complex power systems constitute the overlapping commonness that disallows any oneness, homogeneity, or unity. Instead, ideas of “heterogeneous commonality” and “common differences” that are “differently similar” make up the sexual class of women. I am looking in/at this moment to find new articulations of these complex, overlapping relations of race, sex, class, and genders—between and inside of each. Disabilities and trans identities further illuminate this process.
Why are women’s lives more differentiated today within the structural systems of patriarchy than in earlier historical periods? Most women across racial lines are working overtime doing the labor necessitated by misogyny and they also occupy sites that were once closed to them within this very system of male privilege. But this latter change of females to new sites in the public sphere—presidents, CEOs—has little to do with rearranging structural or collective power.
Women have been or are presidents and secretaries of state and foreign ministers in the United States, Haiti, Liberia, Argentina, Chile, Jamaica, Germany, France, India, Pakistan, and many other countries. Meanwhile, five hundred thousand women die annually in child-birth. And too many millions are displaced, traversing the globe as refugees.
Everything changes and nothing changes. Both of these statements are valid, and with the uncertainty comes new possibility. I am looking for the new-old meanings that express both change and stasis. Feminisms are both stuck and have moved beyond languages that are both necessary and outmoded. Should we still use the term patriarchy when so much has changed? Why is masculine privilege today more diversely written on women’s bodies of all colors and many classes? How can Google still think it is OK to pay women less than men in such obvious discriminatory structural fashion?
Distinctions like first and third world still apply, and they also do not. The third world lives in New York City, and Kentucky Fried Chicken operates in Kenya. The second world disappeared along with the Soviet Union in the revolutions of 1989. Indigenous feminisms are constructed within settler and imperial locations and stand against western imperial feminisms of all sorts.