anafem 4

As anarchists look for genealogies of principles and praxis in a variety of social movements, from the anarcho-pacifists who spoke out against World War II to anarchists who joined the Black Power movement, so too should they look for their feminist foremothers, not only in the early 20th century anarchist movement but in the radical women’s movement of the 1970s. Many radical feminists shared anarchist goals such as ending domination, hierarchy, capitalism, gender roles, and interpersonal violence, and utilized and influenced the key anarchist organizational structure of the small leaderless affinity group. They grappled with the questions of how to balance autonomy and egalitarianism and create nonhierarchical organizations that also promoted personal growth and leadership. In 1974 Lynne Farrow wrote, “Feminism practices what anarchism preaches<a href="#footnotes" aria-describedby="footnote-label" id="footnotes-ref">[1]</a>.”

Anarcha-feminism was at first created and defined by women who saw radical feminism itself as anarchistic. In 1970, during the rapid growth of small leaderless consciousness raising (CR) groups around the country, and a corresponding theory of radical feminism that opposed domination, some feminists, usually after discovering anarchism through the writings of Emma Goldman, observed the “intuitive anarchism” of the women’s liberation movement. Radical feminism emphasized the personal as political, what we would now call prefigurative politics, and a dedication to ending hierarchy and domination, both in theory and practice.2 CR groups functioned as the central organizational form of the radical feminist movement, and by extension the early anarcha-feminist movement. 3 Members shared their feelings and experiences and realized that their problems were political. The theories of patriarchy they developed explained what women initially saw as personal failures. Consciousness raising was not therapy, as liberal feminists and politicos frequently claimed; its purpose was social transformation not self-transformation.4 Radical feminist and anarchist theory and practice share remarkable similarities. In a 1972 article critiquing Rita Mae Brown’s calls for a lesbian party, anarchist working-class lesbian feminist Su Katz described how her anarchism came “directly out of” her feminism, and meant decentralization, teaching women to take care of one another, and smashing power relations, all of which were feminist values.5 Radical feminism attributed domination to the nuclear family structure, which they claimed treats children and women as property and teaches them to obey authority in all aspects of life, and to patriarchal hierarchical thought patterns that encouraged relationships of dominance and submission.6 To radical feminists and anarcha-feminists, the alternative to domination was sisterhood, which would replace hierarchy and the nuclear family with relationships based on autonomy and equality. A chant that appeared in a 1970 issue of a feminist newspaper read “We learn the joys of equality/Of relationships without dominance/Among sisters/We destroy domination in all its forms.”7 These relationships, structured around sisterhood, trust, and friendship, were of particular importance to the radical feminist vision of abolishing hierarchy. As radical feminist theologian Mary Daly wrote in 1973, “The development of sisterhood is a unique threat, for it is directed against the basic social and psychic model of hierarchy and domination.”8 Radical feminists opposed the “male domineering attitude” and “male hierarchical thought patterns,” and attempted to act as equals in relationships deeper than male friendships.9

Most anarcha-feminists were initially radicalized by the political and cultural milieu of the anti-war movement, but it was their experiences in the women’s liberation movement combined with the influence of Emma Goldman that led them to develop anarcha-feminism as a strategy. As feminists struggled to reclaim women’s history, Goldman became a feminist icon due to her advocacy of birth control, free love, and personal freedom. In 1971 radical feminist novelist and historian Alix Kates Shulman wrote, “Emma Goldman’s name has re-emerged from obscurity to become a veritable password of radical feminism. Her works rose from the limbo of being out of print to…being available in paperback. Her face began appearing on T-shirts, her name on posters, her words on banners.”13 Goldman criticized the bourgeois feminist movement and its goal of suffrage, which led many women to criticize her as a “man’s woman.” However, Shulman and many others argued that Goldman was a radical feminist worthy of recognition because she stressed the oppression of women as women by the institutions of the patriarchal family and puritan morality, as well as religion and the state.14 As anarcha-feminist Cathy Levine wrote in 1974, “The style, the audacity of Emma Goldman, has been touted by women who do not regard themselves as anarchists… because Emma was so right-on…. It is no accident, either, that the anarchist Red Terror named Emma was also an advocate and practitioner of free-love; she was an affront to more capitalist shackles than any of her Marxist contemporaries.”15 Feminists honored Goldman’s ideas and legacy by opening an Emma Goldman Clinic for Women in Iowa in 1973, publishing new volumes of her work, naming their theater troupes after her, and writing screenplays, operas, and stage plays about her life. 16 In 1970, the women’s liberation periodical Off Our Backs dedicated an issue to Goldman with her image on the cover. Despite this, Betsy Auleta and Bobbie Goldstone’s article about Goldman’s life discussed what they perceived as her faults (her opposition to suffrage and disconnect from much of the women’s movement) because she had become a “super-heroine” in the movement. 17

## Siren and Early Anarcha-feminist Networks

Early anarcha-feminist theory and debate emerged through Siren newsletter. The first issue, produced as a journal in 1971, contained “Who We Are: The Anarcho-Feminist Manifesto,” written by Arlene Wilson, a member of the Chicago Anarcho-Feminist Collective.18 The manifesto focused on differentiating anarcha-feminism from socialist feminism through a critique of the state: “The intelligence of womankind has at last been brought to bear on such oppressive male inventions as the church and the legal family; it must now be brought to re-evaluate the ultimate stronghold of male domination, the State.”19

Historian Barbara Ryan argues that the “small group sector” of the feminist movement virtually disappeared by the mid ‘70s, due to ideological and practical conflicts within the movement and the influence of liberal feminists, who advocated larger structured organizations.41 However this frequent narrative, which emphasizes the fast rise and fall of small CR groups, negates the crucial contributions of anarcha-feminists, who continued to organize within small, decentralized, and leaderless feminist collectives throughout the 1970s. Radical feminists extended the CR group’s anarchistic structure to a variety of other projects, such as domestic violence shelters, living collectives, and periodicals, many of which continued to support women through the late 1970s and into the 1980s. According to Helen Ellenbogen’s 1977 review of anarcha-feminist groups, many of these collectives were not explicitly anarchist but “intuitively anarchist,” such as the grassroots domestic violence shelters in Cambridge and Los Angeles where anarcha-feminists worked and observed practices like discouraging women from calling the police to deal with abusive males.42 Ellenbogen remarks on how anarcha-feminists joined women’s health clinics in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Boston, which resisted cooperation with the state and utilized collective process.43 In a 1972 article in Siren, Los Angeles anarcha-feminist Evan Paxton explained the anarcha-feminist principles of these self-help clinics, including the one where she worked. Clinics gave “women the confidence and knowledge to take care of their own bodies, which is essential in the struggle for self control.”44 Women’s health clinics helped women avoid the paternalism of (usually male) doctors and gain self-control.45

Anarcha-feminists operated a free school in Baltimore, which taught courses on Wilhelm Reich, movement structural skills, how to form a co-op, and anarchist and feminist political theory.46 Others worked on media projects like feminist newspapers or journals such as Through the Looking Glass, which focused on women prisoners, The Second Wave, and feminist radio stations.47 This focus on outreach and education illustrates anarcha-feminists’ long-term approach to revolution. Theorists like Kornegger and Rebecca Staton argued that anarchist revolution, both historically and in the present, requires preparation through education, the creation of alternative non-hierarchical structures, changes in consciousness, and direct action.48 As Staton wrote in a 1975 article in Anarcho-Feminist Network Notes, “Anarchists…have seen their own role in the revolutionary process as agitators and educators—not as vanguard…. The Revolution, for Anarchists, is the transformation of society by people taking direct control of their own lives.”49 In 1976, in the first issue of Anarcha-Feminist Notes, Judi Stein, an anarcha-feminist who worked at a feminist health center, described her experiences with collective processes, self-help, and feminism there as “ways to live out anarchism.”50 By working at self-help clinics, free schools, feminist radio stations, newspapers, and domestic violence shelters, anarcha-feminists spread their ideas and organizational methods, and helped themselves and other women in their own struggles for autonomy.

From the beginning of the movement. anarcha-feminists differentiated socialist feminists and their theories from the traditional male socialist Left. In a 1971 article in the first issue of Siren, Arlene Wilson’s Chicago-based anarcha-feminist group emphasized that anarcho-feminists “are all socialists” and “refuse to give up this pre-Marxist term,” and continued, “We love our Marxist sisters…and have no interest in disassociating ourselves from their constructive struggles.” In 1974 Black Rose anarcha-feminist Marian Leighton commented that socialist feminist literature is not “narrowly dogmatic or opportunistic”63 like that of traditional male Marxists. Rather, it could be included in anarcha-feminist analysis. Anarcha-feminist film maker Lizzie Borden argued in a 1977 article in feminist art journal Heresies that Marxist women like Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollantai, and Angelica Balabanoff came closer to anarchism in their opposition to bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and the subversion of the revolution by the Bolsheviks than their male comrades.64 However, like Leighton, she emphasized that these anarchistic tendencies stemmed from socialization and lack of access to power, not simple essentialist understandings of gender. As Carol Ehrlich wrote in her 1977 article Socialism, Anarchism, and Feminism, which appealed to socialist and radical feminists to embrace anarchism, “Women of all classes, races, and life circumstances have been on the receiving end of domination too long to want to exchange one set of masters for another.”65 Leighton, Kronneger, and Ehrlich argued the defining distinction between radical feminism and anarcha-feminism was largely a step in self-conscious theoretical development.66 Thus, it was feminists’ unfamiliarity with anarchism that led them to embrace Marxism, although their ideology, “skeptical of any social theory that comes with a built-in set of leaders and followers” held more in common with anarchism.67

Anarcha-Feminists were also influenced by the theories of the French situationists, who positioned women’s oppression as a part of larger systems of power relations without reducing it to an effect of capitalism. Carol Ehrlich and Lynne Farrow argued that Situationism should be a component of anarcha-feminist analysis because it emphasizes both an awareness of capitalist oppression and the need to transform everyday life.72 Situationists expanded Marx’s theories of alienation and commodity fetishism to apply to modern consumer capitalism and argued that capitalist society led to the increasing tendency towards the consumption of social relations and identity through commodities and alienated people from all aspects of their lives, not just their labor.73 In her 1977 article Socialism, Anarchism, and Feminism, Ehrlich argued that a Situationist analysis is applicable to anarcha-feminist theory. With a Situationist analysis, all women’s oppression is real, despite their class status. Furthermore, women held a special relationship to the commodity economy as both consumers and objects to be consumed by men. Ehlrich argued “A Situationist analysis ties consumption of economic goods to consumption of ideological goods, and then tells us to create situations (guerrilla actions on many levels) that will break that pattern of socialized acceptance of the world as it is.”74

However, the goals of empowerment and egalitarianism came into conflict.86 “Elites”, or women with informal leadership positions within groups, often socially coerced other women into agreeing with them, or not stating their opinions at all, and in reaction the movement developed a paranoia about elites; women who exercised leadership or even attempted to teach skills to other members were often shunned and trashed.87 This triggered bitter statements like Anselma dell’Olio’s 1970 speech, “Divisiveness and Self-Destruction in the Women’s Movement: A Letter of Resignation” which claimed, “If you are…an achiever you are immediately labeled…a ruthless mercenary, out to get her fame and fortune over the dead bodies of selfless sisters who have buried their abilities and sacrificed their ambitions for the greater glory of Feminism.”88 Ironically, to some women, this justified the behavior of women who were in fact dominating others, and then presented themselves as tragic heroines destroyed by their envious and less talented “sisters.”89

Anarcha-Feminists asserted that the small group was not simply a reaction to male hierarchical organization, but a solution to the movement’s problems with both structure and leadership. In 1974, Cathy Levine, the cowriter of “Blood of the Flower,” wrote the anarcha-feminist response to Freeman, “The Tyranny of Tyranny.” Often printed with Freeman’s essay, Levine’s piece first appeared in the anarchist journal Black Rose.95 Levine argued that feminists who utilize the “movement building” strategies of the male Left forgot the importance of the personal as political, psychological oppression, and prefigurative politics. Instead of building large, alienating, and hierarchical organizations, feminists should continue to utilize small groups which “multiply the strength of each member” by developing their skills and relationships in a nurturing non-hierarchical environment.96 Building on the theories of Wilhelm Reich, she argued that psychological repression kept women from confronting capitalism and patriarchy, and thus caused the problem of elites.97 Developing small groups and a women’s culture would invigorate individual women and prevent burn out, but also create a prefigurative alternative to hierarchical organization. She wrote, “The reason for building a movement on a foundation of collectives is that we want to create a revolutionary culture consistent with our view of the new society; it is more than a reaction; the small group is a solution.”98

However, it remains to be seen if replacing a separate women’s movement of small affinity groups with often mixed gender affinity groups was strategic. Today, many anarchist women and queer people, often in reaction to the sexism of anarchist men and rape culture inside anarchist collectives and movements, are forming their own affinity groups once again. It is worth investigating how changing ideas about gender and sexuality and the rise of queer and trans politics affected this change, and if it is a strategic one. How did theories of intersectionality and Black feminism interact with anarcha-feminism, and differ from earlier anarcha-feminist arguments that often did not directly address racial politics? The history of anarcha-feminism points to these and many more questions in an area of anarchist politics and theory that is generally under-investigated.

## Conclusion

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<li id="footnotes">Peggy Kornegger, “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” in Reinventing Anarchy: What Are Anarchists Thinking These Days?, ed. Howard Ehrlich (Routledge and Kegan Paul Books, 1979). <a href="#footnotes-ref" aria-label="Back to content">↩</a></li>

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