Tom Hayden is Dead

I think Phelps’ discussion of the Port Huron Statement really speaks to contemporary concerns:

What made the Port Huron Statement impressive was not its specific demands but its broadbrush evocation of idealism, especially in its opening section on “Values.” It called for replacing “power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance” by “power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.” … The answer was participatory democracy: the principle that individuals should share in decision-making affecting their lives and that society should be structured accordingly, that politics should bring people out of isolation to shape a “common participation,” and that work life should be imbued with meaning and dignity … the Port Huron Statement might have gone into the dustbin of radical pamphlets rather than inspiring a generation, for its declaration of “Values” expressed in words what the Berkeley Free Speech Movement would manifest in action two years later…

I saw on Facebook there’s an obit in Common Dreams as well:

“In a February 1981 essay for The Nation titled “The Future Politics of Liberalism,” which was published in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s presidential inauguration, Hayden outlined his idea of a just society, illustrating how economic, social, and environmental elements are all intertwined in that vision:

“We need more than ever a participatory society in which persons of all life styles believe that they matter, instead of the escapist culture that absorbs millions in irrelevance. We cannot contend with the coming of external limits unless we delve more into our rich inner potentials.

It comes down to moving from a wasteful, privately oriented, self-indulgent existence to a more conserving, caring and disciplined life style. The cornerstone has to be a renewal of self-reliance, not the outmoded frontier fantasy of the Republican philosophers, but the reassertion of personal responsibility in everything from conserving resources to decentralizing services to keeping ourselves well through self-care to practicing a “right livelihood” in business. It is a change from planned obsolescence to the production of useful goods that last, from consumer madness to the achievement of inner satisfactions, from the opulence of Jay Gatsby to the frugal self-assurance of Henry David Thoreau.

More important than money and technique in elections is the factor of motivation and vision. The Democrats (or someone else) will return to national leadership when they are inspired again.”

After the news of his death, many on the left took to social media to mourn the loss of a longtime progressive champion and express their gratitude for his inspiring legacy”

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/10/24/tom-hayden-one-great-20th-century-activist-leaders-dies-76

Fonda was at Hayden’s bedside the day before he died, and spoke well of him after. So the acrimony of the divorce wasn’t beyond some reconciliation.

I never actually looked at the “Port Huron Statement” whose drafting Hayden was a part of. Except for the non-inclusive language of its time, I especially like:

Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic: a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history, one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved: one with an intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability and willingness to learn.

Some things haven’t changed:

The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of military and business interests.
…
We live amidst a national celebration of economic prosperity while poverty and deprivation remain an unbreakable way of life for millions in the “affluent society”, including many of our own generation.
…
The awe inspired by the pervasiveness of racism in American life is only matched by the marvel of its historical span in American traditions.

A good survey of the late-50s currents that contributed to the founding of SDS is Maurice Isserman, “If I Had a Hammer.”

I’ll agree with William Timberman that it is perplexing to read the history of a time when one was there, written by those who weren’t.

My (having been there) view:

The early sixties, including the Port Huron Statement and the civil rights movement, were very different from the late sixties of the hippies. I didn’t much twitch at the Times statment, having seen the counterculture go from beats to activists to hippies. Hayden came from the middle part and morphed through the last part.

The sexism of the first two was thoroughgoing and as bad as anything you’ve seen in “Mad Men.” But there was a seriousness about changing the society that the hippies lost in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Young women were caught up in it too, but found conflicts. The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, and women began to object more strongly, although one can date some of their resistance to The Second Sex, published in 1949 but popular in the mid-fifties.

Bernie Sanders’s civil rights experience came out of the early sixties – I referred to 1961 in conversations with friends – and his campaign was tinged with that white male supremacy, which is why he had difficulties communicating politically with women and people of color. It was informative to see people who were born well after the 1960s describing similar reactions to those I had had in 1961.

As William Timberman says, a lot of nuance is being lost in the articles and in this discussion, but I suppose that’s how history is written. As I watch the process, it reminds me to read history of times before I was born and places I haven’t been with that in mind.

Hippie is now used only derogatively by anyone.
At best ironically as in “hippie punching”.

There was also the Youth Independent Party, or Yippies. Which included Abbie & Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner et al. Yippies were more into Guerilla Theatre. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Lee Weiner were part of the Chicago Seven.
I do give them credit for refusing to take the “very serious people” seriously.

Part of the angst the Tea Party caused me was stealing the Yippies’ schtick.

Being old enough to remember some of this is relevant I guess (though I was still at school in 63) although I was living in Australia in the 60s and for a while in England in the 70s so am not familiar with the detail of the American scene (although it was very influential in those days). Anyway I think if Phelps is suggesting there was a clear distinction between the political movements and the counter-cultural movements I don’t think that’s true. Maybe some people were more one way or the other, but they overlapped.

Maybe you need a fashion historian. As I remember it, counter cultural fashions (long hair, beards, long dresses, etc) weren’t really widespread until the early 70s, although probably in some places (San Francisco?) they may have been common earlier than that, maybe late 60s? I don’t think they were common anywhere in 63.

Cheryl Rofer: “Bernie Sanders’s civil rights experience came out of the early sixties – I referred to 1961 in conversations with friends – and his campaign was tinged with that white male supremacy, which is why he had difficulties communicating politically with women and people of color. ”

Can you give some examples of that tinge, or that difficulty communicating?

Alan Haber, one of the Statement authors, wrote in 2012:

The Michigan Today article talks about the Port Huron Statement as an object separate from the organization spirit that created it. it was not Tom Hayden’s work or my work that made it happen. It was a determination arising in our generation then, particularly among young women, to do something about the wrongs we saw. Women like Sharon Jeffrey and Carol Cohen and Sandra (Casey) Cason, Dorothy Dawson, Becky Adams, Betty Garman, Mary (Maria) Varela, Sarah Murphy, Barbara Jacobs (to name but a few) all in all, were more significant than the men, like Tom and me who tend to get the attention (male) writers. They brought a human directness, and love, as well as organizing skill and knowledge, that made sds different from other political organizations.

Kiwanda @ 19
I think what you have said, and that excerpt, supports what Cheryl Roger is saying rather than contradicting it (if that was your attention).

Haver is saying those young women should have got recognition, but didn’t.

The James Miller book is indeed indispensable for an excellent (and I believe the best) account of Hayden’s birth as an activist and his tenure with SDS. To fill out another facet of Hayden’s activism, and while it is discussed a bit by Miller, see Jennifer Frost’s treatment of the SDS’s community organizing efforts under the direction of its Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) in her book, “An Interracial Movement of the Poor”: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York University Press, 2001). As Frost notes in her conclusion, ERAP, while often assessed or dismissed simply as a failed experiment, “contributed to building an interracial movement of the poor, specifically, a mass movement of poor _women_.” The ERAP experience led activists and organizers to concentrate their energies in various directions following its “many difficulties, defeats, and conflicts.” Some of these directions were novel and creative, for example, “[f]or many women organizers, feminist consciousness evolved less from awareness of sexist treatment by men in the projects than from how they benefited from their work in ERAP. [….] The considerable confidence, organizing skills, and ‘intellectual ammunition’ women gained in ERAP were also a positive legacy that underlay the formation of the women’s liberation movement.” Moreover, Frost shows us how “[r]elationships forged in ERAP connected women’s liberation to the welfare rights movement” and, in addition to motivating a preference for “coalition politics,” “former ERAP participants brought lessons about organization building into other social movements on the Left at this time, including the anti-war movement. This is just a taste of Frost’s analysis and nuanced understanding of the direct and indirect (and often unintentional) effects of ERAP. Frost documents the fact of, and reasons behind, “the enthusiasm for community organizing in SDS,” the latter owing much to “Hayden’s insistence and confidence” (which, in turn, had been inspired by his acquaintance with the direct political action strategy and tactics of SNCC).

To be honest, as an democrat I find the policy incomprehensible and I don’t really have any energy left to criticise it. I have been getting a very strong vibe that noone is willing to discuss it and I really don’t want to get labelled a ‘troll’ more than I already have, but thank you at least for allowing me to register my disagreement. More careful arguments (which nobody seriously responded to) were already set out at length on the other thread so it’s probably best if I just leave you all to it.

Harry, thanks for the posting. The discussion is interesting (LFC, yes, I have those books!) but the article seems skimmed and point missed in some cases, largely by those who were “there.” I could claim, with a bit of a smile, that I was “there,” as the first five years of my life were in the 1960s. Putting this more soundly, I’m not that young. I’ve lived a life thinking and reading a great deal about that time – I wrote an undergraduate thesis on the sixties back in the 1980s – and talking to loads of somewhat older people over many years who are sixties veterans. I was avid about this and tended to find I thought their way more than the way of my own Reagan-voting generation in a fair deal of ways. Plus, I actually do have some very vivid early memories redolent of the sixties (some of them actually from the early seventies, albeit, esp. when my family lived in a mostly African American part of St. Louis). So this is to say that if there are complexities to the history of the 1960s, there are complexities to making assumptions about those who came after and how they relate to it too. (The NYT op ed, conversely, was written by someone who “was there” – but in the 1960s and not of the sixties, as it were, because it was possible to be professional and straight and miss out on all the action and sensibilities.)

Now, I wasn’t attempting to deal with the whole sixties or the whole of Hayden’s life. I was making two claims. The most important to me, at least, was that Hayden’s most lasting and signal contribution was in the Port Huron Statement of 1962, which is obscured in the fog of the NYT obit (which doesn’t have the excuse of haste – it was posted right away indicating it was prepared long before). I was trying to say, as Engels conveys well in his initial post above, that it is so powerful, and radical, still today.

Second, I was dealing with origins, with what Hayden “burst out of”: Was it the counterculture, or rather the Midwest, Michigan in particular, a Catholic upbringing, and the early New Left, whose impulses were distinct, yes, distinct, from the counterculture that followed. Were there overlappings and mutual influences by 1969-1970 between New Left and counterculture, so that people could talk of a “youth culture” or “revolutionary counterculture”? Of course, and I refer in my piece to Hayden’s later “shaggier” and “more revolutionary” self which is an acknowledgement of that. But in the history of the 1960s the New Left and counterculture are not the same thing. Little of the early New Left owes to the beatniks, which is why the 1963 photo is revealing, and much of the counterculture proper came later (Summer of Love, 1967, being its breakthrough in national apprehension of it, at least) and was, yes, apolitical, about self, “dropping out” and tripping and communal life and stylistic rebellion rather than organizing so as to transform the whole society. What Hayden burst out of was the stirrings of political dissent among youth in the context of the black freedom movement and fears of Cold War saber rattling, out of democratic movements making demands on power structures.

There are a lot of shades of complexity, yes, but analytically the early New Left is *not* “the counterculture.” I wrote with a bit of passion because I see in my own students the disabling and trivializing effect of the Hollywood idea of “sixties = counterculture.” It is a disservice that obscures what was most radical in the sixties, its challenges to the structures of American power. And it doesn’t frame the life of Tom Hayden well.

The sexism in the early New Left was real – as elsewhere in American society – and people are wholly right to point it out, and indeed I probably should have said something about that. Point appreciated. But ponder this: “the personal is political” was a concept present in the Port Huron Statement, which literally used those words in enjoining people to embody their politics in their lives; indeed, feminism may be seen as an extension of the logic of participatory democracy. Sara Evans’s book on the emergence of the women’s liberation movement out of the New Left is excellent on this: she charts how it was precisely because of being in the New Left and believing in its ideals, and learning how to do an analysis of oppression, that young women came to see their own oppression. In this, the early New Left was a bit like the abolitionist movement before it, which gave rise to the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, the first women’s rights convention.

Anyway, an overly long post… But thanks for the discussion!

“Since the other thread seems to have bled over here, as I said, maybe you should just call people out when they are nasty, delete if necessary, ban as last resort.”

Yes, that makes some sense. The disadvantage is that it risks being more obnoxious because you end up arguing with people – from a perch of power – about whether they are being obnoxious or not. Which never goes non-obnoxiously, sadly. I will say: I’ve been criticizing Engels. But it’s not like Engels is the only commenter around the place who gets high-handed. I myself am high-handed sometimes. And everyone likes to play the victim. We are rhetorically compensating for perceived excess on the other side, so we feel. And we are all biased about that, perceiving it more on the other side than our own. Well, it’s a problem. But we are trying to encourage de-escalation.

It occurs to me that one good way to grasp what was happening to young people in the U.S. between 1961 and 1968, and to avoid the shallow characterizations we’re objecting to here, is to look at the arc of Bob Dylan’s artistic development from, say, North Country Blues (1964) to Visions of Johanna (1966). Mr. Jones wasn’t the only one who knew something was happening, but didn’t know what it was. Do we know any better now? Maybe, maybe not. We don’t like to admit it when we’re being all analytical, but the truth is that hindsight is at least as deceitful as memory.

From the PHS:

… no one is demanding structural changes, such as the shuttling of Southern Democrats out of the Democratic Party. …

In such a setting of status quo politics, where most if not all government activity is rationalized in Cold War anti-communist terms, it is somewhat natural that discontented, super-patriotic groups would emerge through political channels and explain their ultra-conservatism as the best means of Victory over Communism… Their political views are defined generally as the opposite of the supposed views of communists: complete individual freedom in the economic sphere, non-participation by the government in the machinery of production. But actually “anticommunism” becomes an umbrella by which to protest liberalism, internationalism, welfarism, the active civil rights and labor movements. It is to the disgrace of the United States that such a movement should become a prominent kind of public participation in the modern world — but, ironically, it is somewhat to the interests of the United States that such a movement should be a public constituency pointed toward realignment of the political parties, demanding a conservative Republican Party in the South and an exclusion of the “leftist” elements of the national GOP.

Well, let no-one say that the SDS did not get exactly what they called for in this paragraph.

Cheryl Rofer,

“The early sixties, including the Port Huron Statement and the civil rights movement, were very different from the late sixties of the hippies. I didn’t much twitch at the Times statment, having seen the counterculture go from beats to activists to hippies. ….
The sexism of the first two was thoroughgoing and as bad as anything you’ve seen in “Mad Men.” But there was a seriousness about changing the society that the hippies lost in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Young women were caught up in it too, but found conflicts. The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, and women began to object more strongly, although one can date some of their resistance to The Second Sex, published in 1949 but popular in the mid-fifties.”

The Australian writer Kate Jennings gave a powerful and controversial feminist speech at a Vietnam War moratorium in 1970 here, saying that women and women’s issues were being overlooked by the left at the time.

She later wrote that “Everything changed that day, in part because of the speech itself, in part because of the reaction of the men in the crowd. They went berserk: ‘Ugly bitch! You belong on your back!’ Et cetera. Men of the revolution in full throat. How dare you!? Many women in the left found the speech outrageous and condemned the abuse in it, although some conceded I might have a point or two. Others became lifelong feminists on the spot. But the confrontational language of the speech worked: we could no longer be ignored. Right tactic, right time. I read the speech for the first time in thirty-five years a few weeks back and sat in a state of shock for several hours. Holy shit! Blistering! I remembered the beginning of the speech and thought the content was mainly about how men on the left were concerned with the dead in Vietnam but not with women dying from backyard abortions. I’d forgotten that I gave a serve to *everyone*. There is something in my make-up that ups the ante…. My biggest sin over the years has been to question the usefulness of postmodern feminist theory, which Australian women academics adopted with gusto, setting out to prove themselves more Left Bank than the Left Bank. Difference became the watchword: gender politics split the Left asunder, and it has yet to recover.”

The actual speech and formatting is a good exampled of the language of the times (crooked timber comments are pretty mild by comparison I think):

“watch out! You may meet a real
castrating female
or
you’ll say I’m a MANDATING BRABURNING
LESBIAN MEMBER OF THE CASTRATION
PENISENVY BRIGADE which I am
i would like to speak.
i would like to give a tubthumpingtablebanging emotional rap AND be listened to, not laughed at. you don’t laugh at what your comrade brothers say, you wouldn’t laugh at the negroes, the black panthers. many women are beginning to feel the necessity to speak for themselves, for their sisters.
i feel the necessity now.
it’s the moratorium. i would say, oh yes, the war is bad a pig bosses war may the nlf win. i also say VICTORY TO THE VIETNAMESE WOMEN. now, our brothers on the left and in the peace movement will think that what i am about to say is not justified, this is a moratorium. it’s justified anywhere. we’ve heard you loud and clear before, brother shits, we know we have to work towards the Revolution and then join the ladies’ liberation auxiliary if we have any time left over. ….”

Nice article by Phelps. He could have spared us the “leprechaun” reference, though :-)

William Timberman, I’ve heard from people who were in SDS in 1962, who knew Hayden then, who really were there, and loved what I wrote. They reposted it on Facebook, even. But I suppose they are superficial, like me, and need a schooling in Dylan?

John Holbo, the problem I think CT will confront, no matter what its policy, is that a comments section without one-upsmanship, snark, sarcasm, baiting, and the like is nigh on impossible to achieve. That’s why so many sites are getting rid of the comments (NPR, the Chronicle of Higher Education, etc.). And I have to say I like them better now.

Out of here now. As a friend of mine says, the internet is a conspiracy to get us all to write for free. I gotta go write other stuff! Best of luck to all.

but this
indeed, feminism may be seen as an extension of the logic of participatory democracy.

– it’s not good, since feminism preceded the ‘new left’ by many years. That’s pretty poor actually.

“To that extent, someone like Michael Rossman (Berkeley/Free Speech Movement, Bay Area community activist and teacher, author of the memoir “Wedding within the War”) may be a more worthy figure to commemorate than Hayden.”

Did he just die too?

Val @21: ” Kiwanda @ 19
I think what you have said, and that excerpt, supports what Cheryl Rofer is saying rather than contradicting it (if that was your intention).

Haber is saying those young women should have got recognition, but didn’t.”

Rofer was making a broad claim about now, Haber was talking about then. Rofer’s remarks suggest that she thinks that Sanders didn’t learn anything, or at least enough, in the intervening fifty years. So, no, Haber’s remarks are not much relevant to Rofer’s unsupported broad claim about the Sanders campaign.

I thought the common understanding was that second wave feminism arose mostly as a reaction by leftist activist women to gender iniquities within the movement, see for example Marge Piercy’s The Grand Coolie Damn. (Although the main point of discussion regarding her essay today should surely be its use of the racially charged word “coolie”.)

Swore I’d not look, but just now I did.

Val, thanks, I appreciate that. And you’re right about the formulation on feminism, but geez, the last bit I said was about the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, so it’s not that I was unaware of the long history. What I should have said, to be more precise, is that the regeneration of feminism in the 1960s owed much to the Port Huron spirit, to participatory democracy. It really did. (I do recommend the Evans book, it’s quite brilliant. O’Donnell, I’ve not read Frost yet, though I did dip into it at one point, but sounds right too…)

John, the editor at Jacobin wanted leprechaun gone too, but I told him that Todd Gitlin asked me what I’d thought of Hayden and I said that and Gitlin (who knew Hayden very well from very far back, of course) chortled. I swear, it’s what he was like, a bit of mischief and play to him, more than you’d imagine. But maybe it’s a goofy line. Who knows. I wrote that thing in a flash during office hours that weren’t attended by students not yet bothered about their end of term essays. Just lucky to have gotten it out.

Off and away again. Again, thanks Harry.

John @ 38: I understand your humorous intention but worry that some others might confuse the joke with reality. The Big Lebowski was in fact partly based on Jeff Dowd who was one of the Seattle Seven conspiracy defendants. But Jeff came around well after the Port Huron Statement. But the statement in the movie did reflect some truth about the character.

My own involvement with SDS started in 1969. By that time there was a co-mingling of counterculture and more staid New Left elements. Conflict between those elements was a factor in the split in SDS between Progressive Labor and Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) factions. PL was dour, conservative in dress and given to windy dialectical analysis of everything, right up to whose turn it was to do the dishes. Getting high and having sex was more of a RYM tendency.

Timberman, ah, yes, the barb did seem aimed at me but glad for the clarification, and so reciprocally I retract my retort. I’d still stand by my formulation. It’s true that if values are culture, as of course they are, then the Port Huron Statement with its call for new values may be said to be countercultural, and of course the kids at Port Huron were already listening to Dylan. We can blur all this if we wish. But none of that is what the phrase “the counterculture” means when it’s used somewhere like the NYT, or by my students. They mean the hippies. And yes, no one looked like a hippy in 1962 or 1963, because they didn’t exist yet, despite pockets of bohemianism. They came later. I was arguing just that: that the youth radicalization led to the youth culture, not the other way around, as Harry caught.

I just, by the way, got another email from someone loving the piece, someone who was a Columbia 1968 participant and a Weatherman sympathizer and a longhair freak in the end, bona fide. And then I got another, in the same hour, from someone who was a major voice of 1970s gay liberation and lived through the sixties as a New Left intellectual (playwright, historian, essayist). So I guess we could argue the sixties forever but I’m content there are enough who were there then who found I got it right enough.

I’m signing off for the night now. Peace.

Christopher Phelps @47
If you’re still reading, I understand what you’re getting at, but even the way you expressed the Seneca Falls part had the same problems to me – as if feminism rose out of broader social movements, as a secondary effect. I think we could probably agree that historically there were two separate factors:

– one is feminism per se, which never actually died, even though it became a bit quiescent or unfashionable at times,

– and the other is those social and civil rights movements in which women were involved, and at times perceived their own oppression played out in (which also heightened their awareness of it in broader society).

I think there is some confusion going on – you and Kiwanda seem to saying that new left/participatory democracy praxis made the young women more aware of their own oppression, while Cheryl Rofer, and ZM in quoting Kate Jennings, are pointing to the women’s experience of being oppressed within the movement.

Although there is some overlap in practice, the first reads as if “the movement” deserves credit for radicalising women, while the second reads as if the the men in the movement deserve censure for oppressing women directly or condoning it by not recognising it or not seeing it as important. Two different things.

I think what Cheryl is referring to (Cheryl please correct me if I’m wrong) is broadly the problem of condoning oppression by not recognising it, and that she was surprised that Bernie Sanders still seemed insensitive in this area (both on racism and sexism).

Cheryl Rofer 48: so, no evidence that Sanders was “tinged with white male supremacy, which is why he had difficulties communicating politically with women and people of color”.

To call the two black women taking the microphone from Sanders at his rally a “confrontation with BLM protestors”, if that’s what you’re referring to, seems a bit misleading. He said after that event that “We have to end institutional racism, but we have to deal with the reality that 50 percent of young black kids are unemployed, that we have massive poverty in America, that we have an unsustainable level of income and wealth inequality…we have to address both.” Was this objectionable to you?

Kiwanda @ 56
I think this discussion is going a bit off-topic when we focus on Sanders, as engels says, so I will keep this brief – also hopefully Cheryl will answer for herself – but what I find problematic in Sanders’ statement is implicit in the “but”, as if they are competing priorities (or as if economic inequality even has some kind of priority over racism and sexism) rather than being part of the same system of oppression

Val, I agree that feminism is a response and answer to women’s oppression, but historically there has been much women’s oppression without any organized or sustained feminist response. What produces that feminist response? Not the oppression alone. In American history (which is key globally in this instance) there is this evident pattern: that in the 1840s, and again in the 1960s, feminist movements were born out of movements that initially were about emancipation from racial oppression, those being abolitionism and the civil rights movement. In both cases, women were drawn into political action on behalf of a cause they thought of in highly moral terms, which led them into speaking, writing, arguing, in other words into the embodiment of citizenship, and then their involvement in that egalitarian cause, the powers of analysis and conviction that it gave them, led them to reflect on the lack of egalitarianism within both the movement and the society, and led them to begin making a case for women’s freedom and women’s equality. In the case we are discussing, the 1960s, it’s the contradiction between the values of Port Huron and the inability of young women to be full participants that generates a dissonance of experience and consciousness, and it’s from that which the sixties women’s liberation movement or radical band of the women’s movement emerges out of the New Left. There is a memo written early on, in 1964, by Casey Hayden, along with another women, both of whom had been in SNCC and SDS alike, that was key; it makes a direct comparison between sex and caste, or what we would call gender and race. (Friedan’s 1963 book, a parallel liberal feminist phenomenon, also had such an effect in liberal circles, as opposed to radical ones, because it performed a comparable role in regard to the civil rights movement and liberal reconsiderations of race.)

Val, I feel you’re not really hearing me. I conceded straight off that New Left sexism was real. Not ambiguous, real. You’re communicating with someone here who is pro-feminist.

As for feminism’s history, was there ever any other organized women’s rights convention before Seneca Falls in 1848? Is that not key?

If you were to read the Sara Evans book (Personal Politics) she would make clear all that I am saying in regard to the 1960s, that is, the way the idealism of participatory democracy and the contradiction of working for racial equality in a movement that was gender-inegalitarian spawned a rebirth of feminism.

I’m going to leave this off now (really do need to get writing done today) and wish all well.

@62

Ok happy to concede on the organised women’s rights convention. However you might see that as someone from a country where female suffrage began in 1902, I don’t necessarily see your country as a leader in women’s rights. I think it’s fair to say America has a chequered history in that regard. As ZM points out, there’s been a lot of discussion on this. I was surprised to find out how low women’s political representation is in America, and the situation there in regard to work and family is terrible. So maybe the feminist movement started strongly there but has met ongoing opposition and not achieved as much as in many other countries.

(Not expecting a reply, happy to leave it at that.)

John and Harry —

Yet another great example of how CT comments actually evolve.

The original post is interesting and cites to a Jacobin article.
The author of the article shows up and comments!
A bunch of on point comments follow.
Will T makes a comment that Christopher Phelps takes as an insult.
Christopher then speaks of the merits of having no comments and it’s all the best to censor those bastards like NPR now does (all the while having told the author of the NYT article that he got it completely backwards.)
Will realizes that Chris took his comments the wrong way because Will was insulting on the NYTs author.
Chris seems fine with that (irony?) and Will and Chris are now OK.
Val continues to turn the discussion towards feminist issues (a pattern to say the least) and the discussion goes from the Port Huron Statement to the 1848 Seneca Falls convention.
Chris seems to have forgotten his objections to comments and then comments multiple more times. Which is of course a good thing.

hard to keep the crooked timber of humanity on a straight course…

Hayden’s passing brought back a lot of memories for me. We in SDS* were really only a small splinter of the “counterculture”. That culture dabbled in politics, and we dabbled in sex, drugs, and r&r. I have remained a political junkie ever since. The rest…alas, not so much.

All of piece, I guess. RIP, Tom.

*The RYM-PL nonsense drove a small group of us at WSU into the IWW. Good times.