for women’s liberation. But where feminist radicals tied the success of feminism to the broader project of social revolution, radical feminists saw the oppression of women as the root of social ills ranging from war to capitalism. This led radical feminists to criticize, and in some cases to reject outright, the rest of the left as a bastion of male supremacy and a detour from the essential work of freeing women as women.32 This approach was always double-edged. On the one hand, it produced brilliant insights into the nature of oppression and resistance: the claim that “the personal is political,” for instance, and the use of consciousness raising as a way to organize women in all spheres of life. Similarly, the critique of sexism and macho behavior within the new left, typified in essays like Marge Piercy’s “Grand Coolie Damn,” was clearly on target. She began her essay by noting that
the Movement is supposed to be for human liberation. How come the condition of women inside it is no better than outside? We have been trying to educate and agitate around women’s liberation for several years. How come things are getting worse? Women’s liberation has raised the level of consciousness around a set of issues and given some women a respite from the incessant exploitation, invisibility, and being put down. But several forces have been acting on the Movement to make the situation of women actually worse during the same time that more women are becoming aware of their oppression.33
At the same time, the prioritization of women’s supposedly common experience as women underplayed the divisions between the lives of women of different backgrounds (black and white, poor and rich, young and old, lesbian and straight, etc.). This blindspot alienated many working-class women who otherwise might well have been open to the insights feminism had to offer. As a result, the work of radical feminists began to reflect more and more narrowly the lived experience of white, middle-class, educated women.34 The trajectory from here to liberalism was never foregone, but neither is it hard to divine.
By contrast, feminist radicals emphasized the need to include women’s issues within the overall analysis of the new left. Without ignoring the problems of sexism in broader social movements, they argued that women’s problems could not be solved without simultaneously addressing racism, the war, and what new leftists called “the system.”35 For a number of women, including several founders of STO, this meant first and foremost addressing the concerns of working-class women, women of color, and the women of Vietnam. In doing so, it became clear that many of these issues—poverty and discrimination in the black community, for instance, or war crimes in Southeast Asia—were primarily about race and class, and only secondarily about sex. From this perspective, the limits of the radical feminist worldview seemed increasingly frustrating to the feminist radicals. In some cases, this led to a baby and bathwater sort of reaction, where even the important lessons of consciousness raising were dismissed as middle-class diversions.36 The personal might be political, but women doing ten-hour piecework shifts in textile factories have more urgent problems than being forced to conform to men’s standards of beauty. The solution, according to the feminist radicals, was social revolution with a feminist twist.
Another, tangentially related development in 1969 was the birth of the modern gay rights movement during the Stonewall rebellion in New York City. On the night of June 27, police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, continuing a longstanding tradition of harassing gay men, lesbians, and drag queens in one of the only places they could then congregate.37 For reasons that are still disputed today, the patrons resisted the police, and successfully forced them to retreat in fear for their own safety. In one of the most heavily queer neighborhoods in the United States, this small altercation quickly blossomed into a full scale riot during which 2,000 or more angry gays and lesbians fought several hundred police officers for control of the streets. At least two more nights of fighting followed, and the movement for gay and lesbian liberation burst upon the scene, taking obvious inspiration from both the black and feminist movements in its combination of consciousness raising and militant street tactics.
In later years, the lesbian and gay liberation movement would fracture under the strain of divisions similar to those encountered by the women’s movement of the late sixties. Nonetheless, both gay and lesbian liberation and feminism were sources of great enthusiasm and optimism (as well as dread and derision) on the left as the decade came to a close. The strategic choices implied by the various tendencies within both movements ensured that no one could predict what the seventies had in store for feminism or for the gay movement.
* * *
A striking number of feminists, if only a limited segment of the gay and lesbian movement, cut their teeth on the student movement of the sixties, especially within Students for a Democratic Society.38 SDS had grown dramatically over the course of the decade, from a small organization of progressive students at mostly elite universities to a massive network of radical youth from all walks of life, including many who were not even students. But expansion led also to heightened disagreement over politics and strategy. Regular meetings of the group in the late sixties were marked by ever more bitter argument between two leading factions: the Worker Student Alliance and the Revolutionary Youth Movement. At the annual SDS convention in Chicago in June of 1969, the conflict split the group, effectively destroying what had been the largest formation within the new left and leaving the student movement in near total disarray.
The Worker Student Alliance was a front group for the Progressive Labor (PL) Party, which was the newest of the old left parties, having been founded in 1961 by dissidents leaving the CPUSA.39 From the start, PL had prioritized work on campuses, and by the mid-sixties it had begun sending members into SDS. Around the same time, the leadership of PL began to advocate a pro-working-class strategy (hence the name “Worker Student Alliance”) that criticized nationalism both in the black community and in Vietnam. Instead, PL argued for a combination of unite-and-fight approaches to labor struggles in the US and Maoist internationalism abroad. Their deference to Mao and to the working class brought them a certain amount of credibility within SDS, but their version of antiracism led to significant criticism. Among the initial opponents of PL’s strategy was Noel Ignatin, later to become one of the founders of STO, whose open letter to PL was published—along with a sympathetic response from Ted Allen to Ignatin—under the title “The White Blindspot” in 1967.40 Ignatin argued that PL inappropriately separated the struggle for black liberation from the efforts of the working class to overthrow capitalism, as if the former were merely a set of liberal reforms needed before the latter could be fully implemented.
“The White Blindspot” was the first written formulation of the analysis of white supremacy that would characterize STO throughout its existence. In it, Ignatin and Allen argued for the centrality of struggles against white supremacy in any working-class context. In particular, emphasis was placed on the need to combat white skin privileges, which in the view of the authors poisoned the well of working-class solidarity. The burden was squarely on the shoulders of white workers to adopt the demands of black workers as their own, not simply incorporate some antiracist rhetoric into otherwise white-led efforts.
While certainly controversial in its own right, Ignatin’s view was welcomed by the anti-PL forces within SDS. In fact, Ignatin was recruited to join SDS partly on the basis of his letter, despite the fact that he was a factory worker not enrolled in any school.41 By the time of the fatal conference two years later, one or another version of the white skin privilege line had been more or less adopted by a variety of people in SDS, including a small but significant faction of the SDS leadership, which coalesced primarily
