Unknown Speaker  0:01  
about feminist presses and the quotes word practical theory and the origins of that word. And then have an open discussion, which we can all talk with each other about what I say and think she will respond to from this morning. And to begin that, I would like to just suggest that some of the questions that are on my mind grow out of my experiences primarily working with quest, and in teaching feminist theory. Now, I think from the list of people in this room, we have quite a different combination of students, teachers, editors, writers, activists in different places. So I'm just going to talk in general about my experience. And then I think, when we're talking afterwards, he would not only indicate your name, but sort of what particular activity you've been involved in, I think that would help us to get a sense of the different perspectives that you know, grow out of different experiences with the whole question of theory or with fitness, or other kinds of presses. And also, you can ask me very specific, factual questions, if some of the assumptions I make about what I say about existing presses you don't know about, or you want to know more about how quest or daughter's name for any of them that I mentioned actually work and what that means okay. To begin with, I had sort of a slight argument over lunch over this issue, but it's the question I've been asking, or at least thing has has to be asked and examined for everybody who's involved in any way and writing, teaching and publishing. And I sort of call it the question that nobody wants to discuss. And that to me is why are we publishing and writing when this is a society in which basically nobody reads anymore? And what does that mean for us as a feminist movement? Now? I asked that question very seriously. I was at a women imprint conference in Omaha, Nebraska this summer. Some of you may have heard of it, which was a conference of approximately 80, feminist journals, presses, bookstores, all the enterprises of this conference, were enterprises, feminist enterprises, that dependent on the assumption that people read, and that the written word is still a viable medium in our society, and I think that that, that that assumption hasn't been discussed, and begin to be questioned, not because I want to get rid of reading quite the contrary, but because I think that the fact that reading is more and more de emphasized in the society, and particularly in the last 20 years with mass TV culture, is a very threatening thing to the basic ideas that feminist stands for, and particularly to building a movement. I don't want to talk about to sort of preface all my comments with why is reading important. Now, I assume everybody in this room has some connection to the university or you wouldn't be here. So to you reading is important. Or you think of yourself as someone who does read, when even those of us who still I think are involved in reading and writing, have not necessarily looked at the degree to which even what is being read and written is very much affected by mass culture. So that, for example, I find more and more of what is selling. And this is true, whether you're talking about feminist books, or non feminist course, is basically quick action packed novels, or, you know, that read roughly like a one half hour to two hour television show. You know, that following fax, the basic kind of catch and images that TV has produced, or muckraking kinds of things like John Dean's book is probably the best example. You know, where in fact, we are not dealing with ideas so much as personalities and personalities, experiences, and that this has become the mass produced notion, even of reading. And what does that mean in terms of people who deal with ideas? Now, obviously, this

Unknown Speaker  4:08  
is crucial to me, first of all, and perhaps most importantly, I never want to deny the economic relationship to my questions, because I'm in the reading business. But it's also I think, important for a lot of other reasons. First of all, I think that the most simple one is that reading is a form of conveying ideas and information that is not popular in the existing media that is not covered in the existing media. And obviously, the network of feminist newspapers, from campus newspapers to national newspapers, is one of the attempts to utilize the written word for information, not so much for the ideas and theory part that I want to talk about later, but just for information that would not otherwise be available. Now, to me, the more important functions of reading in addition to me formation from the roles of reading and creating an active thinking, and I think aggressive or assertive potential for women to rebel. And it seems to me that the every revolutionary movement that I have ever studied or known anything about no matter what its other goals has made literacy and high priority is made literacy and the teaching of people to read and to be able to think. And when I say read, I don't just mean read, I also mean reading and thinking as an integral, connected thing has made literacy a high priority, because in fact, the ability to think for oneself and rebill and imagine alternatives is very connected to the ability to read and to be able to find out about worlds beyond just your immediate environment. I think this is true, even in this culture. One of the ways I've learned that is from particularly lower working class women I know in the feminist movement, who have talked about the public library and their lives as children, as the most crucial existing institution, to finding a way for them to get out of the world and life they were in and imagine something else. And I think that in some ways, perhaps the middle class, which is even more tied to TV in a funny kind of way, has perhaps missed some of them. But nonetheless, I think that we have to stop assuming that literacy. And the ability to read and think is already existing in our society. And all we have to do is put the ideas out there and they will be received, we have to start to work also on creating the capacity and the environment and the teaching skills for those of us who teach that will make this possible. Finally, oh, two other things about reading what the obvious one, to me that goes with the relationship of reading to rebellion, is that I think mass culture in this country and television in particular, is being used whether it necessarily inherently is is another question, but it is certainly being used as a pacifier as a way of pre programmed pre programming our ideas, and creating essentially passing people. This is not something I came up with. I mean, I read a lot of studies about television and its effect on culture. And the one I did most recently is it was a Newsweek magazine. And I read Newsweek magazine, by the way, cover to cover, not so much to tell me the truth about the world, but to tell me the truth about how people are being told what the world is. And I read it sort of like a novel. It's sort of like a novelist way of getting into what it is that the main, the major culture is saying, the world is all about, you could return to pick your brand. But basically, you get that same thing. I think it's important to get that even when we're critiquing it. But at any rate, I've been very impressed. And the last one I read was about a month or two ago, and Newsweek, a whole major feature on what television is doing to our children, and many of us are, I'm sort of halfway in between many, many of the people who are now in colleges are already with children and television, that's not a future away thing. And I began to realize the difference. Those of you who are in the room is older, older than I will remember radio,

Unknown Speaker  8:27  
as a very different thing than what radio today is. And the difference between watching television, in terms of all of the images being provided are ready. And even listening to radio or reading a novel, for example, in what you have to do, by way of creativity and imagination. I sat before the radio, and it was my ear up against the side of it. And I had to imagine what the Chateau looked like, I had to imagine the women on queen for a day, you know, I had to imagine the Long Ranger and Tonto and this whole scene, it was not already given to me. And just that process. And the difference between radio and TV, I think makes it clear the difference between TV and reading a novel in terms of the role of the imagination, and the way in which it's crucial to regain that I'm not saying destroy all the television sets, although sometimes I feel that way. But rather, I do think we have to look at how they are affecting our ideas, our culture. And this is where we got into the argument over lunch. To me, that's a very crucial feminist issue. And its feminist not because it only affects women, but because I see feminism as that developing idea, theory and framework of the world which has the potential for really massive change and how we do everything. So in my mind, there is no question that is not a feminist question. There is no question that can be raised, that does not have to be examined as a feminist issue and come up with a new way of Looking at what that means. And also feminism is not doing just what we now call quotes, women's issues, it has a whole theoretical perspective on the world. That's my bias about this. The final thing about reading is that reading and writing is the cheapest, most available form of media, which anyone can get a hold of, anyone can get a hold of at least the pencil and paper, if you're trying to read write, anyone has the access to producing their own ideas, at least to write them down on a pencil and paper, and increasingly, so at least to a mimeograph machine, right? Compare that to what it takes if you want to make even the smallest of films in terms of resources. So you see the immediate class bias and sort of, you have to have money and resources to be able to use any other medium. So there's a lot of other areas of this touches on. Okay, so literacy is a feminist issue and teaching women to read writing things a priority. So how do we do that? Or how does that relate to our job as theoreticians, publishers, teachers, etc? Oh, I've been experimenting with that. And in two ways. First of all, I came to this whole set of questions. And perhaps this is the most important thing to me, I came to thinking of reading and theory is important, not out of the university. In fact, I left the university in 1966, when I graduated with a BA degree, quite indignant, quite self righteous, and quite clear that I would never return to university again, because it was obviously irrelevant to the real issues of the world, which were the issues that were going on in the movements in the 60s, so I left the university for movement. It's a decision I've never regretted. But over the years of activism, movement, organizing, etc, that I've done for the past 10 years, I began to realize more and more, and I've sort of come kind of slowly into the back door of the territory of the university territory that the university doesn't do a very good job of, but it's still the only institution that at least says is important, which is the territory of theory, ideas and knowledge. And so I've tried now to figure out how do we bring that task of the university from a movement perspective, in my case, bring that back to the university and try to demand that some of that be done in that environment, and utilize the resources and the women in particular state in that environment and have some of those skills to bring a kind of new nexus between activism and academia? Oh, now, probably, everybody in this room probably represents a different combination of activism and academia, or a different combination of how you, each one of us a sort of different way that we've tried to bring those together, but you're probably not in this room, or even at the conference, you're not struggling with both of them, somehow, some way. So that that's one of the questions I'd like to discuss, which is how to bridge that gap and bring those together. Particularly because my experience in the movement and as an activist was that, in fact, the sort of constant activity that we were engaged in, while it did certain things

Unknown Speaker  13:22  
was not, in fact, leading us to a sense of power, and a sense of direction of the movement. And to me, one of the reasons we weren't getting there is that we really didn't have very much underlying theory and analysis of what we were doing. And we're very unable to pass on the history of our own experiences, so that the continuous cycle of every new group of feminists sort of from 1968, on having to recreate the wheel every year, and not be able to really build on the experiences of before seemed to me to be related to both our lack of a sense of history, and our lack of theory and analysis of what had happened, what have we learned. So the next round could be a spiral forward instead of simply a circular kind of motion. Now, when I say they didn't build power, I'm revealing what is another one of my clear biases, that part of bringing change is building power, and distinctly a power that is based on feminist perspectives and analysis. There were, I think, many good deeds and still are in the women's movement, many good vibes, particularly in the women's culture movement, but to change society, I think we also need good theory, which requires innovative analysis based on those experiences based on the movement and based on scholarship. And I guess that's where I connected somewhat to what Mary Peyer was saying this morning at the end when she talked about the tradition of critical inquiry, and in my mind, creating a tradition of critical inquiry that moves forward and it's both In the field and in the academe. Now, that's where we got to with quest. We started quest and the end of 1973, early 1974. first issue was the summer of 1974. And it really grew out of primarily movement activists with a couple of people who had university training as well. And what we wanted to do was to, in fact, find a way to move forward that critical inquiry into the movement, drawing from the university but not becoming just a university journal. And it's interesting to me that the first criticism we got the first review that was made if our first issue was criticized, because they said that it was too much practical theory. And that's where I picked up that word, which was probably you wondered what the hell did that word meaning when you saw the title for this workshop? Well, that word has become kind of half joke, half serious definition. For those of us in quest of the kind of political theory that we are about, we aren't sure whether there's any other kind of theory, because it's theory in our minds that ought to have practical consequences somewhere somehow. But at any rate, if we have to distinguish, we decided, as many of us have done before, to take the word that was being thrown at us as a criticism and to turn it around to use it as a definition of the fact one of our goals, which was to create theory, that would deal very significantly with ideas and hard ideas. And we deal with the fact that ideas are not always easy. And a lot of the women's movement has rejected theory, because it's not easy, it's not easy to figure out. But at the same time we have a practical orientation will be aimed at analyzing the practical experiences movement and the practical questions of what to do next.

Unknown Speaker  16:54  
Now sort of do at the same time that I was involved in that with the Quest Group, I also started to teach as an adjunct, which for those of us who don't have PhDs is our only backdoor entry into the university as an adjunct in various programs, universities in the Washington area. And I decided to teach courses on feminist theory. Now, I first said I would teach a course of feminist theory in 1973. And I II really picked up something I had never looked at before, which was the entire set of volumes from the Feminist Press, I'm clearing house and Women's Studies, forces and a stack about that high of syllabuses and everything that was going on, it was called Women's Studies and women's forces, etc. And I spent about three days reading through this thinking that in preparing my curriculum, I would see what other people taught when they taught him in this theory. And after three days of going through this, I couldn't find a course that was addressed to feminist theory, I found a lot of courses that were very exciting in various other areas. But he discovered that at least at that point, nobody was saying, there is an existing body of thought that is feminist theory. And it needs to be taught, explored, analyzed, developed. And I suddenly realized that what we had thought was a movement problem in quest, that movement wasn't talking about theory was equally much a problem and what was going on in women's studies in academia, but there were many exciting explorations of disciplines, and introductions to some sociological analysis and women's role, etc. But there was very little, and today I'm happy to report that, at the Women's Studies conference in California, I met about four or five other women. In fact, we decided to start a little workshop caucus called the feminist theory caucus, or, you know, what the hell is feminist theory? And how do you teach it. So there are a few more now than they were in 73. But still not a primary focus of anybody because it does not fit into even philosophy, which I suppose are political science, which is supposed to be the places that most easily fit, it hasn't been fit into the women's studies idea of what it is to pursue women's studies. So I decided back then that I would have to create a definition of practical theory or political theory to guide my own forces, and connect my own experience of the questions and movement and the academic questions. So I developed a model that I use in my own teaching. I don't know whether it's a model that I don't know yet. It's sort of a experimental model, it may not be adequate. There may be other things that it misses. But I've been using it for a couple of years to sort of guide the courses that I've taught and to help us look at the existing political writing and what's there and what's not there. And that model is to define theory, political theory in particular. In general, as that which provides a framework for interpreting and analyzing the world and also A framework for guiding the directions for changing that world. That if feminist theory is anything it is that underlying interpretation we bring to what exists, and the interpretation and analysis we make of how that can be changed. Now, in the courses that I've taught, we've divided that into sort of four parts. And we've done an interesting sort of experiment, I'll tell you what the four parts are in a minute. You've done a little experiment, which is to take major writings within medicine with life, mostly articles rather than books, because it's easier to take a shorter piece, Jane Albert's mother, right for the heart socks article on two perspectives on power. That was inquest or any other article, very daily articles, any article that sort of represents feminist political thinking, and to ask these four questions, so that article, and very few of the writings answer all four, but you'll begin to see the bits and pieces that we have as well as the questions that we're not yet able to answer or deal with. Now, the first part of that, which is the one that when someone has done the most, is the observing and describing what is it? What is it that exists? What is reality, obviously, especially in the early years, the women's who would this was the most crucial phase was to, in fact, define reality, in a different way. And through a different set of eyes and assumptions, then what the society said was reality. And this is still I think, what 90% of the women's literature does, which is to observe and describe reality as women experience and in different areas in different fields. And it is the critical base raw material for any theory, that observation and description.

Unknown Speaker  21:48  
The second stage, and when I say stages, things don't always go in stages. I mean, these are four parts, they, they come and go and interact more cyclical than just 1234. But the second part is the interpret, interpreting and analyzing of why that is, of why what you have stated exists is what exists. And this is where you get into the most crucial thing, which is mostly what people call theory. Mostly, when people talk about theory, they mean analysis, I mean, only this stage, to me, they're all for a part of theory. But that stage in which you have your Marxist feminist analysis, you have your radical feminist or lesbian feminist, you have various feminist analysis of why these institutions of oppression and problems that have been described in the first stage are the way they are. And you begin to look at what does each one of them say about why this is the problem? The third stage that we use in analyzing theory is the one that I've found most difficult. Well, no, both three and four are totally difficult. There's very little done in either one. And the third one is determining and choosing what we think should exist. And this really involves primarily a question about values, and, and imagining new social structures, that that reflect those values. For example, some of you may know in quest, we did an issue on future visions and fantasies, the thing that absolutely amazed us was that almost no one who sends us articles, if we got a certain number of articles, could in fact, talk about or imagine what could exist. This was supposed to be the issue of fantasy and vision. And it tended to be people, most of the stuff we got was, instead of fantasy and vision was sort of talking about, well, what might have existed once before, in the past, there's nothing wrong with that, but it would stop there. Or it would be maybe a total fantasy of sort of how a small group could exist. So based on the experience of one small group, but almost nothing that really dealt with the social structures in society, and how in fact, when we deal with food distribution, raising of children, the economy, the political structure, whether it would be democratic or some other form, and the rights of minorities versus majority, you know, all those questions that we have barely begun to touch in terms of a feminist view of what the values and the structures that represent those values would be that some people wouldn't call that theory, but to my mind theory has to involve also, that projection of the future. And the fourth stage, which, again, depends a lot on having some beginnings in the first three, which is hypothesizing and strategizing about how to get from here to there. How do we get from what we said existed to what we think should exist, and that most obviously, usually involves, how do we change the structures of the society? And if you can't answer that, Straight to about why they are the way they are, it's very hard to figure out how you're going to change them to what they're going to be. So you see how these four questions constantly interact, as you begin to get a re interpretation or a new thought of one, it begins to shift something you thought about the others. So it's a continuous process in that way. Now, there are a lot of other models. And I just throw this out as a model that I've found helpful, and looking at what exists and particularly in beginning to realize, and try not to be discouraged by the fact that feminist political theory as an entire body of thought and interpretation of the world, and not just folks, women's issues, has really just begun, that the task of feminist political theory, whether the whatever stage, the movement is in the task of feminist political theory, is at its earliest stages. It is not like Marxist theory, which now has over 100 years tradition of writing or liberal democratic theory, which has over 200 years of writing and thought, if we think that we are comparable to those and I do, I believe that feminist theory is comparable to that kind of entire perspective on the society, not just a few issues, then we have to realize that in many ways, we've just begun the task of creating all of that. And when we get discouraged, as I do, and I'm sure you do, at why we don't know what to do next, or why our answers aren't good enough, or why we keep people keep getting fired, or et cetera, we have to have that perspective on how much work

Unknown Speaker  26:32  
we still have yet to do. Okay, I want to just connect this briefly dependents presses. This is my view of the task of feminist political theory or practical theory. Then I see the feminist presses and feminist publishing. As one of the major ways that we have to be able to develop this theory in all areas, both fiction and nonfiction across disciplines, etc. Now, my own publishing experience, did not begin with quest. And I think to talk about feminist presses, or feminist publishing, people often think about feminist publishing and feminist presses as sort of what we have now with a few major presses that are really able to produce fairly, you know, good slick books, that, in fact, the history of the Feminist Press, and even in this way, it goes back a lot further, my mind the history of the Feminist Press goes back to the new monograph machine. And it always has to be connected back there, because it goes back to that original assumption that you begin with whatever resources you have, even before you built an entire institution that we now have called the Feminist Press, and the mimeograph machine and cranking out my case 1967 6869. I remember cranking out 500 or 1000 copies of why women's liberation, or an early version of an essay called Sexual Politics. Long before there was a book that was published, you know, two years later, that became a best seller. And we really believed I mean, we were cranking those things out, because we believe somehow that if you could get enough more copies of these articles into enough women's hands, that change would really happen when there was a very in the history of the woman's press, and I think there was press today has to keep within the tradition of that history was a history that combined activism, ideas and even eroticism, that, in fact, doing that was a very erotic and active part of building a movement. That was not a passive sort of, you know, detached experience. And that I think the Feminist Press still represents and did even in the, you know, the earlier way, I mean, Susan B Anthony's, the revolution, I mean, they're their traditions even 100 years ago of what the Feminist Press meant in terms of the place that women had to begin to explore our own ideas and to control them. Now, since that time, since the mimeograph machine I've worked on several different publications off our backs, the Furies quest, I've worked with Diana press daughter thing. And what I began to realize is, there are a lot of reasons why I think this press is important, but the most crucial one that is not what I think is talked about most is because I think all those pieces of the Feminist Press have in fact been one of the important basics for creating and inspiring new writing, new thinking, new ways of exploring thought and new new ideas. That there is a really, what I want to use symbiotic that there is a really integral relationship between the existence of your own press and the ability to create new ideas and A new theory for a movement. And that the existence of that press, first of all, putting out the first thoughts of some people, but also its continuing existence creates an atmosphere and a possibility that was begun when the mail establishment press wouldn't have us either wouldn't have us or completely distorted whatever we wrote. And even now, when some male published feminist works or possible, that even now I think it's very crucial to keep alive, a feminist media, because that media exists not just to get our ideas to the point where the men will decide they sell, and therefore they will publish us. But it also exists to keep those channels open, and to keep some kind of control for ourselves over those ideas, where we can continue to explore, create, and control our words and ideas, because as soon as one set of ideas becomes acceptable and sellable, there's another whole set, that's not going to be, it still has to be pushed forward, I'm gonna even go so far as to say this makes a lot of my friends really angry with me this and I'm not predictable or consistent. But as soon as an idea starts to become sort of what I call a movement axiom, or, you know, a principle that everyone agrees with, then I start to say, Okay, what's wrong with that idea? It's too popular. It's too Pat, too many people are saying it's got to be something wrong with it. And, you know, that I think is a sense that I have a feminism

Unknown Speaker  31:30  
is part of a kind of permanent, revolutionary or evolutionary change in thought that we don't just get to a point where we say, Okay, now we have the principles, and we don't have to question them anymore. Now, I'm not I want to say I'm not saying that we should never use the veil media, I do not take the position that some people working to Feminist Press do that it's a mistake to ever print in a male media for any reason. I think that there are times when we should use it. There are times when it's strategic and useful. I don't condemn or consider it, totally irrelevant to get women's work printed. Male presses are in male newspapers in particular. But I think that it should never be seen as the primary goal of our own writing and thinking, I think that creating a strong, viable feminist controlled media should always be our primary focus, that should be the fundamental thing that we keep going as a Feminist Press, we can use the other media, we can use that to help support our own media in a variety of ways. But if we begin to lose track of and start to use the other media at the expense of our own, then I think that it's not just a question of whether we will have them in this crisis is a question of whether we will in fact, be able to keep control over the development of our own ideas, and the development of our own movement. And its ability to continue to create new words new work, fiction theory, that is not going to be acceptable and 70, double, to make up another terrible word, or popular at all times. So the feminist presses in my mind that are not, they're not passive receptacles. They're not sort of passive receptacles for what already exists. They're active creators of our future theory or active creators in the part of creating theory, creating fiction, creating reading and ideas. And especially I think, for those of us who I assume you wouldn't be in this room if you weren't one, who still somehow believe in the power and importance of ideas and words of reading and writing is a powerful form of the process of feminist development, especially for us. The creation and maintenance of the Feminist Press has to be integral to our future and is our future not an alternative side

Unknown Speaker  33:51  
activity? Okay, that's my wrap. And what I would do now is stop and ask all of you to

Unknown Speaker  34:04  
talk with each other respond. I wish we were seeing each other better, but at least it's a circle. Circle so we can see each

Unknown Speaker  34:13  
other and