Beyond Individualism to a Mass Women’s Movement
As a female young adult RC leader living in late-stage capitalism, I struggle with how liberalism is shaping wide-world women’s liberation. Re-evaluation Counseling holds out that an important part of fighting for liberation is discharging our feelings and acting on our thinking. Meanwhile, capitalism sells us the idea that liberation means being able to follow our feelings no matter what. In the wide world, women’s liberation often means total sexual freedom (and constant sexualization) and gender-identity fluidity. This limits our ability to fight for women’s liberation and build political power as women.
We young adult women grew up without a broad, active women’s liberation movement constantly reminding us of the reality of male domination and holding out a picture of women building a mass movement together. This left us vulnerable to thinking that our struggles as women were individual and trivial and to being preoccupied with our individual decisions rather than focusing on building mass movements as women.
Many of us desperately wanted to have integrity. But because we didn’t have a broader movement to plug into, as did women in earlier periods, we attached that desire to individual decisions. Because of our individualism patterns, middle-class women seem especially vulnerable to getting confused here. As “a way out” of how internalized sexism and middle-class oppressor material have made us feel bad about ourselves, we often focus on making more “liberated” individual decisions. We forget that mass movements and solidarity with all women are essential for change.
I am excited about fighting to reclaim a bigger vision of women’s liberation that goes beyond individual decisions, sexualization, and liberalism to fighting for our minds and rebuilding a mass women’s movement.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
(Present Time 184, July 2016)