Page 57 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 51

performs a double-take, suggesting that ‘it may not be, in fact, the exaggeration
which it first appears’. Palmer’s tergiversations between a literal and
metaphorical understanding of conspiracy imagery map out in miniature the
convoluted development of feminist debates on figuration in the decades
following Friedan’s first book.
In the late 1960s, some feminist writers were concerned not merely to express
their experience, but to present a coordinated account of What Was Really Going
On: the task was not so much to name the problem as to name the oppressor.
Conspiracy and its related tropes became a focus of debate between feminist
groupings in the question of who or what was basically to blame for ‘the
oppression of women’. The three most cited candidates were, as the analysis of
the time framed it, individual men, women in complicity with male institutions,
or ‘the system’. In the late 1960s these possibilities were articulated, for example,
with the formation, fragmentation and repositioning of various radical feminist
groups, which defined their differences through their manifestos. Groups such as
Cell 16 of Boston and The Feminists of New York favoured talk of conditioning
and internalized oppression, employing a vocabulary of brainwashing, self-
surveillance, infiltration, complicity and double agency to account for why
women seemed to believe in and conform to stereotypes of their inferiority and
submissiveness. What became known as the ‘pro-woman’ line, on the other hand,
explicitly rejected such conspiracy-minded psychological talk in favour of
‘external’ factors, thereby removing blame from individual women. For
example, the Redstockings, a break-away group from the NYRW, declare in
their 1968 manifesto that ‘women’s submission is not the result of brainwashing,
stupidity or mental illness but of continual, daily pressure from men’ (1968:533–
6). If women seem to collaborate with their oppression, ‘pro-woman’ feminists
like the Redstockings maintained, it is only because they are reluctantly forced
through circumstance into making complicitous compromises in order to
survive. In the manifesto they go on to argue that:

Attempts have been made to shift the burden of responsibility from men to
institutions or to women themselves. We condemn these arguments as
evasions. Institutions alone do not oppress; they are merely tools of the
oppressor.
In effect, then, the Redstockings aimed to replace the abstract and metaphorical
language of brainwashing with a particularized and literal naming of the enemy.
By this logic, believing anything less played into the oppressor’s hands.
What made these debates about the figuration of patriarchy even more fraught,
however, was the increasing suspicion that women’s groups had been infiltrated
by real double agents. So, for example, when in the autumn of 1968 the NYRW
began to disintegrate, some of the original members, feeling that their former
tight-knit camaraderie had in fact been deliberately undermined, began to talk
about the presence of agents provocateurs and double agents. Patricia Mainardi,