Page 58 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

52 CULTURAL STUDIES

a member of the inner circle of NYRW who went on to form the Redstockings,
looked back on those meetings in an interview during the late 1980s:
As the movement grew, so did the number of women whose commitment
to the women’s liberation movement was more tenuous. Your feeling was
that these were people who were there to stop anything from happening. I
would not be the slightest bit surprised [to discover] that there were agents
and reactionaries there.
(Echols, 1989:99)

Radical feminists thus had to confront the possibility that the very meetings in
which discussion of the conspiracy of patriarchy was on the agenda were
themselves subject to the all-too-literal conspiracies of the CIA and FBI. When
the Redstockings re-formed in 1973 (after an absence of several years), they
devoted much of their energy to denouncing what they now saw as a liberal plot
to take over the radical feminist movement. The desire to construct what had
gone wrong in the 1960s in terms of a literal, personalized conspiraey reached its
apotheosis when the Redstockings began to accuse Gloria Steinem and Ms.
magazine of being involved with the CIA (Echols, 1989; Willis, 1984). Talk of
the literal surveillance carried out under COINTELPRO (the government’s
conspiratorial counter-intelligence programme) thus coexisted uneasily with a
more metaphorical understanding of hegemony as a form of complicitous self-
surveillance.
Much feminist writing of this time finds itself caught between a desire to
create a new set of terms, and a need to continue to appropriate the language and
ideas of an older, more literal and more male-identified form of political activism.
The problematic engagement with the language of conspiracy takes place within
a wider struggle during the 1960s over an appropriate language for feminism.
Where some women sought to expunge all trace of a male-identified political
vocabulary, others enacted a satirical appropriation of that language. Injecting a
measure of humour and anarchic confusion into an already tense situation was
the formation in the late 1960s of groups like WITCH (Women’s International
Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and Lavender Menace. The formation of
WITCH in the summer of 1968 by Robin Morgan and Florika of NYRW can be
read partly in response to the success of the Yippies. One of WITCH’s first
actions, for example, was to put a ‘hex’ on Wall Street, recalling Abbie
Hoffman’s throwing money at the Stock Exchange the previous year. WITCH’s
formation and choice of name was also an ironic yet serious allusion to the
Conspiracy, aka the Chicago Seven, the group of activists who were at this time
on trial before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for
allegedly inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The HUAC was
brought back into the limelight for the first time since the McCarthy years as part
of the government’s heavy-handed attempt to break the power of the increasingly
militant movement. Referring to the fact that the HUAC had not included any