11 Ehrenreich’s paper in Heresies #9
The comments on the session with Bonnie Johnson at The Second Sex Thirty Years Later Conference by the socialist feminist Barbara Ehrenreich were published in Heresies #9, Organized Women Divided.
Ehrenreich's remaks, titled "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To Socialist Feminism" equated the situation of being "pulled in two directions" along class and gender lines to what Johnson and Bristow spoke about in Both And. Ehrenriech's remarks equated race with class, and did not reflect what seems most pressing in Johnson and Bristow's conversation, the feeling of being trapped outside communities rather than being torn between allegiances to two.
When I think of myself as a member of a class, I mentally throw in my lot with my brother, my son, other men who share more or less common life chances and expectations. When I think of myself as a member of a sisterhood of women, I mentally abstract myself from immediate family or community ties, and focus on what I have in common with women who may, in some cases, live in vastly different circumstances from my own. The point is that both ways of imaginatively situating ourselves are true to our experience. We exist in two kinds of "community" — as women in a class of women and men, and as women in the sisterhood of women. Both are real. But we do not have a feminist politics that expresses the totality of our experience as women — "the both and the and" that Camille Bristow and Bonnie Johnson have spoken about. We have "partial feminisms," and I am afraid that these partial feminisms only end up doing violence to some part of ourselves.
While I keep searching, and find several other papers from the conference published in Feminist Studies, I am unable to find Bristow and Johnson's piece published anywhere.
However, there are many citations to another "conversation" involving Johnson.
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