As political scientists whose work has centered on feminist and democratic theory and practice, we have long seen ourselves as having been formed, profoundly, by the social movements of the 1960s. Now, in rereading and reflecting on the Port Huron Statement (PHS) and the chapters in this edited volume, we are struck, on the one hand, by how much our lives and careers were influenced by the political moment (and movements) to which it gave rise and, on the other, by the ways in which our work within political science took off from one of its most profound omissions: its almost total inattention to gender.

The PHS began with a call to “visualize” the application of ideals to the “real world.” It lamented the decline of utopian thinking, expressing distress that people say that there is “no alternative” to the present order of things. To the contrary, the authors of the PHS argued that “there is an alternative to the present.” They insisted that there was a way of imagining a dramatically new social order; indeed, the Statement offered both a profound critique of many aspects of the presumed political consensus of the late 1950s/early 1960s (what Daniel Bell famously characterized as the “end of ideology”) and a call to imagine a more truly participatory, egalitarian, democratic (and productively contentious) society.

Barbara Haber captures the sense of exhilaration that accompanied the hope—and belief—that a new social order was possible in her chapter, “A Manifesto of Hope”: “we held a shared assumption that through collective thinking we could understand the world, and that with passionate dedication we could change it.” We, too, shared in the “high spirits born of shared moral purpose, a sense of historic mission, and the sweet company of kindred souls [that] were infectious” (p. 140). As Haber and others note, the PHS ignored gender as a category of oppression, and paid no attention to the social, economic, and political changes that would be necessary to procure greater equality for women. Our own teaching and writing on gender justice, then, stemmed both from our having shared the conviction of the PHS authors that social change in the direction of greater justice and equality was possible, and from our increasing awareness that gender justice would have to be an essential aspect of any vision of social justice worth fighting for. For us, feminism was (and remains) profoundly—and practically—utopian: insisting that the world both should and could be transformed to address the systemic oppression of women. The imagining of a radically different social order—and the belief in the efficacy of such reimagining—was central to feminist theory, and feminist activism, just as it was to the PHS. Early Second Wave feminists dared to imagine alternative social norms and structures, and insisted that these changes had to be part of any leftist/progressive political agenda.

As nearly every chapter in this volume attests, the fact that the PHS was revised, edited, and ratified collectively after intense small-group discussions became an important model for many New Left organizations, and was mirrored and transformed in the consciousness-raising groups that were one of the hallmarks of the Second Wave. Jane Mansbridge observes that thousands of collectives formed across the country in which members made their decisions by “ʻparticipatory democracy,’ by which their members meant a combination of direct face-to-face assembly democracy and decision making” (p. 196). In addition to direct participation, the drafters of the PHS “work[ed] outward from concrete, immediate experience to derive general values, and us[ed] those values as criteria for comprehending structures and evaluating events” (“Manifesto of Hope,” p. 144). While the PHS had called for engaged political analysis, the women’s movement grew out of the experiences of consciousness raising, and argued that “the personal is political.” Members of consciousness-raising groups drew on their personal experiences in order to uncover shared experiences that—they/we came to recognize—arose from social norms and social structures. The articulation of these experiences made clear that a great many of the frustrations women experienced were not simply individual problems but consequences of systemic forces of domination and subordination. Consciousness raising was an extremely important analytic tool, a valuable methodology for the shaping of feminist analysis and theory.

The documents that emerged from feminist collectives—for example, “Redstockings Manifesto,” “The Woman-Identified Woman,” and “The Combahee River Collective Statement”—showed the impact of the “manifesto,” the short and publically accessible form of the PHS, on the women’s liberation movement. Indeed, the very framing of it as a liberation movement reflects the influence of the PHS and its attention to anticolonial liberation movements around the world. And the continued effort to connect theory to practice, classroom learning to “real life,” and to attend carefully to what activists said and did became a central feature of our teaching, and of feminist classrooms more broadly.

Both of us see our careers as manifesting the kind of oppositional action within one’s own sphere of activity that the PHS called for. As political theorists, much of our early writing (and certainly our teaching) participated in what we experienced as truly thrilling (and also disturbing) feminist explorations of the canon, calling out the deeply gendered character of depictions of the polity in works from ancient Greece to John Rawls, and ultimately moving beyond critique to the building of gender-inclusive theory. Our teaching and writing also participated in the larger feminist intellectual process of chronicling women’s exclusion from public office and their disparate legal treatment, as well as reclaiming the histories of women’s activism and resistance, both in the United States and around the world. It is hard to imagine thinking or teaching now without the trilogy of “race, class, and gender” and their intersections; but, although the gender piece was missing from the PHS, the analysis in the Statement provided a critical context for that next step.

Finally, the insistence of the PHS that alternative social structures were possible, and must be created in the contexts in which we live and work, was reflected in activism within the American Political Science Association itself. The Women’s Caucus for Political Science was formed at the 1969 Annual Meeting of the APSA to address the marginalization of women within the profession. (During the two preceding decades, a total of 15 articles out of 1,000 [1.5%] in the APSR were authored by women. [Joyce Mitchell, “The Women's Caucus for Political Science: A View of the ‘Founding,’” PS: Political Science and Politics, 1990]). The successful motion at the 1976 Business Meeting of the APSA charging the association not to hold its Annual Meeting in any state that had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment (and hence not in Chicago, since Illinois had not ratified the ERA) was another important moment for us and other feminist political scientists. Our continued engagement with efforts to open up and democratize that organization are, surely, further manifestations of the belief that one needs to work for greater equality in one’s immediate context and close to home, as well as on the national stage.

Despite its lacunae, the PHS inspired us and many of our generation to believe that it is possible and necessary to imagine alternatives to existing social structures and practices; that writing and speaking about and giving artistic expression to these visions is a form of political activism; that social analysis and policy formation must include the voices and insights of the marginalized and oppressed; and that political engagement entails acting “where you’re at” (in our case, the university and professional associations). We still share these beliefs, but await the new insights and paths—both theoretical and practical—that the rising generation of student activists (like those in the Occupy movement) will add to the political dialogue of which the PHS has been a vital part.