How should scholars view and relate to activism and social change?
Concern over this question is neither new nor limited to political
scientists. Nevertheless, because of the special relationship between our
academic enterprise and the larger women's movement outside the
academy, this concern is particularly acute for those of us who approach
the study of politics from a feminist perspective.
Our very presence in the academy as scholars of women and politics and
of feminist theory is, in fact, a manifestation of the influence of the
larger women's movement. The contemporary feminist movement in the
United States had its origins in the founding of the National Organization
for Women in 1966 and in the women's liberation groups that sprang up
around the country in 1967 and 1968 (Freeman
1975). Shortly thereafter, the Women's Caucus for Political
Science was founded in 1969 by a small group of courageous political
scientists who felt that the American Political Science Association was
not sufficiently responsive to the concerns of women. They believed that
there needed to be an organization external to the APSA, a sort of
pressure group, to advocate for women. Then, in the mid-to-late 1970s, the
first generation of academic works on women and politics and feminist
political theory—including Jeane J. Kirkpatrick's Political
Woman (1974), Jane Jaquette's
Women in Politics (1974), Marianne
Githens and Jewel L. Prestage's A Portrait of Marginality
(1977), and Susan Moller Okin's Women
in Western Political Thought (1979)—began to appear. And from these modest
first signs of the influence of feminism and the feminist movement within
the discipline of political science, a sizable and well-institutionalized
subfield devoted to the study of gender and politics has developed over
the years, with its own organized section within APSA and its own journal,
Politics & Gender.
Without the impetus of the contemporary feminist movement, many of us
who today study gender and politics would instead have devoted our
research and our careers to other pursuits. Consequently, a pressing
question for many scholars of women and politics has been: How do we give
back and help to further a movement that we care about deeply and that has
given us so much—that has opened doors and provided opportunities
that did not exist for earlier generations of women scholars—without
sacrificing our academic careers and credibility?
In fairness, I have to admit that I struggled with this question far
more in the early days of my career than I do now. Like so many of us
whose formative years were the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was committed
to changing the world and naively went to graduate school to study
political science because I perceived politics to be the most effective
mechanism for achieving widespread social change. Needless to say, I was
quite stunned when as a graduate student I discovered that political
science, at least as taught and practiced in the 1970s in the
aftermath of the behavioral revolution in the discipline, was almost
completely unconcerned with social change and had very little to do with
the practice of politics. Nevertheless, I was very fortunate early in my
career to be hired into a position jointly shared by the Political Science
Department and the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers
University, where I have had ample opportunity to interact with activists
and practitioners and to satisfy my desire to help advance the goals of
feminism outside the academy.
But while I no longer personally agonize as I once did over my fear of
becoming an “irrelevant” academic, I do have frequent
opportunities to reexperience the agony vicariously through the struggles
of my graduate students, most of whom have come to Rutgers to study women
and politics. Many of them return to school after having worked as
activists in rape crisis centers, public interest groups, or the offices
or campaigns of women politicians. They are torn between their competing
desires to have successful academic careers and to continue to be engaged
with activist pursuits that can lead to material differences in
people's lives. They quickly discover that the requirements of
graduate school leave little time for activism, and they rightly worry
that the demands of establishing themselves as successful scholars and
achieving tenure will leave them with even less time for engagement with
the world outside the academy.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to this dilemma. Rather, as I
counsel my graduate students, each person has to struggle to find her or
his own personal solution. Nevertheless, for all of us who have battled
guilt and insecurity over our inability to be as involved with activism
outside the academy as we feel we should or would like to be, I would urge
that we give ourselves a break. Most of us are actually making more of a
contribution to feminism and to progressive social change than we give
ourselves credit for.
Activists Inside the Academy
To a great extent, the dichotomy between activism and the academy is a
false dualism when applied to feminist academics. This point was
underscored for me by a heated exchange that took place at a small
conference organized by the Center for American Women and Politics in
1994. The conference brought together activists outside the academy,
political practitioners, and scholars to discuss research needs in the
area of women and American politics. One of the “activists” in
attendance was particularly relentless in her criticism of
“academics,” who, in her view, were largely uninvolved in
politics and activism outside the academy. Finally, Virginia Sapiro could
take no more; she stood and very passionately and eloquently spoke in
defense of the academics in attendance, reminding us all that feminist
scholars are activists within the academy. Within our colleges and
universities we often struggle against sexism, racism, and homophobia, and
most of us are engaged in efforts to try to correct inequities on our
campuses and in our profession. In short, we fight the same kind of
battles over the same kind of issues within our own institutions as those
outside the academy do in other settings.
Intellectually, Mary Katzenstein's insightful study of feminist
protest inside the Catholic Church and the U.S. military (1998) has been very useful in demonstrating that
feminist activism not only exists outside institutions but also is present
inside the major institutions of society and the state. Just as feminist
women in the church and the military are activists within their
institutions, so too are feminist academics activists within the
institutions of higher education. Feminist scholars individually and
collectively have pressed for the implementation of affirmative action in
hiring, equity in promotions and pay, the availability of child care and
parental leave, and the prevention of sexual and other forms of
harassment. But perhaps the most significant contribution of feminist
academics to progressive social change takes place in the classroom.
Anyone who has taught a women's studies course or a gender-related
course in political science and watched the transformation in students who
have never thought much about gender certainly knows how powerful
education can be as a tool for social change. Feminist political
scientists not only help to educate those who will be activists and
leaders outside the academy, but also play an important role in educating
graduate students who will become the next generation of political
scientists and, hopefully, continue to work for equity and progressive
change inside the academy.
Activism Outside the Academy: The Need for
Translators
While I would suggest that we need to refuse the false dualism between
activism and the academy and to reevaluate our activist role within the
academy, nevertheless activists and practitioners outside the university
view academic feminists as of limited usefulness in assisting them in
their activist work. From their perspective, our research and writings are
inaccessible, are filled with arcane jargon and incomprehensible
statistical analysis, and often miss the point.
In my graduate teaching, I have students read a collective interview
on the relationship of feminist theory to practice that was published in
Signs several years ago. This interview highlights very vividly
the disjuncture between feminist activism and feminist scholarship
produced in the academy (Hartmann et al. 1996).
Of the participants in this collective interview, two (Nancy Hartsock and
Linda Williams) are political scientists at major research universities;
three others (Charlotte Bunch, Heidi Hartmann, and Roberta Spalter-Roth)
hold or have at some time held full-time university appointments; three
(Hartmann, Hartsock, and Bunch) published essays that were viewed as
classics in feminist theory in the 1970s and 1980s; and only the remaining
two (Ellen Bravo and Maria Blanco) are activists who have not spent
significant amounts of time during their careers in academic environments.
In short, while all of the participants have had significant involvement
in feminist activism, this is about as “academic” a group of
activists as one could ever imagine.
The close ties to academia of several of the participants in this
interview make their observations regarding the irrelevance of academic
scholarship (in this particular case, feminist theory) to their activist
work all the more troubling. For example, Hartmann and Bunch, who penned
highly influential essays in feminist theory in the 1970s and 1980s, both
commented that they “don't read journals like Signs
anymore” (Hartmann et al. 1996, 923).
Later in the interview, Bunch elaborated on what she sees as a major
problem with contemporary women's studies programs, arguing that too
frequently, students “are not being informed about feminist practice
and they are not being engaged in the relationship between theory and
practice…. [I]n general, it seems that these
[women's studies] programs are far from the origins of
women's studies, which was to use the academic arena to deepen our
understanding of the problems women face and to encourage women to be
activists” (Hartmann et al. 1996,
936).
Of course, most of us who are gender and politics scholars are not
located entirely in women's studies departments and programs although
we are often connected to such programs; most of us are in political
science departments. Nevertheless, the “practitioners” of
politics are just as disillusioned with the state of academic inquiry as
are the “activists” of feminism. One can easily imagine a
group of politically oriented practitioners having a similar collective
interview about political science scholarship where they talk about how
they do not read journals like the American Political Science
Review, how they learned very little in their political science
courses about the actual practice of politics, and how most of political
science seems irrelevant for solving the very difficult domestic and
global problems we face today.
The reasons for this disjuncture between scholarship and practice are
complex, and I would not begin to suggest that I have a solution to this
problem. However, I would suggest one step that we could take to reduce
the gap between academics and activists outside of academia and contribute
to social change. More of us need to become, and to train our graduate
students to become, “translators” who work to bridge the
communications gap between scholars and activists outside the academy. We
need to grow more comfortable operating across and between the boundaries
of academia and the political world outside of academia.
In my work at the Center for American Women and Politics, I do a
considerable amount of “translation” work. This work involves
taking the ideas and research findings of academics, digesting and
processing them, and then communicating these ideas and
findings—stripped of all but the most important qualifications and
much of the academic and technical jargon—to practitioners,
activists, and the general public. For purposes of translation, ideas and
findings have to be condensed and simplified without sacrificing their
heuristic value or their validity. As Ellen Messer-Davidow, who has
written extensively about how women's studies has become too distant
from activism, has explained: “Folks outside the academy won't
read 250-page books with a lot of technical jargon….
[T]hey can't sit here and say, on the one hand, on the
other hand, on the third hand, on the fourth hand” (“Women's Studies and Activism” 2004,
2). Similarly, practitioners or activists will quickly stop listening if
you talk to them about “linear models” or the problems of
“essentialism,” but I have found it very possible to talk with
practitioners about both linear models and essentialism, just in very
different language. My experience has been that practitioners and
activists are hungry for the kind of information we have. They want to
know about the latest research findings, and they love to be provoked with
new ideas and different ways of thinking. But this information has to be
put into a form that is accessible and potentially useful to them.
Among the political women with whom I interact the most (i.e., public
officials, leaders of women's organizations, activists involved in
electoral politics), the academic idea with by far the greatest impact and
staying power has been Carol Gilligan's conception of “a
different voice.” I have to admit that this has sometimes been a
source of great frustration to me, especially in recent years, and I have
been known to emit loud groans from the back of the room upon hearing yet
another political woman, more than two decades after the publication of
Gilligan's famous book, refer to Gilligan and women's
“different voice.” So much wonderful work on sex and gender
has appeared since the publication of In a Different Voice in
1982, and yet political women are completely
unaware of this work! My groans are, in part, a reaction to the fact that
the analytic framework political women most frequently draw upon is still
rooted in early-1980s academic feminism, but in larger part, my groans are
a reflection of my own (and our collective) failure to successfully
communicate a better, more compelling, analytic framework based on more
recent scholarship.
There are, however, valuable lessons to be learned from the way that
Gilligan's concept of “a different voice” has resonated
with political practitioners and activists. The first is that an idea is
most likely to take hold with activists outside the academy if it can be
communicated simply in straightforward language. Gilligan's book
itself is written in a much more accessible style than most academic
writing, and I have met a few political women who have actually read the
book. Most, however, have not, but nevertheless, they have absorbed
Gilligan's basic argument because in its more popularized form,
stripped of all references to Lawrence Kohlberg and theories of moral
development, the concept of a different voice is easily understood.
Perhaps even more important, these women see Gilligan's concept
of a different voice as having applicability to their own lives and the
work they do. It resonates with their experience, and they respond best to
ideas that have meaning for them. While academic feminism has taken an
antifoundational turn in recent years, most practitioners and activists I
encounter remain quite essentialist in their ideas about women, which is
one of the reasons they like Gilligan's framework so much.
There really are two additional lessons here for would-be translators.
The first is that translators must know and understand the worldview and
assumptions of activists and practitioners to be effective communicators.
Effective translators must know and have experience with the world of
activists as well as the world of academia. For example, if I want
political women to think about the category “women” in less
foundational and perhaps more complicated ways, I will have much greater
likelihood of success if I recognize that they begin with foundationalist
assumptions—that is, if I meet them where they are. And the second
lesson is that translation is not unidirectional. Translators have a role
to play not only in communicating academic frameworks and research to
practitioners, but also in bringing the experience of activists and
practitioners outside the academy back to the academy so that academics
can learn from those experiences. For example, I personally have far too
much respect for political women, their worldviews, and their expertise to
discount their essentialist beliefs as simple ignorance or a form of false
consciousness. So perhaps part of my responsibility as a translator is to
bring back to academia my experiences with practitioners and to ask my
fellow feminist academics to reflect more on the reasons for the thorny
persistence of essentialism as a mode of thinking outside of academia and
what that persistence means for more antifoundationalist ways of
thinking.
Frustrations and Satisfactions of
Translation Work
In my years of work as a translator, I have found both great
frustrations and even greater satisfactions. Among the greatest
frustrations is that the work of translation is devalued within the
university setting. The academic incentive structure rewards research and
teaching while giving lip service at best to “public service.”
In fact, spending too much time interacting with the world outside of
academia is often viewed as a sign that one is not a “real”
scholar. I remember very clearly being told by a colleague early in my
career that my work, even my analyses of quantitative survey data
published in academic journals, is not research but, rather,
“advocacy.”
However, if academics see those of us who work as translators as too
practically oriented, practitioners and activists frequently see us as too
academic. I have been occasionally reprimanded, and more often teased, for
being too “ivory tower,” for having my “head in the
clouds,” and for not being sufficiently “grounded.”
I have experienced the frustration of learning to talk in sound bites,
of being misquoted in the media in ways that make other people angry
and/or make me seem ridiculous, or both, and of having to purchase and
wear powder and lipstick so that I don't look washed-out or sweaty on
television. And when it comes to communicating to the public through the
media, the work of translating can be very disruptive of more academic
pursuits and even one's personal life. Reporters work on deadlines,
and their deadlines become your deadlines. Calls have to be returned the
same day they are received, and reporters will track you down anywhere and
any way they can.
On the other hand, the work of translation can be immensely satisfying
for a number of reasons, including the fact that activists and
practitioners are often very grateful for the assistance and information.
Two sources of satisfaction stand out as particularly important. First,
sometimes you can actually see that you have had an influence and that
your perspective has made a difference! As a personal example, in meetings
and discussions with leaders of women's organizations in the late
1970s and early 1980s, consistent with the findings of women and politics
research, I would repeatedly emphasize the importance of electoral
structures (e.g., incumbency, multi- versus single-member districts) as
impediments to electing more women to office. But I felt as if I was
beating my head against a wall with these women leaders who were almost
exclusively focused on gender role socialization and the need to change
women's attitudes. A decade later, I attended a meeting with some of
the same women where I was urging that we reconsider the barriers posed by
women's own attitudes, and all they wanted to talk about was the
importance of electoral structures! That was the moment when I first
realized I had actually had some influence on the way leaders of
Washington-based women's organizations viewed the impediments faced
by women in electoral politics.
A second satisfaction of translation work comes from the contributions
to our own research that can be made by operating on the border between
academia and activism outside academia. Interactions with activists
outside the academy can be richly heuristic. Practitioners and activists
are an extraordinary source of research ideas. They continually suggest
questions to which they would like to have answers, and while these
questions are not framed academically, they nevertheless can often be
addressed through academic research. As an example, the research I have
done on the effect of term limits on the representation of women among
state legislators was stimulated, in large part, by women
legislators' and electoral activists' preoccupation with the
likely effects of the implementation of term limits in their states.
Practitioners and activists can also provide invaluable feedback on
research findings, and interactions with them can serve as an additional,
more informal “test” of research findings or interpretations.
For example, I always feel much more confident about findings of surveys
that we at the Center for American Women and Politics have conducted with
women in elective office, or about my interpretation of those findings,
when in conferences or conversations with these women I hear information
from them that is consistent with my more scientifically derived findings
or interpretations. Hearing firsthand from politically active women about
their experiences helps to reassure me that I got it right. This, of
course, is quite a different model of research from the one that I and
many others learned in our graduate training, where we were taught that in
order to remain “objective,” we should maintain what Jane
Roland Martin describes as “aerial distance” from our research
subjects (1996). And while there is some danger
of what Martin refers to as “verstehenism”—identifying
too closely with one's research subject—most of us are
perfectly capable of striking a balance between too much and too little
distance.
Conclusion
As women and politics scholars have striven to achieve academic
credibility, we have faced pressures to abandon any commitment we might
feel to help further the objectives of the women's movement inside
and outside the academy. Nevertheless, many of us have continued to push
for equity inside the academy and our profession, and we certainly need to
recognize and commend ourselves for the critical activist work we do
within institutions of higher education.
Fewer of us are actively engaged, as part of our professional lives,
in working with activists and practitioners outside the academy. As more
and more women and politics scholars gain a secure foothold in academia, I
would hope more of us would choose to become translators, working to
bridge the communications gap between scholars and activists outside the
academy. As Charlotte Bunch made clear in an essay written years ago that
still resonates today, all activists operate on the basis of theoretical
assumptions:
Our assumptions about reality and change influence our
actions constantly. The question is not whether we have a theory, but how
aware we are of the assumptions behind our actions, and how conscious we
are of the choices we make daily among different theories…. These
theories may be implicit or explicit, but they are always there (1987, 243).
The same can be said for information; all activists operate on the
basis of the information they have available to them, regardless of how
out-of-date and inaccurate or up-to-date and accurate that information
might be. It is easy for us, as academics, to sit in our universities and
bemoan the current state of feminist activism, the lack of greater
progress for women in politics, and the near-absence of feminist
perspectives and influence on public policy. Yet we need to recognize that
we share responsibility with feminist activists outside the academy for
the collective fate of our movement. Activists will continue to act, even
without our help. But with our help in translating and communicating the
latest and best ideas and findings of our scholarship and research, the
actions of activists outside the academy can become more effective, and
perhaps the world we inhabit will become more just.
