lesbianfeminists:

“The agendas of feminism flow from the class from which they come as differently as if they were not of a single movement. Some women cannot understand how homelessness, welfare travesties, police brutality, ‘open shops,’ and treaty rights are feminist issues, just as some women will never develop sympathy for the glass ceiling.

Because middle and upper class values (buying and owning classes) dominate the media and mainstream consciousness, the goals of class mobility have replaced those of classlessness. Even within the movement some women of class privilege speak of being held back by the multidimensional issues of lower class women. The concerns of poverty and working class women are just too costly to the ‘success’ of climbing women and receive the same gratuitous liberal ‘concern’ as guilt has always produced. As new opportunities open for women there is increased pressure for women to succeed— economically, for what else really matters or is substantially different from the kinds of undervalued success that have always been women’s? Within the women’s community the achievements of women are celebrated who accede to, and succeed in, this new frontier which not too subtly replicates within the pressures from the outside. The Women’s Liberation Movement is becoming the Women’s Consumer Market as women’s economic successes mean more and more products, advertising, and focus on women. This all keeps us inside the same system fighting for the crumbs. We may create better work places, own our own businesses, and endure all the stresses of career compounded by unrelieved female expectations. We’ve come a long way.

Within the movement we are also a market. The development of women’s culture has been done entrepreneurially, which makes sense inside a capitalist system in which every other activity is remunerated. But what that means in our own communities is that participation in women’s culture comes from a cash outlay, giving us a culture in which we consume each other and leave some women totally outside because they lack disposable income, not politics.

Through this process our consciousness about oppression pushes us to include and be sensitive to women who are more oppressed than we are. Inclusion and sensitivity, however, still come from status quo-maintaining values, insuring that awareness produces no substantial systemic changes. Because some can buy in, women’s success depends now more than twenty years ago on the maintenance of the system as it is. To effect change, the movement of women cannot move without a clear examination of class.”

“The New! Improved! Classless Society,” Nett Hart in Out of the Class Closet: Lesbians Speak. 1994.