What Are We Fighting For?

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What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism (1998) is a book-length essay by Joanna Russ, in which she synthetises various strands of feminist thought going up to 1985* and deconstructs anti-feminist arguments.

(*1985 is an arbitrary year, past which she chose to stop including new publications, with the exception of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, because otherwise she would never have finished the work, which had been underway since the mid-1980s and originally intended to be much shorter.)

It is dedicated to Susan Koppelman, and "heavily indebted to" Clara Fraser.

Contents

Introduction
Acknowledgements
  1. Advancing Backward
  2. Who's On First, What's On Second, And I Don't Know's On Third: Freud To Dinnerstein To Chodorow To Everybody
  3. Mommy, Where Do Baby Theories Come From?
  4. For Women Only: Or, What Is That Man Doing Under My Seat?
  5. She Wasn't, She Isn't, She Didn't, She Doesn't, and Why Do You Keep On Bringing It Up?
  6. I Thee Wed, So Watch It: The Woman Job
  7. Why We Women, Sloppy Creatures That We Are, Can Never Find Anything In Our Pocketbooks
  8. Seeing Red: My Life Is Harder Because Yours Is Easier
  9. "A Socialist Feminist Is A Woman Who Goes To Twice As Many Meetings"
  10. Is Labor Labor?
  11. Looking Backward (And Forward?)
  12. "There Is A Village / Over / That Hill"
  13. "O.K., Momma, Who The Hell Am I?"
  14. "Coalition Work Is Not Done In Your Home"
  15. So...
Leftovers:
  1. The Daily Corruption Of These Sweet Small Boys
  2. Scaling The Office Building
  3. Home Thoughts From A (Whole Lot Of) Broad(s)
  4. Comparing Notes
Bibliography
Index

Quotes from Russ

Page 3 (from "Advancing Backward"):

...what seem to me really ominous are two signs often taken as positive: that the caricaturing of feminism and feminists has significantly lessened in the past few years (as of this writing), and that more and more women are willing to call themselves feminist, even if their positions on the issues doesn't match up to anything those of us who were active in the 1970s consider feminist.
First, caricature stops when confrontation stops. When the air no longer rings with horrid tales of ball-breaking dykes, man-hating neurotics, vicious and parasitic wives, and the rest of the tiny train of male-imagined phantoms, that's not because feminism has influenced patriarchy but because patriarchy has influenced feminism almost out of existence. Redefining "feminism" to mean anything having to do with women (or anything having to do sympathetically with women) without the context of the explicit political analysis that ignited the subject in the 1970s may meet with less direct opposition -- but try speaking about "exploitation" and "oppression" and you will be met with the same attacks, the same mockery, and the same snide complaints with which we are all so dismally familiar. Or at best you will be faced with the nervousness that signals: I'm willing to assume that we're friends again, but only as long as you pretend that the whole issue is a dead letter and never, never bring it up again.
Second, feminism is something you do, not something you are. Women who say "I'm not a feminist" and proceed to do feminist work are allies no matter what they call themselves. Those who call themselves "feminists" and don't substantiate that claim by their actions are another story entirely. In the last few years, I've heard accounts of women who wander into conferences on "women" or "women's studies" beatifically ignorant of any feminist theory and without feminist awareness of even the most rudimentary kind. Sometimes, they even say they've been sent by their (male) superiors on the presumption that other women will be "nicer" to them than men or because women's studies is assumed to be so much less demanding than the rest of academia. Less heartbreaking -- but often troubling -- are those publications that call themselves "feminist" while sturdily refusing to define that highly variable term, those (much worse) that want to celebrate women and women's work without bringing up anything as nasty as sexism, and (sharks among the dolphins) plain old sexist crap now being advertised in the company of work that, however problematic one branch or other of the movement may find it, is still not an attack on the very idea that feminism means something.


Page 68 (from "Mommy..."):

To add a little of my own personal motivation to my own healthily selfish desire for a happy life, I am angry at academic colleagues whose work, supposedly feminist, leaves a deficit in the education of female students in my classes who are classically feminist in their perceptions, emotions, and preoccupations, and which deficit I find myself having to make up single-handed. I am sick to death of the lies of the mass media, I am sick of not having enough allies, and I want feminism to become ravingly radical once again. I even have a suggestion as to how to achieve this happy end.
We must all become crazy, man-hating separatists.


Page 436-437 (from "Comparing Notes"):

Experience alone is unintelligible. Theory alone is empty. Consciousness-raising is whatever brings the two together, formally or informally, in a classroom, a house, on the street, in an apple orchard in Sonoma. It is research.

See also

Some of the works and authors Joanna Russ references often in What Are We Fighting For? include:

Publications

  • ISBN 0-312-15198-5
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