Essay by Donna McCabe
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, New York usa

1995

Barbara Deming was a woman able to act in ways larger than herself. She saw society as a whole, not a fragmented, atomized group of individuals, but something much more united. I write this paper in an effort to show that Barbara's inclusionary tactics were perhaps the only thing that made her struggles so successful. Separatism leads to exclusion and difference, binaries that Barbara saw would never work. That individualism, even as a political strategy, would not help to make a better society.

This essay recounts Barbara's activist life, her writings, her growth towards feminism and a truly nonviolent society. Barbara Deming wrote herself, and her causes into a history that too easily overlooked her and them. Her ideologies were consistent throughout her life, growing from nonviolent resistance and moving through the women's movement. Words and actions were the root of Barbara's life. An intellectual and moralist, Barbara's words and actions resound in harmony with today's feminist theories. She was a visionary, yet practical. She fought violence and corporate greed throughout her life.

As a political activist in the 1960's, Barbara could have found it easy to slip into the "us against them" cold war mentality so prevalent at that time. When we look to fight an enemy, to blame them for our troubles, we necessarily use difference as a foundation. Barbara Deming saw that, in creating an Other, we distance ourselves from our very selves. In We Are All Part of One Another, Barbara recognizes "we do not belong to an other, but our lives are linked; we belong in a circle of others" (285). She saw that there was power in individuals (literally meaning indivisible) grouping together (the individual indivisible from culture) emphasizing the commonalties. Where Barbara succeeded in creating community, she succeeded in creating a sense of belonging and bonding in contrast with individual self-interest.

When we speak about individual self-interest, immediately we must discuss rights. Rights are grounded in individual freedoms. Rights are not a product of collective life. Our entire system of justice is then based on these individual rights; the rights of one person over another. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in Feminism Without Illusion eloquently demonstrates how, given that we are individuals almost completely unable to think in collectives, history has unfolded.

When we think of individual rights, we are clearly able to see that some people were physically weaker than others. Rather than the continual bloodshed of an eye for an eye, the justice system came about in order to both stop the endless loop of violence and protect the physically weak. A court became a place where, regardless of physical strength and wealth, a person could fight for their individual rights. This is still the basic premise behind justice. Such a system is based entirely on particularist rather than universalist principles. It is also based on case law; a system that sets precedent by referring to prior settlement. A system that, until this day, is dominated by men, established by patriarchy.

"Historically, individualism for men has depended upon the subordination of women" (Fox-Genovese 66). Women had to turn to the government, the police, and the courts to support and enforce their rights (feminist goals). But, with a few exceptions, the patriarchy of justice has been slow to recognize the women it claims to protect. When women turned to the law, the barriers between public and private spheres became eroded. "But feminist insistence that the personal is political, that no private institution, including the family, has the right to oppress or abuse women has certainly contributed to justifying the state's and the courts' growing role in 'private' relations" (Fox-Genovese 67).

When Barbara's non-violent activism and extensive political writings began in the 1960's, she recognized the inherent individualism of the country. Though it would have been easy for her to blame those in Washington for war and nuclear weapons, she did not. Her ideology "we are all part of one another" shone brightly through. She saw that her power was in showing compassion for others, be they her friend, her oppressor, or her jailer. In her 1971 essay "On Anger," Barbara recognizes that the dualisms themselves were what created oppression. "Black people have done better in this regard perhaps than women - they did jointly acknowledge their oppression, which was more obvious, and jointly acknowledge that they had other selves than the selves presented to them by their master. Women have had, for the most part, to try to keep alive their pride in isolation from one another. And they have all too often hidden their anger even from themselves" (Deming, We Are All 214). The civil rights issue, at least on the surface, united blacks of all genders, all classes. Feminism has had a much harder time with this.

Barbara writes of the suppressed anger of the Chinese peasants during the revolution, when the property they had always been denied began at last to be divided among them; and they were encouraged, after a lifetime of oppression by the landlords, to speak out what they felt to be due to them from those men - speak out their anger. As they began to speak it, it would overwhelm them and they would often beat the landlords to death on the spot - in a passion, a passion, in part, of uncertainty that their new rights were really theirs (215). It was for cases exactly like this that our justice system that we have today was designed. Barbara recognized that the idea of individual rights is perhaps not the best paradigm to structure a culture. People must take rights in this culture. Or, conversely, they are given them by an authority, namely the government. In other words, individual rights do not exist without an authority (oppressor).

Barbara's tactic while protesting was always resistance. Making the oppressor's job difficult for Barbara was her way of making them see her, and their own humanity. When faced with her as inseparable from her culture, rather than herself as an individual, the oppressor was forced to recognize their similarities at a very deep level. Simply using the term oppression implies an indivisible nature of the individual from a larger society. As a rhetorical move, it allows people to place blame onto another group, rather than on an individual. The word oppression implies authority over another group. In other words, groups oppress other groups. It makes no sense to say that individuals oppress other individuals. But individuals take actions. This would imply that we can not separate the individual from the larger context of society.

Barbara was incarcerated during the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Bay Walk for Peace and Freedom, a racially integrated protest over the U.S. actions in Cuba. The group was arrested for "parading" without a license. Barbara made it difficult for the prison authorities to ignore her humanity, or rather their shared humanity. She did this through non-cooperation. Barbara did not let prison guards simply will her away. "Nobody has to print in a manual for guards that the prisoner must be wished out of existence for society's sake; this magic principle is grasped as if by instinct" (Deming, Prison 3).

Jail sentences were not the only way to be active in Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA) who organized this peace walk. The organization encouraged all to participate in the nonviolence movement. As later with Barbara's criticism of what she saw as an exclusionary women's movement, she suggests that the larger the group of volunteers, the more those willing to risk jail terms could act. "The only way to build the 'beloved community' is to seek again and again not how to cast out but how to gather (Deming, Prison 24). Barbara actions with CNVA gave her extraordinary spontaneity - the sense that an individual can act, and has weight. "The only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision without being scared into wanting to retreat is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive, naming abuse of power, that is held unfairly and must be destroyed, but naming no person one whom we are willing to destroy" (Deming, We Are All 271).

Civil disobedience was Barbara's way of exerting her power against the state. It is often the case that the laws based on individual rights, passed to protect, come to be used against the very same people they allege to protect. By empowering authorities we often further victimize ourselves. Identity politics could lead us to this very same disempowerment.

These dangerous times of the 1960's necessitated Barbara's inclusive ideology. The threat of nuclear war made the world seem very small. It was perhaps the easiest time in history to recognize individual actions as being integrally attached with culture. Barbara's writing about this time in history is compelling and compassionate.

In order that Barbara could act she necessarily joined with others. Her part in activist groups could be looked at as identity politics. Judith Butler realized, as Barbara Deming did, that we risk strengthening the institution when we politicize identity. "Identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression" (308). But rather than creating a binary opposition of 'us' and 'them,' Barbara recognized that the battle could not be waged on traditional terms. Just as nonviolent resistance became an opposite of war, Barbara saw that her struggle would be lost to the more powerful authority if waged on 'their' terms. During the racially integrated peace walk, Barbara spoke of her commitment: "I was protesting that there is any such classification as second-class citizen - and protesting it in my own name. I didn't do it out of altruism; I did it because I knew in my soul something of what it was to be a nigger" (216).

In May 1963, Barbara was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama for joining a group of black demonstrators who were petitioning "without a license." They were acting for the collective right to be treated like human beings. This jailing helped Barbara realize just how racist the status quo was. She was brought, alone, to the white section of the jail, while the other black protesters were brought to the segregated black section; a section that she knew was smaller, dirtier, and more violent. She was able to identify "this world that is theirs, I live in it too now. But I am able to leave" (117). After her jailing she continues the struggle with these activists. "They have linked hands. Have I the right to reach out and to take hands, too? I am not sure. I stand self-conscious" (123). Over the course of several days, Barbara confronts her fears, but she does so with the help of her black comrades. "The people I move about give me their courage. There is a contagion to it, and I catch it; it is simple as that. I catch it through closeness. They make me one of them" (123). She is no longer the same.

Barbara had realized that being a woman was being a second-class citizen. She later learned that being a lesbian would create a further separation. In her 1971 essay "On Anger" quoting Shulamith Firestone The Dialectic of Sex, Barbara sees that all oppression stems from the "sexual class system" which is the "model for all other systems of oppression, and that until we resist this, until we eliminate this, we will never succeed in truly eliminating any of the others" (216). She recognized that it was more effective for her to appeal to the root of the problem, rather than the vine. The root was not her suffering, was not black suffering, it was not about the calling the leaders of the United States ignorant, it was about humanity.

Barbara did see the power of identity politics. "Politics bridges the gap between the particular and the general and constructs a nexus through which need may be translated into justice. Politics permits the grouping of individual experiences into general goals" (Fox-Genovese 31). Joined in a community of nonviolent activists who trusted the truth to be stronger than pragmatic compromises, Barbara began to develop her ideology of nonviolent struggle as a powerful strategy for change. This community helped Barbara into feminist discourse.

To recognize women as a universal, where affirmation and solidarity existed between all women, feminist theorists have often resorted to the abstract. In her "Letter to WISP" (Women Strike for Peace) published in Liberation, April 1963, Barbara believes that women's truths lie in the here-and-now of our culturally trivialized daily lives. Barbara's first-found truth: that we must not allow ourselves to look away from the radical implication of each truth we find. Her challenge: dig deep for the truth; when you have found it, and the courage to acknowledge it, then act truthfully upon it. The function of history is to record these truths. Barbara wrote to insure that her dreams became the truth (108).

During the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which was a committee in the federal House of Representatives which conducted a 'witch hunt' for Communists in peace and leftist organizations during the early sixties, Barbara recognized the truth of her experiences. In hearings against WISP members, Chairman Doyle's opening statement reflects the male status quo that Barbara began to challenge. "The struggle between the women and the committeemen was an unequal one because the women spoke out of their own direct experience - their concentration upon their children - and the committeemen spoke out of long acquaintance with certain portentous words and phrases - 'excessive desire for peace' impending 'adequate defense preparations,' sapping 'national strength,' serving the 'aggressive plans of world Communism." The Committee spoke these phrases as if they themselves had immutable reality. "It has not dawned on them that the rapidly altering nature of the world about us has drained certain words of all former meaning" (105). This questioning of language helped Barbara see the world more clearly. Her use of language now became an important prelude to action.

In "On Revolution and Equilibrium," published in Liberation, 1968 Barbara begins to take us past a traditional definition of pacifism, to powerful nonviolent revolution. Many would state that the word 'power' is a word inconsistent with a faith of nonviolence. "For too many years, black Americans marched and had their heads broken and got shot. They were saying to the country, 'look, you guys are supposed to be nice guys and we are only going to do what we are supposed to do. Why...don't you give us what we ask?'...We demonstrated from a position of weakness. We cannot be expected any longer to march and have our heads broken in order to say to whites: Come on, you're nice guys. For you are not nice guys. We have found you out" (174). This statement sound very similar to an assertion that bell hooks would write some twenty years later in black looks. Barbara is looking for a new, nonviolent vocabulary which would make their struggle more comprehensible to others. The need to show a clear vision of the revolutionized, nonviolent, good society. Describing that utopia required a new vocabulary.

In 1971 Barbara was seriously injured in an automobile accident. Barred by her physical condition from travel and physical activism, Barbara turned to new forms of written activism: the letters and open letters of the seventies in which she brought her personal and political analyses together in a sharper focus than ever before. Their synthesis is the philosophy of feminist nonviolence. These writings break through the barriers of socialization, training, and habit so that the feminist attitudes and assumptions we glimpsed in her earlier writing now shine forth openly.

Barbara had for years been struggling to trust her own feelings, but in her letter "On Anger" it becomes clear how much of her own experience and emotion - as a woman, as a lesbian - had been set aside from consideration, or had been recognized and expressed only by analogy in the struggle against racism. Barbara began to challenge her anti-war comrades to reject the traditional trivialization both of women and of personal experience. Through feminism we can all begin to dare to presume to trust our own eyes.

Barbara saw that our vision was a product of our culture. Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of Ones' Own : " 'Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.' Men have had to carry around these selves twice their natural size. A burden, because a lie. It is the truth that sets us free" (226). For Barbara, the task for all of us is to erase the so-called differences between the sexes, bring out the women in all men, the man in all women. By doing so, we are able to act not as atomized individuals, but as parts of a larger community. We join gender back into an singular noun. Barbara saw this leap as possible when discussing gender in a way she was not able to understand during her lifetime of activism. "I would say myself that our sexuality is given us so that we can commune with one another. It cracks our single selves. Without sexuality we would be impossibly isolated within our individualities. We could not experience community, could not experience in our flesh the truth that we are, all of us, members one of another" (244). Our sexuality is very damaged. Damaged by the attempt to split it into the so-called male and so-called female. This lie is what has weakened any possibilities of communion. "If society did not try to make us all heterosexuals - and if patriarchy were dispelled and, with it, the power inequities that make most heterosexual relationships so distorting - my guess is that we would find ourselves quite naturally attracted to either sex" (246). Barbara recognized the base opposition that created all others to be gender. A separation of our very be-ing.

Like many feminists, Barbara believed that a possible starting point for this split in gender occurred with capitalism. Private property led to individual rights, which, in turn, led to our justice system. Private property allowed man to attempt to produce himself through the making of women and of the earth itself a mere means of his subsistence. Our current environmental movement is purely a product of private property. If no one person could own land, then no one would have rights to pollute simply because it was "their" land. Man has tried not to become fully human, but to deify himself. This caused women, the subordinates of men, to seek justice through authorities. A justice system where the weak could stand up against the strong. This, too, is lacking in our justice system today. If the Contract With America passes, the loser of a court case will be responsible for all legal fees. In essence, if a private party tries to sue a corporation, the individual will have to post a bond for the estimated full court case for both sides. This fear and cost of losing will stop the weak from suing the strong. It is counter to the concept of justice. This moves justice from the often dangerous individual right, to the more dangerous corporate right.

Postmodern feminists seem to look to the root of the problem with deconstruction of discourse. If the only way anyone can interpret culture is through the medium of language, attacks to phallologocentricism could change our very institutions. If we can recognize that individual rights, property, money, and the legal system exist as texts, changing the general nature of language would expose the internal contradictions inherent to each. This shift in paradigm would do more than add women to the existing order; do more than separatism leaving one male and one female order. A change in paradigm would make us ask different questions than those we continue to ask. My hope is that it would lead to the world that Barbara Deming fought for so passionately. Barbara was aware of the very real difference between us. "It is very necessary to learn from one another under what varying conditions we live our slave lives" (291). She would agree with Judith Butler that there is no such thing as choice. "The longer we listen to one another - with real attention, sharing more than opinion but life experiences - the more commonalty we will find in all our lives" (291).

"If the fundamental contradiction that has to be resolved is, as I think it is, the contradiction between the lie that men and women are of different natures and the truth that we are of one nature, the truth that no human being should be thought of as The Other, then the appropriate form of struggle is surely that form still largely to be invented: nonviolent struggle. One can't prove a common nature with other by doing violence to them" (289).

Butler, Judith. "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" Inside/Out. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Deming, Barbara. We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader. Ed. Jane Meyerding. Philadelphia: New Society, 1984.

---. Running Away from Myself: A dream portrait of America drawn from the films of the forties. New York: Grossman, 1969.

---. Prison Notes. New York: Grossman, 1966.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991.

Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: race and representation. Boston: South End, 1992.

Tong, Rosemarie. Feminist Thought, A Comprehensive Introduction. Boulder: Westview, 1989.