| This dissertation tracks the meanings and usages of the slogan, "The Personal Is Political," in popular feminist writing over the past four decades. A vernacular catchphrase for the theoretical construct and organizing principle around which U.S. feminism constituted itself in the late 1960s, the slogan fundamentally altered the way many Americans came to think of the political relationship between public and private life. At the same time that the organizing principle of the women's movement spread across mainstream American culture, the slogan "The Personal Is Political" became the centerpiece of a heated internal debate within the movement itself. That debate continues.; Across time and space, the struggle to fix the slogan's meaning has paralleled the struggle to define "feminism" for a broad public. Chapters follow explicit efforts to define the movement's meaning in four textual arenas: radical feminist manifestos from the 1960s and 1970s; books, speeches, and magazine columns by Betty Friedan from 1963 to 1981; popular polemics written by "third-wave" feminists in the early and mid-1990s; and zines circulating online and offline between the early 1990s and 2001. Within each arena, the slogan has justified divergent interpretations of feminist politics, the sources of women's oppression, and how feminist revolution takes place. By charting the evolution, production, circulation, and effects of a discursive formation at the center of U.S. feminism, I point toward specific trends and tendencies as well as overlooked cycles of repetition and unresolved tensions in the larger movement this slogan has come to represent.; Over time, U.S. popular feminist discourse has lost its concerted emphasis on patriarchal critique; has become more about the individual than the collective; and has circulated comfortably in increasingly mainstream and commercial venues. I show how third-wave feminist narratives perpetuate a partial vision of the popular politics of the past, obscuring the ways contemporary popular feminist discourse reenacts debates of 35 years ago, while also reflecting profound differences in the socio-historical circumstances in which today's young feminist spokeswomen live, think, and write. Following the slogan's travels, I conclude, allows us to challenge the binaries of public/private, radical/reformist, popular/academic, and, ultimately, second wave/third wave. |
