Re: Ellen Willis dies
On Nov 10, 2006, at 12:33 PM, JBrown72073@cs.com wrote:
Not noted in the obits I’ve seen so far she was co-author of the Redstockings Manifesto, as well as naming the group with Shulamith
Firestone: Bluestockings, the pejorative term for intellectual and socialist
women, with red for social revolution.
And she kept its spirit alive for decades, one of the many excellent
things about her writing and agitation.
Redstockings is in Liza’s piece:
A founding member of Redstockings, Willis was an articulate
champion of seventies radical feminism, but wrote equally well
about the pleasure-hating eighties, with its drug wars, censorship
and the rise of the “right to life” movement. She was deeply
committed to a vision of love between free people, and through that
lens, the social control decade took on a fresh desolation. She was
eloquent about the extent to which fear of the libido not only
energized the evangelical far right but had permeated feminism.
Writing about feminist anti-porn crusades, she urged women not to
“accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual
pleasure, and curbs on men’s sexual freedom as a substitute for
real power.” Yet she admitted that the sexual radicals like herself
didn’t have all the answers, and had “failed to put forth a
convincing analysis of sexual violence, exploitation and alienation.”
Doug