THE CENTER FOR

women teow Newsletter

The City University Graduate Center

33 West 42 Street, New, York City 10036 212 790-4435

Volume II, No. 4 March, 1981

The Femintst Therapy Collective and the Center for the Study of Women
and Sex Roles co-sponsored a conference on February 7-8 on "Pemintsm and
Psychotherapy: Narrowing the Gap Between Ideology and Practice." The conference
was conceived and organized by the members of the Feminist Therapy Collective:
Judith Greenald, Liz Margolies, Rosanna Murray, Pamela Oline, Rea Rabinowitz,
Ellen Shumsky, Mary Simpson, Lynne Stevens, and Lee Zevy. Judith Greerwald, an
Associate of the Center, opened the first sesston. Speakers at that session
were Gerda Lerner, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Cesste Alfonso. The moderator
was Muriel Dimen. Her remarks, printed here below, provided a context for the
thoughts of the speakers, who addressed the topic from historical, cultural and
clinical perspectives.

FEMINISM AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

Muriel Dimen

I would like to say a few words about my sense of the relation between
feminism and psychotherapy. I am proud of having co-authored the early feminist
manifesto, "I am furious (female)", with five other members of the Women's
Caucus of the Columbia NUC, New University Conference. The Caucus started in
1968 and the manifesto was written by Spring, 1969. It was also in 1968 that
I started therapy. So, for me, organized feminism and therapy began at the same
time, and, at odds as they were, they often converged and altered each other
over the years.

This would have seemed incongruous in 1968. Then I was ashamed of being
in therapy, or more accurately, in analysis. All good radicals believed then,
even as they went off to their therapists, that since emotional difficulty had
social causes, its solution was political action. And if you went to therapy,
it at least should be group therapy; otherwise you were indulging in a very
individualistic, not to say elitist practice.

And indeed, during my first few years of therapy, I could not concentrate
tuch on politics, except for an occasional demonstration. I needed to get my
living and my soul in order first. Very often my rage about sexism and other
injustices seemed remote from the despair of the therapeutic moment.

Yet I knew that the dissonance between therapy and politics was an artifact
created not only by analytic ignorance and radical blinders, but by a culture
that says there is something shameful about emotional difficulty, that treatment
is the responsibility of the individual while obviating the socio-economic
conditions that allow individuals to secure healing; by a culture which tells
the patriarchal lie that either you are autonomous or you are dependent, and
ignores the human truth that we need both connection to and separation from others.

I learned about the existence of this lie from both feminism and therapy.
Both taught me the same paradoxical truth, that, as Jessica Benjamin put it,
autonomy can be realized only in conjunction with mutual recognition of mutual
dependence. The feminist vision that the personal is political, and the
therapeutic insistence on healing through the self-~in-relation to another, helped
me to believe that therapy and politics were not always at odds. They showed me
that individual self-realization comes only through collective engagement which
itself depends on individuals, who, if not autonomous (and who can be in this
society?) are striving to become so. Volitics is collective action; it is also
personal action. So in effect is all of human life, including therapy.


Of course, I knew this as an anthropological principle, but leamed it in
my guts only when I was on the line, which is to say on the couch and on the
barricades. And I began to climb onto the barricades in a committed way only
when I had begun to gain an empathy I had always lacked. It was only by: coming
to accept in myself that variegated aspect of women's experience that Nancy
Chodorow has delineated so clearly, the ongoing and primary experience of
self-in-relation-to-other, that paradoxically I could feel sufficiently autonomous
and yet engaged with others to work in political groups in the public domain.

So, yes, Virginia, there is politics after therapy. But I could not have
come to see this from therapy alone, without the support of feminism for my social
perceptions and my need to heal. Indeed, I have come to think that only a vision
inspired by feminism will make possible the realization of the radical impulses
of psychoanalysis, and Marxism as well.

This should not be surprising since, in a sense, and as is well known,
feminism and psychoanalysis grow from the same transformation of the domestic
domain, of gender relations, and of personal life that industrial capitalism made
possible, and monopoly capitalism intensified. S8oth contain the promises and
problems of their origins. Psychoanalysis and the therapies it has inspired
grew in the cracks of the domestic foundation. Often functioning to hide the
cracks, it may yet, despite itself, widen them. Even though it usually and
resolutely ignores social conditions, therapy and its theories echo capitalism's
revolutionary promises of authentic selfhood, a promise, which if kept, would
crack the foundations of the state.

For authenticity insists that what creates it must be revolutionized. That
is, for the promise to be kept, we must revolutionize sexuality, the gender
system, and personal and domestic life. These are the social and theoretical
issues to which feminism has so far most successfully addressed itself. And
so psychoanalysis, like marxism, will have to take feminism into account. When
they do, the result will be a revolutionary theory and praxis different from
anything we now have and which we cannot yet envision. Feminism contains the
seeds of both an epistemological and social revolution.

But for these things to happen, feminist therapy must continue to grow, and
growth means change. Sometimes feminism seems not to know what it knows. It
seems to act as if the inner world of conscious and unconscious doesn't exist.
At other times, feminism behaves as if the personal is all that exists. I fear
that feminist therapy often strays in the latter direction, consequently
sociologizing the psyche and psychologizing the society. I think this tendency,
if not paid critical attention, is dangerously confusing. Not is it a solution
to wander in the other errant direction. Feminist therapy -- and feminism as well --
must see the psychological and the social not only as connected, but also as
distinct. It must do so to ensure that the domain of personal life created by
capitalism, tended by therapy, and associated with femaleness, does not become
the only life over which we have control. It is nearly that now, and as such
becomes defenseless against a ravaging state and economy which seek to destroy
it even further, by such measures as the conservative Family Protection Act
introduced by the New Right Senator Paul Laxalt to the Senate in 1979.

The only way feminism can accomplish this creative but difficult task is
to remember that the political is also political. The public world is not an
extension of the family, just as the inner world is not a miniature society.
Feminist therapy can, and must, make not only itself, but other therapies and
movements remember this. It can do so by pointing out what it uniquely knows,
that the choice is not one or the other, but both; the road to authentic selfhood


is a route also of collectivity and private experience is unique and
idiosyncratic only as part of a shared public domain. One can, in other
words, be a self only while being a self-in-relation-to-other, but one cannot
have a socially connected self unless there is a society which connects, which
structures all relations, the economic and political as well as the personal.
And a decent society cannot exist unless all selves-in-relation-to-other can
also be selves.

These have been critical remarks, but are meant in the spirit of feminist
collaborative work. And so this conference, a working conference where we can
examine critically what we know and acknowledge what we don't, is part of a
creative process.

“urtel Dimen ts an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Herbert H. Lehman
College, and an analytie candidate in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy
and Psychoanalysis, New York Untverstty.

@ 1981 by Muriel Dimen. The remarks printed above may not be reprinted without
written permission of the author.

Notes

The next issue of the Newsletter will be devoted entirely to book reviews, and
will be edited by Ethel Tobach. Anyone interested in writing brief reviews for
the issue should contact Ethel Tobaci, Room 609, The Graduate Center.

The National Center for Health Services Research has announced an April 1
deadline for applications for Dissertation Research Support Grants. Support

is designed to encourage individuals to employ their skills in the investigation
of complex health service delivery problems. For information, contact, Grants
Review Branch (Disserations), NCHSR, Center Building, Room 7-50A, 3700 East-West
Hwy., Hyattsville, Md., 20782. (301) 436-6920.

Sunrise Semester, the early morning educational television series, is presenting

a program on "Women and Men in a Changing Society." The program is aired at 6:30

am on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays in the New York area. In March, the

program will focus on medicine and health care, in April, it will cover the labor
force, and in May, it will discuss feminism and its opponents. The series is hosted
by Dr. Marilyn Young and Dr. Ellen Ross, and appears on the CBS stations.

The Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration will be held from
July 5-July 30 at Bryn Mawr College. Co-sponsored by Bryn Mawr College and HERS,
Mid-Atlantic, the Institute offers an excellent opportunity for professional
development for women higher education administrators. For information, contact
Nancy Monnich at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 19010 or call 215-
645-5173.

The Feminist Therapy Collective, co-sponsors of the conference on Feminism and
Psychotherapy, have announced the creation of the Center for Feminism and
Psychotherapy. The Center hopes to stimula-e the creation of a network of
feminists, researchers, psychotherapy practitioners and consumers who are
committed to a search for new ways of looking at therapy and at society. Contact
the Center at 317 Sixth Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, 11215.


Conferences

FEMINIST AND THE SCHOLAR VIII

The Barnard College Women's Center will sponsor "The Feminist and the Scholar,
VIII", on Saturday, April 11. The theme of the conference will be "Dynamics of
Control"; the featured speakers will be Blanche Wiessen Cook, Zillah Eisenstein,
and Cheryl Townsend Jilkes. The afternoon activities will include eighteen
workshops and a performance of Eve Merriam's "And I ain't Finished Yet", by
Anna Smith. "Generations of Women: Private Lives" is a photo exhibit by the
women of Jersey City State College that will be presented in conjunction with
the conference. For more information, call 280-2067.

DEVELOPING AND FUNDING RE-ENTRY PROGRAMS

A regional seminar on developing and funding re-entry programs for women will

take place on May 1, 1981. Sponsored by FIPSE and NSF, the conference is open
to faculty, and directors of women's education programs who are interested in

program planning, curriculum development and innovative approaches to re-entry
women. For information, contact Bernie Bulkin, at 643-5470.

WOMEN: EDUCATION, WORK AND FAMILY

On March 2, 1981, there will be a colloquia on "Women: Education, Work and Family"
in room 1437 at the Graduate Center from 10am-12 noon. Alva Baxter, Jacqueline
Ray, Thelma Simkins, and Susan Forman will speak, and Florence Denmark will be the
discussant. For more information, call 221-3598.

WOMEN AND THE LAW

"Women and the Law" will be held on April 3-5, in Boston, “fassachusetts. The theme
of this year's conference will be "Women and Justice: Blind No More." To register,
contact Women and the Law, 207 Bay State Road, 4th Floor, Boston, Mass., 02215.

OUT OF THE MARGIN AND INTO THE TEXT

"Women: Out of the Margin and Into the Text" is the theme of a conference set for
Saturday, March 14 by the Brooklyn College Institute in Women's Studies for Secondary
School Faculty. Speakers will include C. Jack Coleman, Institute for the Study of
Brooklyn, Renate Bridenthal, and Charlotte Frank, the New York City Board of
Education. Workshops will include "Meet the Authors: New Books in Women's Studies",
"Counseling Young Women", and "Music, Art, and Cultural Resources for High

School Teachers". Contact Gertrude Berger, 780-5476, for more information.

NEW _YORK WOMEN'S STUDIES CONFERENCE

The New. York Women's Studies Conference will be held at The College Learning Lab,
State University College at Buffalo, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York, 14222
on March 20-22, 1981. "Women Respond to Racism'' will be the theme of this
conference and will be a focus of the National Women's Studies Association
Conference in Storrs, Connecticut, later this year. For more information, contact
Patricia Quinn, (607) 798-6793/772-8988, School of General Studies, SUNY at
Binghamton, New York, 13901.

FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF WOMEN IN MUSIC

On March 26-29, the First International Congress of Women in Music will be

held at New York University. In addition to scholarly presentations and papers,
the Congress will include several performances of music written by women. For
information contact Jerrald Ross, Department of Music and Music Education,

Room 777, Education Building, 35 West 4th Street, New York University, New York,
N.Y., 10003.


Notes

Since we began to publish the NEWSLETTER regularly, the mailing list has grown

by over 50%. Unfortunately, the cost of mailing to addresses outside the CUNY
system, and the basic cost of producing the newsletter has also risen. We ask

that all readers of the NEWSLETTER send $2.90 to help cover a portion of our
production and mailing costs. With a small amount of support from our reader-
ship, we can continue to mail to everyone on our list. Without your help, we

will have to begin to cut back on our subscription list. Thank you for your support.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Society for Menstual Cycle Research and the College of New Rochelle are
sponsoring a conference on Menarche to be held June 12-13, 1981 at the College

of New Rochelle. The planning committee is interested in papers from scholars

in the humanities, the biological and social sciences, and the health professions.
Contact Dr. Sharon Golub, College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, N.Y., 10810.

The Doris Lessing Society will sponsor two panels on Lessing's work at the 1981
MLA. The topics of the panels are "Teaching Doris Lessing" and "Doris Lessing:
*The Great Tradition’ or The Female Tradition". Send complete papers for the
teaching session to Anne Hedin, English, Indiana University, Bloomington,
Indiana, 47405. Papers for the cther session should go to Katherine Fishburm,
English, 201 Morris Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI., 48824.
Deadlines for both are March 15. The Doris Lessing Newsletter also seeks
contributions under 10 pages. Contact Claire Sprague, 61 West Ninth St., New
York, New York, 10011.

The editors of an anthology on Latin American Lesbians welcome submissions of
all types. The anthology will include articles, poems, short stories and songs,
in English and Spanish. The deadline is April 30, 1981. Send material to

LALA, c/o D.L., 170 Avenue C, Apt. 4-H, New York, New York 10009, or call

Digna or Juanita Ramos at 473-6864.

A conference on Women and Jewish Culture requests papers for their conference

on October 29-30, 1981, at Ohio State University. They seek cross-cultural and
cross-disciplinary papers on a range of topics. For information, write to

Professor Gila Ramras-Rauch, Melton Center for Jewish Studies, Ohio State University,
339 Dulles Hall, 230 W. 17th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, 43210.

Submissions are requested for a special issue of Women's Studies to bed edited
by Ruby Rohrlich and Elaine Baruch. The theme of the issue is women and utopian
societies. For information, contact Elaine Baruch, 310 East 46th Street, New
York, New York, 10017, or Ruby Rohrlich, 303 West 66 Street, New York, 10023.

During the month of March, Women in the Trades is offering workshops on
heating efficiency and energy saving devices. To register or for information,
contact Women in the Trades, 198 Forsyth Street, New York, New York 10002.

The Proceedings of the 1980 AWP National Conference on Feminist Psychology
is now availa-le. It contains summaries of all 115 papers, workshops, and
symposia of the 1980 conference. The cost is $6.50 for AWP members and
$7.50 for non-AWP members. Send check payable to J. Libow, 2271 Cedar St.,

Berkeley, Ca., 94709.


MARCH -APRIL

Thursday, March 5 6:30 Women and Urban Communities Group meets in Room
542. At the last meeting Cushing Dolbeare spoke and
distributed a paper on "Triple Jeopardy: Lower Income
Women and Their Housing Problems’) which will be the
topic of the March 5 meeting.

Friday, March 6 4:30 SPRING LECTURE SERIES Lois Verbrugge will speak on
"Women and Health: Issues for the 80's", in the Third
Floor Studio.

Wednesday, March 18 4:15 Professor Alice Kessler Harris, of Hofstra University
will speak on "Thinking About Women in the U.S. Labor
Movement". Room 829

Monday, March 30 7:30 Feminist Health Works presents a panel on "The Crisis
in Birth Control", in the auditorium. The panel will
include an historical overview, a talk on the cervical
cap, and a lock at contraceptive dumping outside the US.

Monday, April 6 7:30 Feminist Health Works presents a forum on "Reproduction
and Genocide in Third World Communities. Speakers will
discuss sterilization abuse in the Bronx and in Puerto
Rico and will discuss the Sydenham Hospital struggle.

Monday, April 13 7:30 Feminist Health Works forum on "What is Lesbian Health
Care?'' Topics for discussion will include alcoholism
in the lesbian community, lesbian perspectives on rape
counseling and on mainstream medical care.

Thursday, April 16 4:90 SPRING LECTURE SERIES: Jacqueline Fleming will speak on
"Sex and Race Differences in the Impact of the College
Environment: Institutional Implications.'"' 3rd Floor Studio.

Monday, April 20 7330 Feminist Health Works forum on 'Women Inside: Medical
Abuse in Prison". A film "Inside Women Inside" will be
shown, and a discussion will follow.

Monday, April 27 7:30 Feminist Health Works forum on "Abortien:Reconciling the
Activist and the Practitioner". An historical, activist
and practitioner's view of the abortion rights movement.

Friday, May 1 4:90 Rosalind Rosenberg, an historian at Columbia University,
will speak on "Social Sciences and Feminism: The Early
Years, 1890-1920."

Monday, May 11 7:30 Gyn-Ecology: Female Mutilation and the Medical Profession
will be the title of the Feminist Health Works. forum.

Monday, May 18 7:30 Feminist Health Works forum on "Occupational Safety and
Health: Your Job is Killing You".


Announcements

The 92nd Street Y will present the Jewish Film Festival in September, 1981. Iwo
programs focus on women's issues. The first is Jewish Women: Independence, which
features Joyce at 34 and Girlfriends. Claudia Weill, director of Girlfriends, is
the speaker for the program which takes place on September 15, at 6 pm. The
second program on women is titled Jewish Women: Independence and Aging. The

films are Yudie and Tell Me A Riddle; the speaker is Mirra Bank. The program

is scheduled for September 15 at 8:30 pm. Call 427-6000, ext. 212 for information.

The National Association for Women Deans, Administrators and Counselors seeks
submissions for the Ruth Strang Research Award, an award of $500 and manuscript
publication. The manuscript may focus on any subject deemed timely and of importance
by the members of NAWDAC. Preference is given to emerging professionals and students.
Send 3 copies of the manuscript and a C.V. to Dr. Carolyn Wood, Department of
Educational Administration, College of Education, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,
New Mexico, 87131. The deadline is January 1, 1981

Women Educators announces their annual "Curriculum Materials Award", to be presented
at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York, March,
1982. Send one copy of materials on women for use in educational settings to:

Mary Harris, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Kansas State University,
Manhattan, Kansas, 66506. Include a one-page description of how the materials relate
to sexism, sex-role stereotypes, and the image of women and girls. Deadline: Dec. 15,
1981.

The Fulbright Teacher Exchange program offers opportunities to teach and attend
seminars abroad for the 1982-83 year. Those eligible to apply are teachers of
classics, German, Italian, and world, Asian, or Middle Eastern history and area
studies, social studies supervisors, teacher educators and administrators.
Requirements are U.S. citizenship, a bachelor's degree, and two years of teaching
experience. Applications are due between September 1 and November 1, 1981. Contact
Teacher Exchange Branch, Office of International Education, U.S. Department of
Education, ROB-3, Room 3068, Washington, D.C. 20202, (202) 245-9700.

Newsflash, the newsletter of the Women's Educational Equity Act Program, has
published a list of foundations that provide grants for women's education projects.
Check Volume 3, Number 5 of Newsflash, or write to WEAL, 805 15th Street, NW,

Suite 822, Washington, D.C. 20005.

The Center for Women's Studies at Wichita State University seeks a visiting
Associate or Assistant Professor to teach undergraduate women's studies in Spring,
1982. Send a letter of application, vita, and three letters of recommendation to
Selection Committee, Center for Women's Studies, Wichita State University, Box

82, Wichita, KS, 67208.

The New York Feminist Art Institute will held an open house on Sunday, September
20, from 2 pm to 5 pm. Members and teachers at the Institute will be present to
discuss the workshops and classes for the fall semester. For further information,
contact the Institute, 325 Spring Street, New York, 10013, (242-1343).

The Body: Matter, Metaphor, and Mores is the topic of a Fail colloquium at Douglass
College in New Brunswick, New Jersey. All sessions will take place at 7 pm in
Room 922 of the Loree Annex of the Douglass Campus. For more information, contact
Viola Van Jones, (201) 932-9729.


(Book Reviews, eont'd)

The statement of the problem Sokoloff tackles is familiar: there has been a
dramatic increase in the number of women in child-bearing years who work, but
inequality between women and men in a sex-segregated labor market not only persists
but increases. Her summary of the positions taken on this problem is based on
extensive reading and is a fair appraisal of the studies included. "Status as
attainment", she points out, clarifies many myths about women's aspirations and
behavior, butthe theory does not get at the underlying problem of how women's
responsibility for the devalued sphere of the home was structured in the first
place. The failure of those "mainstream" sociologists who focus on social status
and prestige is, she concludes, that they lose track of important determinants
in property, power and decision-making.

"Dual labor market" theorists enter into the terrain ignored by "Status
attainment" theorists, but fail to address the question of why the two separate
labor markets operate by different rules. This is where Sokoloff has stepped into
the theoretical breach. She shows how the new breed of managers who were not owners
of the centralizing corporations that came into being in the late nineteenth
century sought to legitimize their new roles in professionalization of the field.

By separating the technical ability to perform from the cognitive ability to abstract,
plan and understand the whole, they found a functional role that is spelled out in
Braverman's remarkable (1975); this is one of the basic building blocks in Sokoloff's
theory.

Sokoloff subdivides the segregated labor market into three part: the competitive
sector which is the least profitable productive sector drawing on what "dual market"
theorists would call the "secondary" labor force; the monopoly sector which generates
technical innovation and growth, and the state sector which does not create value
but absorbs it. Women are owerrepresented in the competitive and state sectors.

The lower wage earned by the less-favored female or ethnically-prejudiced workers
employed in these sectors sustains growth in the monopoly sector.

Sokoloff does not get caught up in the chicken-and-egg controversy about
patriarchy and capitalism. She demonstrates the advance in the Marxist-feminist
position showing how patriarchal organization of male-female relations provided the
material and ideological bases of capitalism and patriarchy. What has changed with
capitalism is that patriarchy has moved from private-centered to public-centered
exploitation of women, with men of all classes benefitting.

Sokoloff's book is one of those increasingly rare productions of scholarship
that build on existing theories, always moving forward in her criticism and
reformulation of the central arguments. It realizes the dream we share as social
scientists of advancing scientific understanding at the same time that we are aware of
the ideological by-products both of what we criticise and what we produce.

--June Nash, Department of Anthropology
The City College

AK RK KK KK KKK RK KK KK KK

An Advanced Workshop in the Evaluation of Sexual Disorders will take place, under
the direction of Helen Kaplan, on November 15, 1981, at the Payne Whitney
Psychiatric Clinic. To apply to attend the workshop, contact Ruth Pollack,
Office of Continuing Medical Education, P-111, Department of Psychiatry, The

New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, 525 East 68th Street, New York, New
York, 10021. Or Call 472-4344.

Women in Music is the focus of a conference sponsored by the University of Michigan
School of Music. The deadline for program proposals is November 1, 1981. The
conference will take place on March 12, 13, 14, 1982. Contact Marilyn Mason,
Coordinator, School of Music, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48109.