Re-Thinking Second Wave Feminism's "Sex Wars”

In August 1978, women gathered at the Berkeley Women's Center to transform consciousness-raising into action. One of several organizations that sprung up following the release of the Rolling Stones' Black and Blue album, Women Against Violence in Media And Pornography (WAVPM) soon imagined itself as a central node for anti-pornography activists across the country. However, San Francisco was also home to Samois, a leather dyke organization that viewed WAVPM's agenda as a threat to hard-won battles for queer sexual citizenship in the Bay area. Based on oral interviews and archival research, my paper explores a new approach to what became known as feminism's “sex wars.” I argue that the iconic confrontation between pro- and anti-sex feminists at Barnard College in 1983 was itself the outcome of realignments among movement feminists set in motion by WAVPM and Samois between 1978 and 1982. Furthermore, organizing by Samois and other lesbian sex radicals was crucial to pushing this conflict into formal, feminist venues where alternative views about sex and power could be heard. These settings included a series of twelve hearings on pornography held by the National Organization for Women (NOW) in the same cities where the Department of Justice's Meese Commission was doing its work. These hearings sought to provide qualitative feminist data on the sex industry, and to permit grassroots pro-sex activists to air their views. Ultimately, this testimony prevented NOW from endorsing an anti-pornography position. Finally, I will place this debate in an emerging literature about late Cold War sexuality to argue that what was at stake in the “sex wars” of the 1980s was the future of lesbian sexual citizenship itself in a feminist policy establishment reeling from the election of Ronald Reagan and the failure of the ERA.