Since academic feminists are formally responsible only to the universities, they are structurally free to sell out the movement.

For structural reasons, academic women disproportionately influence the movement; they are responsible only to their colleagues. Now a woman doesn't just wake up one day with power in her pockets and a contract in her hands. Especially for a woman, joining a profession involves a lengthy, taxing apprenticeship. This affects her commitments.

First of all, an apprentice is always under the gun. She is a token woman in a hostile setting, constantly on call to prove herself. Too, academic supervisors tend to mistake deference for professional aptitude, professional aptitude for brains, and brains for souls. Evaluating the first, they manage to judge the last. So to the apprentice it seems that her, her intellect, her very worth are under constant surveillance. With such things at issue, she feels she can not afford to relax. Unsuppressed desires for naps indicate basic depravity. She is always accountable for the way she spends her time. And Goddess help her if she fritters away her hours in non-academic pursuits, e.g., political movements.

Second, an apprentice has trouble learning the ropes, since the most important job requirements are formal. Theoretically she is a free agent who exerts herself, not because her grade depends upon a certain mode of endeavor, but because her soul requires the stimulation her efforts supply. She needs the vistas opened to her by mastering the (sexist) literature on mating behavior. As production norms are informal, she learns to second guess her superiors, and to toe the line without being told. She internalizes their norms--many of them sexist--or she doesn't make it.

Finally, joining a profession takes many years. The longer she's been an apprentice, the higher a woman's investment; naturally she wants a return on it. And the stakes are high. A university appointment is one of the more lucrative and pleasant jobs open to women. The apprentice need only leave her carrel to see how far she might fall. Failure at a late date can mean she loses everything; a lot of goodies ride on success. So she is leery to jeopardize her operator's license.

But in order to get and keep her credentials, she must secure her superiors' esteem. Psychologically and materially her position depends upon following the informal norms they set. An academic woman does not lightly risk offending her colleagues.

Their access to institutional resources, combined with the formal and informal pressures on them to keep their colleagues' approval, makes academic feminists cautious and conservative. they hesitate to board any train which they don't know carries gravy, or at least offers a safe ride. This affects the way they discuss the Woman Problem.

Though they are credentialed thinkers, academic feminists rarely research new topics or develop new ideas on the gender problem. Rather, they trail in the movements wake: They examine issues which some faction has already introduced, explored, and substantiated. Watching the faction defend it's case and attract support, they have time to guess how their colleagues and the press might react if they themselves mentioned the problem. Only when it becomes clear that the faction's stand is viable do academics adopt the issue (without acknowledging movement inspiration, naturally).(3)

And their participation adds precious little to the discussion. Mainly, academics claim ground a faction has already secured. For instance, the movement's civilian branches started talking about rape over two years ago [in 1970-71]. Academic feminists objected then, on grounds that the topic was flamboyant and would alienate people. Thanks to the movement's tenacity, though, it is now pretty obvious that rape is a serious problem, better explained as applied sexism than as a weird deviation by deranged criminals or repressed nymphomaniacs who "ask for it." And now it seems a veritable epidemic has struck academic women: everyone's studying rape. As if the movement discussion never occurred, however, these studies invariably begin at the ABCs. How many rapes really take place? Who rapes whom where? Are rapists normal? What constitutes a psychological profile of rape victims?--in other words, is rape a serious problem? And we attribute it to deranged criminals or repressed nymphomaniacs?

Hackneyed questions like these are guaranteed to produce no new insights. Academics say they supplant unsubstantiated movement rhetoric with correct, compelling analyses. But we defy anyone to discern in a random selection of academic feminist's work--say on sexuality, since the rape literature hasn't been published yet--more intellectual merit than movement essays of several years ago exhibited.

Not that academics merely plagiarize movement writings: they don't. It might be better if they did. For in order to make an analysis academically respectable, they tear the guts out of it. Take socialization, for instance. The thesis that cultures train women to shuffle is now popular with academics. Originally the movement linked sexism and socialization to illustrate three simple points. First, male dominance is socially, not biologically, caused. Second, it affects all areas of life even infancy. Third, it's eradication requires a major social overhaul, not minor reforms of single institutions. That was the context in which the movement began discussing socialization.

Academic feminists, however, attempt merely to demonstrate sexist socialization occurs. So they produce swarms of content analyses on "The Negative Image of Women in...." "Daytime TV soap operas frequently depict women in subservient roles (see VIGNETTES OF ACADEMIC WOMEN above). So do academic texts (see MOVEMENTS above). So do children's games (see VIGNETTES OF ACADEMIC WOMEN above). Yes, socialization indeed denigrates women (see MOVEMENTS above)." Period. Indoctrination, once considered a symptom, has now become the disease. This socialization-as-root-cause thesis leads not to the indictment of institutions or male domination, but merely to platitudinous calls for changing the image of women. And few, nowadays, oppose that.

The marriage issue also exemplifies academics' bowdlerizing tendencies. For a long time, academic feminists publicly disputed movement theories that connected sexism and marriage. Conjugal matters, according to academics, were not suitable topics for discussion among polite feminists. Job discrimination, yes; hubby, no. But the movement itself has advanced beyond the early theories. Currently factions debate the way marriage structurally affects women, and the nature of this relationship to other institutions. And now academic feminists at last acknowledge a connection between marriage and sexism.(4) But their discussions focus on the possibilities of personally liberated (heterosexual) relationships, marital contracts, and househusbands. Thus they water down the issue. It becomes a question of individual solutions, not structural analyses.

Given academic feminists' cannibalistic tastes, one might think they would swoon in ecstasy every time the movement opened another can of worms. They don't. Whenever some faction raises a new issue, they object. "You don't have enough evidence to support that. Take a course in methodology, see what Toynbee has to say. Synthesize Rousseau's, Freud's, Woolf's, and Benedict's comments on gender. Any woman can." Or, more succinctly, "This time you've gone too far." These admonitions are not politically neutral, since in lieu of proper proof, "until more conclusive data appear," and unless the faction wins, academics accept the official version of events. Rather than uphold movement assumptions and explore the frontiers of its issues, they move in only when it has secured an area, and tidy things up beyond recognition.

Academics maintain that their tardiness and fastidiousness help movement theory. They claim to replace it's subjective political bias with objectivity and facts. They're wrong, of course: as we argued earlier, once a movement exists, all movement-related stands are political. What academics do, without saying so, is change the politics of the issue. And the results conform more closely to status quo politics. Thus abortion, which academic feminists once found too hot to handle, is now supported as a means of population control: a less blasphemous defense than the movements demand that women control their own bodies.

For not all brands of politics equally displease the university powers-that-be. It is the relative lack or diminution of controversy which marks a position as apolitical (and thus acceptable) to academic women.. Four years ago [in 1969], for instance, academic feminists opposed the idea of hiring women qua women. "Quotas? My God! How political! They would ruin everything the university represents! Hiring should be based on individual competence." But now that HEW suggests a quota system, academic feminists militantly insist a certain proportion of jobs go to women. Fierce. These days academic feminists are distressed by the academically unpopular suggestion that an applicant's resume include his/her views on the Woman Question. "Establish political employment criteria? We can't back that." Similarly, academic women once objected to movement use of the word "oppression." They found it rhetorical and preferred "discrimination." But now that the term "oppression" has become commonplace even in the universities, academic women use it all the time. Thus what they consider apolitical (and defensible) varies with the state of consensus among their peers.

Academic feminists select issues which no longer agitate the movement. They water down the terms, change the politics, and avoid controversy. Given the movement's current needs, these choices make their work on women almost useless. This problem doesn't bother them unduly; they don't aim for a movement hearing.(5) Rather, they address an unfriendly professional audience. The time lag, the bowdlerization, the altered but unannounced politics, the search for consensus can all be traced to the necessity of academic feminists' defending their work before their colleagues: their main "target population." And their colleagues are a hostile if ignorant lot. The optimal response to an antagonistic, uninformed audience is, "That's a stupid position and I won't waste my time discussing it." or "You don't know what you're saying, fool. Go do your homework and then we'll talk." But academic women have to take colleaguial objections seriously, which means they have to defend themselves on their attackers' terms. Hence the mushing around.

With respect to the movement, however, academics remain powerful. Because their views receive publicity, their caution and conservatism retard it. It must try to recoup the target population, answering spurious academic-inspired objections to old theses, rather than developing their complexity. Simultaneously, factions must defend new ideas against the academic dislike for innovation. And meanwhile, publicly accusing "lay" feminists of damaging the cause with emotional excesses, academics have the resources to define themselves as the real movement.

Academics can easily pass off their platitudinous studies as the only movement theorizing. Now, people need conceptual tools to understand their situation; they need some information on a movement to evaluate it. If academic feminists supply most of the tools and information to the movement's target population, that population won't necessarily accept academic views. No matter how tightly a milquetoast group controls media access, it can't brainwash all of the people all of the time. But its effect is to discourage the development of a base for more thoroughgoing protest.

Academic feminists are better placed than other women to delineate the movement issues and solutions. They also have the resources to set up action organizations. Consequently, they can channel the energies of many people who seek ways to implement a desire for change.

But academics tend to equate gender advancement with self-advancement. They particularize general movement programs into planks which specifically benefit them. These particular demands are then peddled as if they were the original platform. The movement calls for more information on women. Using this principle, academic women publish "new" anthologies (containing many articles which have been around for years) and pocket the profits; they also push women's studies programs staffed by professionals (a most useful particularization, given the tight academic job market). The movement attacks sexism on the job. So academic women publicly protest that university secretaries don't respect them enough.

The ease with which such translations are made is striking, since often what would benefit academic women would harm others. For example, academics push the Equal Rights Amendment in the name of Women's Liberation, despite the likelihood that the ERA, unless rephrased, will destroy protective legislation. Protective legislation with all it's flaws, does protect women's working conditions a bit. Extending it to men would protect women's conditions more. But academic women don't have to worry about working conditions. Their problem is hiring and promotion discrimination. And here the ERA, even in the present form, may help out. to illustrate further: some academic women advocate a half-time hiring principle. This, they say, would give people more free time to be Human. Now, precedent suggests that women workers might be restricted to half-time jobs under such a plan. And part-time female employees could lose the rights which federal legislation on full-time workers safeguards (e.g., sick leave, minimum wage). A half-time job demand hardly serves women who work because they must and who have trouble finding adequately high-paying jobs. This doesn't give an academic woman sleepless nights. Even if she obtained only half-time jobs, one can manage on $6000/year or more supplementary income,(6) and there is something to them with benefits to all women, whether or not the two conflict.

Academic feminists legitimize their particular demands with general movement principles. They are also certified intellectuals--and they have political power. So they can force the movement to support them politically, without themselves having to return the favor. For whoever fights them appears anti-intellectual and pro-sexist. Take movement feminists' opposition to employment discrimination. "Here's your chance," she tells the movement feminists. "Time to put your bodies on the line for our common cause." If they simply don't show, they come off churlish, hypocritical, and irresponsible. Should they demand to evaluate her work first, she accuses them of making intellectual judgments on the basis of political criteria--i.e., of anti-intellectualism. Or suppose they decide to tell her that they object to her particularizing, that they don't want just any woman, they want committed allies. She replies that the big demands come first: the immediate necessity to get women into the system; afterward we'll worry about which women we happen to prefer. If they fight her at this level, they seem to oppose better jobs for women. She also may call her the prototypical ally. And if they say that they had something....well, a little more radical in mind, she accuses them of dogmatism and divisiveness. Precisely because she monopolizes the principles, counter- charges of unsisterliness, hypocrisy, irresponsibility, anti-intellectualism, and particularizing rarely stick. She dictates the terms of solidarity; movement feminists must either go along or appear to oppose feminism itself. They end up supporting her just because she's female. Thus academic feminists commandeer movement aid.

It is easy for academic feminists to identify their private ends with the gender's needs, their theories with feminism. They possess the structural power to broadcast the equations widely; the movement lacks the resources to object. Now, it may be argued that accusing a handful of women of subverting a movement is an unduly conspiratorial view of things. But academic feminists are not a small group of isolated individuals. They are a cohesive group operating in large institutions with access to power. The universities underwrite them. Their numbers may be small, but their structural advantages are great.

Academic women command politically useful resources unavailable to non-academic women. This gives them disproportionate power in defining the movement. They are not, however, accountable to the movement. There is a name for such a group: an elite.

Without the existence of a movement which potentially taps massive discontent, the establishment would have no use for female academics. They depend on the movement's existence but cool it down and get rewarded for doing so. They peddle conservative platitudes as movement analyses. They use the movement's momentum to advance their own goals. There is a word for such behavior: opportunism.

Academic feminists can no longer be allowed to deny the politics of their actions, or to evoke movement forbearance with slogans like "sisterhood" and "unity." Women's Liberation can no longer afford to ignore, under the policy of laissez-faire tolerance, the distribution of power within the movement's name. The movement should compare its situation with that of academic feminists and act accordingly. There is a phrase for such action. And the phrase is, "Squash the toadies." --End