Activists Inside the Academy

To a great extent, the dichotomy between activism and the academy is a false dualism when applied to feminist academics. This point was underscored for me by a heated exchange that took place at a small conference organized by the Center for American Women and Politics in 1994. The conference brought together activists outside the academy, political practitioners, and scholars to discuss research needs in the area of women and American politics. One of the “activists” in attendance was particularly relentless in her criticism of “academics,” who, in her view, were largely uninvolved in politics and activism outside the academy. Finally, Virginia Sapiro could take no more; she stood and very passionately and eloquently spoke in defense of the academics in attendance, reminding us all that feminist scholars are activists within the academy. Within our colleges and universities we often struggle against sexism, racism, and homophobia, and most of us are engaged in efforts to try to correct inequities on our campuses and in our profession. In short, we fight the same kind of battles over the same kind of issues within our own institutions as those outside the academy do in other settings.

Intellectually, Mary Katzenstein's insightful study of feminist protest inside the Catholic Church and the U.S. military (1998) has been very useful in demonstrating that feminist activism not only exists outside institutions but also is present inside the major institutions of society and the state. Just as feminist women in the church and the military are activists within their institutions, so too are feminist academics activists within the institutions of higher education. Feminist scholars individually and collectively have pressed for the implementation of affirmative action in hiring, equity in promotions and pay, the availability of child care and parental leave, and the prevention of sexual and other forms of harassment. But perhaps the most significant contribution of feminist academics to progressive social change takes place in the classroom. Anyone who has taught a women's studies course or a gender-related course in political science and watched the transformation in students who have never thought much about gender certainly knows how powerful education can be as a tool for social change. Feminist political scientists not only help to educate those who will be activists and leaders outside the academy, but also play an important role in educating graduate students who will become the next generation of political scientists and, hopefully, continue to work for equity and progressive change inside the academy.

Activism Outside the Academy: The Need for Translators

While I would suggest that we need to refuse the false dualism between activism and the academy and to reevaluate our activist role within the academy, nevertheless activists and practitioners outside the university view academic feminists as of limited usefulness in assisting them in their activist work. From their perspective, our research and writings are inaccessible, are filled with arcane jargon and incomprehensible statistical analysis, and often miss the point.

In my graduate teaching, I have students read a collective interview on the relationship of feminist theory to practice that was published in Signs several years ago. This interview highlights very vividly the disjuncture between feminist activism and feminist scholarship produced in the academy (Hartmann et al. 1996). Of the participants in this collective interview, two (Nancy Hartsock and Linda Williams) are political scientists at major research universities; three others (Charlotte Bunch, Heidi Hartmann, and Roberta Spalter-Roth) hold or have at some time held full-time university appointments; three (Hartmann, Hartsock, and Bunch) published essays that were viewed as classics in feminist theory in the 1970s and 1980s; and only the remaining two (Ellen Bravo and Maria Blanco) are activists who have not spent significant amounts of time during their careers in academic environments. In short, while all of the participants have had significant involvement in feminist activism, this is about as “academic” a group of activists as one could ever imagine.

The close ties to academia of several of the participants in this interview make their observations regarding the irrelevance of academic scholarship (in this particular case, feminist theory) to their activist work all the more troubling. For example, Hartmann and Bunch, who penned highly influential essays in feminist theory in the 1970s and 1980s, both commented that they “don't read journals like Signs anymore” (Hartmann et al. 1996, 923). Later in the interview, Bunch elaborated on what she sees as a major problem with contemporary women's studies programs, arguing that too frequently, students “are not being informed about feminist practice and they are not being engaged in the relationship between theory and practice…. [I]n general, it seems that these [women's studies] programs are far from the origins of women's studies, which was to use the academic arena to deepen our understanding of the problems women face and to encourage women to be activists” (Hartmann et al. 1996, 936).

Of course, most of us who are gender and politics scholars are not located entirely in women's studies departments and programs although we are often connected to such programs; most of us are in political science departments. Nevertheless, the “practitioners” of politics are just as disillusioned with the state of academic inquiry as are the “activists” of feminism. One can easily imagine a group of politically oriented practitioners having a similar collective interview about political science scholarship where they talk about how they do not read journals like the American Political Science Review, how they learned very little in their political science courses about the actual practice of politics, and how most of political science seems irrelevant for solving the very difficult domestic and global problems we face today.

The reasons for this disjuncture between scholarship and practice are complex, and I would not begin to suggest that I have a solution to this problem. However, I would suggest one step that we could take to reduce the gap between academics and activists outside of academia and contribute to social change. More of us need to become, and to train our graduate students to become, “translators” who work to bridge the communications gap between scholars and activists outside the academy. We need to grow more comfortable operating across and between the boundaries of academia and the political world outside of academia.

In my work at the Center for American Women and Politics, I do a considerable amount of “translation” work. This work involves taking the ideas and research findings of academics, digesting and processing them, and then communicating these ideas and findings—stripped of all but the most important qualifications and much of the academic and technical jargon—to practitioners, activists, and the general public. For purposes of translation, ideas and findings have to be condensed and simplified without sacrificing their heuristic value or their validity. As Ellen Messer-Davidow, who has written extensively about how women's studies has become too distant from activism, has explained: “Folks outside the academy won't read 250-page books with a lot of technical jargon…. [T]hey can't sit here and say, on the one hand, on the other hand, on the third hand, on the fourth hand” (“Women's Studies and Activism” 2004, 2). Similarly, practitioners or activists will quickly stop listening if you talk to them about “linear models” or the problems of “essentialism,” but I have found it very possible to talk with practitioners about both linear models and essentialism, just in very different language. My experience has been that practitioners and activists are hungry for the kind of information we have. They want to know about the latest research findings, and they love to be provoked with new ideas and different ways of thinking. But this information has to be put into a form that is accessible and potentially useful to them.

Among the political women with whom I interact the most (i.e., public officials, leaders of women's organizations, activists involved in electoral politics), the academic idea with by far the greatest impact and staying power has been Carol Gilligan's conception of “a different voice.” I have to admit that this has sometimes been a source of great frustration to me, especially in recent years, and I have been known to emit loud groans from the back of the room upon hearing yet another political woman, more than two decades after the publication of Gilligan's famous book, refer to Gilligan and women's “different voice.” So much wonderful work on sex and gender has appeared since the publication of In a Different Voice in 1982, and yet political women are completely unaware of this work! My groans are, in part, a reaction to the fact that the analytic framework political women most frequently draw upon is still rooted in early-1980s academic feminism, but in larger part, my groans are a reflection of my own (and our collective) failure to successfully communicate a better, more compelling, analytic framework based on more recent scholarship.

There are, however, valuable lessons to be learned from the way that Gilligan's concept of “a different voice” has resonated with political practitioners and activists. The first is that an idea is most likely to take hold with activists outside the academy if it can be communicated simply in straightforward language. Gilligan's book itself is written in a much more accessible style than most academic writing, and I have met a few political women who have actually read the book. Most, however, have not, but nevertheless, they have absorbed Gilligan's basic argument because in its more popularized form, stripped of all references to Lawrence Kohlberg and theories of moral development, the concept of a different voice is easily understood.

Perhaps even more important, these women see Gilligan's concept of a different voice as having applicability to their own lives and the work they do. It resonates with their experience, and they respond best to ideas that have meaning for them. While academic feminism has taken an antifoundational turn in recent years, most practitioners and activists I encounter remain quite essentialist in their ideas about women, which is one of the reasons they like Gilligan's framework so much.

There really are two additional lessons here for would-be translators. The first is that translators must know and understand the worldview and assumptions of activists and practitioners to be effective communicators. Effective translators must know and have experience with the world of activists as well as the world of academia. For example, if I want political women to think about the category “women” in less foundational and perhaps more complicated ways, I will have much greater likelihood of success if I recognize that they begin with foundationalist assumptions—that is, if I meet them where they are. And the second lesson is that translation is not unidirectional. Translators have a role to play not only in communicating academic frameworks and research to practitioners, but also in bringing the experience of activists and practitioners outside the academy back to the academy so that academics can learn from those experiences. For example, I personally have far too much respect for political women, their worldviews, and their expertise to discount their essentialist beliefs as simple ignorance or a form of false consciousness. So perhaps part of my responsibility as a translator is to bring back to academia my experiences with practitioners and to ask my fellow feminist academics to reflect more on the reasons for the thorny persistence of essentialism as a mode of thinking outside of academia and what that persistence means for more antifoundationalist ways of thinking.

Frustrations and Satisfactions of Translation Work

In my years of work as a translator, I have found both great frustrations and even greater satisfactions. Among the greatest frustrations is that the work of translation is devalued within the university setting. The academic incentive structure rewards research and teaching while giving lip service at best to “public service.” In fact, spending too much time interacting with the world outside of academia is often viewed as a sign that one is not a “real” scholar. I remember very clearly being told by a colleague early in my career that my work, even my analyses of quantitative survey data published in academic journals, is not research but, rather, “advocacy.”

However, if academics see those of us who work as translators as too practically oriented, practitioners and activists frequently see us as too academic. I have been occasionally reprimanded, and more often teased, for being too “ivory tower,” for having my “head in the clouds,” and for not being sufficiently “grounded.”

I have experienced the frustration of learning to talk in sound bites, of being misquoted in the media in ways that make other people angry and/or make me seem ridiculous, or both, and of having to purchase and wear powder and lipstick so that I don't look washed-out or sweaty on television. And when it comes to communicating to the public through the media, the work of translating can be very disruptive of more academic pursuits and even one's personal life. Reporters work on deadlines, and their deadlines become your deadlines. Calls have to be returned the same day they are received, and reporters will track you down anywhere and any way they can.

On the other hand, the work of translation can be immensely satisfying for a number of reasons, including the fact that activists and practitioners are often very grateful for the assistance and information. Two sources of satisfaction stand out as particularly important. First, sometimes you can actually see that you have had an influence and that your perspective has made a difference! As a personal example, in meetings and discussions with leaders of women's organizations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, consistent with the findings of women and politics research, I would repeatedly emphasize the importance of electoral structures (e.g., incumbency, multi- versus single-member districts) as impediments to electing more women to office. But I felt as if I was beating my head against a wall with these women leaders who were almost exclusively focused on gender role socialization and the need to change women's attitudes. A decade later, I attended a meeting with some of the same women where I was urging that we reconsider the barriers posed by women's own attitudes, and all they wanted to talk about was the importance of electoral structures! That was the moment when I first realized I had actually had some influence on the way leaders of Washington-based women's organizations viewed the impediments faced by women in electoral politics.

A second satisfaction of translation work comes from the contributions to our own research that can be made by operating on the border between academia and activism outside academia. Interactions with activists outside the academy can be richly heuristic. Practitioners and activists are an extraordinary source of research ideas. They continually suggest questions to which they would like to have answers, and while these questions are not framed academically, they nevertheless can often be addressed through academic research. As an example, the research I have done on the effect of term limits on the representation of women among state legislators was stimulated, in large part, by women legislators' and electoral activists' preoccupation with the likely effects of the implementation of term limits in their states.

Practitioners and activists can also provide invaluable feedback on research findings, and interactions with them can serve as an additional, more informal “test” of research findings or interpretations. For example, I always feel much more confident about findings of surveys that we at the Center for American Women and Politics have conducted with women in elective office, or about my interpretation of those findings, when in conferences or conversations with these women I hear information from them that is consistent with my more scientifically derived findings or interpretations. Hearing firsthand from politically active women about their experiences helps to reassure me that I got it right. This, of course, is quite a different model of research from the one that I and many others learned in our graduate training, where we were taught that in order to remain “objective,” we should maintain what Jane Roland Martin describes as “aerial distance” from our research subjects (1996). And while there is some danger of what Martin refers to as “verstehenism”—identifying too closely with one's research subject—most of us are perfectly capable of striking a balance between too much and too little distance.