In the past two days, I successfully defended my dissertation (“Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century”) and had a new peer reviewed article published in the open access journal Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power. The article is titled “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98),” and it is part of a fantastic special issue called “Burning the Ballot: Feminism Meets Anarchy.”
Here is how the editors describe my article in their introduction to the special issue:
“As we draw towards the end of our special issue Spencer Beswick continues the discussion of anarcha-feminist contributions to struggles for abortion access, queer and trans liberation, and challenging all forms of oppression and domination within movement spaces themselves. Looking at the Love and Rage organization, and highlighting its contributions throughout the 1990s to keep the anarchist flame alive, Beswick shows the continued intersectional promise of anarcha-feminist politics against liberal forms of inclusion and continually furthering anti-racist and feminist concerns within broader anarchism. The wide ranging work of Love and Rage shows the necessity, but also the difficulties, in expanding intersectional work within movements that continues to resonate today.
In particular, Beswick details the efforts by Love and Rage to foreground and incorporate an explicit anti-racist feminist politics as the organization grew and developed by carefully considering the interventions of Women of Colour feminists and organizers. Importantly, the growing pains of the organization are highlighted, including a critical discussion of its own internal challenges with racism, patriarchy and male domination, and they serve as a reminder of the need for continued vigilance to confront systems of domination in all movement spaces. Externally, the militant contributions of Love and Rage to confronting anti-abortion reactionaries provide lessons and points of consideration for the movements of today. “Militant confrontation of Operation Rescue was a turning point in the development of a new anarchist feminism,” Beswick argues, “feminists went on the attack in order to defend women’s autonomy and build a new world. In their uncompromising struggle for reproductive freedom, anarchists helped build a fighting, revolutionary feminist movement.” By examining the contributions, complexities and contradictions within Love and Rage “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98)” charts the history of anarcha-feminist agitation and its enduring legacy, while revealing the continued work that needs to be done in the present.”
I published a short essay, first written in the early covid days, in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory’s Pandemics from the Bottom Up series, “The Quarantine Commune” (September 11). You can also find me reading this on Youtube here.
I’m looking forward to writing and sharing more in the coming year! My new year’s resolution is to finish my dissertation, titled “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century.”
“At recent pro-choice demonstrations, we have been told that the only way to protect abortion is to vote for Democrats in November. Yet the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade under a Democratic president, house, and senate. The Democrats appear more interested in fundraising off of Roe and attacking grassroots activists than they do fighting the right-wing assault on abortion. But reproductive rights were not won by electoral means, and that is not how we will defend them. The historical experiences of feminist abortion struggle between the 1960s and 1990s offer alternative strategies for building power and transforming society.”
“On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we talk with both long-time anarchist organizer Suzy Subways and historian Spencer Beswick about how anarchists in the 1990s organized in the face of a deadly far-Right attack on abortion access across the so-called United States.
With the growth of both the above ground organization Operation Rescue, which mobilized thousands to shut down abortion clinics and the underground anti-abortion movement which targeted doctors and reproductive health offices with firebombings and assassinations, abortion access was under threat like never before. But while liberals stuck to legalistic attempts to sway the courts, anarchists, utilizing strategies and tactics from groups like Anti-Racist Action, brought a fresh perspective to the struggle and began to mobilize and build coalitions.
During our discussion we cover this history as well as what led to the passing of Roe v Wade; as Beswick argues that it was the creation of a mass, militant movement that centered bodily autonomy and freedom that forced the State to codify limited abortion rights into law. As the supreme court is poised to rule on striking down Roe v Wade, this history, and the lessons and questions that it raises, is needed now more than ever.”
The Supreme Court’s plan to reverse Roe v. Wade means that abortion will likely soon become illegal for many people across the United States. As we search for effective responses, we can look to anarcha-feminist strategies to protect abortion by building mass movements and grassroots reproductive healthcare infrastructure. This week, I published two articles about this history; check out the excerpts below.
Beyond voting for candidates who support abortion rights at election time, what is to be done? The historical experiences of the feminist abortion struggle between the 1960s and 1990s offer alternative strategies. Feminists originally won reproductive rights through mass mobilization in the streets combined with widespread underground provision of abortion and other health care. These actions forced the Supreme Court to affirm a constitutional right to abortion in 1973.
[In the 1980s-90s] anarchists (anti-state socialists) within the feminist movement rejected voting and legal reforms in favor of radical grass-roots activism. Instead of the slogan “we’re pro-choice and we vote,” anarchists often marched behind a banner reading “we’re pro-choice and we riot!”
Following the example of second-wave feminists, anarchists framed abortion as a question of bodily autonomy and women’s liberation.
Heading into the 1990s, amid new right-wing attacks on abortion rights, anarcha-feminists in Love and Rage built grass-roots infrastructure to perform abortions and provide for reproductive health more broadly. They sought to build autonomy on their own terms by organizing self-help groups in which, San Francisco activist Sunshine Smith explained, “women learn the basics of self-cervical exams, do pelvics on each other, and learn how to do menstrual extraction.”
Anarchists believed this kind of infrastructure was key to bodily autonomy and helped lay the foundation for building revolutionary dual power: radical institutions that challenged the hegemony of the state. If women controlled their own bodies and institutions, they would no longer depend on the state to protect their rights.
The anarchist and feminist traditions of mass mobilization, autonomous health infrastructure and grass-roots struggle offer alternatives — or at least a radical complement — to voting. Reversing Roe v. Wade will not stop abortions; it will only make them more dangerous and less accessible. As anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman argued in 1992, “the day when abortion is again made illegal may come sooner than we like to think. We must be ready to take our bodies and our lives into our own hands.”
As the Supreme Court prepares to reverse Roe v. Wade under a Democratic president, house, and senate, it is clear that action at the ballot box is insufficient to protect abortion. Reproductive rights were not won by electoral means, and that is not how we will defend them.
Anarcha-feminists were on the front lines of the struggle for abortion throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. They were convinced that Roe v. Wade would not last forever and that they could not depend on the state and the legal system to protect reproductive freedom. Anarcha-feminists took a three-pronged approach to abortion struggle: defense of abortion clinics, construction of grassroots reproductive health infrastructure, and an anti-state approach to building feminist dual power.
Anarcha-feminists physically protected abortion clinics from the likes of Operation Rescue, which was formed in 1986 to act as anti-abortion shock troops.
Anarcha-feminists established autonomous infrastructure and self-help groups in which people learned to take care of their own bodies and induce abortions on their own terms. As one anarchist put it in a 1991 article, “medicine is something we must take into our own hands. Because how can you smash the state if you’re still walking funny from a visit to the gynecologist’s?”
Anarchists advocated expanding grassroots infrastructure and self-organization to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to perform their own reproductive care. They argued that this would produce true reproductive freedom and autonomy that was independent of the state and its laws.
Anarcha-feminists did not appeal to the state to maintain abortion rights. They believed that the state was inherently patriarchal and was ultimately the enemy of reproductive justice. Thus, the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-98) argued in its draft political statement that “our freedom will not come through the passage of yet more laws but through the building of communities strong enough to defend themselves against anti-choice and anti-queer terror, rape, battery, child abuse and police harassment.”
Establishing reproductive healthcare infrastructure is a key component of feminist dual power that challenges the hegemony of the state and capitalism. This kind of infrastructure prefigures—and concretely establishes—a world defined by mutual aid, solidarity, and autonomy.
The argument: The anarchist and feminist traditions of mass mobilization, autonomous health infrastructure and grass-roots struggle offer alternatives — or at least a radical complement — to voting. Reversing Roe v. Wade will not stop abortions; it will only make them more dangerous and less accessible. As anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman argued in 1992, “the day when abortion is again made illegal may come sooner than we like to think. We must be ready to take our bodies and our lives into our own hands.”
Anarchist women formed the “Obnoxious Wimmin’s Network” in the late 1980s in order to build the anarcha-feminist movement and fight against male dominance in the radical scene. In 1989, they organized a women-only gathering preceding the “Without Borders” Anarchist Gathering in San Francisco. They decided to meet on their own in order to address women’s issues, talk politics without men dominating the conversation, and strategize about how to deal with sexism within the movement. This gathering helped establish anarcha-feminist connections and community that went on to transform the anarchist movement in the coming decades.
Around 150 women (trans inclusive and usually styled as “wimmin”) came together from July 18-19 under the banner of the “Obnoxious Wimmin’s Network” at the Collective Chaos anarchist space in Oakland, which had been founded by members of the Vermont Family. Over the course of two days, they hosted a series of workshops, discussions, and performances ranging from self defense and home abortion techniques to participation in the sex trade industry.[1] (Note that there was also a men’s gathering at the same time, which was significantly smaller and did not go as well. This will be the subject of a future post. Edit: Here it is: Anarcha-Feminism at the San Francisco Men’s Gathering (1989))
The first evening was dedicated to open mic performances including poetry, music, dance, and collective theater. Women gave presentations on fashion and the media, showed videos about women in the sex industry, and shared art based on their experiences of patriarchal violence. There were also multiple music acts: a trio called The Yeastie Girls “performed feminist rap on subjects ranging from safe sex to the joys of masterbation [sic],” and the Blue Vulva Underground “entertained us with rock/trash music featuring such topics as menstruation and sexism in relationships.” This open mic performance space provided an opportunity for women to meet each other in an informal setting before the following day’s workshops.
Day two featured a series of workshops dealing with women’s issues. It began with a session on self defense (both physical and psychological), followed by a workshop on “wimmins health skills, including vaginal health and cervical self examination” at which “Eden demo[n]started technique & explained how wimmin can take cont[r]ol of their health care away from the medical establishment and put it back into our own hands.” Along with a session on home abortion techniques in the afternoon, this continued a long tradition of feminist self-help infrastructure in the women’s liberation movement. These workshops led to the formation of more sustained women’s self-help groups and infrastructure in the Bay Area.
In 1990, a participant named Sunshine Smith, who went on to help organize a self-help group, reflected in the Love and Rage newspaper that “Being in a self-help group has had a very strong effect on my relationship to my own body, as well as my understanding of women’s bodies in general. Women who go through this process together develop a very strong bond. We are truly taking control of our own bodies: learning our cycles of change, learning what a uterus feels like inside another woman, and becoming intimately familiar with the look and feel of the inside of a woman’s vagina.”[2] This is a quintessentially anarchistic approach to women’s health: not relying on trained clinicians, even feminist ones, but rather taking one’s body into one’s own hands—and doing it collectively with friends and comrades.
Next came a workshop on the “intolerance of sexual diversity,” in which women discussed “ways in which bisexual, lesbian, and heterosexual wimmin can work on understanding and relating supportively with eachother [sic], as well as dealing with non-monogamy, S&M, and relationships involving more than two people.” This was followed by workshops on women political prisoners and women in the sex industry. The latter involved around 60 participants, including a number of sex workers, who “discussed how their sex work related to anarchism, self-empowerment, and non-work relationships. Discussion also focussed [sic] on the difficulties sex trade workers face in dealing with feminists who are anti-pornography and against the sex industry.” (For more on an anarcha-feminist approach to pornography that references debates in this time period, see my piece, Creating ‘New Porn’: Anarcha-Feminism vs. Onlyfans.)
The day ended with a workshop on anti-racism, which delved into “the relationship between feminism and racism, how wimmin’s perception of the threat of violence from men is related to racial issues, and how the anarcha-feminist movement, as mostly white wimmin, can be more inclusive and supportive of wimmin of colour.” This reflected a growing awareness of the problem of anarchism’s whiteness, which would become a central issue in the movement in the 1990s. The reportback does not go into any more detail on how these conversations about anti-racism went or if there were any concrete takeaways or next steps proposed.
The wimmin’s gathering ended with “an open discussion [that] ran into the night, including the topic of dealing with sexism within the anarchist community.” The reportback’s author says nothing more about this topic, and I do wonder why there was not a dedicated time to discuss this problem, since it was one of the major impetuses for hosting the gathering. The reportback ends by reflecting that “The Obnoxious Wimmin’s Gathering was a valuable opportunity for wimmin to meet each other and discuss issues of importance to the anarcha-feminist community, and it is hoped that such events will be part of future anarchist conferences.”
This kind of gathering was crucial for the formation and strengthening of a continental anarcha-feminist movement. It enabled women from across North America to meet each other, discuss women’s issues, compare their experiences, learn new skills from each other, engage in self-critique, and strategize about how to continue developing anarcha-feminist theory and practice.
[1] Unless otherwise noted, all quotes come from an anonymous reportback printed in the “Without Borders Chronicle” on Thursday, July 20, 1989. I also consulted a flyer with the schedule for the wimmin’s gathering (image included here).
[2] Smith, Sunshine. “East Bay Women’s Community Gets Rolling: Smashing scales, wielding speculums, and demanding much more than our rights.” Love and Rage, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 1990), 11.
I recently organized an online panel at the Boston Anarchist Bookfair on November 14th (2021), which was recorded and uploaded to Youtube. My own talk, which begins around 41:20, is titled “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98).” It is based on research and interviews that I have been conducting for my dissertation on North American anarchism in the late 20th century.
My talk explores the theorization and practice of revolutionary intersectional anarcha-feminism, with a major focus on abortion and reproductive freedom but also addressing queer and trans liberation, debates around pornography, CUNY student struggles, and the fight against patriarchy within Love and Rage itself. You can watch it here:
Woman holding a flag and a sign reading “Free my uterus! And all other political prisoners.” From Liz A. Highleyman, “Reproductive Freedom in Everyday Life,” Love and Rage Vol. 3, No. 2, 1992.
I’ve been working on an article on anarcha-feminism in the late 1980s-90s, focusing primarily on abortion struggle (in part in response to the new Texas anti-abortion law). As the anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman put it in 1992, “The day when abortion is again made illegal may come sooner than we like to think. We must be ready to take our bodies and our lives into our own hands.”
Anarcha-feminists were on the front lines of the militant struggle for abortion. They were convinced that Roe v. Wade would not last forever and that they could not depend on the state and the legal system to protect abortion, so their analysis and political practice feel particularly relevant today. Anarcha-feminists generally took a three-pronged approach to abortion struggle: construction of women’s infrastructure, defense of abortion infrastructure, and a combative relationship with the state. (Note that the language in this post is very gender-normative because this is the language that the feminists I’m looking at used at the time.)
1. Construction of women’s infrastructure: establishing autonomous infrastructure (health clinics, etc.) and self-help groups in which women learned to take care of their own bodies and induce abortions on their own terms. As one anonymous anarchist put it in an article called “Laws and Outlaws,” “Medicine is something we must take into our own hands. Because how can you smash the state if you’re still walking funny from a visit to the gynecologist’s?”
This meant first and foremost an urgent need to (as Highleyman wrote) “rebuild the network of feminist women’s health and reproductive resources that existed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s,” particularly organizations like the Chicago Jane Collective which provided underground abortions before they were legalized. While anarcha-feminists supported abortions provided by accredited doctors, their focus on women’s autonomy led them to draw on alternative traditions of women-controlled health practices. This includes herbal and holistic methods which women have used “throughout the ages […] to control their fertility and reproduction.” Thus anarchists advocated expanding grassroots infrastructure and self-organization to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to perform their own reproductive care. This would produce true reproductive freedom and autonomy, independent of the state and its laws.
2. Defense of abortion infrastructure:physically protecting abortion clinics from the attacks of Operation Rescue and others. Many non-anarchists took part in this, of course, but anarcha-feminists brought Black Bloc tactics and a willingness to engage in physical confrontation, and they were very successful in preventing Operation Rescue from shutting down clinics in NYC, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and in many other places across the country.
But anarcha-feminists believed that defense of infrastructure was not enough. They vowed to go after Operation Rescue, prevent them from meeting, and disrupt them anywhere they went. When Operation Rescue attempted to host a summer training camp in Minneapolis in 1993, anarchists physically confronted Operation Rescue, blocked them in their church, disrupted their meetings, vandalized their materials, protected clinics from their attacks, and generally made them unwelcome. Although some liberals opposed these tactics, anarchists and other militants handed Operation Rescue a major defeat and ran them out of town.
Reflecting on the experience, an anarchist named Liza wrote in an article titled “Minnesota Not Nice to Operation Rescue,” that “it seems like no matter how hard activists fight, we rarely win. Except this time we were victorious. We fought against these fascists […] We saw the demise of Operation Rescue in the Twin Cities, partly due to our unprecedented aggressiveness and opposition, and partly because their movement is losing, big time.”
3. Combative relationship with the state: anarcha-feminists did not appeal to the state to maintain the right to abortion. They believed that the state was inherently patriarchal and was ultimately the enemy of women. In place of the slogan “we’re pro-choice and we vote,” anarcha-feminists marched behind a banner reading “we’re pro-choice and we riot.”
Anarcha-feminists attempted to insert anarchist analysis into the mainstream feminist movement and convince feminists not to focus on legalistic, state-centered activism. They supported struggles to maintain legal abortion, but they cautioned that the state could not be trusted to maintain the right to abortion, and women must be ready to act on their own terms to maintain their bodily autonomy and self-determination. This meant taking power into their own hands.
As Sunshine Smith remarks, forming self-help medical groups and abortion infrastructure in the Bay Area “has, in very concrete ways, made our struggle against the anti-abortion group Operation ‘Rescue’ and the ‘Supreme’ Court stronger and more effective. We have learned that if the time comes, we can and will do home abortions. We are becoming physically aware of the invasion the government is conducting into our bodies. We are now able to repulse the state from our uteri because we are gaining the knowledge that enables us to control our own bodies.”
Anarchist contingent at the “March on Washington for Reproductive Freedom” (Love and Rage, 1989)
In the 1980s, the Christian Right waged war on abortion. When President Reagan failed to outlaw it, anti-abortion activists in Operation Rescue (founded in 1985) took to the streets to physically shut down abortion clinics. Using the slogan “if you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder,” they even defended far-right activists who firebombed clinics and killed abortion providers.
Operation Rescue was met by a new generation of anarcha-feminists across the country who drew on an evolving repertoire of anarchist tactics to defeat them. They confronted anti-abortion activists in the streets as part of their broader fight against patriarchy, capitalism, and the state in the late twentieth century. Instead of symbolic protest, anarcha-feminists directly confronted Operation Rescue in order to defend abortion and women’s autonomy from both the far right and the state itself. Anarchist interventions in reproductive justice struggles helped revitalize a feminist movement that had fought a decade of rearguard battles against the neoliberal Reagan counterrevolution.
Militant abortion defense became a key element of late twentieth century anarchist feminism. Anarchists announced their presence at the 1989 March on Washington for Reproductive Freedom with a banner reading “We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!” This slogan is a far cry from the mainstream feminist emphasis on voting and other legal strategies. This demonstrates the anarchist commitment to both women’s autonomy and militant direct action. In New York City, a group affiliated with the anarchist organization Love and Rage (1989-98) used black bloc tactics to defend an abortion clinic from Operation Rescue in 1990. Dressed in all black to preserve anonymity, two dozen helmeted anarchists linked arms alongside members of Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!) and AIDS activists in ACT UP to prevent Operation Rescue from disrupting the clinic.
Several years later, Operation Rescue attempted to host a summer training camp in Minneapolis in 1993. The anarcho-punk Profane Existence collective set the tone for the local response when they vowed in a widely distributed poster that if Operation Rescue came to town, anarchists would “lock [them] in a church and burn the fucker down.” While things did not go quite this far, anarchists physically confronted Operation Rescue, blocked them in their church, disrupted their meetings, vandalized their materials, protected clinics from their attacks, and generally made them unwelcome. Although some liberals opposed these tactics, anarchists and other militants handed Operation Rescue a major defeat and ran them out of town.
Reflecting on the experience, an anarchist named Liza wrote in an article titled “Minnesota Not Nice to Operation Rescue,” that “it seems like no matter how hard activists fight, we rarely win. Except this time we were victorious. We fought against these fascists […] We saw the demise of Operation Rescue in the Twin Cities, partly due to our unprecedented aggressiveness and opposition, and partly because their movement is losing, big time.” Operation Rescue soon suffered a split and major demobilization, in part due to legal action taken by President Bill Clinton’s administration against anti-abortion militants. But before this, they were defeated in the streets by anarcha-feminists who took matters into their own hands. Direct action proved critical to defending reproductive freedom.
Although grounded in the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement, this younger generation of revolutionary feminists who confronted Operation Rescue was also inspired by the group Anti-Racist Action, who fought fascists in the streets, as well as squatters in Western Europe Autonome groups who began using black bloc tactics in the 1980s. Anarchists introduced these radical street tactics to the feminist movement and proved their efficacy in the fight against anti-abortion activists. Militant confrontation of Operation Rescue was a turning point in the development of a new anarchist feminism: feminists went on the attack in order to defend women’s autonomy and build a new world. In their uncompromising struggle for reproductive freedom, anarchists offered a new vision of revolutionary feminism.
Poster distributed in Minneapolis by anarchists in preparation for an Operation Rescue “summer training camp” (Profane Existence, 1993)
Note: I wrote this short text for an online exhibit on the 1980s. It is connected to an article I am writing on anarcha-feminism in the late twentieth century, primarily in Love and Rage.
Primary Sources:
Kraker, Jan. “Anarchists Confront Operation Rescue.” Love and Rage, Vol. 1, No. 5 (August 1990), 3.
Lib, Laura. “An Introduction to Anarcha-Feminism.” Love and Rage, Vol. 2, No. 3 (March 1991), 6.
Liza. “Minnesota Not Nice to Operation Rescue.” Love and Rage, Vol. 4, No. 4 (September 1993), 1, 3, 19.
Love and Rage New York Local. “Member Handbook.” (August 1997).
“Run ‘Em Out of Town: Operation Rescue Are Coming, But Pro-Choice Radicals Are Grinding Our Axes.” Profane Existence, No. 19-20 (Summer 1993), 4.
Secondary Sources:
Carroll, Tamar W. Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Hadley, Janet. Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity. London: Virago Press, 1996.
Martin, Bradford. The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan. New York: Hill & Wang, 2012.
Tanenbaum, Julia. “To Destroy Domination in All Forms: Anarcha-Feminist Theory, Organization, and Action, 1970-1978.” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory N. 29 (2016), 13-32.
Ziegler, Mary. After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2015.
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