IF YOU TRAVEL AROUND this country, you can’t miss it: In the eighties and nineties, networking is what consciousness-raising was to the seventies. It’s the primary way women discover that we are not crazy, the system is. We also discover that mutual-support groups can create change where the most courageous individual woman could not.
If we’ve already experienced consciousness-raising (or a feminist book club, mothers’ support group—whatever we call the feminist revolutionary cell in our lives), then a women’s network built around work or some other shared concern may support the logical next steps in activism and learning. If we missed the sanity-saving revelations of sexual politics that those small C-R groups provided (and still do provide), then truth telling inside networks may produce similar revelations and give us similar support.
But there is a problem. Unlike the old consciousness-raising groups, the new networks are often seen as imitative of Establishment tactics. Some do exclude unsuccessful women instead of breaking down barriers for women as a group, but most suffer only from an image problem that comes from the terms themselves. Networks or even old girls’ networks raise the echo of old boys’ clubs in our brains. Though consciousness-raising is also derivative as a concept, its references include the “speaking bitterness” of the Chinese revolution, the “testifying” of the black civil rights movement, the support groups of Alcoholics Anonymous, and other models of transformation. Networks may conjure up the status quo.
That is, until you put women’s in front of it. And until you realize that it may be used generically to include everything from specialized national coalitions like the National Women’s Health Network or the Feminist Computer Technology Project to such local information exchanges as the Women’s Forum in New York or the Philadelphia Forum for Executive Women.
In the psychology of naming, I’ve noticed that networks with Forum in the title seem to be the most elitist, while those with words like Support Group or Caucus tend to be the least. The city-wide networks that include the top levels of many professions are also more likely to end up with status as the key ingredient, while those organized around a particular issue or institution tend to include the whole spectrum of women it affects.
More important, the most consistent women’s usage of network is not as a noun, but as a verb. It’s a process, not an end in itself. In that sense, networking is loosely knit and lateral, a contrast with the more closed, hierarchical style of such male counterparts as professional associations, fraternal orders, interlocking directorates, and old boys’ networks themselves.
To be honest, however, there is a problem with content, that is, with what a few women’s networks are actually doing. Especially if organized by women dependent on a very male-dominated profession, networks can go through painful, approval-seeking stages of assuming that Establishment opposition will surely melt if only we are “good girls”: if only we stick to the narrowest definition of work-related issues, and don’t identify with women as a group by saying a word like “feminist,” or by supporting such “unrelated” issues as the Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive freedom.
Usually, this stage is short-lived. Where money and power are involved, most “good girls” soon find they get the same opposition anyway. Even the sight of a table full of women lunching together in the corporate dining room can get a reaction from male superiors. When Mary Scott Welch wrote a description of successful networking by women at Equitable Life Assurance and the United Storeworkers, she also reported on some less-enlightened employers whose executives ripped down meeting notices and sent female “spies” to report on quite innocent proceedings. The timidity and conformity of women in some job-related networks are alarming, but that may be one inevitable hazard of organizing around jobs we depend on but don’t control.
Such cautious behavior is often condemned by other women as male imitative (by which they mean that women are seeking approval from men and not each other), but, in fact, it is culturally very female indeed. A parallel group of men would be far less likely to count on likability and approval when facing a powerful employer, and far more likely to go for collective power.
Poor, black, Hispanic, and other discriminated-against men seem better able to identify their own self-interest than are most women of any race. It’s hard to imagine an organization of Jewish media executives who wouldn’t support their own inclusion in the U.S. Constitution, for instance, or a black newscaster who would refuse to join the NAACP because he had to appear objective about racist events. Yet I recently met with one group of sophisticated New York media women, nearly all strong feminists as individuals, who undermined the pro-ERA boycott of unratified states by going without protest to a professional meeting in one of those states. And one of the most prominent women on television, self-identified as a feminist, insists that she cannot contribute to pro-equality groups, or even join the National Organization for Women, because she must report on anti-equality events. In fact, there are still a couple of professional women’s networks that are debating whether to use the controversial word women in their group names at all.
For sad if obvious reasons, women (especially white women who are seduced by access to the powerful) are the only discriminated-against group whose members seem to think that, if they don’t take themselves seriously, someone else will.
As for access, we might take the valuable advice of Carolyn Reed, head of the National Committee on Household Employment. “As a household worker,” she said, “I’ve never confused access with influence.”
These problems of networks should serve as a caution, but not as a discouragement. Carol Kleiman describes hundreds of diverse and successful groups in her book, Women’s Networks: The Complete Guide to Getting a Better Job, Advancing Your Career and Feeling Great as a Woman Through Networking. Whether they are organized around alcoholism or architecture, for women’s studies or against violence, they tend to be unconventionally inclusive of women who share that interest across lines of race, age, class, sexuality, disability, or education. They are usually trying hard to invent open structures and flexible tactics to advance themselves and their sisters at the same time.
In fact, there are real and functional differences between incumbent networks who try to guard power, and insurgent networks who hope to disperse it.
We might feel better about our networking sisters, and understand the survival value of having this female turf in our own lives, if we specified and tried to honor these distinctions:
Women tend to define power differently. Given notions of masculinity, the hierarchical nature of corporations, and the prevalence of inherited wealth, traditional definitions of power have a lot to do with the ability to dominate other people and benefit unfairly from their work. This is remarkably distant from the meritocracy that the Establishment professes, and it doesn’t lead to much democratic competition or structure. In fact, if you excluded inheritors of wealth and managers of so much investment money that not making a profit might be a challenge, most “old boys’ networks” would be decimated. I’m optimistically assuming that male entrepreneurs would survive, but equal responsibility for raising their own children would cut down their ranks, too.
On the other hand, women have tended to define power as the ability to use our own talents and to control our own lives. When we are tempted to act out power’s traditional meaning of dominance, the cultural punishments for such “unfeminine” behavior are so great that we tend to pull back, even at our worst, to the use of guilt and quiet manipulation.
In fact, women’s uses of power are so different that management consultants are now studying women’s management style as a source of more cooperative or collaborative forms. For instance, the habit of saying “Here’s what needs to be done,” instead of the usual “You must do this,” or sharing credit by name with everyone who contributes to a project.
Even our much-lamented and destructive inability to delegate has an “up” side. We may end by working as hard or harder than any of our employees, and that can be leadership by example.
Obviously, we need to learn the useful parts of the more hierarchical, “masculine” style. But no more than most men need to learn the useful parts of our style.
When it comes to content, women’s conviction that power has to be earned (especially by women) leads to an emphasis on individual excellence, knowledge, and learning. One network of high-level women already on corporate boards meets regularly for the sole purpose of being lectured by the best women economists and management experts. (They had no objection to being lectured by the best men, but found that they tended to condescend.) The percentage of female managers who return for advanced degrees and training far exceeds that of their male counterparts, though companies are still more likely to subsidize the latter.
When women work in groups or become a critical mass, instead of being dispersed through existing structures, the differences are easier to see. Hierarchies are usually weaker, more likely to be based on who does the most work, and less likely to be based on status in the outside world. (Even those few professional networks that use salary as a membership criterion usually say “should be earning”; a recognition of the fact that few women are getting paid what they are worth.) Meetings are short on formalities or the use of titles and long on thanking lists of people for working.
Perhaps most distinctive of all, these networks often state a goal that few Establishment groups would consider—“empowerment,” that is, giving power to other women.
Like an immigrant group out to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, women may help each other with public speaking, confidence building, solutions to professional problems, announcements of job openings, or lists of women-owned businesses and services to support. Considering our training to look to men for expertise and authority, it’s a victory that we try to empower each other as professionals by seeking out women physicians and gynecologists (for whom the demand now exceeds the supply), women rabbis and ministers for group ceremonies, women audio technicians for our meetings and concerts, women stock analysts for our investments, and women piano tuners, company plane pilots, security guards, and carpenters for home or office.
“We’re not lowering our standards,” said a Houston woman when challenged on her group’s choice of a woman architect. “We may even be raising them. Statistically speaking, women professionals had to be better to get where they are.”
Even the most traditional skills take on a new meaning. For instance, a retired designer has for years contributed beautifully made clothes to her congresswoman, and a Minnesota home-maker extends the political effectiveness of Koryne Horbal—former United States representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women—by helping to answer her voluminous mail.
More and more, we’re seeing the empowerment of another woman as a reciprocal gift. That’s a long way from Tom Wolfe’s classic definition of power as “making them jump!”
Even when activist networks start out as exclusive, inclusiveness often takes root as good tactics. Suppose you organized a network of all the women corporate vice-presidents in Los Angeles. It would be interesting, and the members could exchange a useful parallel or two. But they wouldn’t learn anything additional about their own corporations and, if they got help with a career move, it would mainly be a lateral one.
Suppose instead that each vice-president was part of a network within her own corporation, from women lower down in the hierarchy (including the president’s secretary) to those up the line (including the only woman on the board). Clearly, that vice-president could gain information from the president’s secretary, as well as unusual access to a board member. If she wanted to move within the company, she would be more likely to know about openings. If she wanted to move elsewhere, she might have a valuable recommendation from a member of her own board. At the same time, the board member would have gained firsthand knowledge of this company for which she is legally liable, and the secretary could have had a path to promotion and unusual access to people at the top.
This boundary-crossing value is especially high where women’s numbers are small. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 48 percent of all jobs come through personal contacts. Since we are rarely part of the masculine lines of personal communication, we had better create our own.
At the Women’s Media Group in New York, for instance, women rise at expensive monthly lunches, during what is known as the “bulletin board,” to announce jobs they need filled or tout the talents of junior colleagues. Since some women executives started out as secretaries themselves, they may have a better understanding of that job’s importance, and see it as both a step to promotion and a source of valuable advice. “Secretaries know everything,” explained one member of a university network that includes faculty and faculty wives as well as clerical and cafeteria workers. “We give them respect, support, and job mobility. They tell us what’s really going on.”
Here are a few examples of such boundary-crossing networks that I’ve witnessed:
• One corporate wife forced her husband to raise his secretary’s salary.
• One female United States government employee, on her own time and phone, called rape-prevention groups to let them know where federal research money was available.
• One very rich former newspaper publisher and one former Justice Department official—not the sort of women who are supposed to identify downward—both protested Savvy magazine’s editorial treatment of secretaries. (“My dear,” sniffed the former publisher, “they only write about how to get good ones, not about how to treat them better.”)
• Several black feminists lobbied white male legislators, and several white feminists lobbied black male legislators (all by mutual agreement), thus allowing men to get educated on women’s issues without feeling threatened by “their” women.
• A network of high-level academic women are supporting, at some professional risk, the discrimination suit of women faculty against Cornell University.
• A small women’s caucus of a big California political organization lobbied internally and stopped it from endorsing candidates who opposed reproductive freedom.
One network at an eastern university exemplified these tactical virtues of diversity. First, students protested the lack of gynecological care in student-funded health services, and even withheld their money—but nothing happened. Then, women faculty members spent months documenting unequal criteria for tenure—but nothing happened. Finally, telephone operators and other underpaid nonprofessional campus employees petitioned for salary increases—and again, nothing happened. But when all three groups networked in mutual support and not one phone call went in or out of that university for a day, something happened: each group suddenly got one of its demands. Yet the telephone operators would have been fired if they had gone on strike by themselves, without student and faculty support, and those student and faculty groups might still be trying to get their demands taken seriously, had it not been for the operators.
Finally, women’s ability to build bridges out of their shared experience often benefits men, too. The CBS women’s group established job ladders and career counseling, and now men are using them, too. Sometimes such bridges built by women are international. The Irish Peace Movement was begun by both Catholic and Protestant women, and Arab and Israeli women were meeting long before Camp David. There is even discussion of a joint statement to be made by American, Israeli, and PLO feminists.
Networks are psychic territory. Women of every race are the only discriminated-against group with no territory, no country of our own, not even a neighborhood. Even powerless men can usually point to some part of the globe, past or present, where they were honored in authority—a place to travel, if only in imagination, and gain self-respect. Within their countries, those men also have neighborhoods and bars where they can gather freely. But women rarely do.
In a patriarchy, a poor man’s house may be his castle, but a rich woman’s body is not her own.
That’s why groups run by and for women are so important to us. They are our psychic turf, our place to discover who we are, or could become, as whole independent human beings. They help us to go beyond a secondary role in the family and in the workplace—to leave the tyranny of society’s expectations behind.
They also force us to develop in ourselves those qualities and skills that, in mixed groups, we tend to assign to men.
A few hours a week or a month of making psychic territory can let us know that we are not alone. They can affirm a new reality in an era when national leadership and daily papers are full of top-down assumptions about “what the majority of Americans want,” or, for that matter, who the majority of Americans are.
But our need may go even deeper than a need for a territory of our own. Since very few of us grew up with mothers who were allowed to be powerful in the world, we often felt motherless. Perhaps in the freedom and support of groups run by and for women, we are becoming each other’s mothers.
If so, it’s a need that also crosses boundaries.
Devaki Jain, a distinguished economist in India and a longtime friend, has spent twenty years as a feminist working on family planning, health care, and employment. Though all are important, she has concluded that the most important single element in women’s progress is this: one woman-run group outside the family and outside the work force; at least one structure in each woman’s life that is a free place for women.
In India, this might be a handicraft cooperative as well as a social network, a group of women who talk by the well every day or a professional association. But without this source of confirmation and mutual support, women rarely have the confidence to use the rights they already have, much less the strength to demand more.
Somewhere in our lives, each of us needs a free place, a little psychic territory. Do you have yours?
—1982