Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity (Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America Ser.) by Beins Agatha

Author:Beins, Agatha [Beins, Agatha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2017-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Dear Sisters

The Female Liberation Newsletter began many of its mimeographed issues with a letters section. Below the masthead information, which occupied about a quarter of the front page, and just below the underlined section labeled “Letters” (sometimes in all capital letters, sometimes with only the L capitalized), readers would often encounter the salutation, “Dear Sisters,” as evidenced in these excerpts from issues published between February and November 1971:

Dear Sisters, The Newsletter is wonderful.87

Dear Sisters, Working for a temporary job agency in Boston, I get the opportunity to observe many different offices, businessmen, and their secretaries.88

Dear Sisters, There are plenty of Gay Liberationists here, but I haven’t seen any sign of Women’s Liberation.89

Dear Sisters, A friend and I will be organizing a group of Puerto Rican and American women in San Juan in September.90

Dear Sisters, . . . I am a graduate student at Harvard Graduate School of Education, interested in Continuing Education Programs for Adult Women and career development for women—91

The explosion of media by feminists and about feminism in the early 1970s meant that the women’s liberation movement circulated widely in mainstream and feminist media, including but greatly exceeding print texts. Sisterhood features prominently in these artifacts, but feminist newsletters and newspapers were the genre in which sister was most often used in the form of a direct address. Despite its ubiquity in periodicals, this rhetorical trope receives little scholarly attention. Though recognized and cited, periodicals remain underanalyzed in general, and scholars most frequently use feminist periodicals as evidence to support an argument about a specific topic (for example, reproductive rights or lesbianism) or as evidence of the richness of feminist publishing rather than reading them intertextually or analyzing them rhetorically on their own terms.

In general, a mode of address offers a narrative about the speaker, the addressee, and their relationship. “Ms. Chatterjee,” “Hey you,” “Sweetie,” and “Your royal highness,” for example, reflect identity categories, power differentials, and affective valences as well as provide information about the social and rhetorical situation. The periodicals examined here are social movement publications, created and read primarily by those affiliated with feminism, and the modes of address reflected such an assumption: calling someone a sister hails her as a radical comrade who shared the writer’s political vision. The previous chapter elaborated the relational structures editorial collectives attempted to practice, and this sense of kinship was reflected in and reproduced by the discourse of sisterhood. The numerous announcements in which editors asked women to contribute to the publication imagined readers as collaborators, and the variety of voices published in a periodical as well as the frequency with which editorial collective members changed indicates that many readers responded to these hailings.

As with the discourse of sisterhood, a close reading of the direct address shows its appearance in different rhetorical situations. Letters often began with sisterhood. The vast majority of letters printed in the periodicals opened with “Dear sisters,” not “Dear editors.” “Dear friends,” “Dear women,” and “Dear [publishing group]” also occasionally appeared, but this epistolary language overwhelmingly reinforces sisterhood as the proper frame for addressing one’s audience.

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