When Did Coalition Politics Between Women on the Left and Right Become Impossible?
Reflections on the 1984 Indianapolis anti-pornography civil rights ordinance
It’s that time in August when we who aren’t helping kids start school hold our breaths and wait for life to begin again. So please:
When did coalitional organizing between women on the left and right become impossible?
I’m not sure, but as a feminist, there is a place and time that I remember vividly: Indianapolis, in the spring of 1984. Led by Mayor William Hudnut III, Republican politician Beulah Coughenour, and local movement conservatives, that city became one of the few municipalities where the model anti-pornography civil rights ordinance, written by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, passed into law. Hudnut, who had urged MacKinnon and Dworkin to come to Indianapolis after hte measure failed in Minneapolis, signed the bill on May 2, 1984.
Hudnut almost immediately found himself in court. The law did not survive scrutiny by the United States Supreme Court. But in part, because they had partnered with conservatives to pass the ordinance, in subsequent campaigns, radical feminist anti-pornography activists like MacKinnon and Dworkin found themselves characterized by other feminists as censors, “anti-sex,” and–-the worst slur of all on the age of Reagan–-conservatives themselves.
Few feminist anti-pornography activists were or ever became conservatives. MacKinnon and Dworkin were not among those who did, but it was not an impossible transformation. Laura Lederer, a founding member of San Francisco’s Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM), did. Frustrated by feminists’ failure to support strong anti-pornography measures, Lederer joined George W. Bush’s State Department as an expert on the international trafficking of women and children and subsequently became a born-again Christian.
Although the 1980s were years of increasing polarization between left and right in which Republican women had to stop calling themselves feminists, anti-pornography activists believed they could overcome partisanship. MacKinnon and Dworkin thought they could find common ground and partner successfully with Indianapolis's conservative religious and political stakeholders. The outcome, they believed, could be a politically diverse women’s movement that included conservatives, the poor, people of color, Christians, and men.
But what was the incentive for Indianapolis conservatives to partner with feminists, who they had successfully defeated in the fight for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment less than five years earlier?
I propose that in 1984, for Mayor William Hudnut and the ambitious new city councilwoman Beulah Coughenour, it was primarily an economic and urban development plan they had already embarked on. Indianapolis had been hit hard by de-industrialization in the 1970s, and Ronald Reagan’s economic policies had not improved its sluggish economy. Like many cities, when legitimate businesses had moved out of working-class neighborhoods, the porn industry—along with sex workers and drug dealers—had moved in. And this shift, while it spoke to the city’s overall economic problems, also—as it had in Minneapolis—primarily affected voters of color.
It also affected the city’s real estate interests. Coughenour was an urban renewal activist, a doctor’s wife, and a mother who had leveraged her leadership of Indiana STOP ERA to run for City Council. She had already spearheaded major infrastructure projects to jump-start the re-development of Indianapolis’s business and residential neighborhoods.
That redevelopment plan had many moving parts. For Hudnut, who had optimistically declared Indianapolis an “All-American City,” a boosterish, pro-development agenda required the suppression of a sex industry that had grown prodigiously and become vastly more profitable in the 1970s.
It also required refashioning Indianapolis to bring suburbanites and tourists to town. As part of this project, the city had already built a large, new football stadium to attract an NFL franchise. Indeed, a month before Hudnut signed the anti-pornography ordinance, the Baltimore Colts abandoned their crumbling city, loaded their belongings into a convoy of trucks in the middle of the night, and moved into that stadium to become the Indianapolis Colts.
In our current moment, when political polarization has become the norm, it is difficult to grasp that almost 40 years ago, women wanted the same thing—for different reasons—could work together without sharing an ideology beyond their mutual belief that pornography was corrosive.
And the rationales for suppressing pornography in Indianapolis were diverse. Anti-pornography radical feminists viewed the porn industry as a matrix of violence that served as a barrier to women’s freedom and equality as public citizens. Conservatives viewed pornography as a dangerous realm of free sexual choice for both men and women that endangered heteronormative family formation and women’s moral and physical safety.
City boosters and community organizers—again, for different reasons—often agreed that porn perpetuated urban blight. Working-class people, who often saw grocery and hardware stores replaced by peep shows and adult bookstores as their neighborhoods deteriorated, were also often not interested in the civil liberties and intellectual freedom of porn customers.
Working-class women were also more likely to feel the adverse effects of porn than were the new, middle-class feminist consumers who championed it as erotic freedom. MacKinnon’s Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), a pioneering study that established her as a rising star in legal and feminist studies, may have even given her credibility among Indianapolis’s white working-class women. By 1984, numerous lawsuits and federal studies had demonstrated that displaying porn, fondling, jokes about sexuality, and demands for sex in exchange for professional advancement were barriers to women’s economic equality. Furthermore, MacKinnon’s advocacy on behalf of Linda Boreman, the star of Deep Throat (1972), established that porn sets, peep shows, and other sex businesses were workplaces too, where women were subject to coercion, physical violence, and wage theft.
Protecting the integrity of working-class neighborhoods was part of the model ordinance’s origin story. Written for the Minneapolis City Council in the fall of 1983, when Dworkin, a visiting scholar in women’s studies at the University of Minnesota, was co-teaching a course with MacKinnon, the ordinance was conceived as an alternative to zoning. An interracial progressive community group, Neighborhood Pornography Task Force, mobilized to oppose a re-zoning that would shift the city’s sexual commerce out of a neighborhood being gentrified by whites and into nearby poor, working-class, and black communities.
To the surprise of many who were present that evening, MacKinnon and Dworkin explained that zoning was not a strategy that would ultimately contain pornography but merely shift it to neighborhoods where residents lacked political power. As historian Pamela Butler wrote in 2010, zoning also accepted “the notion that pornography must exist somewhere, and that the role of public policy is simply to keep it in its proper, nonresidential place.” That “nonresidential place” was invariably a working-class and people of color community.
In Minneapolis, where the ordinance was passed by the city council but vetoed by the mayor, MacKinnon and Dworkin learned that community activism was not enough to defeat a well-financed pornography industry determined to protect its turf. Hudnut’s reassurance that he would sign the bill if it were passed—not Indianapolis’s broad conservative base—made the “All-American City” the next stop for the ordinance campaign.
But because the courts overturned the ordinance, we will never really know what it would have meant in practice. Would it have given poor people a vehicle to protect their neighborhoods from becoming red-light districts? As pro-pornography feminists asserted, would it have fueled a return to conservative anti-smut campaigns? Would it have created the “chilling effect” that, as American Booksellers v. Hudnut argued, would have caused bookstores to purge themselves of any materials that might have made them vulnerable to a civil suit?
We don’t know.
What we do know is that the attacks on the ordinance outside the courtroom were an object lesson for any feminists who might have imagined selectively partnering with conservative activists in the future. MacKinnon and Dworkin were smeared as conservatives. Major news outlets also promoted misinformation, some promoted by the pornography industry and some by other feminists. One Associated Press story published on May 2, 1984, explained incorrectly that the ordinance “authorizes women offended by violent pornography to file complaints with the city’s Equal Opportunity Office.” In reality, it permitted civil litigation against pornographers by people of all genders and sexualities who could prove that their human rights had been violated in the making or forced exposure to pornography. And the ordinance did not ban the private, consensual use of pornography in the home, which was becoming far more common as video cassette recorders became a cheap entertainment technology.
News outlets deliberately obscured the eagerness with which politicians embraced the ordinance, focusing instead on the titillating coalition of feminists and movement conservatives. For example, following the legal debacle in Indianapolis, the New York Times reported that feminists had “joined with conservatives and others in seeking to pass similar laws elsewhere, including Minneapolis, Cambridge, Mass., and Suffolk County, L.I.” (February 25, 1986.) That was a partial truth. In every city where the ordinance had been introduced, Republicans had joined with Democrats to support the bill. But only in Indianapolis and Suffolk County, Long Island, were movement conservatives crucial to the ordinance campaign, and the version proposed in Suffolk County was so different from the model ordinance written by MacKinnon and Dworkin that neither woman supported it.
By 1986, the idea that conservatives and liberals could have any common ground or cooperate had evaporated entirely, making it impossible for feminists to work in ideologically diverse women’s communities without risking the hostility and derision aimed at Dworkin and MacKinnon.
Yet MacKinnon, at least, had originally imagined the opposite possibility. In an unpublished interview with University of Minnesota women’s studies colleague Susan Geiger done just before the Indianapolis campaign, MacKinnon speculated that anti-pornography politics had the potential to produce the diverse coalitions of which feminists had dreamed in the 1960s. Moreover, such partnerships could build a bridge to conservative women, bringing them back to feminism and pushing back against an increasingly polarized political culture.
But MacKinnon also understood the risks. “We may see women of the right speaking against pornography,” hoping to see “the mobilization of some of them in favor of this ordinance, although we haven’t seen it in Minneapolis so far. People will then say this is just a right-wing plot or an idea.” Moreover, as she pointed out, the multi-racial, left-liberal, gay-straight coalition formed in Minneapolis had not persuaded ordinance critics that it was a progressive initiative, nor had it drawn conservatives into the fight.
Yet, MacKinnon hoped that conservatives would join the campaign in Minneapolis as women and supporters of women. “If pornography affects all women the way our analysis says it does,” she argued, “women, regardless of political tendencies, may see that, which would then include women of the right. This hasn’t happened here, but it may happen yet. This may represent the beginnings of a real change in the way women see themselves and organize as women.”
MacKinnon was “willing to work with anyone who sees the issue this way. Anyone who wants to occupy the ground that has been staked out is welcome to do so. I say that knowing that this has a real potential for backfiring politically.” But she also thought the campaign might have the power to transform values traditionally held by the right. “I don’t think someone can agree with the fundamental analysis of pornography we have here and still hold to fundamentally anti-women views in other areas. So, I think it has the potential for basic change.”*
Has that path to change become impossible? It’s hard to know. But since it is far too dangerous to talk about, it might as well be.
If you are a New Yorker, save the date!
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Short takes:
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Can Congressman Tim Ryan, currently duking it out with J.D. Vance for the open seat in Ohio, win this working-class state back for the Democrats? Timothy Noah of The New Republic thinks so. And while Ryan is doing it by stealing Republican talking points, “Ryan parts company with Trump Republicans most obviously in his vigorous support for labor.” (August 18, 2022)
Well, this is a thoughtful piece. But I was thinking about the ordinance recently in a different vein: one reason it was criticised at the time by feminists I knew was the fear that it would be weaponised against feminists, against gays and lesbians, against the most vulnerable and the very people it was intended to protect. It was not written with that intention -- everyone understood that -- but it we felt the way it was written it could be used in that way (taking the basic point from critical legal studies that law is not what it says on the books, law is a set of practices and institutions... mobilised by a group of people ... )
Why I was thinking about this was, very much the same thing we feared about the porn ordinance is happening in the academy with Title IX regulations. (I was having dinner with yet another strong and dedicated feminist whose life is in turmoil because a single unhappy student reported something to HR.) And the general point would be: yes, coalition is a fine thing to hope for, and often essential, as Bernice Reagon said, but it's also important not to be naive -- and she said that too.
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