The Feminist Moles in the Federal Government

Book Review by Jo Freeman

The Women’s Movement Inside and Outside the State
by Lee Ann Banaszak
Published by Cambridge University Press, New York; 2010,  247 pp.

When I was in college long ago there was an ongoing debate on working inside the system vs outside of the system.  

As I watched the women’s liberation movement emerge and unfold in the late 1960s and 1970s, and read more deeply in US history, I realized that this was a false dichotomy. The “system” was bigger than the government and other institutions. Indeed,  the best way to bring about change was a two-pronged approach, with people ‘inside’ and ‘outside’  the government working for the same goal, if not necessarily with the same methods.

I wrote a bit about that in my first book, The Politics of Women’s Liberation. In her new book Lee Ann Banaszak has proven it.

A major reason so much new law benefitting women was passed in the early 1970s was because insider feminists emerged after the women’s liberation movement became public in 1970. Once outsider feminists created a visible demand, the insider feminists used their positions and knowledge to write the laws and regulations implementing those laws which outsider feminists and Members of Congress (another type of insider) promoted.

Using snowball sampling, Banaszak tracked down women who worked for the federal government and were involved in the early women’s liberation movement. She relied on oral histories of those who were dead and interviewed those who were living. She put together the story of those who pushed the feminist agenda inside the agencies they worked for and fed crucial information to women outside who could mobilize press attention and constituency pressure on government decision makers.

Banaszak tells us that her 40 informants were highly educated (63% had a post-graduate degree), mostly from middle to upper-middle-class parents, and ten percent non-white. While some of the insiders were men, Banaszak doesn’t say if any of her informants were male. Nor is there a list of interviewees in the book, though the oral histories are listed.

Some of these people were already working inside the government when the feminist movement erupted in the late 1960s and some joined it later. Some were true moles — keeping quiet about their own policy preferences while arranging for key decision makers to hear feminist views on crucial issues or even sneaking in a few changes in rules and regulations to benefit women. Others were advocates within the government, especially after agencies set up women’s programs in response to the women’s movement. Banaszak found that two-thirds of the feminist insiders worked in “women’s policy offices” at some point in their governmental career.

The range of insider views on what needed to be done was similar to that of feminist outsiders. A number of  insiders believed that extensive social, political and economic changes were necessary for women’s liberation, and others that women could take care of themselves if they only had an equal chance with men.