Political Science

This essay traces the history of and various meanings captured by the phrase " the personal is political " in the United States. It begins with the use of the phrase by young civil rights activists, tracks it through into the early days of feminism in the late 1960's and early 1970's, and highlights how it is related to the emergence of identity politics and the theorizing of difference within feminism. The essay closes with some observations about contemporary uses and abuses of the phrase by those who identify as feminists in the popular sphere.

... who commit sim-ilar crimes, she does not recognize the significance of this for analyzing the gendered quality of the death penalty.2 I ... When women commit violence in the private sphere, they are breaking the rules of gender and must be either refeminized--often a ... gendering. ...

Elizabeth Pleck (1987) identifies three significant periods of reform, in the colonies and then the United States, with respect to social and political responses to domestic violence. She dates the first period from about 1640 to 1680. In 1641 the Puritans of colonial Massachusetts enacted the first laws to be passed anywhere that ruled specifically against wife beating and "unnatural severity" to children. This period of reform was inspired by concern with the religious health and welfare of the community at large. Violence in the family was considered to violate religious imperatives to sustain domestic harmony and peace and thus to disrupt the divinely sanctioned settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Religious and community interventions were designed to keep the family whole and to hold violators of the codes of domestic harmony publicly accountable. Pleck dates a second era of reform from 1874 to 1890. During this period, which heralded the beginning of the Progressive era, violence in the home became a matter of concern to the burgeoning bourgeois class. However, they understood family violence to be the scourge of the working and immigrant classes. Bourgeois reformers understood themselves to be saving women and children, but perhaps more importantly, to be instilling in the "dangerous classes" the norms and values of the more "stable" middle