The personal is political leveled political and bodily experiences into a single category

Evidence

Morgan also pays a great deal of attention to personal experience: the politics of subjectivity that defined the New Left in general and the credo ”the personal is political” that has defined second-wave feminism. Morgan describes her feminist radicalization: ”speaking from my own experience, which is what we learn to be unashamed of doing in women’s liberation, during the past year I twice survived the almost-dissolution of my marriage, was fired from my job (for trying to organize a union and for being in women’s liberation), gave birth to a child, worked on a women’s newspaper, marched and picketed, breast-fed the baby, was arrested on a militant women’s liberation action, spent some time in jail, stopped wearing makeup and shaving my legs, started learning Karate, and changed my politics completely. That is, I became, somewhere along the way, a ‘feminist’ committed to a Women’s Revolution” (xiv). This passage is remarkable for the deliberate leveling indifferentiation of Morgan’s gendered experience. We see here so clearly how the category of ”experience” is constructed: the more traditionally political activities of union organizing, marching and picketing, being arrested and spending some time in jail are interspersed with and undifferentiated from the near-dissolution of a marriage, the birth and breastfeeding of a baby, abandoning feminine rituals of makeup and leg-shaving, and learning karate. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 863

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The personal is political inverted into the political is personal as feminism went postmodern — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 865; Ordinary daily experience is shaped by the political powers that rule it. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 667; People can absorb political problems into purely personal solutions — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1075 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Ordinary daily experience is shaped by the political powers that rule it. #expands (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 667
• People can absorb political problems into purely personal solutions #exemplifies (0.80) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1075
• Open political discussion blurred the line between personal morality and structural critique #expands (0.78) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1246