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From: turpin@cs.utexas.EDU (Russell Turpin)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: womyn-only space vs. men-only space?
Summary: Is the issue what is good, or what should be legal?
Message-ID: <27881A40.9220@ics.uci.edu>
Date: 7 Jan 91 06:50:40 GMT
References: <1990Oct31.185009.701@athena.mit.edu> <46160@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <1990Nov26.050132.24561@iti.org> <1990Nov30.021256.4293@cbnewsd.att.com> <12000@sybase.sybase.com> <19910102.1@mydog.uucp>
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[Our system crashed when I first posted this.  Apologies if some of you
(or all of you) see this more than once.  --CLT]

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In article <19910102.1@mydog.uucp> gcf@mydog.uucp (Gordon Fitch) writes:
> One of the important elements of segregation which no one seems to be
> talking about (or which I missed; on Usenet, you never know) is the
> issue of power.  It matters whether those who seek to gather in groups
> of their own kind have status and power in the society in which they
> live, or not.  If they do not, and if their society is competitive, as
> ours is, and if they are likely to be judged by their membership in
> the group, as is the case in our society, then they are effectively
> under continuous attack and need some kind of space in which to
> breathe, as it were, and also meet others who are being subjected to
> the same kind of attack to consider what they might do in the way of
> common self-defense.
>
> If, on the other hand, they are like the people who gather at Bohemian
> Grove, their exclusiveness has quite another meaning. ...

As with many threads discussing the rightness or wrongness of
particular acts, it has become unclear in this one whether we are
discussing what we should applaud and condemn, how we should make
rules in various private institutions, or what we should
legislate.  Hopefully, everyone can recognize the difference in
purpose between the Bohemian Grove and a rape victim's support
group, and the ethical import of this.

Things are not so clear when one discusses what we should
legislate.  Currently, whether it is legal to exclude a
particular class of people from a group depends in part on the
group's purpose and nature.  This distinction is narrow: if the
group's nature and purpose make it essentially a part of a
particular kind of business, financial, or educational
organization for which discrimination is actionable, then the
group's discrimination is also actionable.

Those who think there is no danger in having the state concern
itself with the purpose of a group before deciding the legality
of its activities are either overly optimistic or naive.  It is
very prudent to keep such distinctions in law definite and
narrow.

Mr Fitch is certainly right that whether exclusion is good or bad
can depend on whether the group's members are the powerful in
society or those without power.  But I would argue that this is a
distinction that we never want to write into law.  It is a very
dangerous precedent to have one law for the powerful, and another
for the less powerful.  Such distinctions have always worked to
the benefit of those in power, and regardless of the motives in
creating such distinctions, I suspect they will always be bent
toward that end.  Getting rid of such distinctions in the law was
a great advance for the common people.  It removed -- in theory,
if not in practice -- one tool that the powerful have frequently
used to maintain their power.

Russell