Making Coalitions Work: Solidarity across Difference within US Feminism

Abstract

The importance of working in coalition, that is, the process through which groups that define themselves as different work together politically, either long or short term, in the service of some mutually valued end, is a frequent refrain in the writing of feminists of color. In the twenty-five years since Bernice Johnson Reagon addressed the West Coast Women's Music Festival on the importance of coalitions, many feministsboth scholars and activistshave argued for the centrality of coalitional strategies for feminist social change. Feminist coalition work has been variously described as an imperative, an opportunity, and an inevitability, given that difference is culturally constructed and all groups contain heterogeneity.1 Yet relatively little work has looked at the way these theoretical premises play out in activists' political work. This article aims to bring our models of theorizing coalition into dialogue with practice by listening to activists' own reflections on their work. In her interview, welfare rights activist Marion Kramer recounted the story of how7 several organizations serving the interests of poor and homeless people met at a summit in Philadelphia in 1989. Funded only by a small grant allowing homeless people to make the trip, those who attended strategized ways to take a local campaign called Up and Out of