The Personal Is Political, but the Personal Is Also Personal Max Murphy (USA

The Personal Is Political, but the Personal Is Also Personal

Max Murphy

Editor’s note: One of the great joys for Michelle and me during our time at the United World College-USA has been to get to know Max. Max combines an extraordinary philosopher’s mind with enormous big hearted compassion as he guides students along the path of their learning journey.

I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a mountain town and liberal bastion. Like other, similar places in the American West, Subarus (or ancient trucks) plastered in bumper stickers are a staple of any drive. There are some local specialties: “La Llarona is my homegirl” is my personal favorite. “My other car is in the arroyo ‘’ is a classic. These are New Mexico specific but many are not. “CoExIsT”, and “Endless this war” are easy to find. More wordy, but still all over the place, are stickers proclaiming that “well-behaved women seldom make history.” This term was coined by historian Laurel Ulrich in a 1976 article in American Quarterly. The phrase gained traction, and she followed it up with a book of the same title in 2008. I do not have a strong opinion about Ulrich’s argument or article, or even about the bumper stickers it spawned. What is fascinating to me is that a phrase, initially written decades ago for a specific academic project, can capture hearts and minds enough to leave the realm of academia and enter the realm of Subaru bumper stickers in my local Co-op parking lot. This article is not about well-behaved women, but rather about another idea that I believe has left its original context and entered the collective consciousness: the idea that the personal is political.

My ethnographic context, as such, is UWC-USA, a school with students who are from all over the world, yet who often have an overlapping background in terms of political bent and cultural exposure. Among this population, it is clear that the idea of the personal as political has disseminated out of the academy and entered, not quite the realm of bumper stickers, but at least the realm of idiom. However, after working with this population for several years, I have come to the conclusion that the personal as political is not always liberatory: unless paired with tools of self-reflection, understanding the personal as political can be disempowering and depressing. Due to this, I argue that part of the responsibility of educators who work with politically inclined youth is to give them the tools and ethics they need to understand that their personal experience is just that, personal, and that political self-description is a starting point from which to detail out their own lives, not an end unto itself.

The phrase “the personal is political” was popularized by feminist Carol Hanisch in an essay published in 1970. I am not a feminist historian, but here is my blunt-axe interpretation: The history of women’s experience in the United States is fully intertwined with shifting cultural interpretations of the difference between the public and the private. Historically in the United States, the “public” is the realm of (white) men: ostensibly, of politics and business, and of labor that is financially understood and rewarded. The private, conversely, is the realm of women, and of “personal “ issues: child and elder care, contraception, unpaid household labor, domestic violence, and many others. This interpretation hamstrung policy solutions for issues that affect women via the depressingly simple strategy of removing the issues from political consideration entirely. You can’t win the fight if you’re not allowed into the ring in the first place – and if the fight you posit is determined by the authorities to be more about personal failings than structural blind spots, then blame is most easily assigned to those who name the challenges. The image comes to my mind of some portly politician with a top hat and a cigar telling a group of women advocates to “take it up with your husbands, not my problem, not the country’s problem.”

Given this context, arguing that the personal is political was quite brilliant. It picked away at a foundational logic of what today we might call a system of oppression, after identifying a very particular tool of that system. There was, seemingly, an ontological reason by which Hanisch’s needs (and, I assume, the needs of her coalition) could not be addressed via political means. In response, Hanisch went right for the ontology and pried it open to make room for political discussion of women’s issues.

Moving forward over fifty years to 2022, and my guess is that a political historian would say that we have taken

some steps forward and some back since Hanisch published her article. What is obvious to me though, is that in this time the idea that the personal is political has become ingrained in the minds of my students at UWCUSA. These students come from all over the world, from as many molds as you can imagine, and there are no complete consistencies across our student body. More often than not, however, they are interested in social issues, have grown up with the internet, and lean to the political left. From the time I have spent with them, it is clear that, though the idea that the personal is political has not yet made its way into the realm of stickers, it is cemented in their consciousness as a truism. I do not believe this is always a conscious connection: it is simply a logic of cause and effect that they view their lives by.

There are many, many examples of this. Our students are in a constant back and forth with our administration, requesting and demanding that our school do more for their mental health: mental health being an issue that falls squarely in the realm of the personal, and that decades ago was more or less off the table as a mainstream political issue. Every day, students in the cafeteria discuss the political rationales and ramifications of their diets (or their practices of consumption in general). For a militant vegan, damn right your diet is a political issue (that’s right, YOUR diet). More amusingly, one of my students (of Asian descent) had a phase of saying “stop Asian hate” whenever anything unpleasant happened to him, eliciting general laughs from the crowd. His delivery was excellent. During my first semester living on our campus, students who were frustrated at our security cameras posted a photo of a panopticon around campus. I bet some of them even understood Foucault’s metaphor. Our students interpret their entire lives through political narratives, and in some ways that is why they are here: they are both intelligent and politically inclined.

As an anthropologist by training, I am comfortable saying that they are not wrong. I am accustomed to drawing lines of meaning between human behavior and cultural phenomena; and yes the food they eat, the tests they take, and the way they feel all have political implications and causes. Of course they do. Maybe this is why Hanisch’s phrase still carries so much weight: it seems, to many, to be essentially accurate.

However, this realization does not imply direction. When our students lean too far into understanding the personal as political, no matter how true, they divest themselves of their ability to see their own way forward, and to craft personal answers and context-specific responses to their needs. There is a sort of classic trajectory for students at UWC-USA that demonstrates this: the shift from an initial promise of a community based around social analysis, to the realization there is something missing. From there, I argue, the path forward for our students depends on if they, and if we as educators, have tools to individuate from political analysis and both locate and generate possibilities for our personal futures.

I watch brilliant young people show up at our school, and accurately assess the politics and power dynamics that influence their life. They have much of the language and knowledge they need to do this: they stand on the shoulders of giants that were brilliant in their assessment, and whose assessments have made their way in digestible form onto the internet (or onto bumper stickers). Even more importantly, they have found each other, and are living in a community where they can interact and bounce ideas off of people who have the same interests. I often hear students describe that UWC-USA has a bit of a golden glow before they arrive: they expect to get off their bus from the airport and be among a wealth of differing human experiences, but at the same time be among people with similar ethics and interests. The feeling is that they will Arrive (capital intended), and somehow be emancipated from their cultural context, and plumb the mysteries of their experience with their new friends.

However, once all this is said and done, and they have lived at our school for a period of time, there is a slight moment of shock at a particular realization: despite all the understanding they are able to demonstrate, they don’t actually feel any better. Rather than feeling emancipated by having understood how their personal lives are influenced by politics, they feel overwhelmed. This is a pretty reasonable reaction to seeing that the minutiae of your daily life are beholden to entities way beyond your scope. Students express this most often in the context of academic achievement. The surface expression is classic jaded adolescent talk. “I hate studying for this test. It’s the system man, what can you do? Whatever, it’s fine.” Underneath that however is a more intimate and painful experience of overwhelm.

How can you feel comfortable in your own skin when you are a student studying at 1 am, and you have the

itching feeling that an immense system of cultural values and capital cares about the grade you get on your econ test tomorrow? When our students understand intellectually the forces that influence their lives, but are not given direction on what to do next, or what tools can help them, they feel overwhelmed by the scope of the issues they perceive.

The issue of tools, or a lack thereof, is significant. I have stated that when our students put themselves through this sort of power analysis, their realizations do not provide direction. Accurate assessment tells you what is true, but not what to do about it, or where to look next in order to go a layer deeper with your understanding. bell hooks explains this very concisely when she argues that “the ability to see and describe one’s own reality is a significant step in the long process of self-recovery, but it is only a beginning.” Self-description is like seeing the landscape around you, and the possibilities of a path ahead. You are aware of your context, but haven’t gone anywhere with it yet. To use another metaphor, maybe you have seen the shadows on the wall but haven’t taken a step to leave the cave, or aren’t actually sure how to use your real legs.

The sense of overwhelm, and lack of clarity on where to go after they have seen and described their own reality, contribute to a vague (but often severe) malaise that can hang out around our students. They feel stuck, because they can feel something is wrong, and they know what it is, to some degree. However it feels too large for them to even begin to be able to do anything about it. This generates a sense of hopelessness, or at its worst, a narcissistic validation of their own experience without any sense of capacity to change. My most painful moments as an educator have been watching students implode into a space of desperate and enraged helplessness. I am not an expert in youth development, but I am very familiar with my students. From this position, I am always asking myself what I can do, what I can model, and what my students need in order to take care of themselves, without constant overwhelm or hopelessness.

The phrase “the personal is political” implies a causal direction: the personal is influenced by the political landscape in which it takes place. This is certainly true. However I have come to the conclusion that part of my job as an educator, and part of the job of anyone who considers themselves a peacemaker, is to understand that the personal is political, but the personal is also personal. Most crucially, I believe that we must do our best to offer students a complementary set of self-reflective tools that are able to detach temporarily from systemic analysis. Tools that help students say: “I can find agency in my own growth with whatever I’m facing.” This, as far as I can tell, is the next step after political self-description. The tools of power analysis are capable of doing what they were designed to do: there is just always further learning. The difference that we can do our best to outline and influence is between an unreflective projection of one’s personal experience, and an assessment that is self-examined and contextualized. Hilariously, I think my argument is somewhat in line with another classic Subaru bumper sticker: think globally, act locally. Although I would change it to; think globally, act intimately and personally. There is a more holistic approach to the personal than intellectual analysis. So, I would argue, if you are the student mentioned earlier, overwhelmed by the political significance of your upcoming econ test, your best move may be to take a walk, or journal, or talk to your friends, or take a nap, or find whatever your own personal tools are to balance your political analysis with personal agency.

Critically, I think going inward and developing personal tools of reflection does not mean isolation or narcissism. Our students can often feel that detaching from political awareness means self-absorption, and is contraindicated with doing powerful good in the world. There is too much suffering, no time to take a walk! Even if the only reason to promote tools of self-reflection was to counterbalance the overwhelm of political analysis, that would be enough. However, this balance is also in service of our precarious world. It is difficult to foster peace while overwhelmed by a feeling of disempowerment in your own life. For those of us that work with young people, we can do both them and the world a service by providing skills and spaces for students to stretch out of the constancy of political analysis, and to develop the muscles of their own agency. ²

Max Murphy works for the Bartos Institute for the Constructive Engagement of Conflict at UWC-USA. His primary role is training students in the skills of communication, mediation, and restorative justice, and designing programs where they can put these skills to use both on and off campus. Max spent several years studying medical anthropology and has a particular interest in the way that the body expresses cultural and historical experiences, and can be used as a tool for decolonizing the mind. Before working in conflict resolution, Max worked as an outdoor educator, providing students with skills of leadership and problem solving in expeditionary settings. A lover of deserts and mountains, Max was born and still lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his partner Sam and his cat Oona.