There is by now a vibrant and contentious literature on the relationship between political change and mental illness. Does despair breed compliance, or can you fight back harder the less you have to lose? Could a shared cause of psychological suffering become a cause, rallying and even sustaining the sufferers? Must a mind unhinge itself from the social and economic order it inhabits to fully analyze, let alone try to interrupt, the mechanism? When attempting to lead a revolutionary movement, does it help to be a little crazy? Will the attempt drive you that way? How can we calculate the psychological toll of political defeat? Can the long-term, repetitive, one-step-forward-three-back efforts required for political organizing or for psychological well-being ever feel sufficient to the urgent crises they address? Will emotional healing inevitably tend toward adjustment to an unjust status quo, or can it serve revolt? Is solidarity the best cure for individual misery, or should safeguarding one’s own mental health be recognized as a prerequisite for collective action?
the kind of street-theater protest Firestone and her comrades were so adept at: the invasion of Albany’s legislative hearings on abortion; the burial for traditional “weeping womanhood” at Arlington National Cemetery; the 1969 Counter-Inaugural Coalition March in D.C. (WOMEN: LET’S GIVE THEM BACK THEIR VOTE); the notorious Atlantic City demonstration against the 1968 Miss America pageant, inaccurately immortalized in the term “bra-burning.” The effectiveness of such actions—including the risk of misinterpretation and backlash and co-optation—can be endlessly debated, but protest nonetheless can in mere moments alter consciousness, expand the field of possibility, show you how many thousand others share a sense of what is wrong, how many of those are already working and risking to fight what is elsewhere treated as unalterable. {read}