The fiftieth anniversary of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) provides a good occasion for reflecting on the history of women and feminist philosophy in the society. I'm not in a position to provide anything like a real history. But I can offer some memories and impressions of my own experiences. These will of necessity be personal and idiosyncratic. But they might nevertheless shed some light on certain historical events while also revealing something about how the women and feminist philosophers of my generation encountered the society's practices and how some of us sought to change them.I belong to the generation of women and feminist philosophers who did their graduate work in the 1970s, the generation who sought to enter the profession in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We had a tough row to hoe. In graduate school, many of us labored alone as the sole woman in the cohort or class. And many of us pursued our work in departments that had not a single woman professor, let alone one interested in feminist philosophy. This was as true for those of us in Continental departments as for those in more mainstream analytic programs. In fact, I have the impression, though not the data to support it, that the situation may have been worse in Continental departments, which inherited or mimicked an Old World European style, more overtly patriarchal and authoritarian than that characteristic of analytic departments. In such departments, as in analytic departments, female graduate students had to do our work in what I can now see, with the benefit of hindsight, were “hostile climates.” It was often assumed that we didn't belong, weren't serious, and could never become real philosophers.My own experience, it must be said, was rather different. I did my graduate work in the 1970s at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Unusually, the department's faculty roster included two senior tenured women, Virginia Held and Gertrude Ezorsky. Granted, they didn't speak to each other. And both were analytic philosophers. But both had serious interests in left-wing political philosophy, while Virginia was developing an interest in feminist philosophy. More important, both sent a clear message, by their very presence in the department, that a female philosopher was not an oxymoron. In addition, this was a time when CUNY had a significant cohort of women Ph.D. students, including Eva Kittay, Diana Myers, Judith Lichtenberg, Sue Weinberg, Marcia Lind, Bea Banu, and me. Comprising some of the strongest students in the program, this group represented a critical mass. As a result of our numbers, the department's ethos was relatively woman-friendly. Not only did we women students enjoy considerable legitimacy, but most of us went on to have careers in the discipline, and at least four have done work in feminist philosophy.But CUNY was the exception, not the rule. In the 1970s, most female philosophy graduate students had to fight for the standing that their male counterparts were granted as a matter of course. Facing skepticism, if not outright hostility, women had to fight for the right to do philosophy, to be taken seriously. And we had to fight that battle over and above all the myriad “normal” difficulties that all graduate students faced. Quite a few talented women I knew did not make it through.Those of us who did faced bleak conditions once we left graduate school and embarked on teaching careers. In those days, the job market still functioned largely as an old boy network. Very few searches were genuinely open, and even fewer were open to women. Those of us who were lucky enough to get jobs—and it was in one respect easier than now, insofar as the market was better—mostly found ourselves once again the only woman in the department.I can best describe my experience by paraphrasing Art Spiegelman: it was upon leaving graduate school that my troubles in philosophy truly began. I taught at three universities before moving to the New School for Social Research in 1995: State University of New York–Binghamton, the University of Georgia, and Northwestern University. One of these (Georgia) was a largely analytic department; another (Northwestern) was Continental, with very deep ties to SPEP; while the third (Binghamton) was mixed. But there were nevertheless real similarities. In each case, I was the only woman in the Philosophy Department—although Northwestern later hired one more while I was still there. In one case (I leave it to you to guess which), the departmental climate was overtly misogynistic. In the others, the ethos was superficially welcoming but founded on a set of “male-as-norm” assumptions that served to marginalize any woman who landed there. Normal practice included graduate program recruitment brochures that used the generic he; private, off-campus, invitation-only philosophical soirees from which women faculty and students were excluded; offhand remarks by male professors in seminars and faculty meetings to the effect that fellowship money was wasted on women; undergraduate and graduate students who refused to accept the authority of a female professor; and sexual and gender harassment. To be in a department where this sort of thing was “merely” implicit, and not a matter of open hostility, was the best one could hope for in those days.Things became especially dicey when one was teaching or practicing feminist philosophy. The latter was dismissed as ideology (as opposed to “real philosophy”) and made the butt of jokes. Again, this was just as true in Continental as in analytic departments—perhaps even more so. Consider the following three incidents, all tied to my repeated (and repeatedly failed) efforts to hire another feminist philosopher in a celebrated Continental department with deep ties to SPEP. In one case, a distinguished pioneer of feminist political philosophy was rejected out of hand when the chair held aloft a letter from a senior member who was away on leave; waving the letter Joe McCarthy–style, the chair claimed that it contained damaging information about the candidate's personal integrity, information he was unfortunately not at liberty to disclose. In a second case, one of the most influential and widely read Continental feminist philosophers in the country was voted down when a colleague made an elaborate show of covering his eyes, opening her landmark book to a random page, and pointing his finger at a random passage; reading aloud, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, he “demonstrated” that the work was sheer gobbledygook. As disheartening as these incidents were, my colleagues' responses to my protests were even worse: All but one saw nothing wrong with the behaviors in question; and several blamed me for disrupting the meetings. But my protests led to progress of a certain sort. My third attempt went bad in a more subtle way, as colleagues who had learned to avoid public displays of misogyny used backdoor channels to the dean to block a hire for which they had publicly voted. Plus ça change….As these incidents suggest, the rejection of feminist philosophy could be every bit as virulent in Continental as in analytic departments. As a result, women doing Continental feminist philosophy faced multiple burdens. First, we faced all the difficulties of newly hatched Ph.D.s struggling to make our way in the profession. But in addition, second, many of us faced primary care responsibilities beyond those our male counterparts were likely to assume. Third, we faced the sort of gender-based hurdles and hostile climates mentioned above. Fourth, we encountered difficulties stemming from the fact that we were doing Continental philosophy in an analytically dominated profession. Fifth, we faced the scorn (open or hidden) of male colleagues for whom the expression “feminist philosophy” was a contradiction in terms. And this is to say nothing of the further burdens that fell on those of us who were women of color; members of sexual, religious, and/or ethnic minorities; and/or women from working-class backgrounds. The result was a heavy load of layered burdens, asymmetric to those faced by our male counterparts.There was also what I call “the ruse of collegiality.” I mean the effortlessness with which male colleagues interpret women's unease in such environments, not to mention our protests against them, as signs of our “personality problems.” Here's an example from my history, a story that I've never before told in public. A few months after I was awarded tenure, in the late 1980s, I received a large envelope in the campus mail containing materials from my dossier. Most were items I had submitted myself, which were being returned to me. But the packet also contained a document I should not have received, namely, the department's confidential letter recommending me to the Tenure Committee. Naturally, I read it straightaway. After happily making my way through pages arguing that my research and teaching met the standards for tenure, I came upon a section that made my heart stop. Under the heading “Service” was a discussion of my shortcomings as a colleague: I was conflictual, unpleasant, uncollegial, and difficult to work with—I can't remember whether they actually used the word shrill, but that was the general idea. The most galling part was that, having pilloried me, the signatories (who were themselves not exactly poster boys for mental health, let alone collegiality) went on to pat themselves on the back for their ability to look beyond my personality problems and to recommend tenure despite them. In the years since, I have often wondered how that letter found its way to me. Of course, it could have been a simple mistake. But I sometimes suspect that a secretary in the Dean's Office, who knew me and was privy to some of the department's gender troubles, may have intentionally included it in the packet.Although I did in the end get tenure, not everyone in my situation was so lucky. On the contrary, many talented women in Continental feminist philosophy were driven out of the profession. Others hung on but were shunted onto career paths that undervalued their actual gifts and achievements. Even some of the most well-known and highly regarded feminist philosophers of my generation found it necessary to leave philosophy for other disciplines in order to get tenure: Judith Butler had to move to rhetoric, Seyla Benhabib had to move to government, and Iris Young had to move to public policy and political science.Each of us who did survive has her own story about where and how she found the resources (both inner and outer) to persevere in the face of long odds. I've already mentioned one chapter of my story: the CUNY chapter, which gave me a sense of philosophical entitlement. Or rather, it reinforced the sense I had first acquired as an undergraduate major at Bryn Mawr College, which was then (and still is) a bastion of female intellectuality and bluestocking feminism. In fact, it was only in retrospect, many years later, that I came to realize how unusual my formation really was. I'm still amazed at the sheer dumb luck I had to have studied philosophy in such exceptional woman-friendly environments and thus to have been spared the agonies of self-doubt that plagued so many of my female friends and colleagues in the profession. And I've come to see how important it is to spare others those agonies, by building department cultures that nurture and empower female graduate students and junior colleagues. Equal opportunity demands nothing less.Well that's one side of the story. Now here's the other side: the good and hopeful side. We did actually succeed in creating a body of thought of genuine significance, even world-historical significance, I would say. Of course, feminist philosophy still has nowhere near the legitimacy and institutional presence it deserves. Yet the body of thought itself is truly remarkable. It offers a deep interrogation of the hidden gendered structures that ground all manner of philosophical thought: from metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of language to aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, and history of philosophy. Probing each of those fields, feminist philosophers have uncovered the gender biases, asymmetries, and silences. And we have constructed alternatives. Continental feminist philosophy, especially, was (and is) at the forefront of this historic achievement.Thus, the work we did was both revolutionary and stigmatized. How did we do it? A good part of the answer is second-wave feminism—and the broader democratizing New Left ethos from which it sprang. We drew strength from, indeed were lifted by, a great historical wave of radical energy that was sweeping across the world. Borne along on a giant surge of utopian longing and militant commitment, we felt emboldened, capable of standing up for ourselves and making history. Thus, the feminist movement itself was our most important resource. Most of us saw ourselves as the “academic wing” of the broader movement. We drew on, and tried to contribute to, the latter's energy. In those days, there was less separation than now between academic feminism and feminist activism. Ideas flowed back and forth quite easily, as we tried to give conceptual and theoretical form to insights that were generated via consciousness-raising and other extra-academic practices. Many of us tried to develop forms of writing and modes of address that could speak simultaneously to our philosophical colleagues and to broader feminist counterpublics. And of course, we had one another. We found inspiration and encouragement in the Society for Women in Philosophy and eventually in women's caucuses and networks within SPEP, as I shall explain.First, however, I need to say for the record that I am tremendously proud to have been a part of the creation of Continental feminist philosophy. More important, I am deeply grateful to have had the luck to come along at this point in history and to find the sisters and comrades with whom to undertake this project and share this work. The opportunity to situate my work in the context of second-wave feminism gave it a depth and significance it could never have otherwise had.Nevertheless, this, too, must be said: For all its historical importance, feminist philosophy never succeeded in transforming the discipline of philosophy to anywhere near the extent that our counterparts in other humanities disciplines did theirs—I'm thinking of history, literature, anthropology, and classics, all disciplines in which the problematic of gender has been successfully mainstreamed. Our discipline has proved much more resistant to transformation than any of those. Feminist philosophers were forced to take a more separatist path than feminists in those disciplines. As a result, feminist philosophy became a bit of a ghetto, albeit the most vibrant ghetto in the profession. In my view, the effects of our ghettoization are unfortunate—unfortunate for the larger philosophical world, which was deprived of our insights, but also unfortunate for us. Too often, we have found ourselves talking only to one another, reading only one another, citing only one another. Of course, we differ among ourselves on this point. Some are more or less content to be cut loose and spared the need to communicate with a retrograde mainstream. Others, like me, have experienced the isolation as deformation and a loss, albeit not one of our own making. It's possible that such differences are generational. Could it be that the women of my generation were more inclined to directly engage (indeed to attack) the nonfeminist authorities (the “big men”) in our fields? That certainly was (and is) my own MO. But whatever one says about that, our ghettoization remains problematic. As I see it, feminist philosophy should not be one disciplinary subfield among others but, rather, a perspective that challenges, and ultimately transforms, philosophy as such.This brings me, finally, to SPEP. The society's evolution since the bad old days of the 1980s, when I first participated in it, is quite remarkable. Imagine the large hotel ballroom where the fiftieth anniversary session was held, or recall it, if you were there. Picture a packed audience that includes large numbers of women and people of color. Now begin mentally subtracting one woman and one person of color after another, until virtually none remain. What you're left with is a reasonably accurate picture of what you would have encountered at a SPEP meeting in the early 1980s.At SPEP meetings, too, I routinely found myself the sole woman in the room, at best one of two or three. Feminist philosophy was not on the radar screen. In fact, there was virtually no critical social theory, no Marxism, no poststructuralism, no critical “race” theory. There was only, as the society's name proclaimed, phenomenology and existential philosophy. And even these were sanitized. There was nary a mention of Simone de Beauvoir or of Sartre's late Marxian work.SPEP's brand of phenomenology and existential philosophy was, in a word, depoliticized and patriarchal. The informal culture, as I experienced it, was authoritarian and woman-hostile. Equally problematic were the society's governance structures. There were two unelected directors, one of whom was effectively Director for Life. They, or perhaps he, exercised total control over the society's meetings and publications. There was no program committee, no blind review of submissions. The directors simply selected the papers and set the program as they liked. They were accountable to no one. It was at best an old boys' network, at worst a private fiefdom.The effect was to preclude any possible foothold for feminist philosophy. Also precluded was any chance for women to participate fully, on a par with men. And this really mattered for women in Continental philosophy—whether or not they did feminist work. After all, SPEP effectively was Continental philosophy in the United States. To be excluded from or marginalized in SPEP was to face a kind of “philosophical death.” There was simply nowhere else to go.All that changed as a result of a remarkable series of events in the mid-1980s, events in which I participated. The transformation began in 1984, when a motion to establish a Committee on the Status of Women was adopted at the annual business meeting in Atlanta. Frankly, I don't remember much about how that happened, although I played a role, along with Linda Bell, Bill McBride, and several others. I recall, however, that the establishment opposed the motion and that the directors were not at all pleased when it was passed. And I know that I was one of the three original members of the resulting committee, along with Lenore Langsdorf and Bill McBride. What I have only recently remembered, but can now recall with total clarity, is that my paper submission for the following SPEP meeting was rejected.1Much clearer in my mind are the events of the following round, at the 1986 business meeting in Toronto. At that meeting, Iris Young, Bill McBride, and I introduced a resolution aimed at democratizing the organization. Our motion called for (1) competitive elections and term limits for the co-directors, at least one of whom had to be a woman, and (2) an elected program committee and blind review of submissions. Our effort had the support of many, though not all, of the society's female members; some who held back may have been genuinely opposed, while others were sympathetic but too dependent on old boy patronage to come out openly for the cause. In addition, our supporters included many men who chafed under the authoritarianism of the society's leadership and who were eager for change. Bill McBride played a leading role in orchestrating our campaign and in lending it legitimacy. He was a distinguished scholar and a full professor, while Iris and I were nobodies, untenured assistant professors and feminist theorists.The Toronto business meeting was tumultuous. Our side had worked hard to promote attendance—I remember trawling the halls, buttonholing women and other likely supporters, and pressing them to attend. Owing in part to those efforts, but even more to the growing awareness that a confrontation was brewing, the room was packed. I suspect, in fact, that it was the most well-attended business meeting in SPEP's fifty-year history. The chair (who happened to be the aforementioned Director for Life) used every parliamentary trick in the book to discredit our motion and to skew the discussion against it. I can't claim to remember accurately and fully all that went on at the meeting. But one incident stands out sharply in my memory: it was a dramatic moment, which could well have been decisive. The Director for Life was using the power of the chair to call on people whom he believed would oppose our motion. One after another, the naysayers spoke. All the while, Iris, Bill, and I were waving our arms, desperate to get the floor so we could rebut them. But to no avail. We were ignored, as were our supporters, and the cause seemed lost. Disregarding our flailing arms, the chair called on someone way at the back of the room, with whom none of us had discussed the matter. The person he called on was Dick Howard, a senior member of the chair's own department, whom he must have considered a safe bet. Once recognized, Dick did something remarkable and completely unexpected: he stood up and said, “I yield the floor to Nancy Fraser.” One of the unsung heroes of this story, he gave us the chance to make our case for the motion and to answer the claims of its detractors. The vote that followed, as you know, was a resounding victory and one that initiated a major transformation of the society's governing structures.It was perhaps a small change in the grand scheme of things. But big changes are made up of such small events. So this one deserves to be remembered, along with others, as we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of SPEP. It was a moment in which the society's previous way of doing “business as usual” ran up against broader historical forces, which proved to be bigger than it. It was also a moment in which feminist philosophy and feminist activism converged—not only with each other but also with the broader spirit of antiauthoritarianism and the wider democratic energies of an era. I, for one, look forward to the day when such a convergence occurs again.