Robin Payne
Ph.D. Student (ABD)
rkpayne@email.unc.edu
Major Field: United States history
Other Fields: Women's and Gender history
Advisor: Jacquelyn Hall
Research Interests: My dissertation project, entitled "Love and Liberation: Second-Wave Feminisms and the Problem of Romantic Love," seeks to understand how feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s confronted the meanings and consequences of emotional intimacy for women's lives. I draw on diverse feminist writings from the second wave, including theoretical and philosophical writings, feminist manifestos and pamphlets, popular novels and magazines, professional and private correspondence, and personal diaries and journals. Through my close readings of these documents, I have found that feminists of that era were raising new kinds of questions about the deeply rooted historical problem romantic love posed for independent women. I examine their diverse responses to those questions in order to illuminate the central role an intangible emotion played in complicating feminists' pursuit of liberation and to question the impact of feminism on interpersonal romantic relationships in the wake of the second wave.
Though they were not the first thinkers to interrogate the meaning of love or to question women's place in society, second-wave feminists were situated within a unique social and cultural milieu that led them to elevate questions about the intertwined nature of the two issues to a heightened level of significance. Against the backdrop of social justice movements for the rights or marginalized groups and the so-called sexual revolution, many self-identified feminists searched for the roots of women's oppression in their personal lives. Consequently, they began to question how emotional intimacy, especially in relationship to sex and marriage, shaped women's lives. Whether women could love men without forsaking their own identity became a principle concern. As feminists raised questions about the compatibility of love and liberation in myriad intellectual and cultural forums, they explored alternatives in their personal lives, ranging from celibacy to same-sex unions to more egalitarian heterosexual relationships. Because matters of romantic intimacy were so intensely persona, feminists often found themselves bitterly divided over the meaning of romantic love and its future in a post-feminist world. While a small and vocal minority of radical feminists vehemently decried the entrappings of love and declared that it would cease to exist in an egalitarian society, the vast majority of feminists hoped to reconcile a desire for love with the pursuit of liberation. Arguing that feminism would bring about a more pure and true form of love, whether it was shared with other women or with men, they revealed themselves as ultimate romantics.