"The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is an influential essay by American feministJo Freeman that concerns power relations within radical feminist collectives. The essay, inspired by Freeman's experiences in a 1960s women's liberation group, reflected on the experiments of the feminist movement in resisting the idea of leaders and even discarding any structure or division of labor. As Hilary Wainwright wrote in Z Magazine, Freeman described how "this apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied". As a solution, Freeman suggests formalizing the existing hierarchies in the group and subjecting them to democratic control. The phrase has been used to describe one problem in organizing. In 2008 Community Development Journal reviewed the article as a "classic text" which editors felt had influenced the practice of community development. That year a John F. Kennedy School of Government course used the paper in a course on leadership.
Publication history
The essay originated as a speech given to the Southern Female Rights Union at a conference in Beulah, Mississippi in May 1970. Freeman has stated that it was transcribed in 1971 for the feminist magazine Notes from the Third Year and submitted to several women's liberation movement publications, only one of which sought her permission to publish it. Other outlets published it without asking for permission. It was first officially published in the journal The Second Wave in 1972. It was issued in pamphlet form by Agitprop in 1972, and later by the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists, Leeds Group, United Kingdom. In 1973 the author published different versions in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology and in Ms. magazine. It was also published in Radical Feminism by Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone. Later printings included that of the Anarchist Workers' Association, and in 1984 in a pamphlet called Untying the Knot: Feminism, Anarchism & Organisation jointly published by Dark Star Press and Rebel Press.
Criticism
Some anarchists have objected to Freeman's analysis because it also has been applied to some anarchist organizing. Howard J. Ehrlich discussed the negative impact of the article on anarchist organizing in Reinventing Anarchy, Again. In 1974 Cathy Levine wrote a rejoinder titled "The Tyranny of Tyranny" which was initially published in the journal Black Rose. In a review of Freeman's essay for , the anarchist Jason McQuinn inveighed against the essay as an "incomprehensibly unreal and illogical stab at sociology by a paranoid schizophrenic" and noted its popularity among leftist and platformist anarchists.
