The Personal Is Political. The Political Is Personal.

Shadowing the interconnected nature of happenings in the political sphere and those in one’s personal sphere of life has been a successful strategy in sustaining the idea that one’s personal experiences purely result from personal choices. In denying the existence of an inherent interconnectedness between the political and the personal, we forget that the policy choices enacted in the former mold the reality of the latter.

Carol Hanisch coined the phrase the personal is political at the dawn of the second wave of the feminist movement in her 1970 anthology “Notes From The Second Year: Women’s Liberation.” In it, she lays the argument that the issues women face in their everyday lives are as a result of deeply routed political structures. This became evident to her in contextualizing the stories women shared in consciousness-raising groups about their experiences in their domestic lives not as experiences particular to any one woman but as shared experiences from one woman to the next. What one woman experiences may be characterized as a personal experience only to the extent to which it is only hers but when that experience is mirrored by another, it demands of us that we dig deeper for we have just entered the realm of the political. Confining womanhood to the domestic sphere is a policy choice sustained by structures outside of it. Positioning her as second-class citizen within it is a policy choice sustained by structures outside of it. Rendering the female experience as one characterized by political, economic, and social impediments is a policy choice sustained by structures outside of it. How, then, could we deny the inseparable synergy between the personal and the political? Hanisch brought to us the irreconcilable truth that any relationship within which a power dynamic is embedded is a political relationship. Women’s experiences of oppression in the home could not be solely personal, and neither could any of ours who hold a power-regulated social position.

To know that our lives are shaped by a wider political dimension is to know that the personal is political, and to recognize that the happenings of that dimension shape our lived realities is to know that the political is equally personal. Though we know that the political effectively structures the personal, this knowledge only serves its purpose when we understand the political incentive behind shadowing their synergy. The notion that there is an impartiality to both spheres stems from a political desire to separate them, a notion particularly successful in evading the responsibility of confessing the degree to which our beings are politicized. This strategy is sustained by the erroneous suggestion that one’s experience of systemic oppression results from faulty personal choices. Rape is a political matter which isn’t reducible to a personal remedy. Poverty is a political matter which isn’t reducible to a personal remedy. And equal pay is a political matter which isn’t reducible to a personal remedy. Suggesting that personal choices could remedy to structural problems astonishingly fails to address the issue at hand at the expense of the marginalized.

But if the determination of our lived experiences shall be decided in the political sphere, let us as politicized beings leverage those same experiences through political action to mold, shape, and restructure politics to show us the path to our liberation.