Triple Jeopardy

Thanks to Matthew Christy (@matt_christy), the ALTO XML files I received for the corpus of women's movement periodicals were converted into txt files, giving me both Chicago Women's Liberation Union Newsletter and Triple Jeopardy.   I'm also grateful for the help of Patrick Murray-John (@patrick_mj ) (code here) and Tommy Tavenner (@TommyTavenner).

Sadly, the work I did yesterday had some original files that were corrupted and therefore weren't read by Antconc.  I decided therefore to go back and OCR Triple Jeopardy for myself from the scans done by Reveal Digital.  I have recalculated stats and revised the following discussion which thankfully hadn't been read by many people yet!

Cover First Issue Triple Jeopardy from Reveal Digital

Yesterday I stared working with Triple Jeopardy (1971 to 1975) a publication of the Third World Women’s Alliance, a group that grew out of Black women’s activism in SNCC.   I’ve been working through the origins of “consciousness” in the movement for women’s liberation and connecting the concept back to the black consciousness movement. 

figure 1 Keyness

As I’ve been exploring in the first section of my book, The Politics of Women’s Culture, in the movement for women’s liberation activists argued that analysis and awareness of oppression led to a raised consciousness, which then became thevehicle to liberation.  The banner of Triple Jeopardy, published by the Third World Women’s Alliance, offers a different triumvirate: racism, imperialism, sexism. As Figure 1 reveals, the discourse of Triple Jeopardy is very strongly tilted towards those three terms, as measured by keyness, a statistical indicator of use in one text as compared to another text, while CWLU shows only a strong keyness for liberation, with consciousness and sexism just barely registering as key words. 

That gave me the idea of exploring some of these words in both Triple Jeopardy and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Newsletter, as a comparison corpus.[1]  Using Antconc, a concordancing software,  I calculated how strongly patterns of words were connected in the texts.[2]   

Figure 2

Oppress* in both Triple Jeopardy and CWLU co-occurs with our, indicating a group identity (figure 2).  However oppress* is more likely to co-occur with women in CWLU and with people in Triple Jeopardy indicating that our refers to different groups in each corpus.  Similarly, both periodicals show a significant patterns for other identity groups, as in their in Triple Jeopardy and gay in CLWU.

Conscious* forms only one significant patten in Triple Jeopardy, with political, while it appears with women and class in CWLU.  I’m still trying to figure this out, but it seems that being aware might be used rather than consciousness as aware key in Triple Jeopardy. However, words like freedom and struggle are considerably more key suggest that how to act on awareness of oppression may be more important. 

figure 3

While liberation is key in CWLU, liberat* forms many more significant patterns in Triple Jeopardy (figure 3.  In CWLU liberate* is connected only to women, gay and movement.   Triple Jeopardy seems to connect liberat* to both efforts to achieve liberation (struggle and struggles), but also who needs liberating (African Black) How liberat* is tied  imperialism seems to appear through army and national.

figure 4

Imperial* creates patterns with [U.]S. anti, racism and against in Triple Jeopardy, with anti, against and work appearing in CWLU.  In addition to the connection of racism and imperialism,  keyness (figure 1)  may help to clarify how imperialism is being discussed in Triple Jeopardy.   Colonialism, Vietnam, Vietnamese, nation are all key, suggesting a focus on U.S. imperialism, as well as the ideological ties between racism and imperialism.  Work in CWLU may suggest that imperailism is something to be worked on, but it is not tied linguistically at least to sexism.

By keyness, racism is significantly more present in Triple Jeopardy (figure 1) and indeed way up top in the list of key words  in Triple Jeopardy are racial groups, like black and white, but also institutions, like government and army, as well as economics workers, welfare, poor.   Triple Jeopardy seems to contain far more structural analysis with references to members of a family, government, military, prison, other countries, work, sterilization, while CWLU keyness points to more social movement references (staff groups meeting discussion outreach steering committee conference) and is more likely to contain sexism, but at just barely a statistically significant rate

This analysis helps to sort out not only the ways concepts traveled from one movement to another, but also how different groups of women working for liberation shaped different discourses.  While the editors of Triple Jeopardy explained in their first issue, "the struggle against racism and imperialism must be waged simultaneously with the struggle for women's liberation" and expressed a belief that "a strong independent socialist women's group" was the best way to accomplish that, the CWLU, one of the strongest autonomous women's liberation groups with a socialist feminist ideology, paid more attention to sexism and class oppression, and then to racism and gay oppression.  

1.  I date matched the issues for each periodical (Fall of 1971 through summer of 1975).  The total word count is comparable (CWLU 307,000 v Triple Jeopardy 305,000) but composition of the corpora is quite different.   Because CWLU was biweekly while Triple Jeopardy was a quarterly I have 782 items 50 issues  from the CWLU as opposed to 275 individual items in 16 issues of Triple Jeopardy.  

2. MI is a statistical measurement of the likelihood of co-occurrence of two works in a set span of text, in this case 5 words to the right and to the left.  MI of 3 is considered statistically significant threshold for determining that co-occurrence is not due to random chance.