The Tyranny of Structurelessness

"The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is an essay by American feminist Jo 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 feminist movement's experiments in resisting leadership hierarchy and structured division of labor. This lack of structure, Freeman writes, disguised an informal, unacknowledged, and unaccountable leadership, and in this way ensured its malefaction by denying its existence. 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 (the other being "rigidity of structure", according to ecofeminist Starhawk).

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. Many Marxists and social anarchists cite the essay as an important text for developing effective and democratic forms of organizing, while some Marxists and many individualist anarchists argue that it fails to fully justify formal structures. Provided by Wikipedia