Radical feminism
Encyclopedia
Radical feminism is a current theoretical perspective within feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

 that focuses on the theory of patriarchy
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...

 as a system of power
Systems theory
Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems at all nesting levels in all fields of research...

 that organizes society into a complex of relationship
Interpersonal relationship
An interpersonal relationship is an association between two or more people that may range from fleeting to enduring. This association may be based on limerence, love, solidarity, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment. Interpersonal relationships are formed in the...

s based on an assumption that "male supremacy" oppresses women. Radical feminism aims to challenge and overthrow patriarchy by opposing standard gender role
Gender role
Gender roles refer to the set of social and behavioral norms that are considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific sex in the context of a specific culture, which differ widely between cultures and over time...

s and oppression of women and calls for a radical reordering of society. Early radical feminism, arising within second-wave feminism
Second-wave feminism
The Feminist Movement, or the Women's Liberation Movement in the United States refers to a period of feminist activity which began during the early 1960s and lasted through the early 1990s....

 in the 1960s, typically viewed patriarchy as a "transhistorical phenomenon" prior to or deeper than other sources of oppression
Oppression
Oppression is the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner. It can also be defined as an act or instance of oppressing, the state of being oppressed, and the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically, by troubles, adverse conditions, and...

, "not only the oldest and most universal form of domination but the primary form" and the model for all others. Later politics derived from radical feminism ranged from cultural feminism
Cultural feminism
Cultural feminism developed from radical feminism. It is an ideology of a "female nature" or "female essence" that attempts to revalidate what cultural feminists consider undervalued female attributes...

 to more syncretic
Syncretism
Syncretism is the combining of different beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. The term means "combining", but see below for the origin of the word...

 politics that placed issues of class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...

, economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...

, etc. on a par with patriarchy as sources of oppression.

Radical feminists locate the root cause of women's oppression in patriarchal gender relations, as opposed to legal systems (as in liberal feminism
Liberal feminism
Liberal feminism asserts the equality of men and women through political and legal reform. It is an individualistic form of feminism and theory, which focuses on women’s ability to show and maintain their equality through their own actions and choices...

) or class conflict
Class conflict
Class conflict is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes....

 (as in socialist feminism
Socialist feminism
Socialist feminism is a branch of feminism that focuses upon both the public and private spheres of a woman's life and argues that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression...

 and Marxist feminism
Marxist feminism
Marxist feminism is a sub-type of feminist theory which focuses on the dismantling of capitalism as a way of liberating women. Marxist feminism states that private property, which gives rise to economic inequality, dependence, political confusion, and ultimately unhealthy social relations between...

.)

Theory and ideology

Radical feminists in Western society assert that their society is a patriarchy in which men are the primary oppressors of women. Radical feminists seek to abolish patriarchy. Radical feminism posits the theory that, due to patriarchy, women have come to be viewed as the "other" to the male norm and as such have been systematically oppressed and marginalized. They also believe that the way to deal with patriarchy and oppression of all kinds is to address the underlying causes of these problems through revolution.

While early radical feminists posited that the root cause of all other inequalities is the oppression of women, some radical feminists acknowledge the simultaneous and intersecting effect of other independent categories of oppression as well. These other categories of oppression may include, but are not limited to, oppression based on gender identity
Transphobia
Transphobia is a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards transsexualism and transsexual or transgender people, based on the expression of their internal gender...

, race
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...

, social class
Classism
Classism is prejudice or discrimination on the basis of social class. It includes individual attitudes and behaviors, systems of policies and practices that are set up to benefit the upper classes at the expense of the lower classes...

, perceived attractiveness
Lookism
Lookism is a term used to refer to discrimination against or prejudice towards others based on their appearance. The term was first coined within the Fat acceptance movement...

, sexual orientation
Heterosexism
Heterosexism is a system of attitudes, bias, and discrimination in favor of opposite-sex sexuality and relationships. It can include the presumption that everyone is heterosexual or that opposite-sex attractions and relationships are the only norm and therefore superior...

, and ability
Ableism
Ableism is a form of discrimination or social prejudice against people with disabilities. It is known by many names, including disability discrimination, physicalism, handicapism, and disability oppression...

.

Patriarchal theory is not always defined as a belief that all men always benefit from the oppression of all women. Patriarchal theory maintains that the primary element of patriarchy is a relationship of dominance, where one party is dominant and exploits the other party for the benefit of the former. Radical feminists believe that men use social systems and other methods of control to keep non-dominant men and women suppressed. Radical feminists also believe that eliminating patriarchy, and other systems which perpetuate the domination of one group over another, will liberate everyone from an unjust society.

Some radical feminists called for women to govern women and men, among them Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Dworkin
Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women....

, Phyllis Chesler
Phyllis Chesler
Phyllis Chesler is an American writer, psychotherapist, and professor emerita of psychology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island...

, Monique Wittig
Monique Wittig
Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist who wrote about overcoming socially enforced gender roles and who coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964...

 (in fiction), Mary Daly
Mary Daly
Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher, academic, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at Boston College, a Jesuit-run institution, for 33 years. Daly retired in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male...

, Jill Johnston
Jill Johnston
Jill Johnston was an American feminist author and cultural critic who wrote Lesbian Nation in 1973 and was a longtime writer for The Village Voice. She was also a leader of the lesbian separatist movement of the 1970s. Johnston also wrote under the pen name F. J...

, and Robin Morgan
Robin Morgan
Robin Morgan is a former child actor turned American radical feminist activist, writer, poet, and editor of Sisterhood is Powerful and Ms. Magazine....

.

Redstockings
Redstockings
Redstockings, also known as Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement, is a radical feminist group that was founded in January of 1969...

 co-founder Ellen Willis
Ellen Willis
Ellen Jane Willis was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist and pop music critic.-Biography:...

 wrote in 1984 that radical feminism "got sexual politics recognized as a public issue", "created the vocabulary… with which the second wave of feminism entered popular culture", "sparked the drive to legalize abortion
Abortion
Abortion is defined as the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo prior to viability. An abortion can occur spontaneously, in which case it is usually called a miscarriage, or it can be purposely induced...

", "were the first to demand total equality in the so-called private sphere" ("housework and child care,… emotional and sexual needs"), and "created the atmosphere of urgency" that almost led to the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment
Equal Rights Amendment
The Equal Rights Amendment was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution. The ERA was originally written by Alice Paul and, in 1923, it was introduced in the Congress for the first time...

. The influence of radical feminism can be seen in the adoption of these issues by the National Organization for Women
National Organization for Women
The National Organization for Women is the largest feminist organization in the United States. It was founded in 1966 and has a membership of 500,000 contributing members. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S...

 (NOW), a feminist group, that had previously been focused almost entirely on economic issues.

Movement roots

The ideology of radical feminism in the United States developed as a component of the women’s liberation movement. It grew largely due to the influence of the civil rights movement that had gained momentum in the 1960s and many of the women who took up the cause of radical feminism had had previous experience with radical protest in the struggle against racism. Chronologically, it can be seen within the context of second wave feminism, lasting from 1968 to 1973. The primary players and the pioneers of this second wave of feminism included the likes of Shulamith Firestone
Shulamith Firestone
Shulamith Firestone , is a Jewish, Canadian-born feminist. She was a central figure in the early development of radical feminism, having been a founding member of the New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists...

, Kathie Sarachild
Kathie Sarachild
Kathie Sarachild, born Kathie Amatniek in 1943, is an American feminist writer and campaigner. She played a leading part in the Consciousness-raising movement in the 1970s.- References :...

, Ti-Grace Atkinson
Ti-Grace Atkinson
Ti-Grace Atkinson is an American feminist author.Atkinson was born into a prominent Louisiana family. The "Ti" in her name reflects the Cajun or French language petite, for little....

, Carol Hanisch
Carol Hanisch
Carol Hanisch is a radical feminist and was an important member of New York Radical Women and Redstockings. She is best known for popularizing the phrase "The Personal is Political" in a 1969 essay of the same name. She was a leader of the feminist movement that protested the Miss America Pageant...

, and Judith Brown
Judith C. Brown
Judith C. Brown is an American author and historian.She is Professor of History at Wesleyan University.-Publications:* Immodest Acts - The life of a lesbian nun in Renaissance Italy, Oxford University Press, 1986, ISBN 0-19-504225-5...

. Many local women’s groups in the late sixties, such as the UCLA Women’s Liberation Front (WLF), offered diplomatic statements of radical feminism’s ideologies. UCLA’s WLF co-founder Devra Weber recalls, “‘… the radical feminists were opposed to patriarchy, but not necessarily capitalism. In our group at least, they opposed so-called male dominated national liberation struggles’”.

These women helped to make the connection that translated radical protest for racial equality over to the struggle for women’s rights; by witnessing the discrimination and oppression to which the black population was subjected, they were able to gain strength and motivation to do the same for their fellow women. They took up the cause and advocated for a variety of women’s issues, including abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, access to credit, and equal pay. While certainly worthy causes for advocacy, they failed to stir up enough interest among most of the women’s fringe groups of society. A majority of women of color did not participate a great deal in the radical feminist movement because it did not address many issues that were relevant to those from a working class background, of which they were a sizeable part. But for those who felt compelled enough to stand up for the cause, radical action was needed, and so they took to the streets and formed consciousness-raising groups to rally support for the cause and recruit people who would be willing to fight for it.

In the 1960s, radical feminism emerged simultaneously within liberal feminist and working class feminist discussions, first in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, then in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 and Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. Those involved had gradually come to believe that not only the middle-class nuclear family
Nuclear family
Nuclear family is a term used to define a family group consisting of a father and mother and their children. This is in contrast to the smaller single-parent family, and to the larger extended family. Nuclear families typically center on a married couple, but not always; the nuclear family may have...

 oppressed women, but also social movements and organizations that claimed to stand for human liberation, notably the counterculture
Counterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s refers to a cultural movement that mainly developed in the United States and spread throughout much of the western world between 1960 and 1973. The movement gained momentum during the U.S. government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam...

, the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...

, and Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 political parties, all of which they considered to be male-dominated and male-oriented. Women in countercultural groups related that the gender relations present in such groups were very much those of mainstream culture.

In the United States, radical feminism developed as a response to some of the perceived failings of both New Left organizations such as the Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...

 (SDS) and feminist organizations such as NOW. Initially concentrated mainly in big cities like New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, Washington, DC, and on the West Coast, radical feminist groups spread across the country rapidly from 1968 to 1972.

In the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

, feminism developed out of discussions within community based radical women's organizations and discussions by women within the Trotskyist
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...

 left. Radical feminism was brought to the UK by American radical feminists and seized on by British radical women as offering an exciting new theory. As the 1970s progressed, British feminists split into two major schools of thought: socialist
Socialist feminism
Socialist feminism is a branch of feminism that focuses upon both the public and private spheres of a woman's life and argues that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression...

 and radical. In 1977, another split occurred, with a third grouping calling itself "revolutionary feminism" breaking away from the other two.

Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n radical feminism developed slightly later, during an extended period of social radicalization, largely as an expression of that radicalization.

As a form of practice, radical feminists introduced the use of consciousness raising
Consciousness raising
Consciousness raising is a form of political activism, pioneered by United States feminists in the late 1960s...

 (CR) groups. These groups brought together intellectuals, workers, and middle class women in developed Western countries to discuss their experiences. During these discussions, women noted a shared and repressive system regardless of their political affiliation or social class. Based on these discussions, the women drew the conclusion that ending patriarchy was the most necessary step towards a truly free society. These consciousness-raising sessions allowed early radical feminists to develop a political ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...

 based on common experiences women faced with male supremacy. Consciousness raising was extensively used in chapter sub-units of the National Organization for Women (NOW) during the 1970s.

The feminism that emerged from these discussions stood first and foremost for the liberation of women, as women, from the oppression of men in their own lives, as well as men in power. This feminism was radical in both a political sense (implying extremism
Extremism
Extremism is any ideology or political act far outside the perceived political center of a society; or otherwise claimed to violate common moral standards...

), and in the sense of seeking the root cause of the oppression of women. Radical feminism claimed that a totalising ideology and social formation — patriarchy (government or rule by fathers) — dominated women in the interests of men.

Within groups such as New York Radical Women
New York Radical Women
New York Radical Women was an early second-wave feminist group that existed from 1967–1969.NYRW was founded in New York City in the fall of 1967, by Shulamith Firestone and Pam Allen. Early members included: Ros Baxandall, Carol Hanisch, Patricia Mainardi, Robin Morgan, Irene Peslikis, Kathie...

 (1967–1969, no relation to Radical Women
Radical Women
Radical Women is a socialist feminist, grassroots activist organization that provides a radical voice within the feminist movement, a feminist voice within the Left, and trains women to be leaders in the movements for social and economic justice...

, a present-day socialist feminist organization), which Ellen Willis characterized as "the first women's liberation group in New York City", a radical feminist ideology began to emerge that declared that "the personal is political" and "sisterhood is powerful", formulations that arose from these consciousness-raising sessions. New York Radical Women fell apart in early 1969 in what came to be known as the "politico-feminist split" with the "politicos" seeing capitalism as the source of women's oppression, while the "feminists" saw male supremacy as "a set of material, institutionalized relations, not just bad attitudes." The feminist side of the split, which soon began referring to itself as "radical feminists", soon constituted the basis of a new organization, Redstockings
Redstockings
Redstockings, also known as Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement, is a radical feminist group that was founded in January of 1969...

. At the same time, Ti-Grace Atkinson led "a radical split-off from NOW", which became known as The Feminists
The Feminists
The Feminists, also known as Feminists—A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles, was a radical feminist group active in New York City from 1968 to 1973....

. A third major stance would be articulated by the New York Radical Feminists
New York Radical Feminists
New York Radical Feminists was a radical feminist group founded by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt in 1969, after they had left Redstockings and The Feminists, respectively. Firestone's and Koedt's desire to start this new group was aided by Vivian Gornick's 1969 Village Voice article, "The...

, founded later in 1969 by Shulamith Firestone (who broke from the Redstockings) and Anne Koedt
Anne Koedt
Anne Koedt is a United States radical feminist and NY based author of The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, 1970, the classic feminist work on women's sexuality...

.

During this period, the movement produced "a prodigious output of leaflets, pamphlets, journals, magazine articles, newspaper and radio and TV interviews." Many important feminist works, such as Koedt's essay "The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm" (1970) and Kate Millet's book Sexual Politics (1970), emerged during this time and in this milieu.

Ideology emerges and diverges

At the beginning of this period, "heterosexuality
Heterosexuality
Heterosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the opposite sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, heterosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, physical or romantic attractions to persons of the opposite sex";...

 was more or less an unchallenged assumption." Among radical feminists, the view became widely held that, thus far, the sexual freedoms gained in the sexual revolution
Sexual revolution
The sexual revolution was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the 1960s into the 1980s...

 of the 1960s—in particular, the decreasing emphasis on monogamy
Monogamy
Monogamy /Gr. μονός+γάμος - one+marriage/ a form of marriage in which an individual has only one spouse at any one time. In current usage monogamy often refers to having one sexual partner irrespective of marriage or reproduction...

—had been largely gained by men at women's expense. This assumption of heterosexuality would soon be challenged by the rise of political lesbianism
Political lesbianism
Political lesbianism is a phenomenon within feminism, primarily Second-wave feminism; it includes, but is not limited to, lesbian separatism. Political lesbianism embraces the theory that sexual orientation is a choice, and advocates lesbianism as a positive alternative to heterosexuality for...

, closely associated with Atkinson and The Feminists. The belief that the sexual revolution was a victory of men over women would eventually lead to the women's anti-pornography movement of the late 1970s.

Redstockings and The Feminists were both radical feminist organizations, but held rather distinct views. Most members of Redstockings held to a materialist
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...

 and anti-psychologistic
Psychologism
Psychologism is a generic type of position in philosophy according to which psychology plays a central role in grounding or explaining some other, non-psychological type of fact or law...

 view. They viewed men's oppression of women as ongoing and deliberate, holding individual men responsible for this oppression, viewing institutions and systems (including the family
Family
In human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...

) as mere vehicles of conscious male intent, and rejecting psychologistic explanations of female submissiveness as blaming women for collaboration in their own oppression. They held to a view—which Willis would later describe as "neo-Maoist
Maoism
Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...

"—that it would be possible to unite all or virtually all women, as a class, to confront this oppression by personally confronting men.

The Feminists held a more idealistic
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...

, psychologistic, and utopian philosophy, with a greater emphasis on "sex roles", seeing sexism
Sexism
Sexism, also known as gender discrimination or sex discrimination, is the application of the belief or attitude that there are characteristics implicit to one's gender that indirectly affect one's abilities in unrelated areas...

 as rooted in "complementary patterns of male and female behavior". They placed more emphasis on institutions, seeing marriage, family, prostitution, and heterosexuality as all existing to perpetuate the "sex-role system". They saw all of these as institutions to be destroyed. Within the group, there were further disagreements, such as Koedt's viewing the institution of "normal" sexual intercourse as being focused mainly on male sexual or erotic pleasure, while Atkinson viewed it mainly in terms of reproduction. In contrast to the Redstockings, The Feminists generally considered genitally focused sexuality to be inherently male. Ellen Willis would later write that insofar as the Redstockings considered abandoning heterosexual activity, they saw it as a "bitter price" they "might have to pay for [their] militance", whereas The Feminists embraced separatism
Separatist feminism
Separatist feminism is a form of radical feminism that holds that opposition to patriarchy is best done through focusing exclusively on women and girls...

 as a strategy.

The New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) took a more psychologistic (and even biologically determinist
Biological determinism
Biological determination is the interpretation of humans and human life from a strictly biological point of view, and it is closely related to genetic determinism...

) line. They argued that men dominated women not so much for material benefits as for the ego satisfaction intrinsic in domination. Similarly, they rejected the Redstockings view that women submitted only out of necessity or The Feminists' implicit view that they submitted out of cowardice, but instead argued that social conditioning simply led most women to accept a submissive role as "right and natural".

Action

Radical feminism was not and is not only a movement of ideology and theory. Radical feminists also took direct action
Direct action
Direct action is activity undertaken by individuals, groups, or governments to achieve political, economic, or social goals outside of normal social/political channels. This can include nonviolent and violent activities which target persons, groups, or property deemed offensive to the direct action...

. In 1968, they protested against the Miss America
Miss America
The Miss America pageant is a long-standing competition which awards scholarships to young women from the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands...

 pageant by throwing high heels and other feminine accoutrements into a garbage bin, to represent freedom. In 1970, they also staged a sit-in at the Ladies' Home Journal
Ladies' Home Journal
Ladies' Home Journal is an American magazine which first appeared on February 16, 1883, and eventually became one of the leading women's magazines of the 20th century in the United States...

. In addition, they held speakouts about topics such as rape.

Radical egalitarianism

Because of their commitment to radical egalitarianism, most early radical feminist groups operated initially without any formal internal structure. When informal leadership developed, it was often resented. Many groups ended up expending more effort debating their own internal operations than dealing with external matters, seeking to "perfect a perfect society in microcosm" rather than focus on the larger world. Resentment of leadership was compounded by the view that all "class striving" was "male-identified". In the extreme, exemplified by The Feminists, the upshot, according to Ellen Willis, was "unworkable, mechanistic demands for an absolutely random division of labor, taking no account of differences in skill, experience, or even inclination". "The result," writes Willis, "was not democracy but paralysis." When The Feminists began to select randomly who could talk to the press, Ti-Grace Atkinson quit the organization she had founded.

Social organization and aims in the U.S. and Australia

Radical feminists have generally formed small activist or community associations around either consciousness raising or concrete aims. Many radical feminists in Australia participated in a series of squat
Squatting
Squatting consists of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space or building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use....

s to establish various women's centres, and this form of action was common in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the mid 1980s many of the original consciousness raising groups had dissolved, and radical feminism was more and more associated with loosely organized university collectives. Radical feminism can still be seen, particularly within student activism and among working class women.

In Australia, many feminist social organizations accepted government funding during the 1980s, and the election of a conservative government in 1996 crippled these organizations.

While radical feminists aim to dismantle patriarchal society in a historical sense, their immediate aims are generally concrete. Some common demands include:

• Expanding reproductive freedoms.


“Defined by feminists in the 1970s as a basic human right, it includes the right to abortion and birth control, but implies much more. To be realised, reproductive freedom must include not only woman’s right to choose childbirth, abortion, sterilisation or birth control, but also her right to make those choices freely, without pressure from individual men, doctors, governmental or religious authorities. It is a key issue for women, since without it the other freedoms we appear to have, such as the right to education, jobs and equal pay, may prove illusory. Provisions of childcare, medical treatment, and society’s attitude towards children are also involved.”


• Changing the organizational sexual culture, e.g., breaking down traditional gender roles and reevaluating societal concepts of femininity and masculinity (a common demand in U.S. universities during the 1980s). In this, they often form tactical alliances with other currents of feminism.

Radical feminism and Marxism

Some strains of radical feminism have been compared to Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 in that they describe a "great struggle of history" between two opposed forces. Much like the Marxist struggle between classes
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...

 (typically, with reference to the present day, the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...

 and bourgeoisie
Bourgeoisie
In sociology and political science, bourgeoisie describes a range of groups across history. In the Western world, between the late 18th century and the present day, the bourgeoisie is a social class "characterized by their ownership of capital and their related culture." A member of the...

), radical feminism describes a historical struggle between "women" and "men". Radical feminism has had a close, if sometimes hostile, relationship with Marxism since its origins. Both Marxists and radical feminists seek a total and radical change in social relations and consider themselves to be on the political left
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...

. Despite this commonality, as ideologies Marxism and radical feminism have generally opposed one another; radical feminism can be contrasted to socialist feminism
Socialist feminism
Socialist feminism is a branch of feminism that focuses upon both the public and private spheres of a woman's life and argues that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression...

 in this respect. In practice, however, activist alliances generally form around shared immediate goals.

Some radical feminists are explicitly avowed Marxists, and attempt to explore relationships between patriarchal and class analysis. This strain of radical feminism can trace its roots to the Second International
Second International
The Second International , the original Socialist International, was an organization of socialist and labour parties formed in Paris on July 14, 1889. At the Paris meeting delegations from 20 countries participated...

 (in particular, the Marxists Rosa Luxembourg and Alexandra Kollontai
Alexandra Kollontai
Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai was a Russian Communist revolutionary, first as a member of the Mensheviks, then from 1914 on as a Bolshevik. In 1919 she became the first female government minister in Europe...

). These strains of radical feminism are often referred to as "Marxist feminism
Marxist feminism
Marxist feminism is a sub-type of feminist theory which focuses on the dismantling of capitalism as a way of liberating women. Marxist feminism states that private property, which gives rise to economic inequality, dependence, political confusion, and ultimately unhealthy social relations between...

".

Other radical feminists have criticized Marxists; during the 1960s in the U.S., many women became feminists because they perceived women as being excluded from, and discriminated against by, leftist political groups.

Feminist dominance in domestic violence discussions

The problems of interpersonal and domestic violence are often defined in a manner prescribed by feminist thought. Women's shelters for neglected or abused women and children now in place did not exist in the early 1970s. Laws mandating the reporting of domestic violence are now in place in all of the states of the U.S. Discussions of domestic violence are nearly always of a feminist construct, largely due to statistics that show women as having a higher rate of victimization.


Women experience significantly more partner violence than men do: 25 percent of surveyed women, compared with 8 percent of surveyed men, said they were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date in their lifetime; 1.5 percent of surveyed women and 0.9 percent of surveyed men said they were raped and/or physically assaulted by such a perpetrator in the previous 12 months. According to survey estimates, approximately 1.5 million women and 834,700 men are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States. Because women are also more likely to be injured by intimate partners, research aimed at understanding and preventing partner violence against women should be stressed.

Sex-negative?

Both the self-proclaimed sex-positive
Sex-positive
The sex-positive movement is an ideology which promotes and embraces open sexuality with few limits. Sex positivity is "an attitude towards human sexuality that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, and encourages sexual pleasure and experimentation...

and the so-called sex-negative forms of present-day feminism can trace their roots to early radical feminism. Ellen Willis' 1981 essay, "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" is the origin of the term, "pro-sex feminism". In it, she argues against making alliances with the political right
Right-wing politics
In politics, Right, right-wing and rightist generally refer to support for a hierarchical society justified on the basis of an appeal to natural law or tradition. To varying degrees, the Right rejects the egalitarian objectives of left-wing politics, claiming that the imposition of equality is...

 in opposition to pornography and prostitution
Prostitution
Prostitution is the act or practice of providing sexual services to another person in return for payment. The person who receives payment for sexual services is called a prostitute and the person who receives such services is known by a multitude of terms, including a "john". Prostitution is one of...

, as occurred, for example, during the Meese Commission hearings in the United States. Willis argued for a feminism that embraces sexual freedom, including men's sexual freedom, rather than condemn pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...

, consensual BDSM
BDSM
BDSM is an erotic preference and a form of sexual expression involving the consensual use of restraint, intense sensory stimulation, and fantasy power role-play. The compound acronym BDSM is derived from the terms bondage and discipline , dominance and submission , and sadism and masochism...

, and in some cases sexual intercourse
Sexual intercourse
Sexual intercourse, also known as copulation or coitus, commonly refers to the act in which a male's penis enters a female's vagina for the purposes of sexual pleasure or reproduction. The entities may be of opposite sexes, or they may be hermaphroditic, as is the case with snails...

 and fellatio
Fellatio
Fellatio is an act of oral stimulation of a male's penis by a sexual partner. It involves the stimulation of the penis by the use of the mouth, tongue, or throat. The person who performs fellatio can be referred to as the giving partner, and the other person is the receiving partner...

.

Criticisms

Within the New Left, radical feminists were accused of being "bourgeois", "antileft", or even "apolitical", whereas they saw themselves as further "radicalizing the left by expanding the definition of radical". Radical feminists have tended to be white and middle class. Ellen Willis hypothesized in 1984 that this was, at least in part, because "most black and working-class women could not accept the abstraction of feminist issues from race and class issues"; the resulting narrow demographic base, in turn, limited the validity of generalizations based on radical feminists' personal experiences of gender relations. Comedian George Carlin
George Carlin
George Denis Patrick Carlin was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, actor and author, who won five Grammy Awards for his comedy albums....

, in a routine from his 1990 HBO special Doin' It Again, remarked: "I've noticed that most of these feminists are white, middle class women. They don't give a shit about black women's problems, they don't care about Latino women, all they're interested in is their own reproductive freedom and their pocketbooks." Many early radical feminists broke political ties with "male-dominated left groups", or would work with them only in ad hoc coalitions.

Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan was an American writer, activist, and feminist.A leading figure in the Women's Movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the "second wave" of American feminism in the twentieth century...

 and other liberal feminists often see precisely the radicalism of radical feminism as potentially undermining the gains of the women's movement with polarizing rhetoric that invites backlash and hold that they overemphasize sexual politics at the expense of political reform. Other critics of radical feminism from the political left, including socialist feminists, strongly disagree with the radical feminist position that the oppression of women is fundamental to all other forms of oppression; these critics hold that issues of race and of class are as important or more important than issues about gender. Queer
Queer theory
Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...

 and postmodernist
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...

 theorists often argue that the radical feminist ideas on gender are essentialist and that many forms of gender identity
Gender identity
A gender identity is the way in which an individual self-identifies with a gender category, for example, as being either a man or a woman, or in some cases being neither, which can be distinct from biological sex. Basic gender identity is usually formed by age three and is extremely difficult to...

 complicate any absolute opposition between "men" and "women".

Some feminists, most notably Alice Echols
Alice Echols
Alice Echols is a cultural critic and historian. A specialist of the 1960s, Echols is Professor of English, Gender Studies and History at the University of Southern California.-Education:Echols received her Bachelor's degree from Macalester College in 1973...

 and Ellen Willis
Ellen Willis
Ellen Jane Willis was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist and pop music critic.-Biography:...

, held that after about 1975 most of what continued to be called "radical feminism" represents a narrow subset of what was originally a more ideologically diverse movement. Willis saw this as an example of a "conservative retrenchment" that occurred when the "expansive prosperity and utopian optimism of the '60s succumbed to an era of economic limits and political backlash." They label this dominant tendency "cultural feminism
Cultural feminism
Cultural feminism developed from radical feminism. It is an ideology of a "female nature" or "female essence" that attempts to revalidate what cultural feminists consider undervalued female attributes...

" and view it as a "neo-Victorian" ideology coming out of radical feminism but ultimately antithetical to it. Willis drew the contrast that early radical feminism saw itself as part of a broad left politics, whereas much of what succeeded it in the 1970s and early 1980s (both cultural feminism and liberal feminism) took the attitude that "left politics were 'male' and could be safely ignored." She further wrote that whereas the original radical feminism "challenge[d] the polarization of the sexes", cultural feminism simply embraces the "traditional feminine
Femininity
Femininity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with girls and women. Though socially constructed, femininity is made up of both socially defined and biologically created factors...

 virtues". Critics of cultural feminism hold that cultural feminist ideas on sexuality, exemplified by the feminist anti-pornography movement
Anti-pornography movement
The term anti-pornography movement is used to describe those who argue that pornography has a variety of harmful effects, such as encouragement of human trafficking, desensitization, pedophilia, dehumanization, sexual exploitation, sexual dysfunction, and inability to maintain healthy sexual...

, severely polarized feminism, leading to the "Feminist Sex Wars
Feminist Sex Wars
The Feminist Sex Wars and Lesbian Sex Wars, or simply the Sex Wars or Porn Wars, were the acrimonious debates within the feminist movement and lesbian community in the late 1970s through the 1980s around the issues of feminist strategies regarding sexuality, sexual representation, pornography,...

" of the 1980s. Critics of Echols and Willis hold that they conflate several tendencies within radical feminism, not all of which are properly called "cultural feminism", and emphasize a greater continuity between early and contemporary radical feminism.

Also, Willis, although very much a part of early radical feminism and continuing to hold that it played a necessary role in placing feminism on the political agenda, later criticised its inability "to integrate a feminist perspective with an overall radical politics," while viewing this limitation as inevitable in the historical context of the times. In part this limitation arose from the fact that consciousness raising, as "the primary method of understanding women's condition" in the movement at this time and its "most successful organizing tool", led to an emphasis on personal experience that concealed "prior political and philosophical assumptions".

Willis, writing in 1984, was critical of the notion that all hierarchies are "more specialized forms of male supremacy" as preventing adequate consideration of the possibility that "the impulse to dominate… could be a universal human characteristic that women share, even if they have mostly lacked the opportunity to exercise it." Further, the view of oppression of women as a "transhistorical phenomenon" allowed middle-class white women to minimize the benefits of their own race and class privilege and tended to exclude women from history. Further, Willis wrote that the movement never developed "a coherent analysis of either male or female psychology" and that it ultimately raised hopes that its narrow "commitment to the sex-class paradigm" could not fulfill; when those hopes were dashed, according to Willis the resulting despair was the foundation of withdrawal into counterculturalism
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...

 and cultural feminism.

Echols and Willis have both written that radical feminism was, ultimately, dismissive of lesbian sexuality. On the one hand, if the central struggle was to take place within personal heterosexual relationships, as envisioned by the Redstockings, lesbians were marginalized. On the other, political lesbianism granted lesbians a vanguard
Vanguard party
A vanguard party is a political party at the forefront of a mass action, movement, or revolution. The idea of a vanguard party has its origins in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...

 role, but only if they would play down erotic desire. Those lesbians whose sexuality focused on genital pleasure were liable to be dismissed by the advocates of political lesbianism as "male identified". The result, through the 1970s, was the adoption by many of a "sanitize[d] lesbianism", stripped of eroticism.

See also

  • Anarcha-feminism
    Anarcha-feminism
    Anarcha-feminism combines anarchism with feminism. It generally views patriarchy as a manifestation of involuntary hierarchy. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class struggle, and the anarchist struggle against the state...

  • D. A. Clarke
    D. A. Clarke
    D. A. Clarke is a radical feminist essayist and activist in the United States of America since 1980. Much of her writing addresses the link between violence against women and market economics, although she may be best known for her 1991 essay "Justice Is A Woman with a Sword"...

  • Nikki Craft
    Nikki Craft
    Nikki Craft is an American political activist, radical feminist, artist and writer.-Activism:In 1975, she presented the Rockwell International Board of Directors with "...naked doll[s] splashed with blood-colored paint" to protest their B-1 bomber called "The Peacemaker".The same year, Craft...

  • Mujeres Creando
    Mujeres Creando
    Mujeres Creando is a Bolivian anarcha-feminist collective that participates in a range of anti-poverty work, including propaganda, street theater and direct action. The group was founded by María Galindo, Mónica Mendoza y J.Paredes in 1992 and members including two of Bolivia's only openly lesbian...

  • Mary Daly
    Mary Daly
    Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher, academic, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at Boston College, a Jesuit-run institution, for 33 years. Daly retired in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male...

  • Andrea Dworkin
    Andrea Dworkin
    Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women....

  • Melissa Farley
    Melissa Farley
    Melissa Farley is an American clinical psychologist and researcher and feminist anti-pornography and anti-prostitution activist. Farley is best known for her studies of the effects of prostitution, trafficking, and sexual violence....

  • bell hooks
    Bell hooks
    Gloria Jean Watkins , better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, feminist, and social activist....

  • Sheila Jeffreys
    Sheila Jeffreys
    Sheila Jeffreys is a lesbian feminist scholar and political activist, known for her analysis of the history and politics of sexuality in Britain. She is a professor in Political Science at the University of Melbourne in Australia...

  • Catharine MacKinnon
    Catharine MacKinnon
    Catharine Alice MacKinnon is an American feminist, scholar, lawyer, teacher and activist.- Biography :MacKinnon was born in Minnesota. Her mother is Elizabeth Valentine Davis; her father, George E. MacKinnon was a lawyer, congressman , and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit...

  • Misandry
    Misandry
    Misandry is the hatred or dislike of men or boys.Misandry comes from Greek misos and anēr, andros . Misandry is the antonym of philandry, the fondness towards men, love, or admiration of them...

  • Rosetta Reitz
    Rosetta Reitz
    Rosetta Reitz was an American feminist and jazz historian who searched for and established a record label producing 18 albums of the music of the early women of jazz and the blues....

  • Florence Rush
    Florence Rush
    Florence Rush was an American certified social worker , feminist theorist and organizer best known for introducing The Freudian Coverup in her presentation "The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View" about childhood sexual abuse and incest at the April 1971 New York Radical Feminists...

  • Valerie Solanas
    Valerie Solanas
    Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist writer, best known for her attempted murder of Andy Warhol in 1968. She wrote the SCUM Manifesto, which called for male gendercide and the creation of an all-female society.-Early life:Solanas was born in Ventnor City, New Jersey, to Louis...

  • Gloria Steinem
    Gloria Steinem
    Gloria Marie Steinem is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s...



Further reading

  • Bell, Diane and Renate Klein. Radically Speaking. Spinifex Press ISBN 1-875559-38-8.
  • Coote, Anna and Beatrix Campbell. (1987) Sweet Freedom: The Movement for Women's Liberation. Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-14957-0 (hardback) ISBN 0-631-14958-9 (paperback).
  • Daly, Mary
    Mary Daly
    Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher, academic, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at Boston College, a Jesuit-run institution, for 33 years. Daly retired in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male...

    . (1978) Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Beacon Pr. ISBN 0-8070-1413-3
  • Firestone, Shulamith. (1970). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0-688-06454-X (Reprinted editions: Bantam, 1979, ISBN 0-553-12814-0; Farrar Straus Giroux, 2003, ISBN 0-374-52787-3.)
  • Koedt, Anne, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone, eds. (1973). Radical Feminism. Times Books. ISBN 0-8129-6220-6
  • Love, Barbara J. and Nancy F. Cott. (2006). Feminists Who Changed America, 1963–1975. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-03189-X for biographies of participants in radical feminist groups
  • MacKinnon, Catharine
    Catharine MacKinnon
    Catharine Alice MacKinnon is an American feminist, scholar, lawyer, teacher and activist.- Biography :MacKinnon was born in Minnesota. Her mother is Elizabeth Valentine Davis; her father, George E. MacKinnon was a lawyer, congressman , and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit...

    . (1989) Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. ISBN 0-674-89646-7
  • Willis, Ellen
    Ellen Willis
    Ellen Jane Willis was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, activist and pop music critic.-Biography:...

    , "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism", 1984, collected in No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays, Wesleyan University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-8195-5250-X, p. 117–150.

External links

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