No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism

Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism was a radical feminist activist in the late '6os. Today I often have the odd feeling that this period, sovivid to me, occurredfiftyyears ago, not a mere fifteen. Much of the early history of the women's liberation movement, and especiallyof radical feminism (which was not synonymous with the w.l.m. but a specific political current within it) has been lost, misunderstood or egregiously distorted. The left, the right, and liberal feminists have all for their own reasons contributed to misrepresenting and trivializing radical feminist ideas. To add to the confusion, radical feminism in its original sense barely exists today. The great majority of women who presently call themselves "radical feminists" in fact subscribe to a politics more accurately labeled "cultural feminist."That is, they seethe primarygoal of feminism as freeing women from the imposition of so-called "male values," and creating an alternativeculture based on "female values." While radical feminism was conceived asa political movement to end male supremacy in all areasof social and economic life, and rejectedas sexist the whole idea of opposing male and female natures and values, cultural feminism is essentially a moral, countercultural movement aimed at redeeming its participants. Though cultural feminismcame out of the radical feminist movement, the premises of the two tendencies are antithetical. Yeton the left and elsewhere the distinction is rarely made. Along with simply wanting to retrieve this history (my history), I think it's crucial for understanding what happened to the women's movement later, and what's happening now. In the first couple of years of its existence, radical feminism showed every sign of becoming a true mass movement. Wehad enormous energy and enthusiasm and used a variety of tactics—demonstrations and speakouts; I N O M O R E N I C E G I R L S Il8 tireless organizing among friends and coworkers, on street corners, in supermarkets and ladies' rooms; above all, a prodigious output of leaflets, pamphlets, journals, magazine articles, newspaper and radio and TV interviews. The movement exploded into public consciousness , pushed NOW and other liberal feminist organizations way to the left, and grew so fast that existing groups didn't know what to do with the influx of new members. Organized radicalfeministactivism was most visibleand prominent in New York City, Boston andWashington , D.C.and on the West Coast, but myriads of small groups inspired by radical feminist ideas sprang up allover the country. It was radical feminism that put women's liberation on the map, that got sexual politics recognized as a public issue, that created the vocabulary ("consciousness-raising," "the personal is political," "sisterhood is powerful," etc.) with which the second wave of feminism entered popular culture. Radical feminists sparked the drive to legalize abortion and created the atmosphereof urgency in whichliberal feminists were finally able to get the Equal Rights Amendment through Congress and most of the states. Radical feminists were also the first to demand total equality in the so-called private sphere— equal sharing of housework and child care, equal attention to our emotional and sexual needs. It's no exaggeration to saythat the immense transformation in women's consciousness over the pastfifteen years has been inspired by the issues radicalfeministsraised. One exasperating exampleof how easy it is to obliterate history isthat Betty Friedan can now get away with the outrageous claim that radical feminist "extremism" turned women off and derailed the movement she built. Radical feminismturned women on, by the thousands. Yet this movement collapsed as quicklyas it had grown. By 1975 radical feminism had given way to cultural feminism.The women's liberation movement had become the women's movement, in which liberals were the dominant, not to say hegemonic force. Socialist and Marxist feminism, which had come out of other tendencies of the w.l.m. and segments of the left influenced by it, were theoretically confused and practicallymarginal.1 Feminism had become a reformist politics, a countercultural community, and a network of selfhelp projects (rapecrisis centers, battered women's shelters, women's health clinics, etc.). Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism 119 How and why did this happen? Like other left social movements, feminism had to contend with the institutional and ideological power of American liberalism, which succeeded in marginalizing radical feminists while channeling the aspirationstheyaroused into demands for reform on the one hand, a cult of the individual "liberated woman"on the other. In...