"Total system, total solution, total apocalypse": Sex Oppression, Systems of Property, and 1970s Women's Liberation Fiction

This essay examines major texts of 1970s women's and feminist fiction in terms of themes of sex oppression and systems of property which served as the nodal point for post-1945 sexual liberation theory and fiction. Where Beatnik writers like Jack Kerouac and Diane di Prima had insisted that free love could only flourish in a milieu of freedom from property and possessiveness, a new generation of 1970s writers came to abandon the notion that freedom would involve a choice between one system of property and another, and instead began to idealize spaces of removal from those systems. Charting this movement, this essay examines the property/sex oppression nexus across a range of texts—women's fiction and poetry; feminist theory; and consciousness-raising manifestos—written from 1970 to 1975.