Radical Feminism and the Nation: History and Space in the Political Imagination of Second-Wave Feminism

In a retrospective account of the early years of the second wave of the women's liberation movement, first written in 1973 and later revised and republished in 1975, Kathie Sarachild, a radical feminist who had been part of New York Radical Women, explained: "The dictionary says radical means root, coming from the Latin word for root. And that is what we meant by calling ourselves radical. We were interested in getting to the roots of problems in society."¹ The roots of problems in society were to be analyzed in consciousness-raising groups, small women-only settings where women discussed the political dimension of their multifaceted experiences, covering a wide range of topics from early childhood to work, relationships with men, and feelings about one's body. Radical feminists were adamant about the status of women's experience as a foundational category for feminist politics. As Sarachild put it,

The decision to emphasize our own feelings and experiences as women and to test all generalizations and reading we did by our own experience was actually the scientific method of research. We were in effect repeating the 17th century challenge of science to scholasticism: "study nature, not books," and put all theories to the test of living practice and action.²

Thus, through consciousness-raising groups, radical feminists challenged traditional understandings of politics and under the slogan "the personal is political" redefined as political areas of human experience previously relegated to the personal sphere. Nonetheless, although the appeal to feelings and personal experience played a key role in the movement, radical feminists of the second wave absorbed a host of intellectual influences as well, inheriting ideas and practices from the Old Left,³ the psychotherapeutic sensibility of the 1960s,⁴ and the many writings of contemporary social movements such as the New Left or Civil Rights, in which many had been active prior to their feminist awakening. Even more, from the very beginning of the women's liberation movement's second wave, radical feminists engaged in a process of revision and reinterpretation of American history, of both women's history and the history of feminism. This series of rereadings played a crucial role in forming the identity of the new social movement that early radical feminists used the long history of feminist organizing (what is today termed "the first wave") to both invoke predecessors for their own activism and define their political vision.

The early years of the second wave were marked by the efforts of young radical feminists to establish an identity and political vision for their fledgling movement. Radical women argued back and forth whether women's liberation could best be achieved after a socialist revolution, for example, or whether women needed to engage in a revolutionary movement of their own. The second argument prevailed, although many resisted it in the beginning. To establish the identity of the new women's movement, radical feminists used two sorts of historical arguments: they rediscovered and invoked the political history of North American feminist activism during the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the recent example of black liberation struggle, which, in its contemporary form as Black Power, advocated for a separation from the oppressor and provided radical feminists with arguments, slogans, and organizing strategies that had long-lasting consequences for the women's movement. The articulation of these two genealogies as founding rhetoric for the second wave of the women's liberation movement had highly significant effects on the social structure of the movement as well as its politics.

In the article quoted above, Sarachild referred to a founding moment in women's liberation, which probably occurred during late 1967, when the New York Radical Women first coined the term "consciousness-raising" and articulated an idea that would have major consequences for the movement, namely that small, women-only groups should be the preferred organizing tactic for women's liberation. At the time, the emerging second wave of the women's movement mobilized women from two different demographics. Histories of the second wave distinguish between liberal...