Читать книгу Companion to Feminist Studies - Группа авторов - Страница 48

Emerging out of the women's liberation movement of the late 1960s,¹ radical feminism began with a group of American second‐wave feminists referring to themselves as “radical women” and then eventually adopting the radical feminist label.² While the movement was born in the United States, it soon spread to other English‐speaking countries like the United Kingdom and Australia and then, modestly, to the non‐English speaking world, for example to Eastern Europe (Žarkov 2002) and to countries including Turkey (Çaha 2016) and Japan (Bullock 2015). While the heyday of radical feminism is aligned with feminism's second‐wave – from the mid‐1960s until the early 1980s – as Barbara Crow notes in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, the movement “does not start at one particular time in the mid‐1960s nor does it end in 1975,” even if most of the “intense activity” transpired then (Crow 2000, p. 7 n.3). Flora Davis writes that by 1975 most radical feminist groups had actually vanished (Davis 1991), and Ti‐Grace Atkinson observed that by the mid‐1970s, radical feminism “really did not even resemble its origins” (in Fahs 2011, p. 585). Alice Echols echoes this, dating the challenge posed by cultural feminism to radical feminism's dominance to 1973 (Echols 1989). Some scholars however, have suggested that the movement isn't totally historic. In the mid‐1990s, Imelda Whelehan suggested a “modest renaissance” (Whelehan 1995, p. 86), and, as discussed later in this chapter, radical feminism has, in recent years, substantially impacted on public policy in Scandinavia, notably in the realm of prostitution³ criminalization (Levy 2015). Equally, while the number of radical feminist groups and the volume of their activity may have reduced in the last half‐century, radical feminist scholarship is still being produced (Jeffreys 2014; Mackay 2015; Banyard 2016; Bindel 2017).

While the movement began in the late 1960s, radical feminists were highly influenced by scholarship preceding them. Christine Flynn Saulnier (1996) spotlights the influence of writings from the 1950s' civil rights movements and from first‐wave feminist authors like Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Stewart, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The impact of Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex (1949) is also widely noted (McMillan 1982; Simons 1999; Henry 2004). Jo Freeman (1975) in The Politics of Women's Liberation also identifies the influence of Maoist ideas, notably “speaking bitterness.” Within radical feminism this process became known as consciousness‐raising and was enormously influential in establishing the movement's key tenets.

In Radical Feminism Today, Denise Thompson notes, “there is a reluctance among feminist writers to engage in explicit definition. On the whole feminists tend, often quite deliberately, not to say what they mean by feminism” (Thompson 2001, p. 5). While authors may be reticent in articulating definitive definitions – or appointing themselves as a spokeswoman for such an anti‐hierarchical movement – equally, there actually is no single radical feminist theory, something Alison Jaggar addresses:

The most important insights of radical feminism probably spring from women's own experience of oppression, but the grass‐roots radical feminist movement is also influenced by many other traditions, from astrology to zen. Naturally, it is not easy to make all these ideas consistent with each other and radical feminism has generated a variety of theories about women's oppression.

(Jaggar 1983, p. 84)

While feminism does have factions and occasionally clashing ideologies, few movements are ever completely linear and thus, even if contested, definitions remain an essential starting point for this discussion. In 1975, Kathie Sarachild explained her use of the label:

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.

(Sarachild 1975, p. 145)

Robin Morgan used the same analogy:

I believe that sexism is the root oppression, the one which until and unless we uproot it, will continue to put forth branches of racism, class hatred, ageism, competition, ecological disaster, and economic exploitation.

(Morgan 1978, p. 9)

That women are subordinated – are an oppressed class; a sex‐class – and that their subordination is caused by patriarchy are two of the key tenets of the movement. While feminists like Sarachild and Morgan were using radical because of its links to root, the word also references revolution: as Valerie Bryson notes in Feminist Political Theory, the ideas being advocated for “produced a challenge to accepted values and life‐styles that often seemed both extreme and shocking” (Bryson 2003, p. 163). Radical feminism aimed to dismantle not only patriarchy but each of the social, cultural, political, and economic structures that benefited from – and supported – male authority.

In the sections that follow, I examine the principles of radical feminism and explore its criticisms and shortcomings. I end with a discussion of legacy and radical feminism's continued relevance into the twenty‐first century.