Radical Feminism

Conceptual Overview

Radical feminism emerged in the late 1960s simultaneously within liberal feminism and working-class feminism. In the United States, it developed as a response to some of the failings of both New Left politics and the liberal feminist National Organization for Women. In the United Kingdom, feminism developed out of discussions within community-based radical womens' organizations and discussions by women within the Trotskyist left. Radical feminism was taken to the U.K. by American feminists and seized on by British radical women as offering an exciting and powerful theory. As the 1970s progressed, British feminists split into two major schools of thought: socialist and radical. Australian radical feminism developed slightly later, during an extended period of social radicalization and largely as an expression of it.

Radical feminism was truly radical in both a political sense and in the sense of seeking to counter the root (radix) cause of the oppression of women. Radical feminism described a totalizing ideology and social formation that dominated women in the interests of men. This formation was called patriarchy—government or rule by fathers. An important contention was that gender roles in society favored the male and the masculine, producing a system of male domination that was the central organizing principle of patriarchcal society. It is not the case that all men always benefit from the oppression of all women. The primary element of patriarchy is a relationship of dominance, wherein one party (commonly males) is dominant and exploits the other party (generally females) for their own benefit. Dominant men use violent hierarchical social power to control nondominant men as well as women. A major part of radical feminist activism involved consciousness raising, which helped radical feminists develop a communal and [Page 1350]sisterly bond that emboldened them to speak out against patriarchy. Radical feminism held that ending patriarchy was the most vital step toward a truly free society.

Radical feminists organized for women's liberation and analyzed every aspect of the relations between the sexes. A central contention is that sexual politics pervades every part of life: The personal is always political. Radical feminism challenged the history of women's repression and in doing so also challenged sex-related institutions such as the family, motherhood, and prostitution and the assumed normality of heterosexuality. Within the radical feminist era, the “sexual revolution” and “sexual liberation” materialized, with the most intimate aspects of male and female sexuality analyzed. Groundbreaking writings such as Anne Koedt's essay “The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm” (1970) and Kate Millet's book Sexual Politics (1970) were published during this time. Radical feminism addressed issues of inequality between the sexes—inequalities characteristic of societies where men, maleness, and masculine norms dominate.

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