Radical Feminism

This strand of feminist ideas and practices has as its hallmarks a disdain for, if not rejection of, hierarchy and a commitment to cultural as well as political transformation. Seeking more than the reformist measures associated with liberal feminism, radical feminism can be seen as revolutionary or at least aiming at wholesale rather than piece-meal social change. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such feminist luminaries as Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Matilda Joslyn Cage, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Ida Wells-Barnett, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman forged strong grounds for radical feminist theory. Their work was pivotal in, though not typical of, the first wave of feminism during that time period, which began receding from public attention as Western women's right to vote gained constitutional stature.

During the 1960s, radical feminism found renewed, powerful expression in Western societies. In the hands of theorists such as Eve Figes, Shulamith Firestone, and Kate Millet, radical feminism took a shape that both linked it with and distinguished it from New Left politics. During the 1970s and early 1980s, this second wave of feminist expression produced pathbreaking works such as Sheila Rowbotham's Women, Resistance, and Revolution (1972), Ti-Grace Atkinson's Amazon Odyssey (1974), Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), Susan Griffin's Pornography and Silence (1981), and Kathleen Barry's Female Sexual Slavery (1984). Figures such as Gayle Rubin and Mary Daly emerged as still other influential purveyors of a feminist vocabulary built up around the notions of oppression, exploitation, patriarchy, domination, and resistance. Unlike their liberal feminist counterparts, these radical theorists emphasized transgressive and subversive tactics for overhauling social structure. They built their frameworks around the understanding that the personal is political—that is, that power pervades human association and shapes the structures wherein some groups, such as men, dominate and oppress other groups, such as women. From their perspective, the personal and interpersonal levels demand critique and transformation just as thoroughly as large-scale organizations and the institutional order do.

One of the best-known radical feminists who emerged during this period is Angela Y. Davis. Her political activism brought her notoriety in many circles. The publication of Women, Race & Class (1981) gained her attention in academic circles. Davis's book includes an incisive survey of the class and racial biases that had infiltrated first-wave feminism. Alongside her historically grounded critique Davis offers a parallel critique of her contemporary radical feminists. In the antirape movement spearheaded by radical feminists, for example, Davis finds considerable racism centering on stereotypes of African American men as rapists. Working mostly from a Marxian perspective, Davis links women's and other groups' political struggles and treats them all as necessitating the defeat of monopoly capitalism. From her perspective, femininity is above all an ideology of inferiority produced primarily by industrialization, which displaced women's productive labor in and around the household. Eradicating that ideology, then, means eradicating the conditions of its genesis and development.

More than 15 years later Davis published Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998), which focuses on how working-class African American women's feminism found powerful expression in their contributions to blues music. Centering on the works of Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, and Billie Holiday, this study provides rich empirical grounds illustrative of Davis's earlier contentions about the linkages among race, class, and gender in capitalist economies. At the same time, it offers historical insights into African American women's contributions to feminism that amount to a cultural and political legacy that bears further investigation.

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