The Radical Feminist Movement In The United States, 1967-75.

Abstract

It has been almost twenty years since the emergence of the women's liberation movement and yet, with the exception of Sara Evans' groundbreaking monograph Personal Politics, there has been no scholarly history of the movement. This dissertation will begin to fill the lacuna in the scholarship. It analyzes the trajectory of the radical feminist movement from its beleaguered beginnings in 1967, through its ascendance as the hegemonic tendency within the women's liberation movement, to its decline and eventual supplantation by cultural feminism in the mid-seventies. A study of this sort is especially important because radical feminism is so frequently conflated with cultural feminism--a strain which developed out of radical feminism, but contravened much that was essential to it. Radical feminism was a political movement dedicated to eliminating male dominance; cultural feminism was a countercultural movement committed to replacing male values with female values. The dissertation suggests that radical feminism was a victim not only of the economic, political and cultural constriction of the seventies and the collapse of oppositional movements in this period, but of its own theoretical shortcomings. The thesis demonstrates that the theoretical limitations of radical feminism, specifically, its contention that feminism was the transformative theory, that gender was the primary contradiction, and its belief that women were bonded together in a universal sisterhood--all of which derived largely from the left's depreciation of feminism--paved the way for cultural feminism. It also analyzes how the turmoil over sexual preference, class and elitism contributed to the ascendance of cultural feminism. The dissertation is not simply an intellectual history, a social history or a collective biography; rather it incorporates elements of all three. It is based upon both written sources--feminist and leftist publications, underground newspapers, and personal papers--and oral interviews with forty-one women who were involved in the women's liberation movement. This dissertation not only provides a much-needed history of the radical feminist movement, but illuminates the process by which one of the most dynamic social movements of the sixties was vitiated.