Some Ideas From a Few Radical Feminists

Making an Historic Difference One Issue at a Time

Dec 1, 2008

Radical feminists are the acting force of the American Woman's Movement. Their ideas and attitudes are the focus of many issues, and some are remembered more than others.

Radical feminism has gained notoriety, because the activists don’t have one standard issue to work on. Their groups are small, but the activists are included in every issue that women feel oppressed in or discounted out of. This is seen by others that they are too thinly spread. Radical-cultural feminism is seen as the stereotype for all feminists today, meaning that ‘men are oppressors, and only women are right’ attitudes, are what people focus on. Radical-libertarian feminists are faulted for instilling the right to have freedom of choice in everything, when IN reality the women’s movement is all about having choices in a patriarchal society. From these schools of thought, a few women have stood out as leaders in their communities, rising up to change as much as they could. Some of those women highlighted below:

Kate Millett is considered one of the originators of the concept that female oppression is located within the perception of sex/gender situated in patriarchy, and sex is political, because the male-female relationship is the basis for all connection. In her text Sexual Politics, she set the playing field on a style of writing that was seen as feminist literary criticism. Millett saw rape as a patriarchal weapon, and the system over-embellishes the male and female differences in order to keep women oppressed while men lord over them. Therefore, terrorization is the recipe for patriarchy. But Millett did state that some women prove to be unaffected by this determination. Millett is against Freudians and Parsonians, because they hinder the work of feminists. Freudians ratified traditional gender roles, and Parsonians stated that the submission of women to men is natural. Millett hailed the idea of an androgynous society, but only when the traits of both men and women are more thoroughly dissected and researched. To Millett, androgyny is perfect if both male and female characteristics are embraced equally by the androgynous person.

Shulamith Firestone is considered a radical-libertarian feminist. She helped co-found the New York Radical Women, where her activist conduct spread to writing The Dialectic of Sex. She believed in the idea that male suppression of women is held in the reproductive roles of both men and women. In her text, Firestone writes that the only way to overcome oppression, there has to be the introduction and forced habit of artificial reproduction in replacement of natural reproduction. With this in place, the biological nuclear family will be deconstructed and children will be communally raised. Through this, there will be more time to practice different sexual practices, and the construction of masculine and feminine traits will no longer be labeled strictly as male and female. Firestone uses Marxism to determine that sex is controversial. She also uses capitalism to describe the revolution of culture.

Mary Daly's Ideas of Androgyny

Mary Daly is a radical-cultural feminist that degraded conventional masculine traits. She started her activist profession with the book entitled Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, which focused on her ideas of androgyny, but she evolved her scope of thinking to exclude all male and female terms, and defined them as trappings of patriarchy. Her form of androgyny concerns itself on the positive traditional feminine traits, and that a true androgynous person cannot exist until women themselves can say no to subordination. She also pleads for a dethroning of the current patriarchal God, and to replace the deity with a more merciful God. By doing this, both men and women would be seen as equal before the eyes of God. Her belief is this patriarchy loving God has women seen as not even survivors in the eyes of a male dominated society. By her second book, Gyn/Ecology, Daly throws away the term God, seeing it as a death to self-loving women. She then rejects the term homosexuality, because it is too general of a word to use in describing the same-sex love between men and women. Her final word for the chopping block was androgyny, because to her it twists the meanings and the words intended to describe. It was Daly that coined the term ‘wild female’ who shirks both female and male gender roles, to become the perfect person.

Anne Koedt and the "Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm"

Anne Koedt helped organize the New York Radical Women after the split of the Women’s Liberation. Koedt believed that women see themselves as secondary citizens, because the men in their lives enforce the idea that they are. Liberation for women can only be done when women see themselves as primary, not secondary. According to Koedt, the oppression of women is bigger, deeper, and older than the issue of economics, thus showing her anti-capitalist view. What set her apart from the rest of the crowd was her essay "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm". Koedt notes that even if women realize that men aren’t needed for pleasure and just procreation, many women will still choose male partners to ease their psychological burdens.

These women are just a small example of radical feminists that have made a difference that is apparent in the world we know today. The rise of radical feminism in society can be attributed to an overwhelming desire to improve the situation of women by joining and participating in different social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement, and the Peace Movement. The Women’s Liberation Movement rose from out of the anger of the civil rights movement, and the demonstrations have gotten more frequent as new issues arise. The radical feminists have a never-ending urge to change social behaviors through open demonstrations and the continual mantra of ‘equality’ that has brought the idea of radical feminism to the fore ground.

Firestone, Shulamith. Dialectic of Sex. New York, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1970.

Tong, Rosemarie Putnam. Feminist Thought. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998.

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