Radical Feminism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The term radical feminism references a school of feminist thought and approach to mobilization that envisions women’s liberation as completely transforming existing political, economic, and social structures by eradicating the sex/gender system. Radical comes from the ancient word for root. Radical feminism then identifies the root of women’s oppression throughout political history in sex, meaning the traditional sex roles of mother and wife in the family, male and female biology, and genital intercourse. “The personal is political,” a well-known slogan from radical feminism, captures how this movement transformed the female private sphere into a site of politics where men’s exercise of power over women maintains patriarchy. Radical feminism, a movement at its peak of activism in the United States between 1967 and 1975, as a result, redrew the boundary between male public and female private life by locating the body, sex, gender, and sexuality in the political arena so that reproductive freedom, domestic violence, child care, rape, and sexual harassment remain crucial issues nationally and globally.

Evolving from the 1960s civil rights and student movements, radical feminism began by asserting the claim that women needed to organize as women for their issues. Casey Hayden and Mary King’s “Sex and Caste” memo (1965) first expressed this position and equated women’s liberation with that of all human beings. The movement took shape as small groups of women, starting with the New York Radical Feminists in 1967, met in each other’s apartments and homes to share and analyze their emotions and daily experiences with work, school, and marriage. These consciousness-raising groups popped up across the United States as women awakened to the broader social, political, and economic structures oppressing them as women, which catalyzed action for change.

Grassroots direct actions using creative and per formative strategies characterized how radical feminists translated consciousness raising into challenging women’s traditional sex roles. The New York Radical Feminists organized the first such action following the Jeanette Rankin Brigade protest against the Vietnam War (1959–1975) in January 1968, when five hundred protestors gathered at Arlington Cemetery to bury Traditional Womanhood next to the symbol of Traditional Manhood. This burial illustrates radical feminism’s position that achieving equality and freedom for women requires eliminating sex roles, which would render gender, or the social construction of male and female, obsolete. Later in 1968, national media turned attention on the Miss America Beauty Pageant protest in Atlantic City, when the female body was clearly politicized. Radical feminists outside on the boardwalk—while female contestants wearing swimsuits and spiked heels paraded across the stage inside the convention center— threw girdles, bras, eyelash curlers, and other objects representing the constraints of femininity into the Freedom Trash Can. This protest conveyed a rejection of women’s sexual objectification that extended into a powerful critique of how men exercised power over women through sex and sexuality.

Heterosexual intercourse, as a result of Kate Millett’s groundbreaking book Sexual Politics (1970), became central to radical feminism as a power relationship paradigmatic of all others in society. Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), proposed eliminating male and female sex roles by using artificial methods to replace sexual intercourse for procreation as the basis for the family. Radical feminism’s claims about the power exercised through genital sex led to the sex wars of the 1970s and 1980s when radical feminists such as Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin, and Catherine MacKinnon framed pornography as the cause of rape and violence against women. Others such as Ellen Willis, in contrast, advocated for women’s right to explore various forms of sexual desire that might include pornography. Theorizing sex as an exercise of power sustaining women’s oppression, whether in beauty pageants or pornography, radical feminism inserted the body into the terms of American political debate.

Radical feminism achieved its landmark success in the fight for reproductive freedom with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which granted women the legal right to an abortion. This movement’s significance for the twenty-first century can be measured in the United States by acts such as the Violence Against Women Act (1994), which secures federal legal protections against domestic violence, and globally as the United Nations and transnational feminist organizations align women’s rights with the struggle for human rights.

Bibliography:

Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Linda Gordon, eds. Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men,Women, and Rape. New York: Ballantine, 1975.
Crow, Barbara A., ed. Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
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Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975.
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Evans, Sara. Personal Politics:The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left. New York: Random House, 1980.
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Chap. 3 in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Snitow, Ann, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. New York: Monthly Review, 1983.