Since the late 1970s, feminist theorists and scholars have been attacking, subverting, and attempting to dethrone the universalist liberalism of earlier women’s-rights advocates who spoke in the name of a unified, homogeneous womankind. From that point on, the dominant motif …
In Mexico there is an expression, “The dog is master of the cat, the cat is master of the mouse, and the mouse is master of its tail.” In El Salvador, Deysi Cheyne reports: “There is so much violence and …
I am an immigrant to Dissent-land from the shores of the New Left. Although I’ve had my naturalization papers since 1986, my nontraditional background got me this Last Page assignment. For the magazine’s forty-fifth anniversary, the editors asked me to …
Distinctions between public and private have been central to feminist analysis. Distinctions between civil society and the state are far less frequently invoked. Does feminism need a concept of civil society? It certainly does not need what is presented in …
For the past year, feminists have taken a lot of heat for supporting President Clinton in Zippergate. What about that most basic of feminist insights: the personal is political? If people are politically accountable for their personal lives, why put …
At least once a day I hear myself saying some version of the following to my two daughters, ages ten and thirteen: “We didn’t have X when I was young.” Depending on the situation, the next sentence will be, “And …
When Erica Jong’s hymn to Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared in the Nation last November, it was only the latest in a series of feminist tributes to the First Lady. In a March 1993 double salute to Mrs. Clinton and the …
Is socialism—and if so, what kind of socialism—a necessary condition for true equality between the sexes?
When Erica Jong’s hymn to Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared in the Nation last November, it was only the latest in a series of feminist tributes to the First Lady. In a March 1993 double salute to Mrs. Clinton and the …
Is American feminism about to become interesting again? The June 3, 1996 issue of the New Yorker opened with Betty Friedan’s comments on the Stand for Children event in Washington, D.C. Under the subhead, “A gathering heralds a shift toward …
Recently I found myself discussing the dawning of contemporary feminism with two young women—one a first-year student at Brandeis and another a senior in high school about to enter Brandeis. My cousin—the high school senior—was writing her senior thesis on …
I was born a few years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949) in Beijing and grew up an equal of everybody else—judged, at least, by one important criterion, gender equality. My sisters and many friends shared …
Should rights play an important role in feminist theory and practice? The answer to this question is not as simple as it first appears, for contemporary feminism has a profoundly ambiguous relationship to rights. On the one hand, so many …
What does it mean to be a feminist scholar today? To get a sense of the shape of contemporary feminist research, I looked at the last three years of Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, …
