What are women to do in today’s political climate? More specifically, what should the organizations that represent them in Washington do for the next two years? In my view, the task for the women’s movement is clear. The task is …
The dynamism of Marxism, the flowing sixties atmosphere, and the general tendency of feminist utopians to dream of amniotic bliss—all meet in The Dialectic of Sex. When one remembers that the feminist bookshelf wasn’t a foot long in 1970, the fullness, clarity and force of Shulamith Firestone’s feminism is simply amazing.
Ellen Willis fits a certain stereotype of the post-1960s radical. Out of feminist principle she has renounced marriage. She opposes the war on drugs and writes unrepentantly about the acid trips of her youth. She’s a New Yorker, she’s Jewish, …
Feminism, like Broadway, the novel, and God, has been declared dead many times. Indeed, unlike those other items, it has been declared dead almost since its birth—by which I mean its modern rebirth in the 1960s. Feminism has also, as …
America’s ambivalence about the roles of women today was played out most ironically in the past presidential campaign. The Republican National Convention gave the private, family-centered woman Barbara Bush a very public and political role as a highlighted speaker, while …
There is a nascent women’s movement in Eastern Europe, different from that in the West. Where the women’s movement in the West was built in a milieu of relative economic plenty, feminism in the East is being built in a …
Feminism Without Illusions by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. University of North Carolina Press, 1991. 348 pp. $24.95. During the earliest skirmishes between the women’s liberation movement and its New Left progenitors, one of the charges that flew our way, along with “man-hater” …
Justice, Gender, and the Family by Susan Moller Okin Basic Books, 1989, 216 pp. Justice, Gender, and the Family hopes to continue work that political theorist Susan Moller Okin began in her useful Women in Western Political Thought (1979). The …
In the late fifties marrying an economic equal was neither necessary nor possible. Most middle-class—or for that matter, blue-collar working class—men could expect to earn enough to support a wife and children. Moreover, most women who intended to marry and …
The 1980s have been named “the decade of the humanities.” In institutions of higher learning all across the country a debate is underway as to what constitutes the “tradition,” the “canon” of literary, artistic, and philosophical works worth transmitting to …
In the early days of this wave of the women’s movement, I sat in a weekly consciousness raising group with my friend A. We compared notes recently: What did you think was happening? How did you think our own lives …
In the era of Reagan the women’s movement has lost its center. Social activism of all kinds is retreating, and feminism is no exception. The National Organization for Women (NOW), during the post-ERA presidency of Judy Goldsmith, suffered substantial losses …
Jean Bethke Elshtain’s essay “Politics and the Battered Woman” [Dissent, Winter 1985] not only seriously misrepresents my book Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement, but it is a good example of an all …
Almost exactly a century ago, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor presented what is probably the most trenchant argument ever made against democratic socialism. By democratic socialism I mean the demand that men should come together to create a new kind of community, …
“I must write a piece on feminism, family and community,” Jean Bethke Elshtain declaims in her opening sentence. And, alas, since she has, so must I. If only she had published her rambling, pretentious essay somewhere else, like Commentary or, …
