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, …
must write a piece on feminism, family, and community. I write as someone who has been involved in the politics of the feminist movement since the early 1960s, someone who characterizes her own work as made possible in part by …
To ask about the new feminism and contemporary American culture, I must begin with Le Deuxieme Sexe, which Simone de Beauvoir published in France 31 years ago. Joyless but monumental, that book articulated a concept of woman that American feminists, …
The attitude of the women’s movement toward Freud has changed in recent years. The movement’s beginnings were marked by an attack upon what were seen as the rationalizations of Freudian theory for the subordination of women. Naomi Weisstein’s “Kinder, Kuche, …
