[Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader]

Abstract

An unfortunate narrative on radical feminism has developed leading to widespread misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and silencing of numerous earlier contributions. Academics, including authors of texts and teachers of feminist courses, share in misrepresenting radical feminism whenever we gloss over complexity, diversity, and plurality of radical feminist approaches. Teachers in particular are often presented with a series of challenges whenever they broach topic of radical feminism in classroom. Today's Women's Studies courses strive to meet legitimate demands from Queer Theory, Postcolonial and Anti-Racist Feminisms, Postmodern Feminisms, Poststructural Feminisms and Cultural Studies for a nuanced account of diversity of perspectives, method, and action in contemporary feminist theory, practice and research. Crow's anthology, which focusses on original documents that defined and contested radical feminism in United States during a time of intense activity from 1967-1975, presents us with a further challenge: reconnecting today's subject matter with origins of radical feminism through exposure to original documents and sources.There are two reasons for reconnecting with radical feminist works of a quarter of a century ago and Crow is aware of both of them. First, in order to correct our misunderstandings, and undermine stereotypes (all radicals are separatist and essentialist), we need to be aware that earlier radicals wrote about a variety of topics covering questions of international politics, paid work, heterosexuality, colonialism, class and poverty, bisexuality, racism, reproduction, family and domesticity, abortion, pornography, lesbianism, war and violence, among others. Attention to this first reason for reconnecting leads us logically to second: that today's subject matter is steeped in a radical history and has more similarities with 1967-1975 radical writings than many of us may currently believe.The collection is divided into three sections. Part One focusses on radical Political Statements and Processes including 16 articles on Why Women Are Oppressed. Together these provide a valuable research resource of earlier radical feminist statements for student born after (or before) 1980. Included are works on women as a separate class (Atkinson); articles dealing with racism within context of women's oppression (Booth et. al., Dixon, Millet, Beal); and heterosexism (Millet, Weisstein). The diverse collection of articles in Part One contribute to a broader awareness of development of a radical, female- focussed liberation movement, prepared to engage dialectic of sex (Firestone), relationship of black women to wider women's liberation movement (Ware, Beal), pornography (Brownmiller), evolution of slogan the personal is political (Hanisch), sexual politics (Millet), in a world characterized by male power (Berson for The Furies) and male supremacy (O'Connor). Those who think radical feminists completely ignored women of colour prior to 1975 or that black women did not participate in radical feminist writing prior to 1980s should read articles in Part One by Ware and Beal. …

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