Women's Liberation

WOMEN’S LIBERATION. Historically, many men and women on the Left have dismissed feminism as a bourgeois reform movement merely seeking to secure women’s rights within an otherwise unchanged political-economic structure. American feminists, however, have frequently offered a powerful general critique of their culture and society. As an oppositional movement, American feminism has not only helped redress women’s grievances, but has also challenged unarticulated assumptions about men’s and women’s proper economic, social, and cultural place in American society. In this way, feminists have played a central historical role in addressing the problems accompanying changes in family life and shifting gender relations.

The “first wave” of feminism had its roots in the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century. As they fought to end slavery, female activists found themselves ridiculed and even prohibited from public speaking. Their growing awareness of their subordinate legal and social status led to the woman’s rights movement. Convened by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the first woman’s rights conference gathered in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. It passed an extraordinary document modeled on the Declaration of Independence, “The Declaration of Sentiment,” which described women’s social, economic, and cultural grievances and called for woman suffrage. After the Civil War, these women suffered a bitter disappointment when the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, which conferred the rights and duties of citizens upon newly freed slaves, excluded women. Told to be patient, that it was the “Negro’s hour,” American women responded by establishing organizations to secure the vote for themselves. It took four generations of women to obtain suffrage. By the time the Nineteenth Amendment (commonly called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment) was ratified, the American woman’s rights movement had narrowed into a single-issue campaign.

The word féministe originated in France in the 1880s, spread across the Channel to England by the 1890s, and made its way across the Atlantic by 1910. In 1912 a small group of twenty-five New York women formed Heterodoxy, a prototypical consciousness-raising group that required each member “not to be orthodox” in her opinion. To these young adventurous women, Feminism—which they always capitalized—promised self-fulfillment, encouraged erotic satisfaction, and demanded of its participants radical criticism of the culture at large. Such a radical and expressive definition of feminism appealed to bohemians of Greenwich Village but failed to capture many followers.

Between 1920 and the emergence of feminism’s “second wave,” in the 1960s, American feminism was represented largely by the National Woman’s Party (NWP), a tactically militant though politically conservative offshoot of the suffrage movement, founded by Alice Paul in 1916. Convinced that suffrage by itself would not improve women’s status, Paul drafted the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would have declared unconstitutional discrimination on the grounds of sex. A single-issue organization, the NWP kept the ERA alive by persistently lobbying both political parties, but it failed to ally with the civil rights or labor movements. Politically isolated, the NWP narrowed into a small, elite band of Paul’s followers who frequently expressed flagrant racist, anti-Semitic, and red-baiting sentiments.

The contradictions and frustrations faced by many women during the 1950s and early 1960s in effect set the agenda for the second wave of feminism. While the media painted a roseate portrait of suburban motherhood and the happy nuclear family, the preconditions for a new feminist movement were in the making. Popular culture scorned the working woman, but an expanding service sector, coupled with families’ desire for a second income to maintain a middle-class standard of living, drew growing numbers of married middle-class mothers into the paid labor force. A high divorce rate and a revolution in birth-control technology pitted traditional attitudes of sexual restraint against a growing sexual liberalism. As women’s life span lengthened, the problem of the “empty nest” became more serious. The growing enrollment of female students in colleges and universities created a generation of young women with elevated expectations and a heightened sense of entitlement.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, McCarthyism effectively silenced any dissent or even the frank recognition of the many problems that accompanied women’s growing sexual and economic independence. Housewives, as Betty Friedan revealed in her best-selling 1963 exposé, The Feminine Mystique, suffered profound despair, interminable boredom, and unbearable isolation as a result of living exclusively as wives and mothers. Most housewives, however, blamed themselves for their unhappiness. Friedan dubbed their discontent “the problem that has no name.” Working women encountered wage discrimination, sexual harassment, the absence of child care, and unequal pay in a sex-segregated labor force. The sexual revolution, at first celebrated by many young women as an expression of individual emancipation (as well as an act of generational defiance), also created new opportunities for the sexual exploitation of women. New contraceptives increased women’s sexual freedom, but when they failed, they had to confront the reality that abortion remained illegal. Some women resented the objectification of their bodies to promote consumerism, the new permissiveness toward pornography, and the unaltered economic situation that made prostitution a profitable means of survival. Stripped of their traditional sexual veto—by which women had traditionally extracted promises of male financial support and emotional commitment—some women began to regard the sexual revolution of the 1960s as a male-defined proposition.

The 1960s ushered in a new progressive spirit that legitimized women’s questioning of authority and of social and cultural traditions. The civil rights movement successfully ended legal desegregation, the antiwar movement questioned the arrogance of the American effort to contain communism by destroying Vietnam, and Third World countries all over the globe waged liberation movements against dictatorships and foreign domination. From these movements, women learned the power of direct action, absorbed the idea of “participatory democracy,” and witnessed how self-determination could lead to independence.

In the wake of such social change, two generations of women pressed against the limits of male liberalism and radicalism. In 1961 Esther Peterson successfully pushed President John F. Kennedy to establish the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. The commission’s findings, published as American Women in 1963, documented women’s economic and social subordination but offered only timid recommendations that generally ignored working women’s basic needs. In 1963 the U.S. Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which required equal pay for equal work. Symbolically important, the Equal Pay Act never addressed the reality that most women and men work in separate labor forces with separate pay scales. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act illegalized sex discrimination in employment practices, but the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had little intention of enforcing it. Besides, the act exempted educational and governmental agencies. At the third annual meeting of the National Conference of State Commissions on Women, in 1966, a group of women fed up with federal government’s unwillingness to enforce its own laws founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). Among the founders were Betty Friedan, Aileen Hernandez, Pauli Murray, and two dozen fairly influential women. Organized as a national organization with local chapters, NOW became the most visible and broadly based feminist civil rights organization in the United States. Its goal was “to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.” Although NOW eventually embraced many of the more radical goals of the women’s liberation movement—such as reproductive rights and the rights of lesbians—it generally concentrated on challenging legal discrimination, improving women’s educational opportunities, and advancing women’s formal equality. Most of NOW’s work reflected the liberal feminist belief that government must protect the individual’s innate rights to freedom and equal opportunity. NOW therefore worked hard for the ratification of the ERA. In the 1980s, NOW entered mainstream politics, endorsed national candidates, and became closely associated with liberal feminism’s effort to secure equal rights for women. NOW was instrumental in ending sex-segregated want ads, enforcing Title VII through successful class-action suits, and publicizing women’s problems through national task forces.

During the late 1960s, another distinct branch of feminism simultaneously emerged in the United States. These were usually younger women, veterans of other movements, who sought radical change and subjected all authority—especially men’s—to close scrutiny. Their experiences in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and other New Left groups enhanced their sense of personal independence, increased their confidence, and taught them valuable organizing and speaking skills. At the same time, the supposed egalitarianism of these groups frequently collided with young men’s automatic assumption of leadership and decision-making. Often relegated to menial chores, sometimes treated as interchangeable sexual objects on young men’s revolving beds, women in the New Left—like female abolitionists a century earlier—began questioning their subordinate status within a movement ostensibly dedicated to participatory democracy and nonhierarchical relations.

The ridicule that greeted their concerns angered many New Left women and fueled their difficult but eventual decision to create an autonomous women’s liberation movement. As early as 1964, Casey Hayden and Mary King anonymously tried to raise the issue of women’s subordination within SNCC, only to elicit Stokely Carmichael’s joking but symbolic retort that “the only position for women in SNCC is prone.” At the SDS conventions of 1965 and 1966, at the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago in 1967, at the 1969 Counter-Inaugural demonstration in Washington, D.C., New Left women repeatedly witnessed their radical “brothers” ridicule their feminist concerns. First in Chicago, then in New York and in Washington, D.C., women in the New Left gathered in small groups to discuss their shared confusion and resentments. At first, they simply called themselves “radical” women to distinguish themselves from the liberal feminists of NOW. Then, to identify themselves with Third World and black liberation movements, they began describing themselves as the “women’s liberation movement.”

Unlike NOW, the women’s liberation movement was allergic to bureaucratic and hierarchical organization, indeed, even to leadership itself. In style as well as substance, the early women’s liberation movement inherited some of the greatest strengths—as well as weaknesses—from the radical men they had ostensibly left. From the early civil rights movement they inherited the certainty that “separate but equal” would never guarantee equality. From the subsequent Black Power movement, they adopted the belief that women required some degree of separatism to assert their power. From the counterculture, which they often criticized for trying to keep women “barefoot and pregnant,” they retained the moral imperative of living as though the future had already replaced the present. From the late New Left—in the midst of its own self-destruction—they inherited an apocalyptic utopianism that shunned structure and leadership, romanticized “participatory democracy” and the need for consensus, avoided alliances with “establishment” groups, spoke a garbled revolutionary rhetoric, glamorized vanguardism, and demanded moral absolutism, ideological purity, and “correct politics.”

Between 1968 and 1970, women’s liberation groups sprouted rapidly across the country. Sometimes an umbrella group coordinated the formation of new groups, but many thrived in isolation. Newsletters and journals—including the Voice of Women’s Liberation in Chicago, It Ain’t Me Babe in Berkeley, California, off our backs in Washington, D.C., and No More Fun and Games in Boston—speeded the rapid transmission of new activities and ideas.

Seeking radical change, women’s liberationists shunned established reformist efforts in favor of educating themselves and society about the pervasive sexual inequality that conventional wisdom assumed to be “natural.” Kathie Sarachild, an early activist in New York Radical Women, coined the phrase “consciousness-raising” to describe the process by which women discovered the truth of their situation. Within the safe confines of a “consciousness-raising group,” women began unmasking the world around them as they discussed childhood experiences, mother-daughter relationships, marriage, sexual experiences, stereotypes of femininity, and body images, among other issues. By sharing individual problems, members soon recognized the commonality of their female experiences, and the power relations hidden in their personal and public lives. Unlike group therapy, consciousness-raising was not intended to adapt the individual to society, but to galvanize each woman to change society.

An important contribution of the women’s liberation movement was its grounding of political theory in women’s concrete life experiences. In Notes from the Second Year (1970), Carol Hanisch popularized the idea that “the personal is political.” This slogan, which soon became central to the women’s liberation movement, broke down the false dichotomy between “personal” and “political,” and forced women—and some men—to recognize that power relations were just as operative in the bedroom or kitchen as in public life.

Feminist writings—at first printed as pamphlets—quickly made their way across the country, deepening women’s understanding of “the personal is political” and accelerating the “consciousness-raising” that was transforming women’s perceptions of their lives. Ann Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” questioned the Freudian assumption that intercourse was required for female sexual satisfaction, and left open the possibility that, with clitoral stimulation, women could achieve sexual satisfaction with or without men. Naomi Weisstein, a veteran of other 1960s movements, a founding member of the Chicago women’s liberation movement and the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band (1970–1973), used her training as an experimental psychologist to argue in “Kinder, Kirche, Küche as Scientific Law. Psychology Constructs the Female” that psychology had created and rationalized an artificial ideal of femininity. Pat Mainardi’s “The Politics of Housework” disputed the premise that women should bear exclusive responsibility for housework by sardonically repeating the arguments men typically used to avoid sharing domestic work.

To educate the public, early women’s liberationists engaged in “zap” actions, essentially street theater. In January 1968, at the Jeanette Rankin Peace Brigade march in Washington, D.C.—the first all-women’s anti–Vietnam War peace demonstration—a group of New York radical feminists staged a “Burial of Traditional Womanhood” to dramatize the fact that they were protesting the war as independent women, rather than as mothers or wives of men. Later that year, New York radical feminists gained national attention when they staged an even more theatrical protest at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City. Protesting the use of women as sexual objects to promote consumerism, they crowned a sheep to parody women being treated like meat and threw into a large “freedom trashcan” objects of “female torture”—bras, cosmetics, hair spray, girdles, copies of Ladies Home Journal. Later, the press invented the myth that feminists had burned their bras. There were other famous demonstrations. Women’s liberationists invaded bridal fairs to protest the legal inequalities in the marriage contract; they staged sit-downs at famous women’s magazines to protest the trivialization of women’s concerns; dressed as witches, they hexed Wall Street and companies that exploited the poor. The most significant, broad-gauged event took place on 26 August 1970. Sponsored by a coalition of NOW and women’s liberation groups, the national Women’s Strike for Equality commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of woman suffrage by staging rallies and marches across the country. In New York, some twenty thousand women marched down Fifth Avenue, calling for the three preconditions of women’s liberation: twenty-four-hour child-care centers, abortion on demand, and equal opportunity in education and employment.

At its best, “the personal is political” breathed new life into American radical politics by legitimizing the analysis of hidden exploitation and by giving “women’s issues” political prominence. It drew public attention to the thousands of deaths that resulted from illegal abortions, dramatized how the lack of child care prevented women from entering public life as equals with men, and revealed the astonishing prevalence of unsatisfactory sex and “faked orgasms” that remained a well-guarded secret in the midst of the sexual revolution. During the 1970s, it permitted feminists to “name” the many hidden injuries women suffered in silence: rape, sexual harassment, wife battering, and forced sexual slavery.

As political theory, however, “the personal is political” had drawbacks. If theory was based on women’s experiences, then the political program that emerged from a largely white middle-class movement was hardly applicable to women of other races, classes, and cultures. Even worse, defining the personal as political frequently led to the position that how one lived was a political end in itself. In the name of “the personal is political,” too many women were judged traitors for living with men, bearing children, pursuing a professional career, or even dressing “incorrectly.” Many highly skilled women who assumed authentic leadership were trashed by a movement that feared domination by “male styles.”
Critics noted that women’s liberationists seemed particularly hostile toward marriage, men, and children—and they weren’t entirely wrong. Many movement participants were refugees from the 1950s, a decade that vilified female independence and insisted that women’s anatomy was their destiny. The immediate past conjured up images of claustrophobic marriages, coercive motherhood, and constrained chastity. A terror of being trapped—again, or for the very first time—drove activists to search for alternatives to the traditional nuclear families they remembered from the 1950s. As the movement matured, hostility gave way to sophisticated critiques of the institution of marriage, the institution of motherhood, and the impossible burden of raising children alone without help from either men or the government.

From the beginning, radical women theorized about the origins of women’s oppression and sought remedies for it. Reacting against the biological determinism of the 1950s, as well as that decade’s glorification of women’s moral superiority as mothers, early writers emphasized the fundamental similarity of the sexes and sought to eliminate—or at least diminish—sexual difference. Kate Millett’s famous Sexual Politics (1970), a book that attacked the misogyny of American culture, called for “the annihilation of sex roles.” Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) viewed women’s oppression as rooted in their biological difference, and argued that test-tube babies might make women equal to men. By the mid-1970s, Carolyn Heilbrun, in Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973), and others were exploring the possibility of combining the best of both masculine and feminine characteristics.

But by the late 1970s, many feminist writers had begun the search for a “woman-centered” definition of female experience. The women’s health movement—popularized by early pamphlet versions of the book Our Bodies, Our Selves (1971)—redefined birth, menstruation, and menopause as normal processes and helped reverse women’s negative feelings toward their bodies. Writers such as Susan Griffin, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich began exploring—and celebrating—women’s values and experiences. Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) even argued that women possess a distinct morality. A “woman-centered perspective” helped women to reclaim their “difference” as a valuable asset, rather than as a liability. But claims of women’s special nature and natural superiority sometimes came perilously close to agreeing with the Freudian determinism of the 1950s, the sociobiologists of the 1970s, and the Christian anti-feminists of the 1980s. How to define woman’s nature—when men still remained the frame of reference—was and remains a problem that haunts feminist debates over social policy and litigation.

Many of the splits that destroyed the movement’s unity originated in women’s differing political assessments of the causes of and solutions to women’s subordination. Women in NOW, for example, believed that legal reforms would substantively improve women’s status in the United States. Early radical feminists argued that women’s oppression was the root of all systems of oppression and that women together could revolutionize society. The slogan “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” coined by Kathie Sarachild in 1968, best expressed this point of view. Between 1970 and 1972, a “gay/straight split” caused profound ruptures in the movement. Lesbians insisted the movement treat their sexual preference as a legitimate political issue, and some argued that lesbians constituted the political vanguard of the women’s movement. During the 1970s large number of lesbian feminists created a separatist woman’s culture politically based in a growing network of women’s centers, rape crisis centers, battered women’s shelters, and culturally expressed in feminist bookstores, coffeehouses, and music festivals. Separatists believed that only a woman’s culture could fundamentally challenge the “compulsory heterosexuality” of patriarchal culture. By the later 1970s, feminists further splintered into groups that promoted spirituality (womanspirit and goddess worship), ecology (ecofeminism), and specifically anti-masculinist anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigns.

In the earliest years of the movement, feminists who remained most closely yoked to the Left were derided as “male identified” “politicos” by radical feminists. Later, they described themselves as socialist feminists or Marxist feminists. Like radical feminists, socialist feminists believed that radical change, not merely reform, was necessary to free women. Some leftist feminists accepted the traditional Marxist belief that women’s liberation would be achieved after the overthrow of capitalism, the elimination of private property, and the establishment of a socialist society. Noting women’s grim position in socialist countries, however, others argued that patriarchy and capitalism both oppressed women. Two short pamphlets in the late 1960s—Margaret Benston’s “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation” and Juliet Mitchell’s “Women: The Longest Revolution”—were among the first attempts to synthesize the insights of radical feminism with the class analysis of Marxism. One writer called the effort an “unhappy marriage.” Still, autonomous socialist-feminist groups formed in dozens of cities. In the late 1960s, the Boston organization Bread and Roses early defined itself as a socialist-feminist group, and throughout the 1970s socialist feminists formed women’s unions, attempting—mostly unsuccessfully—to organize working women. In 1975 a national socialist-feminist conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, drew more than two thousand women.

Still, socialist feminism had a minimal impact on American feminism as a whole. Its highly sophisticated and often jargon-ridden rhetoric limited its ability to appeal to ordinary women. Expressed in abstract language, socialist-feminist writings rarely embodied the emotional appeal of radical-feminist descriptions of women’s concrete suffering. Americans’ instinctive fear of collectivist solutions and deeply rooted anticommunism, moreover, left socialist feminism a largely self-referential and marginalized group. Its greatest impact was in the universities and colleges, where socialist feminists had a disproportionate influence as faculty members. Their prolific feminist scholarship reinvigorated many feminist issues and analyses with a class and racial dimension and helped keep alive the early women’s liberation belief that there can be no individual solution to women’s problems.

Neither radical feminism nor socialist feminism had the power to determine how feminism became translated into mainstream culture. By the end of the 1970s, liberal feminists and the media had helped integrate feminism into an American liberal tradition that emphasized individual rights and individual solutions to social problems. In a sudden media blitz during 1970, the national media dramatically turned a small movement into a household cliché and at the same time created fraudulent celebrities, discredited participants as hysterical man-haters or lesbians, and distorted ideas. As the women’s liberation movement intersected with the human potential movement, feminism became redefined as a process of individual self-realization. Women’s magazines helped women cope with their new responsibilities by teaching assertiveness, dressing for success, stress management, and other privatized techniques.

By 1980, it was clear that the more emancipatory ideas of the women’s movement—those that had proposed the transformation of the private sphere—had been excluded from the new image of the “superwoman.” Women’s entry into the labor force had not been followed by a commensurate reorganization of public institutions (“flextime,” child care, or paid parental leave), or in the home. Women’s lives broadened, but often at the cost of sheer exhaustion as they worked—without help—a “double shift” as both a paid worker and an unpaid housewife. The result, as so many noticed in the 1980s, was a new prescriptive role: the myth that a woman can “have it all” and, moreover, do it all, but by herself. Family problems continued to be defined as women’s issues. The fantasy of the superwoman obscured the stubborn persistence of a sex-segregated labor market and the fact that, while substantial numbers of middle-class women had moved into the professions, a growing number of women, especially after divorce, had slid into poverty.

In 1980, too, the press repeatedly pronounced the movement dead. Feminists had to admit that their movement was on the defensive. The ERA, passed by Congress in 1972, met stiff opposition from the New Right and was granted a five-year extension to obtain ratification. By 1982, the ERA still failed to win ratification, and was successfully defeated by right-wing propaganda and poor organization and tactics on the part of its proponents.

By 1980, when the American people elected Ronald Reagan as their president, feminism had entered mainstream national politics. Reagan’s campaign, which tried to kindle nostalgia for the 1950s and the traditional nuclear family, helped accelerate the cultural backlash against feminism. The culture wars, kicked off during the 1970s, included the gender wars—the hotly contested struggle over women’s and men’s appropriate role and behavior in American society. Susan Faludi, in her best-selling Backlash (1991), documented one side of that cultural war, the New Right’s effort to sensationalize legal abortion, the media’s effort to blame feminism for “superwoman burnout,” and the mythic phenomena of the “infertility epidemic” and the “terminally single woman.” Marilyn French’s The War against Women (1992), in contrast, documented the continued subordination of women in American society. Still, pundits repeatedly declared the movement dead and dubbed the era as “post-feminist,” thus contributing to the decade’s sense that feminism had become irrelevant to American culture.

The opposite was true. The movement had already spread deeper into mainstream culture and society than most people realized. In films, books, popular culture, and politics, feminism and the conflicts it created took central stage. By the 1980s, the network of self-help centers created by feminists—rape crisis hot lines and battered women’s shelters—had become expected services in most U.S. towns and cities. Across the nation, feminist scholars challenged the paradigms and canon of virtually every academic discipline. During the 1970s and 1980s, black, Chicana, Asian, Latina, professional, trade union, religious, and working women had created their own feminist organizations, and, in the process, had redefined and expanded the meaning of feminism.

The United Nations (UN) Decade for Women (1976–1985) further sowed the seeds of feminism deeply into American soil and around the world. At the U.S. government-sponsored National Conference on Women at Houston in 1977, American women—representing all classes, regions, religions, and political and sexual persuasions—managed to agree on a national agenda that incorporated some of the radical visions of the early women’s liberation movement.

At the UN conferences held in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980), and Nairobi (1985), networks of feminists from around the globe gradually transcended cultural and ideological conflicts to shape a new feminist global agenda. At the 1992 UN Vienna meeting on human rights, for example, feminists succeeded in convincing delegates to acknowledge that some customs are indeed crimes and that women’s rights are human rights. At the 1993 UN Cairo meeting on population and development, feminists again succeeded in persuading delegates that women’s education and economic engagement, not just industrial development, would result in population control. And at the Fourth UN Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, feminists agreed upon a plan of action that acknowledged that violence against women is a violation of their human rights.

On the domestic front, the backlash continued during the 1980s and 1990s. In national politics feminism became a litmus test of both the Left and the Right. The New Right’s insertion of “family values” into the national agenda curiously testified to feminism’s success in making private issues—such as abortion—a matter of public debate.

During these two decades, the gender wars (a large component of the cultural wars) simmered, occasionally erupting into public life. A flurry of sex scandals and controversies titillated—and educated—a public baffled by changing ideas about “appropriate” private and public sexual behavior. The Clarence Thomas hearings, the William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson date rape trials, the navy’s Tailhook sex scandal, the Spur Posse sexual athleticism in Lakewood, California, the gang rape of a retarded girl in New Jersey, the furious debate over homosexuals in the military, the O. J. Simpson trial and verdict, and the Bill Clinton-Paula Jones-Monica Lewinsky scandal all publicized various hidden injuries that feminists had successfully named and publicized during the seventies: sexual harassment, date rape, domestic violence, and discrimination against homosexuals.

The battles of the gender wars have left terrible scars, but they have also publicized gender crimes and redrawn the national and international political agenda. The great triumph of feminism during the last quarter of the twentieth century is that it has forced “women’s issues” into the public arena, where they are still hotly contested and passionately debated. But a new national consensus has not been achieved. Waves of backlash greet every feminist victory. Some of them have been aided by so-called “new feminists,” writers like Katie Roiphe, Christine Hoff Sommers, and Camille Paglia, who, in their different ways, have blamed feminism for the failures of American society to respond to the demands feminists made on men and society.

During this extended backlash African American women have been most successful in giving new life to feminism by redefining the movement’s aims according to their historical exigencies. Writers like Alice Walker, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and many others publicized the particular needs of women in African American communities. And it is poor women in these communities who have tried to publicize the ominous fact that it is women and children who are the poorest group in the United States, as well as in the rest of the world. In their fight for environmental and economic justice, these black women have taken up the banner of the grass-roots movement and redefined the health, shelter, nutrition, and economic security of their families and communities as feminist issues.

As the millennium nears, much more remains to be done. A small percentage of American women have gained the right to have it all, if only they can and are willing to do it all. Neither men nor the government still offer much help to working women. Lesbians, despite decades of efforts to stem institutionalized discrimination, still face cultural and legal efforts to isolate and discredit their lives. Welfare women confront growing blame for their poverty. Women of color still face the double discrimination of gender and race. Still, at the end of the twentieth century, feminists of all political persuasions could claim the not immodest victory of having made gender and women’s lives a salient issue in every aspect of American social, economic, cultural, and political life.

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