Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism

Abstract

ed from a critique of familialism, a commitment to sexual liberation, and race and class struggle cannot sustain itself as a radical force; a movement that attempts such an abstraction is bound to fragment into bitterly opposed factions and/or turn conservative. Yet so long as sexist power relations exist there will be a need for an autonomous, specifically feminist women's movement. It is the legacy of radical feminism that makes it possible to talk even tentatively of a feminist left. And it would be naive to imagine that a left intellectually committed to feminism would automatically be free of sexism either in theory or in practice. In the foreseeable future, any feminist movement that aims to be radical will somehow have to negotiate this tension between the need to preserve its political boundaries and the need to extend them. It will help to remember that radical feminism named the boundaries in the first place.