Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the Sixties. This is a revolutionary, not a reformist, movement, and it is meeting with considerable success. Totalitarian in spirit, it is deeply antagonistic to traditional Western culture and proposes the complete restructuring of society, morality, and human nature. Radical feminism is today's female counterpart of Sixties radicalism. The feminist program is in its main features the same as that of the disastrous Port Huron Statement,
(2) modified to accommodate the belief that the oppressors, the source of all evil, are men, the "patriarchy" rather than the "Establishment." All else remains the same. "Feminism rode into our cultural life on the coattails of the New Left but by now it certainly deserves its own place in the halls of intellectual barbarisms."
(3)
America has seen women's movements before, reform movements seeking for women the political and cultural privileges held by men. They represented what best-selling author and professor of philosophy Christina Hoff Sommers calls "equity feminism" to distinguish them from "gender feminism", the radical variety. She identifies herself as an equity feminist.
(4) It would be better, I think, to drop the word "feminism" altogether since the movement no longer has a constructive role to play; its work is done. There are no artificial barriers left to women's achievement. That fact does not mollify the radicals in the slightest. Revolutions, it is commonly observed, often break out not when circumstances are next to intolerable but when conditions begin rapidly to improve. There are now more female than male students in universities, and women are entering business, the professions, and the academy in large numbers. Yet this seems only to fuel the rage of the feminists.
Indeed, Midge Decter thinks improvement is precisely the problem. She asks "why there should have been an explosion of angry demand on the part of women who as a group were the freest, healthiest, wealthiest, longest-lived, and most comfortably situated people the world had yet laid eyes on."
(5) She answers that "It is a freedom that frightens her [today's woman] and disorients her and burdens her terribly ... The appeal to her of the women's movement is that in her fear and disorientation, the movement offers her the momentary escape contained in the idea that she is not free at all; that she is, on the contrary, the victim of an age-old conspiracy that everything troubling to her has been imposed on her by others." Decter has a profound point. A woman who formerly had a constricted range of choices "must now decide everything essential to her." Whether to be serious about a career, whether to marry, whether to divorce, whether to bear children. Everything is in her hands "to a degree possibly unprecedented in the history of mankind, a degree experienced by her as bordering on the intolerable." The responsibility is too much, the choices too many.
The radical feminist movement not only explains that any dissatisfaction she may experience is the fault of others, namely men, but also comforts her with a sense of solidarity and common purpose in the way that some men find the battalion a welcome relief from the freedom of civilian life. There is probably more to it than that, however. Radical feminism is not merely a way of discovering that a woman is not free. It is also a cause that creates an orientation and a meaning in her life that unstructured freedom destroys. Radical feminism is thus similar to causes such as the identity politics of the racial and ethnic programs on campuses.
