Fundamental Feminism

Radical Feminist History for the Future

Judith Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781317336730
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In this updated classic, Judith Grant provides a new introduction and postscript that frame her original work as part of a larger argument about the importance of structuralism in radical feminist ideas of patriarchy. Forewords by esteemed feminist theorists Kathi Weeks and Cristina Beltrán reintroduce the new edition to the latest generation of feminist students and scholars.

In Fundamental Feminism, Judith Grant explores the evolution of feminist theory in the context of today's feminist thought. In the original work, Grant analyzed three core concepts in feminist theory – "woman," "experience," and "personal politics" – from their origins in pamphlets and writings from the early women's liberation movement to their later constructions in feminist thought. In this second edition, she argues for the pivotal role of early radical feminism and the longstanding influence of these core assumptions on current theories including intersectional theory, queer theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, and ongoing discussions about the sexuality debates of the 1980s.

Fundamental Feminism is provocative reading for anyone interested in the history and future of feminist theory and the power of feminist politics.

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Introduction

RADICAL FEMINISM AND THE FEMINIST THEORY OF THE 1980S

I am closer to retirement than I am to graduate school. It is difficult to go back to a book that one began as part of a dissertation. It turns out that a stunning number of things can occur in one’s lifetime over the span of a few decades. What a task to go back to a work like this and try and imagine what one might change or add, how one’s thinking has shifted, which sentences might make one cringe, which might feel as though they were written by someone else. The time between the first musings that ultimately led to this book and its second edition is bookended in the U.S. by two right-wing Presidents, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and in England by Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson. This calls to mind Marx’s observation that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Alas, whatever Trump may be, most Americans who do not support him – which is to say most Americans – have long stopped thinking of him as a farce. Trump represents just one iteration of what is clearly a global rise of the ultra-right. Along with this always comes attempts to firm up borders, whether they be the ones between countries or the ones between races, between heterosexual and queer, between men and women.

If you were a feminist in the ’80s, there did seem to be bright spots. A main principle of feminism – that women ought to be treated equally – seemed to be becoming the mainstream consensus. Feminist issues such as equal pay for equal work, equal access to birth control, attention to women’s health, support for Title IX, the existence of a concept of sexual harassment and laws to support it, the criminalization of marital rape, and the introduction of the concept of “acquaintance rape” all entered the national and sometimes international consciousness, though they were sometimes delinked from the feminists who made them realities. Feminism never became generally accepted even though its political outcomes were everywhere. And now even these are in retreat. As of this writing, Republicans have become the party of white identity, and the American pussy-grabbing president became the ironic victor over the first woman candidate from a major party.

The thing about feminism is that just when you think it’s dead, it’s not. Because just when you think gender justice has been secured, patriarchy rebounds, and when racism seems to be ended, the American President tweets that women of color ought to go back where they came from. Feminism is as relevant now as it has ever been. One day this may no longer be the case, but for now, struggle and theory are still necessary. Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is brought down because he sexually harassed a series of well-known actresses (“sexual harassment”¹ is a term that, by the way, did not exist when the second wave began), Anthony Weiner ends up in jail for soliciting sex from an underage girl via an electronic device that did not exist in the ’70s or ’80s, and the defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote by some 3 million, speaks glowingly of her serial adulterer husband in an otherwise wonderful book about what happened during the 2016 election.² Because even a woman who has been the secretary of state, the most boy job in the world, can be humiliated publicly by the sexual politics of a man who, though in the most powerful job in the world, still feels the need to reinforce that power through sexual conquest.

As radical feminists wrote so long ago, women are still oppressed as women. Our politics still begins with our feelings. The personal is still political. This is a book about how second-wave radical feminist activism in the 1970s is the foundation for feminist theory. The argument that I made in the book was that there were three core concepts that existed across Anglo-American feminist theories: The category “woman,” an epistemology based on experience, and the idea that the personal is political. I argued that these were concepts that had arisen from the political activism of the ’60s and ’70s, and I traced their development and consequences for ’80s feminist theory. Fundamental Feminism is therefore a work of intellectual history. But I also made an argument for a particular kind of feminism, one rooted in the radical feminist insight that gender is, in and of itself, a power structure. In the wake of #MeToo, the defeat of Hillary Clinton, and sex scandals such as the ones involving Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, I believe that this point may be even more significant today than it was when I wrote the book in the 1990s.

My argument about gender as a power structure has, I think, been lost on many readers of this text. Perhaps the omission of a sustained discussion of the idea of patriarchy is part of the reason. Certainly, it was in my mind at the time of the writing, and my argument in the book’s last chapter was intended to be an extension of radical feminist concepts of patriarchy. However, I considered and rejected including patriarchy as a core concept for two reasons. First, it was in the process of undergoing a rather unforgiving critique, and, second, it was no longer being used as a common term across feminisms. Since identifying common feminist theoretical terms across feminism was a major element of the original project, I left “patriarchy” out. It is also true that I did not fully understand how to rebut the claim that it was a false universal. I now think that the answer to that dilemma is to understand radical feminist ideas of patriarchy as structuralism, and I will discuss this at some length herein.

Feminism of the 1980s was deeply and ideologically committed to difference, plurality, and multiplicity in a way that was qualitatively different from iterations of feminism in the ’70s. It is not that those things were unimportant in the ’70s, but rather that ’70s feminism was more concerned with creating an argument for female unity in the face of male power and less inclined to consider differences among women. Nonetheless, the problem of differences was acknowledged by radical feminists and theorized directly by working-class women, women of color, and lesbians.³ However, the point is still well taken that the main project of radical feminism was to create an argument about a male/female power structure that systematically disadvantaged women as such. Therefore, as I showed in Fundamental Feminism, most early manifestos stressed the core concepts using an idea of woman as a coherent category of unity and struggle because it was rhetorically important to stress sameness over difference. In short, the idea that “women are oppressed as women” was precisely what was being suggested as a political point of view. Radical feminism is not one among many feminisms but has a privileged place as the foundational set of texts from which feminist theory was created.

Feminists of the 1970s were rhetorically engaged in a struggle to persuade people of the existence of male power as a force that inhibited the full and authentic realization of women as human beings. If they spoke in strong terms about male power, female identity, and the patriarchal institutions that upheld that male/female hierarchy, it was because pre-feminism and the dualistic and hierarchicalized roles of gender were presented not as sociopolitical creations but as truth rooted in biology and common sense. While radical and socialist feminists took great pains to include class, women of color, and sexual difference in their analyses (however unsuccessfully), it is nonetheless true that Friedan-style bourgeois feminism was rooted in the experiences of white middle-class women. Issues such as equal pay and access focused on white-collar professions, and the reproduction and abortion politics were framed in ways that did not acknowledge the experiences of forced sterilization and eugenics faced by the working class and women of color. To this point, a founding member of the Combahee River Collective, Demita Frazier, makes a useful distinction about different kinds of feminisms in the ’70s:

I mean, there were people, as you know, who were socialist feminists, who talked about the issue of race, and there were feminists who were – radical feminists who I think were beginning to address the issues of class and race in feminism. But in terms of the quote mainstream close quote feminist movement … one thing we are not going to talk about [laugh] in a real way would be race.⁴

Subsequent academic critiques of the ideas of sisterhood or female unity did not sufficiently differentiate among feminisms and tended to treat the ideas that emerged as uniformly based on white feminist abstractions. No recent feminist theorist has defended and advocated for the role of radical feminism in feminist theory more powerfully than Catharine MacKinnon. In Feminism Unmodified, she made the point that feminism has its own voice and is not simply liberalism applied to women (as is the case with bourgeois feminism). Feminism is not just an argument that rights be extended to women; rather, it is rooted in revolutionary claims about gender as a political hierarchy. Thus, she writes, the central issue of feminism is not the “gender difference, but the difference gender makes.”⁵

Rather than centering radical feminism, most analyses of feminist theory up through the ’80s treated radical feminism as one feminism among many, arguing that the many kinds of feminism reflected the many different experiences of women. If feminist theory did not have an identifiable and common set of ideas, it was argued, this was because it was less male, less rigid, and less univocal than malestream theory. From this point of view, the plurality of feminist theories could be construed as the happy outcome of theorizing that had emerged from a leaderless and radically democratic movement. By contrast, I argued that the plurality of feminist theories could be traced, as least in part, to political and theoretical problems with their core concepts. These concepts, developed as political ideas, were then imported in subsequent theoretical iterations.

The fiery rhetoric of the early political pamphlets I analyzed in the early chapters of Fundamental Feminism soon gave way to academic debates that took place in women’s studies programs and journals devoted to feminist studies. The discipline of feminist studies was made possible by the relatively crude and politically aggressive formulations about the patriarchal bias of all knowledge claims and all theory.⁶ It was these political critiques that enabled feminism to enter the academy, and paradoxically it was there, in the course of many lively if painful debates, that radical feminism was dismantled.

Radical feminism was challenged by very important anthropological and poststructural critiques that came to dominate feminist theory in the ’80s. Universals such as patriarchy became suspect because of their alleged erasure of subaltern groups. Likewise, the very concept of “Woman” was coming under attack via theories and methods of deconstruction. Still, it was always clear to me that, of necessity, some idea of patriarchy continued to inform feminism, though, of political necessity, it often went unnamed. Aside from the justifiable hesitancy to invoke essentializing universals, feminists were abandoning radical feminism for another reason; namely, the backlash against feminism coming from the newly dominant right-wing, pro-nuclear family ideology that was occurring in earnest in the ’80s. The more radical edge of second-wave feminism was alienating many women with its critiques of the stay-at-home housewife, notions of female subservience (victimhood), and criticism of the institution of motherhood as a tool of female domination. To the extent that these ideas were identified with the whole of the second wave, they became something of an embarrassment, and something feminism ought to move beyond.

It is therefore no coincidence that during the ’80s we see the abandonment of early radical feminist critiques of romantic love, the institution of the housewife, monogamous heterosexual marriage, and motherhood as an institution of domination linked to patriarchal power. Likewise, utopic visions of alternative living arrangements that included alternative sexual arrangements were largely delinked from feminism. Many of these ideas were then taken up by what would become queer theory. In that new framing, the discussions of the oppressive aspects of marriage, motherhood, sexuality, and the rest would be addressed not as problems of women’s subordination under patriarchy but as problems of heteronormativity.

Queer theory concentrated on the marginalization and persecution of gay, lesbian, and other sexualities outside of what Gayle Rubin so compellingly called the “charmed circle.”⁷ At the same time, feminist theory largely abandoned its former impulse to radicalize heterosexual sexual arrangements and the institutions that upheld them, such as monogamous, state-sanctioned marriage or the idea that heterosexual sexuality was largely structured around the demand for female sexual accessibility to male desire. Ideas such as a radicalized heterosexuality, a transformed role for women in motherhood, and a recognition of the agency of children were no longer linked to critiques of male power as they had been in the early radical second wave. Radical sexuality continued to be discussed, but it was framed as a queer issue. Feminism turned its attention elsewhere; for examp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Inventing Feminist Theory
• 3. Feminist Strategies: From Core Concepts to Feminist Theory
• 4. Feminism and Epistemology
• 5. Feminism and Postmodernism
• 6. Solutions: A Basic Outline of the Issues and Some Suggestions
• Postscript: Feminist Structuralism: Patriarchy, Humanism, and Consciousness
• Notes
• Index