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known, acknowledged that the achievement of political and legal rights had not solved the ‘women’s question’. Indeed, feminist ideas and arguments became increasingly radical, and at times revolutionary. Books such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) pushed back the borders of what had previously been considered to be ‘political’ by focusing attention on the personal, psychological and sexual aspects of female oppression. The goal of second-wave feminism was not merely political emancipation but ‘women’s liberation’, reflected in the ideas of the growing Women’s Liberation Movement. Such a goal could not be achieved by political reforms or legal changes alone, but demanded, modern feminists argued, a more far-reaching and perhaps revolutionary process of social change. Since the first flowering of radical feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminism has developed into a distinctive and established ideology, whose ideas and values challenge the most basic assumptions of conventional political thought. Feminism has succeeded in establishing gender and gender perspectives as important themes in a range of academic disciplines, and in raising consciousness about gender issues in public life in general. By the 1990s, feminist organizations existed in all Western countries
and most parts of the developing world. However, three processes have accompanied these developments. The first is a process of deradicalization, whereby there has been a retreat from the sometimes uncompromising positions that characterized feminism in the early 1970s. This led to the growing popularity of the idea of ‘ postfeminism ’, suggesting that as feminist objectives have been largely achieved, the women’s movement has moved ‘beyond feminism’. The second process is one of fragmentation. Instead of simply losing its radical or critical edge, feminist thinking has gone through a process of radical diversification, making it difficult, and perhaps impossible, any longer to identify ‘common ground’ within feminism. In addition to the ‘core’ feminist traditions – liberal feminism, socialist feminism and radical feminism – must now be added postmodern feminism, psychoanalytical feminism, black feminism, lesbian feminism and transfeminism , among others. The third, and related, process is the growing recognition of intersectionality (see p. 201) and of the tendency for women to havemultiple social identities. Women, thus, do not have a straightforward gender-based identity but one in which, for instance, race, social class, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality and sexual orientation can overlap or ‘intersect’ with gender. This implies that women may be subject to interlocking systems of oppression and discrimination, as sexism becomes entangled with racism (see p. 162), xenophobia, homophobia and the like. CORE THEMES Until the 1960s, the idea that feminism should be regarded as an ideology in its own right would have been highly questionable. It is more likely that feminism would have been viewed as a subset of liberalism and socialism, the point at which the basic values and theories of these two ideologies can be applied to gender issues. The rise of radical feminism changed this, in that radical feminists proclaimed the central political importance of gender
Radical feminism: A form of feminism that holds gender divisions to be the most politically significant of social cleavages, and believes that they are rooted in the structures of domestic life. Gender: A social and cultural distinction between males and females, as opposed to sex, which refers to biological and therefore ineradicable differences between women and men. Postfeminism: Either the perception that many or all of the goals of feminism have been achieved, or the loss of support for feminism among women. Socialist feminism: A form of feminism that links the subordination of women to the dynamics of the capitalist economic system, emphasizing that women’s liberation requires a process of radical social change. Transfeminism: A form of feminism that rejects the idea of fixed identities and specifically avows sexual and gender ambiguity. Sexism: Prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially discrimination against women.
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