(Levy 2015). Equally, while the number of radical feminist groups and the volume of their activity may have reduced in the last half‐century, radical feminist scholarship is still being produced (Jeffreys 2014; Mackay 2015; Banyard 2016; Bindel 2017).
While the movement began in the late 1960s, radical feminists were highly influenced by scholarship preceding them. Christine Flynn Saulnier (1996) spotlights the influence of writings from the 1950s' civil rights movements and from first‐wave feminist authors like Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Stewart, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The impact of Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex (1949) is also widely noted (McMillan 1982; Simons 1999; Henry 2004). Jo Freeman (1975) in The Politics of Women's Liberation also identifies the influence of Maoist ideas, notably “speaking bitterness.” Within radical feminism this process became known as consciousness‐raising and was enormously influential in establishing the movement's key tenets.
In Radical Feminism Today, Denise Thompson notes, “there is a reluctance among feminist writers to engage in explicit definition. On the whole feminists tend, often quite deliberately, not to say what they mean by feminism” (Thompson 2001, p. 5). While authors may be reticent in articulating definitive definitions – or appointing themselves as a spokeswoman for such an anti‐hierarchical movement – equally, there actually is no single radical feminist theory, something Alison Jaggar addresses:
The most important insights of radical feminism probably spring from women's own experience of oppression, but the grass‐roots radical feminist movement is also influenced by many other traditions, from astrology to zen. Naturally, it is not easy to make all these ideas consistent with each other and radical feminism has generated a variety of theories about women's oppression.
(Jaggar 1983, p. 84)
While feminism does have factions and occasionally clashing ideologies, few movements are ever completely linear and thus, even if contested, definitions remain an essential starting point for this discussion. In 1975, Kathie Sarachild explained her use of the label:
The dictionary says radical means root, coming from the Latin word for root. And that is what we meant by calling ourselves radical. We were interested in getting to the roots of problems in society.
(Sarachild 1975, p. 145)
Robin Morgan used the same analogy:
I believe that sexism is the root oppression, the one which until and unless we uproot it, will continue to put forth branches of racism, class hatred, ageism, competition, ecological disaster, and economic exploitation.
(Morgan 1978, p. 9)
That women are subordinated – are an oppressed class; a sex‐class – and that their subordination is caused by patriarchy are two of the key tenets of the movement. While feminists like Sarachild and Morgan were using radical because of its links to root, the word also references revolution: as Valerie Bryson notes in Feminist Political Theory, the ideas being advocated for “produced a challenge to accepted values and life‐styles that often seemed both extreme and shocking” (Bryson 2003, p. 163). Radical feminism aimed to dismantle not only patriarchy but each of the social, cultural, political, and economic structures that benefited from – and supported – male authority.
In the sections that follow, I examine the principles of radical feminism and explore its criticisms and shortcomings. I end with a discussion of legacy and radical feminism's continued relevance into the twenty‐first century.
Radical Feminism: Key Tenets
Early into the movement, several efforts were made to articulate a radical feminist doctrine: Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1967), The Redstockings Manifesto (1969), and the Radicalesbians' The Woman‐Identified Woman (1970) are three of several manifestoes that became instrumental in shaping the movement (Rhodes 2012). In recent years, scholars have attempted to synthesize these ideas. Saulnier for example, details five key tenets:
(1) the personal is political; (2) women are an oppressed class and patriarchy is at the root of their oppression; (3) patriarchy is based in psychological and biological factors and enforced through violence against women; (4) women and men are fundamentally different; (5) society must be completely altered to eliminate male supremacy – incremental change is insufficient; and (6) all hierarchies must be eliminated.
(Saulnier 1996, p. 32)
Finn Mackay similarly presents four key criteria:
First, the acceptance of the existence of patriarchy alongside a commitment to end it; second, the use and promotion of women‐only space as an organizing method; third, a focus on all forms of male violence against women and their role as a keystone of women's oppression broadly; fourth and finally, an extension of the analysis of male violence against women to include the institutions of pornography and prostitution.
(Mackay 2015b, p. 334)
Using these lists as my starting point, in the sections that follow I examine these key principles.
The Personal is Political
In the late 1960s, the women who would become radical feminists formed small groups to “rap” about their gendered experiences. These consciousness‐raising sessions were driven by four objectives: opening‐up, sharing, analyzing, and abstracting (Cobble et al. 2014). Problems that had historically been dismissed as private realm, domestic, and separate from the public policy agenda – violence in marriage, for example, and workplace sexual harassment and job discrimination – surfaced as endemic to the female experience and two principles emerged: that the personal is political and that sisterhood is powerful.
In practice, the concept of the personal as political moves issues like rape and domestic violence not merely out of women's diaries but, ultimately into the public sphere; to being spoken about as social problems of which institutions – educative, legislative, and judicial – need to address. The personal is political catch‐cry is underpinned by the belief that power is everywhere and that male dominance impacts on – and taints – all aspects of women's lives including their health and safety. Sex became a crucial component of this discussion, leading to the publication of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970): an exploration of sex – the biological categories of it, as well as its intimate practice – as being a key arena where power relations are enacted. Millett used literature by authors like Norman Mailer to make her point; scholars since have presented a range of sexual political analyses; my own work has explored the sexual politics of advertising (Rosewarne 2007), infidelity (Rosewarne 2009), and sexual perversion (Rosewarne 2011a).
Sisterhood is Powerful was the title of a 1970 anthology edited by Morgan, but the phrase is also central to understanding the link between consciousness‐raising and politics: by sharing stories, not only did women realize they were linked by their subordination, but that their collective action was necessary for change.
The Patriarchy Problem
The root that Sarachild and Morgan identified was patriarchy; something defined by Sylvia Walby as “a system of interrelated social structures which allow men to exploit women” (Walby 1986, p. 51). bell hooks later elaborated on these ideas:
Patriarchy is a political‐social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological
