2004, p. 18)
More than just the vague notion of male privilege, patriarchy describes the everyday practice of sexism and, as Bryson (2003) notes, the word became shorthand for male domination and female subordination. The aforementioned Redstockings – a radical feminist group founded in 1969 by Sarachild, Shulamith Firestone, and Ellen Willis – made it clear that their movement was distinct from what had gone before. Radical feminists were breaking away from Marxist understandings of class and from the socialist promise of liberation once capitalism is overthrown4; something they articulated in their manifesto:
Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men's lives… Because we have lived so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition … We identify the agents of our oppression as men. Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination
(in Morgan 1970, p. 598.)
Patriarchy is identifiable throughout social structures and institutions. In the workforce, it is apparent in the gender pay gap, in men's dominance in science, technology, engineering, and math professions, and in women's disproportionate occupation of caring careers like nursing, aged care, and teaching. In political life, patriarchy is evident in male dominance of elected office, in legislation restricting women's reproductive rights, in law and order, in rape myths, and in the infrequent prosecution of sex offenders. In personal relationships, patriarchy is witnessed in women's disproportionate burden of housework and child‐raising, and in women's career interruptions. In intimate relationships, patriarchy manifests in boys' and men's sexual expectations and the orgasm disparity. Patriarchy is also effortlessly identifiable in mass media through the premium placed on beauty, on femininity, on youth, and increasingly on sexiness (Rosewarne 2007, 2017). Globally, son preference, the authority of patriarchal churches and, in turn, the harmful cultural practices and honor crimes inflicted on the bodies of women are also examples.
Violence against women became a central focus of the movement and, as addressed later in this chapter, an area where radical feminism has left a legacy on theory and practice.
Sexual Violence
In Maria Bevacqua's work on rape and feminism, she discusses sexual violence emerging from consciousness‐raising sessions:
A central feature of the small women's liberation groups was consciousness‐raising (C‐R), the strategy credited with providing the critical context in which women talked about sensitive, even painful experiences openly. In this environment, rape was discussed candidly and nonjudgmentally, and participants in the movement came to understand rape as a common women's experience with political implications.
(Bevacqua 2000, p. 30)
A cornerstone of radical feminist belief was that patriarchy was maintained through the threat of sexual violence. Such a view positions rape not as a crime of sex, but one of power. One of the first works to articulate this was Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will where she describes rape as “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Brownmiller 1975, p. 5). More recently, Catharine MacKinnon has continued with this position:
Rape is an act of dominance over women that works systematically to maintain a gender‐stratified society in which women occupy a disadvantaged status as the appropriate victims and targets of sexual aggression.
(MacKinnon 2005, p. 130)
While rape is viewed as a way to keep women frightened and dominated – and, in turn, needing protection from the very men they fear – rape is also viewed as part of the social conditioning of men in a culture where masculinity is understood as active, aggressive, and as enacted in opposition to femininity and against the bodies of women.
Gender and Sex Roles
As a cornerstone of patriarchy and also a manifestation of it, gender is viewed by radical feminists as socially constructed and used to create, and maintain, a sex‐class, something Jaggar discusses:
Instead of appearing as an alterable feature of our social organization, gender constitutes the unquestioned framework in terms of which we perceive and interpret the world. Gender constitutes the spectacles whose influence on our vision goes unnoticed until they are removed. Radical feminism seeks to remove the spectacles.
(Jaggar 1983, p. 85)
For radical feminists, the existence of gender means that women are subordinated based on factors including their biology and, notably, their fertility (Firestone 1970; Rich 1976; Daly 1978). While biology might be relatively fixed, in practice, the invented and performed categories of masculinity and femininity are viewed as social and have been assigned deficits and strengths, something Sheila Jeffreys critiques in Gender Hurts:
[Gender] is the foundation of the political system of male domination. “Gender” in traditional patriarchal thinking, ascribes skirts, high heels and a love of unpaid domestic labour to those with female biology, and comfortable clothing, enterprise and initiative to those with male biology.
(Jeffreys 2014, pp. 1–2)
Saulnier also discusses these ideas, observing that radical feminists have viewed “Women's personalities and their sexuality … as having been constructed to meet men's needs, rather than women's … Rigid sex‐role prescriptions not only distort people, but they also lead to sex‐based oppression” (Saulnier 1996, p. 333).
Some of the earliest radical feminist activism centered on campaigns against gender: the late 1960s Miss America Pageant protests for example, saw radical feminists publicly trashing objects associated with femininity – and which served as metonyms for subordination – including bras and fashion magazines.
A variety of means to abolish gender have been advocated by radical feminists. Millett (1970) for example, pioneered the term “unisex” to advocate for a kind of androgyny or genderlessness. More recently, scholars like Jeffreys have argued that feminizing beauty practices such as makeup and high heels remain pivotal to the maintenance of women's subordination (Jeffreys 2005).
Womanhood
Saulnier's identification of men and woman as fundamentally different introduces the idea of radical feminists posturing that the sexes are different. Here lies a significant point of contention whereby the origins of such difference – and whether or not these differences are unmovable – is heatedly debated. While some radical feminists like Firestone, Adrienne Rich, and Mary Daly posit that sex difference lies in biology, for others, biology might facilitate subordination but socialized subordination is deemed a more potent factor. It is around this issue that an offshoot of radical feminism – cultural feminism – was created, latching onto the idea that difference wasn't just an unhappy consequence of patriarchy, but rather, was grounds to unite women and consider them as superior:
Cultural Feminism is a theory which describes that there are fundamental personality differences between men and women, and that women's differences are special … Underlying this cultural feminist theory was a matriarchal vision – the idea of a society of strong women guided by essential female concerns and values. These included, most importantly, pacifism, co‐operation, non‐violent settlement of differences, and a harmonious regulation of public life.
(Tandon
