While radical feminism had been, since its inception, toying with separatism (Shugar 1995; Thompson 2001) – addressed more fully in the next section – cultural feminism, positioned this as central, although many critics have claimed that in practice female‐only spaces became more concerned with lifestyle rather than politics. Echols for example, considers cultural feminism as the depoliticized arm of radical feminism:
While cultural feminism did evolve from radical feminism, it nonetheless deviated from it in some crucial respects. Most fundamentally, radical feminism was a political movement dedicated to eliminating the sex‐class system, whereas cultural feminism was a countercultural movement aimed at reversing the cultural valuation of the male and the devaluation of the female … Radical feminists were typically social constructionists who wanted to render gender irrelevant, while cultural feminists were generally essentialists who sought to celebrate femaleness.
(Echols 1989, p. 6)
It is from cultural feminism where work like Carol Gilligan's (1982) ethics of care research emerged, and also where feminism converged with spirituality, something Echols discusses:
Whereas early women's liberation papers had titles such as off our backs, Ain't I a Woman, No More Fun and Games, It Ain't Me, Babe, Tooth “n” Nail, '70s periodicals carried names like Amazon Quarterly, The Full Moon, 13th Moon, Womanspirit, and Chrysalis.
(Echols 1989, p. 284)
While separatism had been central to the cultural feminists, it was also a key component of radical feminism, albeit framed less about the primacy of physically separating from men and instead, more simply on channeling resources away from men.
Radical Feminism and Lesbianism
Discussed earlier was patriarchy as evident within households through the unfair division of labor. Heterosexuality, in fact, was condemned by some feminists as an institution key in maintaining women's subordination (Koedt 1970; Rich 1980; Dworkin 1987; MacKinnon 1989; Firestone 1993).
While MacKinnon and Dworkin as well as activists like Anne Koedt have contended that under patriarchy all heterosexual sex contains some element of coercion (Koedt 1970; Dworkin 1987; MacKinnon 1989), some theorists go so far as to argue, in fact, that all intercourse is rape. In 1975, Sharon Deevey argued “every fuck is a rape even if it feels nice because every man has power and privilege over women, whether he uses it blatantly or subtly” (Deevey 1975, p. 24). Deevey's position is one of several drivers of political lesbianism: radical feminist women who choose to devote their energies away from men and toward women; something articulated in 1981 by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists:
We do think all feminists can and should be political lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman‐identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women … Attached to all forms of sexual behaviour are meanings of dominance and submission, power and powerlessness, conquest and humiliation … [It] is specifically through sexuality that the fundamental oppression, that of men over women, is maintained.
(Leeds Revolutionary Feminists 1981, p. 5)
The Leeds Revolutionary Feminists argued that “Penetration is an act of great symbolic significance by which the oppressor enters the body of the oppressed” (p. 6) and that “Every woman who lives with or fucks a man helps to maintain the oppression of her sisters and hinders our struggle” (p. 7).
Separating physically, sexually, and emotionally from men became a way for radical feminists to free up resources and energies for the movement while also helping to dismantle a patriarchal institution.
Radical Feminism: Criticisms
Before discussing legacy and continued relevance, it is worth pausing to examine the enduring criticisms of radical feminism, some of which form the basis for why the movement's apex was reached over half a century ago and has not replicated since. While historically, all feminism has endured some battering in the media (Faludi 1991), radical feminism has endured a disproportionate share of negative coverage. Mackay for example, observes that “the image of the feminist as a man‐hating, hairy‐legged lesbian has achieved almost universal currency…” (Mackay 2015, p. 439). The most obvious explanation for this lies in the perception of extremism:
Radical feminism often seems to serve as the vessel or totem which signifies a feminism gone too far, an extreme example of feminism and a destination at which no sane person would presumably wish to arrive.
(Mackay 2015b, p. 334)
Radical feminism disrupts the status quo and demands that each institution that helps to maintain patriarchy is dismantled: such a revolution was, of course, widely viewed as unpopular, if not treasonous. Another criticism lay in the goals being viewed as simply untenable. Bryson for example, notes that “men cannot be simply ‘killed off’ in the same way as a class enemy might conceivably be; quite apart from humanitarian considerations, this would be a biological impossibility” (Bryson 2003, p. 173). While few radical feminists were actually advocating killing men,5 even the objective of dismantling patriarchy seems, for many, “naïve and simplistic” (Whisnant 2016, p. 68). Similarly, the personal is political catch‐cry has been criticized as narrow, self‐indulgent, individualist, and excessively focused on victimhood. In Sheila Rowbotham's Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action, she raises two further criticisms including the folly of sisterhood and the movement as insufficiently intersectional:
The idea of “women” as a unified group has been brought into question in a series of challenges to perspectives that ignored and denied the experience of groups such as lesbians, black women, working class women, aboriginal women, Jewish women, older women, disabled women, and many others.
(Rowbotham 1992, pp. 79–80)
Rowbotham argues that clustering all woman under one banner – overlooks that factors other than sex may be more important than sex in identity formation. Some scholars have even spotlighted that sex might in fact thwart or inhibit bonding, contending that sisterhood is, in fact, at odds with women's lived experiences and that womanhood is an “invented” rather than natural category (Weisser and Fleischner 1994, p. 2). Several scholars also argue that women can and do oppress each other (Fouche 1994; Bryson 2003). These ideas also link to the broader criticism of radical feminism as insufficiently intersectional, and as artificially deeming sex as the central source of oppression over other factors. Walby for example, spotlights radical feminism's “false universalism which cannot understand historical change or take sufficient account of divisions between women based on ethnicity and class” (Walby 1986, p. 3). Rebecca Whishnant also addresses this:
According to its critics, radical feminism does not engage sufficiently with women's diversity (along racial and other lines), nor does it acknowledge and analyze multiple intersecting systems of oppression.
(Whisnant 2016, p. 68)
While Whisnant counters this assertion – contending that some radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin were, in fact, writing about intersectionality – nonetheless the perceived whiteness of radical feminism has persisted as a critique.
Since the 1980s, with the rise of postmodernism and the mainstreaming of scholarship like queer theory, the stranglehold of biological understandings of sex has waned. Bryson for example, notes that “postmodernism does not only stress the differences amongst women
