Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

WOMEN UNDER SIEGE 23enced the founders of America's political order and that inspired the greatclassical feminists to wage their fight for women's rights.The idea that women are in a gender war originated in the midsixties,when the antiwar and antigovernment mood revivified and redirected thewomen's movement away from its Enlightenment liberal philosophy to amore radical, antiestablishment philosophy. The decisive battles of thesexual revolution had been won, and students here and on the Continentwere reading Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, Franz Fanon, and Jean-PaulSartre and learning how to critique their culture and institutions in headynew ways. They began to see the university, the military, and the governmentas merely different parts of a defective status quo.Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer would continue to offer women aliberal version of consciousness raising whose aim was to awaken themto new possibilities of individual self-fulfillment. But by the midseventies,faith in liberal solutions to social problems had waned, and the old styleof consciousness raising that encouraged women to seek avenues of selffulfillmentrapidly gave way to one that initiated women into an appreciationof their subordinate situation in the patriarchy and the joys andcomforts of group solidarity.Having "transcended" the liberalism of Friedan and the fierce individualismof Greer, feminists began to work seriously on getting women tobecome aware of the political dimension of their lives. Kate Millett'sSexual Politics was critical in moving feminism in this new direction. Ittaught women that politics was essentially sexual and that even the socalleddemocracies were male hegemonies: "However muted its presentappearance may be, sexual dominion obtains nevertheless as perhaps themost pervasive ideology of our culture and provides its most fundamentalconcept of power." 11The New Feminists began to direct their energies toward gettingwomen to join in the common struggle against patriarchy, to view societythrough the sex/gender prism. When a woman's feminist consciousnessis thus "raised," she learns to identify her personal self with her gender.She sees her relations to men in political terms ("the personal is thepolitical"). This "insight" into the nature of male/female relations makesthe gender feminist impatient with piecemeal liberal reformist solutionsand leads her to strive for a more radical transformation of our societythan earlier feminists had envisioned.It is now commonplace for feminist philosophers to reject the Enlightenmentideals of the old feminism. According to the University ofColorado feminist theorist Alison Jaggar, "Radical and socialist feminists