1960s And 1970s Analysis

How useful are radical feminist ideas from the 1960s and 1970s for thinking about women’s experiences today?

1960s and 70s radical feminist thought was successful in creating the enclaves to pass the legacy of the feminist movement onto a new generation (Whittier, 1995), providing major analytical terms such as ‘patriarchy’ and ‘compulsory heterosexuality,’ however the relevance of this approach in regards to recent thought can be debated. Despite contriving a theory of power and repression, particularly in regards to men’s systematic oppression of women, their aim to distinguish and halt the macro structures of power that produce these oppressions can be criticised, (Beasley, 2005). Throughout this essay I will emphasise the importance of

Firestone’s work, The Dialectic of Sex [1970] places emphasis upon how sexuality functions as a form of social control over women, ensuring the continued cultural division and subordination of women. For Firestone, it is reproduction that is the source of female subjection; with heterosexual reproductive practices being the basis of women’s oppression. According to Firestone (1970), the productive and reproductive roles placed upon women, such as the expectation for women to care for and raise children, encourage women to be associated with the domestic sphere and hence determine their social inferiority and lack of economic status. It is therefore argued that a woman’s body is the source of her own enslavement, originating fundamentally through biological oppressions and thus producing cultural divisions between men and women. Thus, it is argued by some radical feminists that the restoration of women’s own bodies and their seizure of control of human fertility would assure the elimination of sexual classes and thus overcome female subjection. Furthermore, radical feminists also place emphasis upon the idea that sexuality is constructed in the interests of men; being largely defined in terms of male experience. This resulted in radical feminists call for women to reclaim their own sexuality for themselves; sex thus being served as a

Rather than viewing heterosexuality as an individual preference, it is suggested that it is a socially constructed institution that upholds the unequal structure between men and women. Thus, heterosexuality is viewed as an oppressive system that directs women into marriage and motherhood (Richardson, 1997) and is central to the distinction between men’s place in the public sphere and women’s in the private sphere. For MacKinnon (1989), the ideas of male and female are ‘rooted in the eroticisation of dominance and subordination,’ using the example of pornography in order to highlight how the depiction of women as submissive commodities used for men’s enjoyment reflects the broader thinking about heterosexual sex, emphasising women’s oppression and men’s dominance. Thus, the objectification of women as sexual commodities to be consumed by males (Rich, 1980) and portrayal of men as active subjects and women as passive objects in private life maps onto the whole way of thinking about men and women and their roles in