Radical feminism

Radical feminists seek to abolish the patriarchy in a struggle to liberate women and girls from an unjust society by challenging existing social norms and institutions.

Redstockings[15] co-founder Ellen Willis wrote in 1984 that radical feminists "got sexual politics recognized as a public issue", created second-wave feminism's vocabulary, helped to legalize abortion in the US, "were the first to demand total equality in the so-called private sphere" ("housework and child care ... emotional and sexual needs"), and "created the atmosphere of urgency" that almost led to the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

[17] The leading figures of this second wave of feminism included Shulamith Firestone, Kathie Sarachild, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Carol Hanisch, Roxanne Dunbar, Naomi Weisstein and Judith Brown.

[20] After consciousness raising groups were formed to rally support, second-wave radical feminism began to see an increasing number of women of color participating.

Those involved had gradually come to believe that it was not only the middle-class nuclear family that oppressed women, but that it was also social movements and organizations that claimed to stand for human liberation, notably the counterculture, the New Left, and Marxist political parties, all of which were male-dominated and male-oriented.

[citation needed] Initially concentrated in big cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington, DC, and on the West Coast,[6][a] radical feminist groups spread across the country rapidly from 1968 to 1972.

They explicitly labeled the equal rights version of feminism as wanting to be like men, vehemently rejecting claims that "women should enter all the male-dominated areas of society.

These consciousness-raising sessions allowed early radical feminists to develop a political ideology based on common experiences women faced with male supremacy.

[27] During this period, the movement produced "a prodigious output of leaflets, pamphlets, journals, magazine articles, newspaper and radio and TV interviews".

[6] Many important feminist works, such as Koedt's essay The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (1970) and Kate Millett's book Sexual Politics (1970), emerged during this time and in this milieu.

[30] The Feminists held a more idealistic, psychologistic, and utopian philosophy, with a greater emphasis on "sex roles", seeing sexism as rooted in "complementary patterns of male and female behavior".

"Feminists threw their bras—along with "woman-garbage" such as girdles, false eyelashes, steno pads, wigs, women's magazines, and dishcloths—into a "Freedom Trash Can", but they did not set it on fire".

She also found a woman willing to terminate her pregnancy on camera with vacuum aspiration, thereby promoting this method of abortion by showing it on the German political television program Panorama.

Cristina Perincioli described this as "... a new tactic: the ostentatious, publicly documented violation of a law that millions of women had broken thus far, only in secret and under undignified circumstances."

"[42] In West Germany, 1973 saw the start of a radical feminist group campaign to withdraw from membership in the Catholic Church as a protest against its anti-abortion position and activities.

However, a petition brought by 146 female journalists and 41 male colleagues to the German Press Council resulted in its censure of the Axel Springer Company, Bild's publisher.

[49][50] Radical feminists argue that most women who become prostitutes are forced into it by a pimp, human trafficking, poverty, drug addiction, or trauma such as child sexual abuse.

In Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, and Taiwan, studies have shown that indigenous women are at the bottom of the race and class hierarchy of prostitution, often subjected to the worst conditions, most violent demands and sold at the lowest price.

This is as a result of the combined forces of colonialism, physical displacement from ancestral lands, destruction of indigenous social and cultural order, misogyny, globalization/neoliberalism, race discrimination and extremely high levels of violence perpetrated against them.

[61] Radical feminists, notably Catharine MacKinnon, charge that the production of pornography entails physical, psychological, and/or economic coercion of the women who perform and model in it.

The feminist anti-pornography movement was galvanized by the publication of Ordeal, in which Linda Boreman (who under the name of "Linda Lovelace" had starred in Deep Throat) stated that she had been beaten, raped, and pimped by her husband Chuck Traynor, and that Traynor had forced her at gunpoint to make scenes in Deep Throat, as well as forcing her, by use of both physical violence against Boreman as well as emotional abuse and outright threats of violence, to make other pornographic films.

[67] Radical feminists hold the view that pornography contributes to sexism, arguing that in pornographic performances the actresses are reduced to mere receptacles—objects—for sexual use and abuse by men.

[73] German radical feminist Alice Schwarzer is one proponent of the view that pornography offers a distorted sense of men and women's bodies, as well as the actual sexual act, often showing performers with synthetic implants or exaggerated expressions of pleasure, engaging in fetishes that are presented as popular and normal.

According to radical lesbian writer Jill Johnston, a large fraction of the movement sought to reform sexist institutions while "leaving intact the staple nuclear unit of oppression: heterosexual sex".

[76] They argued that heterosexual love relationships perpetuated patriarchal power relations through "personal domination" and therefore directly contradicted the values and goals of the movement.

[77] As one radical lesbian wrote, "no matter what the feminist does, the physical act [of heterosexuality] throws both women and man back into role playing... all of her politics are instantly shattered".

[78][79] In their manifesto "The Woman-Identified Woman", the lesbian radical feminist group Radicalesbians underlined their belief in the necessity of creating a "new consciousness" that rejected traditional normative definitions of womanhood and femininity which centered on powerlessness.

[80] Some radical feminists, such as Catharine MacKinnon, John Stoltenberg, Andrea Dworkin, Monique Wittig, and Finn Mackay have supported recognition of trans women as women, which they describe as trans-inclusive feminism,[81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88] while others like Mary Daly, Janice Raymond, Robin Morgan, Germaine Greer, Sheila Jeffreys, Julie Bindel, and Robert Jensen, have argued that the transgender movement perpetuates patriarchal gender norms and is incompatible with radical feminist ideology.

[80] Julie Bindel argued in 2008 that Iran carries out the highest number of sex-change operations in the world, because "surgery is an attempt to keep gender stereotypes intact", and that "it is precisely this idea that certain distinct behaviours are appropriate for males and females that underlies feminist criticism of the phenomenon of 'transgenderism'.

This limited the validity of generalizations based on radical feminists' experiences of gender relations, and prevented white and middle-class women from recognizing that they benefited from race and class privilege according to Willis.