365 results for feminism
An Impossible Heroine? Mary Wollstonecraft and female heroism
The history of feminism provides an apt beginning-point for an exploration of these issues. After all, where is one likelier…point where the women's rights movement invented itself as a tradition, naming itself as feminism and constructing its own historical trajectory. The first histories of English feminism, published at the beginning of the twentieth…many fin-desiecle women who found in Wollstonecraft the ideal heroine - a prototype New Woman - for feminism's heroic age
Soundings Issue 3, Summer 1996
Margaret Thatcher And Ruth Ellis
It has been the strength of feminism to produce a recognition of the political importance of sexuality and subjectivity in the face of more traditional…political or Marxist analyses which have consistently left them out of account. The dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism belongs in that political space. But the very success of that intervention may in turn…Thatcher throws up this question, she also does so in a way which is especially difficult for feminism because she is a woman, one furthermore who embodies some of the worst properties of what feminism
New Formations Number 6 Winter 1988
Women Behind Bars
amalgam of the traditional and the tabloid - that points the finger at feminism for the phenomenon of women's lawbreaking, and recent increases in that lawbreaking. This argument has been…with the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the phenomenon of women's terrorism in general, in terms of feminism's breakaway from the kitchen sink. This testiness is understandable, for such arguments…getting at feminism, rather than at understanding what really causes women's crime. ut, in our view, feminism has little or nothing to do | with women's crime. For a start, crime is primarily about
Marxism Today November 1987
IDEAS
WHAT IS FEMINISM?…spectre o f the old sex war. The feminist becomes the figure of the castrating woman. Feminism creates divisions where none were before. It is, after all, disturbing to think that perhaps we mightnotbeliving“happily…denied them, they turned bitterly to their own struggle for the vote. But the American movement is Feminism is the political movement now as politically distant from the of women produced by the contra American
7 Days Wednesday March 15, 1972 No 20
Tales Of The Unexpected
explores some of the latest fiction and wonders what has happened to the old-style feminist novel Feminism is dead according to an article in an American magazine that I read the other day. They…outrage to ambivalence, or from batty optimism to slumped resignation. After all, feminist writers have often interrogated feminism itself. The feminist fiction of the 60s, 70s and 80s…has happened to the feminist you once were and the feminism you once espoused?'. The very question can herald a new way of writing as well as a shift
Marxism Today March 1989
Closed
separate organisation. I was one of those women : one of the ones who says “Why socialist feminism or revolutionary femin ism or anarchist feminism?” “Isn’t feminism enough?” My fears weren’t entirely allayed…acknowledge exist ing political differences and to ‘boldly’ assert the super iority of class analyses over mere feminism. For rev olutionary feminists my liberalism would lie perhaps in the conditioned impulse to mediate, to smooth…either to redefine them carefully or dispense with them alto gether. This is not to say that feminism can learn nothing from any other political tradition, but to recognise that an independent feminist politics
Red Rag Volume 13
feministsocialists feministsocialist
separate organisation. I was one of those women : one of the ones who says “Why socialist feminism or revolutionary femin ism or anarchist feminism?” “Isn’t feminism enough?” My fears weren’t entirely allayed…acknowledge exist ing political differences and to ‘boldly’ assert the super iority of class analyses over mere feminism. For rev olutionary feminists my liberalism would lie perhaps in the conditioned impulse to mediate, to smooth…either to redefine them carefully or dispense with them alto gether. This is not to say that feminism can learn nothing from any other political tradition, but to recognise that an independent feminist politics
Red Rag Volume 13
Identity Shifts - book review
division of labour is in operation in academia, with the boys doing postmodernism and the girls doing feminism. Knowledge after all is power, and whether we like it or not postmodernism…that feminism and marxism just aren't. Resurrecting some old socialist-feminist agenda is tantamount to putting your head in the sand. As Andreas Huyssen has said, we have to 'try to salvage the postmodern…should be asking 'What is in it for us?' The essays in Linda J Nicholson's book Feminism/ Postmodernism (Routledge, pbk £9.99) put the case both for and against, but their tentative nature reminds
Marxism Today May 1990
Letters Reviews, Notices and ads
were in the Party. Yet for all its pompousness it attempted the fusion of marxism and feminism. Compare it to the safe and predictable editorials of the last few issues. Particularly…sense of attack, of sisterhood as energy and excitement, of struggle, has ebbed. The flag of feminism gets waved high but it’s not too hard to wave a flag. The flag of Marxism doesn…very high. The early creative tension in Red Rag of working out the dialectics between marxism and feminism has dissipated. — but - the original problems remain
Red Rag Volume 11
The Cultural Revolution
f the cultural revolutions that have had the most effect on all our lives, feminism has proved remarkably resilient even to sustained attacks on it. Changes in women's lives have been driven…female labour. Culturally speaking, it seems that even for women who do not define themselves as feminists, feminism has brought about an increase in the demands and expectations of women, yet it has not produced…This state of transition may account for the success of Bridget Jones. The backlash against feminism which Susan Faludi described cannot, I think, be seen to have taken place here in the same
Marxism Today Nov / Dec 1998 Special
Interview with Nancy Fraser
this sort. Theres a very active gay and lesbian movement; there are various currents of feminism emphasising cultural aspects of gender subordination; and all sorts of ethnic-pride and anti-racist movements…professions, or in forwarding an agenda around equalising gender relations. One of the strongest institutional spaces for feminism is the university. In general, the universities are the places where one finds the most left strength…changed how the mainstream of other disciplines - including history, anthropology, literature - is studied. As an intellectual phenomenon, feminism is very secure. But the focus has changed. For instance, Catherine MacKinnons anti-pornography initiatives
Soundings soundings issue 15 Summer 2000
What has socialism to do with sexual equality?
Ellen DuBois, 'The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes Toward the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Feminism', Feminist Studies 3, 1/2 (1975) p66. 3. For the Owenite approach to these issues, see Barbara Taylor…political economy, but his sexual equality' consistent backing for most of the central campaigns of nineteenth century feminism helped secure a close relationship between liberalism and first wave feminism. Neither the socialist nor the liberal…private spaces and the socialist critique of private confinement. Though the latter offered a basis for allying feminism to the socialist tradition, most of those active in the earlier feminist campaigns found a more congenial
Soundings soundings issue 4 Autumn 1996
Linking the Cultural Left and the Social Left: Interview with Nancy Fraser
this sort. Theres a very active gay and lesbian movement; there are various currents of feminism emphasising cultural aspects of gender subordination; and all sorts of ethnic-pride and anti-racist movements…professions, or in forwarding an agenda around equalising gender relations. One of the strongest institutional spaces for feminism is the university. In general, the universities are the places where one finds the most left strength…changed how the mainstream of other disciplines - including history, anthropology, literature - is studied. As an intellectual phenomenon, feminism is very secure. But the focus has changed. For instance, Catherine MacKinnons anti-pornography initiatives
Soundings Issue 15, Summer 2000
What has Socialism to do with Sexual Equality?
Ellen DuBois, 'The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes Toward the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Feminism', Feminist Studies 3, 1/2 (1975) p66. 3. For the Owenite approach to these issues, see Barbara Taylor…political economy, but his sexual equality' consistent backing for most of the central campaigns of nineteenth century feminism helped secure a close relationship between liberalism and first wave feminism. Neither the socialist nor the liberal…private spaces and the socialist critique of private confinement. Though the latter offered a basis for allying feminism to the socialist tradition, most of those active in the earlier feminist campaigns found a more congenial
Soundings Issue 4, Autumn 1996
Cosmopolitan Comes Of Age - interview with Linda Kelsey
Well, it's quite hard. I would define Cosmo's feminism as about justice for all women but working within the existing framework of society, trying to improve…such doesn't really exist in the way it did in the 70s. How has Cosmo's feminism changed in…post-feminism?
Marxism Today September 1987
Party Games
worse for women since the decline and fall of social democracy at the end of the 1970s, feminism is holding its own against the 'moral majority'. Despite some damaging raids on radical sexual politics…Europe - the patriarchal moral minority in Britain has remained just that. That is not to say that feminism is winning, but that strangely enough its influence in the state and in the political parties…major parties are aware that without women they can't win. But the impact of modern feminism has been greatest in the Labour Party. Its current policies are the most coherent. Jo Richardson
Marxism Today April 1987
Family Matters
Morality is right there at the top of the political agenda. Put there by both feminism and the moral Right. And the family is at the centre of the argument…Beatrix: 'Feminism is about trying to put the pleasure back into heterosexuality for women…that the evidence has become public, and that the issue has been politicised, I believe by feminism. What is heartbreaking is the number of old women who for the first time can say, 'when
Marxism Today December 1986
Retreating from reality
claim seems quite extraordinary in the light of the diversity of women's politics. The chapter on feminism highlights many of the pamphlet's deficiencies. It is critical of most developments in the women…feminist journal with a tiny academic circulation. They use this critique to assert that all socialist feminism has become 'post Marxist' feminism. They give radical feminists a pat on the back for 'insisting…REVIEWS: integrate the insights of feminism into a Marxist analysis. Because they themselves cannot come to terms with an analysis that is based
Marxism Today January 1985
I Love Luce: The Lesbian, Mimesis And Masquerade In Irigaray, Freud, And Mainstream Film
Woman' as essence, 'women' as historical subjects and (again the terms are de Lauretis') the subject of feminism as a quasi-Utopian theoretical construct. 36 Because Irigaray creates a space for female experience…insisting on Irigaray's distinctions between 'woman' and 'women' and by clinging to a concept of feminism as a discursive position, not equivalent to either 'woman' or 'women', can feminists disengage from our own fatal…conception of the unconscious as universal, transhistorical, and transcultural, but she nonetheless retains the unconscious for feminism. Indeed, in 'Misere de la psychanalyse' she criticizes Lacan and his followers because they 'love knowledge more than
New Formations Number 9 Winter 1989
Changing
and women is usually regarded as subsidiary. Feminism has to address both spheres. Feminism is not, as it is sometimes characterised, reducible to the politics…left to a male-dominated Left. We do not adhere to a tendency which seeks to legitimise feminism with the commandments of classical Marxism — that would only be dogmatism…extremely determining upon all the most fundamental aspects of my life. Undoubtedly, the exper ience of feminism itself has the power to shape our know ledge and experience of the world we live
Red Rag Volume 12
book reviews: THE LEFT AND THE EROTIC SEX AND LOVE
status. More recently, Germaine Greer in the pages of the Sunday Times has presented a caricature of feminism. 'The truth is', says Greer, 'that we are being manipulated by the promotion and commercialisation…pronouncements. Because of the status of Greer and Friedan as self and media appointed gurus of feminism, we should take their writing seriously and organise our arguments in opposition. There are still too many people…including people on the Left, waiting to dismiss feminism as a freakish off-shoot of the permissive 60s. Within this context Sex and Love, a collection of new essays published by the Women's Press
Marxism Today March 1984
Art History Differently: Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London, Routledge, 1988; 239 pp; £30.00 hardback, £10.95 paperback…books on child care, sermons, etiquette manuals, medical conversations' and the rest. T h e encounter of feminism and art history is complicated by the existence of several feminisms and several histories, by the tension…still stagnating in the first stage of its development' retains its resonance. And this is crucial for feminism, as Pollock points out. Feminism will always be disabled by the principal terms of modernist art history
New Formations Number 7 Spring 1989
Submission And Reading: Feminine Masochism And Feminist Criticism
affirmation of 'bliss' and the dissolution of sexual identity. Perhaps it is the same difficult path which feminism has marked out in its negotiation of these interpretations of 'selflessness' which needs to be followed…Feminists also talk of masochism, and any discussion of the future of feminism today means encountering it again. Has the desperate question put to Germaine Greer at a conference Maria…delicious? Can this desire, and Schreber's will to be transformed into a woman, tell feminism anything today? In 'The economic problem of masochism', Freud notes that 'the masochist wants to be treated like
New Formations Number 7 Spring 1989
Invisible Bodies: Mary Kelly's Interim I
project in progress by Mary Kelly. Her previous work, Postpartum Document, drew on discourses of feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis in charting the experience of the mother-child relationship. Interim is planned as a fourpart exploration…system. Unlike the Document which was launched at the founding moment of the confrontation between psychoanalysis and feminism, Interim enters a stage of well-rehearsed struggle over definitions of feminism and postmodernism which the earlier…psychoanalysis; for the film collective of Dora - the analyst's symptom and therefore the basis for feminism's critique of Freud; and for Jacqueline Rose - the problem of sexual difference. My work is also deeply
New Formations Number 2 Summer 1987
Back To The Future
Right, in Thatcherism but also into a better future. The new ideal of the green movement, feminism, and mod- progress is about incorporating an ern nationalism. It is evident in the way attachment…something much more fundamental: a mounting doubt that progress is rationality's conquest of the irrational. Thus feminism has always been concerned with the links between prevailing notions of sexuality, emotionality and rationality. The green…well as local collective interests, over industrial development in the green belt. In different ways nationalism, feminism and black politics attempt to appeal to and create distinctive collective identities. Thus the Left's search
Marxism Today May 1989