Feminist Revolution: On the Political Imagination of Early Radical Feminism

• In Event: Feminist Revolution, Resistance, and the Idea of Solidarity

Abstract

Radical feminism these days is often dismissed in academic circles because it is unfairly elided with trans-exclusionary radical feminism on the one hand, and with white feminism on the other. While certainly some radical feminists from the early years of the second wave have been guilty of transphobia and racial ignorance, insensitivity, and even prejudice, treating all radical feminism as equally politically problematic keeps political theory from exploring an incredibly rich and productive archive. I believe that we still have a lot to learn from the theoretical project on which early radical feminists embarked in the US in the late 1960s. Influenced by various leftist traditions of theorizing and organizing – including Marxism, Maoism, the SDS and the New Left, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and anti-racism – these women were attempting to theorize from the ground up experiences that were not accounted for (or were misogynistically misrepresented) in the texts and activist circles that they had already engaged. They needed to think their experiences anew and develop new theoretical vocabularies and grammars on which to draw to critique the world in which they lived.

In this paper, I turn specifically to examine the theory and practice of New York Radical Women (NYRW), a radical feminist group that existed from 1967 to 1969, to elucidate how as a group and as individuals they express political imagination: the capacity to theorize beyond inherited concepts and practices, to break away from existing norms, and to think afresh. I draw on work by Linda Zerilli, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Joan Cocks to theorize the concept of political imagination, but the main works I analyze are those produced by NYRW: Notes from the (First, Second, and Third) Year, as well as other texts produced by the group (including documentation of their infamous 1968 protest of the Miss America pageant). NYRW (which included Shulamith Firestone, Carol Hanisch, Anne Koedt, Kate Millett, and Robin Morgan) published important essays that are considered canonical in feminist studies, as well as early works by women who went on to write and edit books that are feminist classics of the early 1970s, such as The Dialectic of Sex, Sexual Politics, and Sisterhood is Powerful. Reading the archive of the NYRW as a whole, I argue, reveals the exercise of a radical political imagination and insights that can inform and reinvigorate the practice of political theory today.

Author

• Michaele L. Ferguson, University of Colorado, Boulder