04 March, 2009

Nothing Much Changes

Generation played a key role here. Young women had enjoyed greater personal freedoms during the War and tended to view feminist organizations[sic] as dull and old-fashioned. Former suffrage campaigners, therefore, complained that the young were only interested in personal fulfilment and pleasing men.
Passage taken from Feminism: a short history of a big idea, by June Hannam, Chapter 5 (p110)

This quote is about feminism in the inter-war years. The 1920s. And yet change a couple of words around and it could very easily be applied to feminism today.

Does anything ever really change, or do we just keep going round and round?

1 comment:

James said...

It's quite simple: you take out the biological essentialists, or you lose. That's the reason feminists keep on losing: they keep on losing sight of the enemy.

The radfems squandered the last decade attacking the same targets they'd attacked in the two decades prior: the pornographers, the BDSM freaks, the etcs, when they should have been attacking "Dr." John Gray. This one has been similarly wasted. This is due to entirely different motivation, but to the same effect, as the "New Feminists" who abandoned striving towards gender equality & wanted to adopt a standard issue "interest group" approach towards feminism.

At least the latter group had the mitigating factor of existing in a time when there was barely any gender theory around...