Feminism's Revolutionary Promise: Finding Hope in Hard Times

Abstract

Being a socialist-feminist activist has never been easy. We occupy a stony ground between the popularity of liberal (and social-democratic) feminism's apparently practical reformism and the heady appeal of radical feminism's claim to a female moral/spiritual superiority. Especially in these not so very revolutionary times, to write about the meaning of revolutionary change from the point of view of socialist-feminism seems to be more an exercise in myth-making than analysis, more an expression of utopian hope than an outlining of political strategy. Ironically, just at the moment that socialist-feminists are trying to cope with what we experience as decline if not defeat of feminism, or at least of feminism as a grass-roots movement within which radicals could organize, some on the left are finding in feminism--and other 'new movements'--revolutionary subjects to replace the working-class.