Radicals/Radicalism

By definition all feminist movements are radical because they challenge established views. Nevertheless, most feminists would agree that modern radical feminism began with the women's movement in France and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. The publication of Germaine Greer's (b. 1939) The Female Eunuch (1970) and Simone de Beauvoir's (1908–1986) release in 1949 of The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe), led to the politicization of sexuality. Greer's book invited debate on issues of female sexuality and the role of patriarchal influence in shaping female destiny. Both Greer and de Beauvoir cited Freud's (1856–1939) study of female sexuality as a sample of male hegemony, which empowered men at the expense of women. The theory of universal patriarchal dominance over women, the primary issue upon which many feminists agree, is the intellectual foundation for radical feminist thought. In England, the feminist critique of Freud was not widely accepted. Juliet Mitchell (b. 1940), for example, argued in her 1974 publication of Psychoanalysis and Feminism that Freud had merely analyzed the biological relationship between mental life and sexuality and did not intend a misogynistic model of human development. In linking the unconscious to economic and political ideologies that oppress women, Mitchell, like Marcuse, offered a psychoanalytical reading of Marx. Her views influenced British feminists through the 1980s. In France, the féministes révolutionaires shared the growing interest in the role of psychology in shaping attitudes, but they looked to the work of Jacques Lucan (b. 1947) and Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), who emphasize the role of language in shaping attitudes. Hélène Cixous (b.1937) borrows from both traditions, employing Derrida's binary system to demonstrate ways in which male/female opposition in language is used to subordinate the female to the male and Lucan's theory of objectification through looking. Luce Irigaray (b. 1932) shares a similar conviction that language produces sexual difference at the psychic level. Irigaray holds that Freud contributed to the creation of a phallocentric mind-set.