Feminism as a radical protest has always been strongest in the United States. Bouchier (1983) points to perhaps 2,000 super-activist, radical/revolutionary feminists in Britain who are seen to comprise about one-fifth of all committed activists and a tenth of marginally-involved women, who themselves number only one woman in a thousand. In comparison, using evidence such as circulation of journals and attendance at conferences, it is possible, he says, to guess at a total of 50,000 activists in radical and/or socialist groups in America. This figure tallies more closely with the incidence of feminist involvement of British women as a whole. Overall, one American woman in three hundred has contact with some feminist organization. Weight of numbers, however, is often not the most significant aspect of a social movement. Activism and commitment can be its greatest assets, as Bouchier explains, using the example of lesbian involvement in the women's movement:

Participatory democracy is self-evidently more demanding of time and energy than the representative variant. To be formally leaderless and structureless along the lines of the general recommendation of women's liberation can lead to an intra-group tyranny which prevents articulation that might be construed as the adoption of positions of leadership and dominance. Therefore, logically, the greater the homogeneity of the group the less the pressure for dissent or independent articulation. We will return to this point but first we must ask why lesbians were attracted to radical feminism?

Barbara Ryan writes that in the late 1960s they were confronted with the choice of aligning with gay men or proponents of women's liberation and that what they found was "chauvinism" in the male groups and "silence" in the women's movement (1992:49). Betty Friedan, for example, later admitted that the issue of lesbianism originally aroused in her "the creeping horrors" (1976:159). Perhaps in response to such attitudes, Ti-Grace Atkinson coined the term political lesbian (see Ryan 1992:50). In its broadest sense this meant being totally geared, privately and publicly, to the causes of women. Such an orientation implies a gnostic or manichaean distinction between men and women which in turn suggests an inherently separatist ethos.

While it was originally an essential strategy for the radical groups due to the necessity for confidence-building, for example, Ryan states that a separatist organizing principle became problematic when the outer limits of this philosophy were stretched to include the adoption of a lesbian feminist lifestyle (1992:59). To develop this point she writes that the adoption of an "ideology" that found only certain actions, lifestyles and relationships acceptable is closely related to social movement histories characterized by values of dominance and control. Why do we see these values? In the radical feminist context the minority identity of lesbians suggests an answer which will be explored through references to social-movement theory later in the chapter.

Though radical feminist women reacted against the male chauvinism they found in leftist groups in the 1960s they still borrowed heavily from them, including the practice of promoting dogmatic positions on correct thinking (see Rowbotham 1973). As for the nature of the dogma promoted, Mitchell and Oakley (1976:11) criticize what they call a premature codification of personal insights into political rules. This codification may occupy the position of religious texts for other moral fundamentalists.

Why do the derivations from such revelations often share an anti-rationality and a contempt for the rules of evidence and logic? Many people in Ireland, for example, who are opposed to the introduction of liberal social reforms appear to feel threatened by the encroachment of norms from the rest of the Western world. It may be that they feel threatened because they see the traditionally homogenous southern Irish society as their basic in-group and, if so, this is a group whose norms can be traced to the nineteenth century, when they were codified by religious authority. Therefore, these norms come into conflict with modern political and philosophical values. That such traditional thinking is naturally authoritarian becomes obvious when one notes a simple link between fundamentalism and authoritarianism: fundamentalist exegesis is based on revelations which are, by definition, commandatory. They are commandatory because they have the authority of a tradition. Such moral certitude naturally breeds confidence when it comes to knowing what is right for others. However, as Flew et al (1984) point out, no philosophical dispute is settled by appeal to authority. We can see that this principle applies not least to the authority of personal opinion or subjective experience.

By the early 1970s the rapid spread of the small-group sector had begun to break down as factions spent larger and larger amounts of their energy attacking each other. The chief factional weapon was 'trashing'. This may be described as a form of character assassination disguised as philosophical difference. The nature of the trashing weapon highlights the logical necessity that criticism cannot be dismissed with the same trick which has involved the employment of the term "false consciousness" to discredit opponents in the Marxist context and the use of the concept of "resistance" to undermine critics of psychoanalysis. As Gellner writes on the latter example, it sins against another modern requirement: the need for cognitive growth. This need in turn presupposes that each intellectual system be judged by data not under its own control (1985:220). Despite Gellner's rather positivistic-sounding reference to "data", we can still see that any refusal to countenance the validity or even the possibility of independent judgment surely represents an attempt to fall back on authority.

In this period splits occurred over organizational matters, lesbianism, separatism and working with the Left. The three-fold division of this sector appears at this point in history but, while splits were happening, antipathy to the National Organization for Women continued unabated. NOW's growth in the same period, however, was unaffected. By the early 1970s it had witnessed the spread of grassroots chapters around the country, while many of the radical feminist groups were in disarray or had ceased to exist.

Even though Freeman (1975) found the differences between the two branches of the movement to be primarily structural and stylistic, Ryan, in examining the reasons for the intensity of the battles over definitions and the emphasis on "ideological purity", identifies as a function of ideology the establishment of a framework for individuals to connect with others through common experiences (1992:61). This obviously leads to pressure for homogeneity, especially if experience is equated with lifestyle, and Ryan observes that, on close inspection, the various views of feminist acceptability represented lifestyles most suited to those who advocated them.

The decline of the original radical feminist groups occurred at the same time, however, as new types of feminist activity were emerging. A self-conscious feminist 'culture' spread with the formation of self-help groups, coffee houses and women's centres. Possible reasons for this change of emphasis include a frustrated withdrawal from the mainstream political arena and a pragmatic reaction to factional strife. Whatever those reasons actually were, this new feminism developed its own cosmology and metaphysics and the idea of women as victims began to be replaced with a view of them as possessors of higher values. Elizabeth Gould Davis published The First Sex in 1971 and this apparently revived matriarchal theory, the basic assumption of which seems to be that female power would create a less violent and materialistic society.

In his book on Wilhelm Reich, Rycroft addresses the idea of the moral elevation of women. He writes that Reich was most unusual, in his time, in idealizing matriarchy and in conceiving of women solely as sources of love and not at all as threatening dominators. In his view, Reich's whole stance can be interpreted as a massive rejection or dismissal of the problem of dominance in human relationships (1971:56). In addition, Rycroft wonders what he would have made of recent ethnological work which suggests that the establishment of hierarchies is one of the basic biological mechanisms for maintaining peace and cohesion in groups.

Without getting into sociobiology, however, we can analyse dominance and hierarchy in quite logical terms of social philosophy. Lovenduski and Randall (1993) summarize radical feminist "ideology" as the belief that the world consists of a hierarchy of oppressions and that subjective experience is the key to understanding this hierarchy. Reflecting on how difficult this can make everyday life, they quote an unnamed feminist activist as saying that the idea of the hierarchy of oppressions means the only person one can be friends with is someone like an identical twin because "either you'd be oppressing them or they'd be oppressing you" (1993:75).

Since humanity is not composed of clones we can thus see that, even according to this outlook's own standards, heterogeneity implies hierarchy, although certainly not any rigid form of stratification. This insight also has implications for identity politics, the significance of which will be discussed in the next chapter.

By 1975 the original radical feminist sector had all but disappeared. The innovative social-movement tactics were replaced by the less-public women's culture and the service projects which became the new forms of small-group activism. Bouchier (1983:129) writes that the British women's liberation movement of the 1970s had no national organization, no leaders, no electoral structures, no rules which imposed obedience to conference decisions. Nor was it narrow enough to be called sectarian, he says, though he admits some sects had developed. He sees it as a broad-based, pluralistic movement without a comparably broad-based organization.

Bouchier's acknowledgement that some sects had developed leads us to a theoretical discussion of sectarianism in the feminist context and, thereby, to an investigation of the presence of values of dominance and control mentioned earlier. By way of comparison, Sulloway (1980:482) utilizes the work of Weisz (1975) when he describes four principal catalysts of the sectarian characteristics which he says are common to psychoanalysis and other "cult-like" schools of thought. To begin with, the nature of the doctrine often plays an instrumental role. If it is suited to a religion or a "sweeping political ideology" by virtue of answering fundamental questions about life and death, then it may develop sect-like attributes. Secondly, sectarianism is seen to be favoured when followers possess only marginal status in society, as was the case with psychoanalysis in relation to orthodox medicine. Under such conditions individuals may use their system of knowledge to interpret their position as outcasts. A third common inducement of sectarian behaviour is the response of the outside world. Greater militancy is to be expected in a movement once its teachings fail to be accepted. Finally, the nature of leadership, which in Freud's case was paternal and authoritarian, is seen as promoting an atypical level of obedience among early Freudians.

The first three catalysts, at least, can be seen to apply in the radical feminist context, but here it needs to be pointed out that, according to the principles of this study, the peculiar feminist linkage of the political and the personal is one reason why there can probably be no such thing as an ideology of psychoanalytic feminism. To the psychoanalytic world, feminism is seen as only an adjunct of emphasis. As already argued, the same applies in the case of socialism.

Bouchier (1983:214) corroborates Sulloway's comments on sectarian catalysts. He draws on the work of Evans (1973) when he writes that strongly-held values and beliefs need to be protected against a hostile world. In social movements this is commonly achieved by creating a secret world of language and theory and visiting punishment on those who do not conform to the rules. This is because the movement is trying to maintain a reality or world-picture very different from that of most people and to do so it must employ a special and highly-restricted kind of discourse.

To elaborate, Berger and Luckmann (1967:144-150) state that the ideological machinery found in most "revolutionary" movements has didactic and policing functions to perform. Such machinery typically includes three strategic components: legitimation, nihilation and therapeutics. Through legitimation a movement seeks to explain the superiority of its conceptual order by presenting a convincing history of how this order came to detect the flaws of its predecessor. Berger and Luckmann point out, however, that the technique of legitimation fails to explain why a particular new reality is the only possible one and this is where nihilation and therapeutics come in. The line between the legitimate and the illegitimate must be made as unambiguous as possible and two common forms of nihilation are employed towards this end. A sharp contrast is introduced between pre-conversion existence and the world of the initiated and a reinterpretation of past events and individuals is required so they harmonize with present reality. Finally, therapeutic procedures are also needed to keep the new order pure by placing on defectors the whole burden of blame for deviance.

Our particular application of this series of concepts runs as follows: if patriarchy constitutes a pre-existing order, consciousness-raising based on subjective experience detects its flaws, sisterhood isolates the initiated, matriarchal theory reinterprets the past and trashing condemns defectors.

Bouchier (1983) asserts that the partiality of the insider rather easily develops into a conspiracy theory of the world which tends to confirm the significance of the embattled movement. Those admitted face progressive selection by tests of orthodoxy until the group is composed of clones. This seen as the classic process of sectarianism. For the insider, however, sectarian feminist orthodoxy has important compensating virtues. Becoming a feminist opens up a range of choices not confronting women in more traditional roles and conforming to a different set of norms narrows the number of choices once more. Bouchier writes that such is the universal attraction of dogma.

If we can link the holding of authoritarian or dictatorial beliefs to social contexts of insecurity and marginalization, we nevertheless need to ask why such beliefs do not apply universally in such situations.

This concept indicates how the structure of the personality predisposes the individual to the acceptance of dictatorial political beliefs. The eponymous classic study is by Theodor Adorno et al. It appeared in 1950 and concluded (1950:971) that there exists a prejudiced personality characterized by hierarchical parent-child relationships, conformism, exploitative dependency, repressive denial, rigidity and a dichotomous outlook which leads to stereotype-formation. In his book on the Frankfurt School, Phil Slater (1976) states that the school's members, including Adorno, utilized a theory developed by Siegfried Kracauer in his 1929 study of German white-collar workers, entitled The Clerks, in order to explain generally the psychological mechanisms of authoritarianism. Slater explains that Kracauer outlines the hierarchical structure of the clerical labour force, pointing out that almost all of these workers have some opportunity to play the "little master". Kracauer's chosen metaphor is one of cycling - with their backs they stoop, with their feet they tread hard (Slater 1977:24).

We must seek, however, a broader analysis or description than that provided by such an outlook which is perhaps too influenced by Nazi Germany. Social psychologists Krech, Crutchfield and Ballachey (1962:48) state that authoritarianism is basically typified by a lack of interconnectedness of beliefs. Their view complements the developmental goal of Jungian psychology, which is that of the integrated personality (1990:174). It is this lack of interconnectedness which crops up immediately once we begin to consider the roots of authoritarianism.

The child psychoanalysis developed by Melanie Klein proposes the 'paranoid-schizoid' position as being the earliest stage of the emotional development of the infant. The main feature of this stage is the splitting of the imago, or idealized representation, of the mother, beginning with the breast, into wholly positive and completely negative aspects (see Klein 1988:287-288; 1991:176-198). Storr (1973:44) writes that these images tend to be reactivated in extreme situations. Thus when people feel threatened by external events like the Black Death, they will regress to a primitive stage of development and seek scapegoats, whether these be Jews, witches or whatever. At the same time they will fall for the utterances of any leader who promises deliverance.

Johnson (1961:595) defines a scapegoat as an object for the irrational displacement of anger or resentment. In his view, scapegoating occurs when the following three conditions are fulfilled: the true source of anger cannot be attacked, the substitute focus is vulnerable and there is a symbolic connection between source and substitute. He points out, however, that perhaps more frequently there is no "real" object of resentment and that frustration is the product of many causes. Nonetheless we may note that the first two conditions are obviously prominent in German bureaucracy as seen by Kracauer in 1929.

The extreme situations referred to by Storr (1973) complement Weisz's (1975) identification of the possession of marginal status in society as a condition favourable to sectarianism. Marginal status, however, may be seen to have both subjective and objective dimensions and even objectively-marginal status is complicated by the concept of status inconsistency which was coined by Lenski in 1954. Status inconsistency occurs in multi-dimensional systems of stratification. For instance, one's level of education may not be consistent with one's job. Such inconsistency is believed to promote resentment among affected individuals who therefore may either favour radical social change or strive for personal advancement.

The Kleinian answer to the problem of how the individual's inner world of internal objects or archetypal images is integrated into ordinary experience would most likely be that rewarding emotional relationships with real people cause such images to lose their emotional charge, only to be reactivated in special circumstances such as those of disaster or bereavement. In other words, Kleinians would probably argue that religious beliefs are unnecessary provided one has satisfying interpersonal relationships. We may observe here in passing that considerations of family structure in character formation can be subsumed under the analysis of emotional development through such relationships. Storr (1973:44) concludes, in contrast, that Jung (1990:225) was right in supposing that such relationships cannot contain the whole of a person's inner world.

There is no need, however, for any implicit or explicit distinction of focus between the inner and the outer worlds. Relationships with other people are but one source of the reconstitution, positive or negative, involved in every worldview and the straddling of idealized ego and idealized culture which feminism has achieved - best reflected in the motto "the personal is political" - constitutes a suitable example of the mythological continuum between the individual and society. The balance of precedence between idealized ego and idealized culture was explained earlier with the reminder that knowledge is dependent on other people.

Furthermore, we can hardly fail to conclude that marginalization, subjective and objective, is tied to powerlessness. The delusions of grandeur common to schizophrenic mental patients, however, show us that, psychologically, power too has subjective and objective dimensions. It is sociologically conventional to distinguish between Weberian, Marxist and pluralistic approaches to power. For Weber, power is "the capacity of an individual to realize his will, even against the opposition of others" (1968:224). In Marxist sociology power is typically regarded as a structural relationship existing independently of individual will, while in American sociology, such as in the work of Parsons, power has typically been seen as a generalized capacity to secure common goals which is diffused through society, leading to a pluralistic political system. These distinctions are perhaps simplistic, however, as attempts to define power tend to confirm difficulties in reconciling agency and structure in sociology. That is, there is much disagreement over whether power is intentional, structural or both. This seems to be only a variation of the old philosophical chicken-and-egg argument of free will versus determinism. Power can be justly regarded as a sociological phenomenon, however, if only for the simple reason that this is perhaps the only way it can be measured in concrete terms. Practically speaking, power is equivalent to freedom in that, as stated earlier, it can be negatively quantified in the light of social controls in relation to needs. These controls can be measured in terms of privilege and orthodoxy. Then one might ask is social control structural or intentional? As already decided, it is both. We saw in the chapter on the first wave that the balance between structure and intention depends on the pervasiveness of cultural assumptions and that the questioning of the latter requires freedom from subsistence activities.

Now let us discuss social controls and interpersonal relationships by returning to the ideas of Berger and Luckmann. The modern proliferation of cults has brought into question the true extent of secularization in Western societies and this is a topic of great interest to these two authors. In sociology the term cult is normally associated with the discussion of church-sect typologies. The cult is regarded as a small, flexible group whose religion is characterized by individualism and syncretism (Abercrombie et al 1988). While it as been suggested that sects emphasise fellowship and cults enhance private experience, in practice it is hard to distinguish religious groups in these terms. It is worth noting that sects can be divided into two types: conversionist and gnostic. The latter type does not seek to change the world by large-scale conversion, emphasising its separateness from and rejection of society. This resembles Parsons' analysis of the example of a delinquent gang which does not seek to change society but has an obvious in-group value system. Parsons calls this value system a "counter-ideology" (1951:335). One may well ask then what is the essential difference between sectarian and ideological but the former term's connotations are narrower than and subservient to those of the latter.

If the point of this lengthy digression is unclear, then we must note that in his depiction of the 1963-69 feminist period Bouchier (1983:60) pinpoints a final element in the situation: the euphoria. For Bouchier, many of the autobiographical accounts sound almost like religious conversion experiences and he asserts that for thousands of isolated women the movement came literally as salvation.

Furthermore, some modern parallels to elements of radical feminism can be discerned among new religious movements (NRMs). These may be conveniently divided into two main types: world-rejecting and world-affirming. The former are exclusive, seeing the outside world as threatening and asking converts to abandon their former lives. World-affirming religions, on the other hand, see the status quo as having certain virtues. These tend to be more individualistic (Abercrombie et al 1988: 166). According to Bryan Wilson, NRMs may take on more responsibility than has been necessary for any religion explicitly to accept in the past, since they may take on the whole burden of community maintenance (1982:135).

Berger and Luckmann (1963) criticized the sociology of religion for what they saw as its simple focus on Christian institutions. They argued that it and the sociology of knowledge both explicated the processes by which the everyday world is made meaningful. In The Social Construction of Reality (1967) they proposed that religion was fundamental to the creation and preservation of social reality. Luckmann (1967) claimed that contemporary individualism contains elements which form an invisible religion and he associated the emphasis on self-expression and self-fulfilment with social mobility, achievement motivation, sexual liberation and the privatized world of the modern family.

The extensions of the self which are inherent in the characteristics of modern individualism, as opposed to extensions of an in-group, constitute a personal mythology of power whereby the myth-making focus shifts from idealized culture to idealized ego. This implies that society allows many of its members the opportunity to switch their attention to the pursuit of self-actualization, which in turn suggests that the scope for individual achievement, as in interpersonal relationships, has increased. If objective marginality is directly linked to quantifiable social controls, then subjective marginality is perhaps easier to observe as formal sanctions decline. This is because satisfactory personal achievement, as in choice of mate, is not guaranteed in the absence of such sanctions.

Luckmann's concept of an invisible religion also suggests that, in the relatively open societies of the prosperous West, those who do not adopt the individualistic conceptions of self-expression and self-fulfilment will instead tend to identify with collectivist or ideological beliefs. We must, therefore, conclude that the stability and integrity of the idealized ego, based on the totality of experience, will determine the extent and depth to which an individual is attracted to an overtly idealized culture.

We must now apply what we have gleaned to some concrete themes or issues favoured by Radical feminists. The rationality of ideas as well as forms of organization can be respectively and comparatively judged by tests of orthodoxy and privilege which were outlined earlier.

Rosemarie Tong (1989:71) suggests that one way to approach radical feminism is to point to its insistence that the subjection of women is the most fundamental form of oppression. This claim can be interpreted to mean that women's oppression causes the most suffering to its victim.

Let us consider the suffering which arises in the arena of sexual relationships. In Beyond God The Father (1973) Mary Daly suggests, using ironically ornithological imagery, that among women it is the ordinary, natural-looking birds - which Daly calls "wild females" - and not the painted birds who suffer. In Pure Lust Daly describes fulfilment for women as a plastic passion in comparison to "joy" (1984:204). Implicit in her apparently ascetic outlook is the idea that mortification and ecstasy are interdependent and in line with this she seems to despise anything commonly perceived as pleasure for women.

The victim-psychology of the movement has been attacked by many writers and among the critics has been Joan Didion who, in The White Album (1979), saw it as little more than a symptom of a post-war society which promised too much too easily. In this context Janet Radcliffe Richards points out one existential limitation of the sexual revolution when she observes that beauty is the same sort of thing whether it is in paintings, sunsets or people, and that someone who does not care about beauty in people is someone who simply does not care about beauty (1980:232). Richards goes on to argue that it is useless to claim that an amoral attitude in these matters discriminates against ugly women. For her it is a case of merely recognizing the inevitable - that differences in physical beauty are no more unfair than variations in intelligence or athletic ability.

Another problem with victim-psychology is the idea that the victim, in her status as such, speaks in a pure voice. Sheila Rowbotham (1973:xii) examines the relationship between innocence and powerlessness and concludes that the idealization of women is incongruous in a revolutionary feminist movement. For her it belongs to the "sentimentalism" which elevates powerless people into innocents and she points out that innocence is impossible when people have never had the choice of becoming corrupt.

We shall return to the nature of women's oppression in the context of other headings because it needs to be analysed in tandem with other issues in order to enable us to flesh out a general line of argument against the notion of its paramount significance.

History holds a special importance for radical feminist theory. In her reformulation of a basic Marxist concept Shulamith Firestone gives us a simple explanation of why this should be when she writes that historical materialism is that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and great moving power of all historical events in the dialectic of sex (1970:12).

After enquiring into the origins of patriarchy in Beyond Power (1985), Marilyn French concluded that early humans lived in harmony with nature. Her tone and outlook is pre-lapsarian and thus it resembles that of Engels (1986) insofar as the latter mistakenly equates matrilineal - lineage traced through females - with matriarchal, where lineage is controlled by women. Pre-lapsarian accounts appear to be cosmologically congruent with creation myths, especially if we distinguish between myths of the emergence of humanity and of the creation of the cosmos. Janet Radcliffe Richards implies that such myths are myths of the natural. She invites us to read any account of the supposed early existence of matriarchies and primitive communal childcare and to see if it is possible to resist the conclusion that the feminists are implicitly backing their recommendations with the suggestion that these things are natural in the sense of being early or primitive (1980:78).

For Richards, 'natural' means being without influence. That means particular, context-dependent influence. Therefore, as she writes, there is nothing whatever that cannot be counted as natural or unnatural in some context or other. Contrary to her view and that of those she criticizes, however, we might suggest that a better route to the 'natural' might be through a comparative analysis of myths. That is, we may define what is natural according to the typical features of human reconstitution of the world.

The belief in the overthrow of men's sexual domination has in practice led to the predominance of lesbian sexuality with radical feminism. As many radicals see it, sexuality is the crucial issue for feminism and "sexuality" is often a euphemism for lesbianism. Tong (1989:123) elaborates, asserting that, with the arguable exception of sado-masochism, lesbian sexuality does serve, for radical feminists in general, as a paradigm for female sexuality - the kind that meets women's own needs and fulfils their own desires.

We shall return in a little more detail to the topic of lesbian sado-masochism in the next chapter but, for the moment, let us think of lesbian sexuality, as it has been theorized, as an example of the ideological congruence of form and content. The key to the separatist debate, for instance, is the theory of sexuality and sexual oppression and in this context separatism holds a practical as well as a theoretical significance. That is, it can be debated and/or organized in isolation.

One of the first radical feminists to insist that the roots of women's oppression are buried deep in patriarchy's sex/gender system was Kate Millett. Her Sexual Politics, originally published in 1970, is a classic in its pristine expression of radical feminist themes and in it she argued that sex is political primarily because the male/female relationship is the paradigm for all power relationships:

Millett also writes (1977:24) that groups who rule by birthright are fast disappearing but that one ancient and universal scheme for the domination of one birth group over another prevails in the area of sex. Her view of the prospects of other power relations seems overly optimistic and this is best expressed in her dated hope for an alliance of women, blacks and students (1977:363).

Her explanation for her emphasis on the position of women arises from the fact that, as she perceives it, our society like all historical civilizations is a patriarchy. The patriarchal family is regarded as essentially feudal and the family is seen as patriarchy's chief institution. Male control of the public and private worlds is what constitutes patriarchy in the first place and, for Millett, eliminating male control means getting rid of gender. In Sexual Politics she advocated social androgyny in its stead, but Marilyn French in Beyond Power had in mind replacing masculine traits with feminine ones. Indeed, she implied that a masculine world is less fully human than a feminine one. French's view echoes a contrast drawn by Germaine Greer fifteen years earlier:

Such a dualistic ontology implies that what is real about us is some a priori essence. According to Ryan (1992:119), the essentialist belief in innate sex differences, whereby women's biological traits are morally superior, is an argument representing a shift in radical feminist analysis from protesting a social structure premised on male supremacy to one which vilifies men.

The assumption of women's superior morality may be said to presume the familiar notion that the oppression of women is the most fundamental form of injustice and Janet Radcliffe Richards assaults the latter perception:

She then points out that, precisely because it is at its weakest when formulated in terms of treatment of women, the argument tends to be reformulated as the idea that if feminist issues were settled the world would be put to rights.

Pulling the various elements present in the last few pages together we may conclude that the feminist pre-lapsarian view of history, represented by matriarchal theory, leads to the judgement of the most fundamental oppression, which in turn reinforces the assumption of women's superior morality. This premise of superior morality applied to history creates the pre-lapsarian view in the first place. This circular reasoning is akin to that of historical materialism, whose creation myths can be divided into that of primitive communism being the state of human emergence and a metaphysical myth of ultimate future revelation through science.

Since Firestone (1970) believed the roots of women's oppression are biological, she concluded that women's liberation requires a biological revolution. We might counter by arguing that men's control of female biology is the real root of the oppression but, leaving this argument aside, the notion of biological revolution implies something non-human as a result. It follows logically that such a result could not be appraised in human terms.

Firestone appears to have a terror of motherhood and pregnancy is described as "barbaric" (1970:198). This is another example of a decadent viewpoint. Let us elaborate with a note on the existential reality of pregnancy for women. Gestation in a male is theoretically possible given the phenomenon of ectopic pregnancy but, nevertheless, the history of all hitherto existing societies involves the history of women's childbearing. In other words, pregnancy is a human constant for women as a whole. As all women do not bear children Firestone is of course entitled to express her own preference but she is hardly justified in elevating it to the level of a general truth.

Firestone's negative assessment of the desire for biological motherhood is harsh in tone. In The Dialectic of Sex she suggests that the desire to bear and rear children is less the result of an "authentic liking" for them and more a "displacement" of ego-extension needs. Leaving aside the argument as to the existence of a maternal instinct, we must here wonder about the mother's desire for immortality. According to Firestone, Engels' Origin was incomplete because he failed to explain why men wish so intensely to pass their property on to their children. She seems to put it down to the vice of possessiveness but this will not suffice as an explanation.

Sheila Rowbotham (1973:64) attributes to Marx a definition of property not as a substance or things but as a relationship and states that it is helpful in that it implies an attitude to natural conditions of production which constitutes a prolongation of the body. This supports the by-now familiar idea that the reconstitution of the world necessarily involves other people and objects. The fact that this can be done through money, politics, friendships, sexual relationships, works of art, religious beliefs, craftsmanship and so on merely reflects the variety of social contexts in which it occurs. Parenthood involves mythology, inescapably, insofar as it adds up to a biologically-produced extension of the self. This has to apply to both fathers and mothers. Of course, this view does not address Firestone's doubt about the genuine nature of parental affections but, more importantly, it suggests that such questions are unanswerable.

Radical and Marxist feminists have strongly criticized contracted motherhood. One important motivation for this criticism is the common view that consent is about as genuine as that of a prostitute. This is a sweeping assumption. Although it may be argued that most contracted mothers like most prostitutes are much poorer than their clients, there is a larger question implied her and that is, in a culture of commodification, just what will people not do for money?

Surrogacy and prostitution are analogous to drug-testing or professional soldiering. Out of these four activities which involve a violation of bodily integrity there is only one which men cannot do. A lot of males are poor but only a minority sell their bodies, whether as prostitutes or as guinea pigs, or join armed forces.

It can hardly be denied that the general radical feminist line of argument implies that freedom for women excludes such options. The commonly-heard reply to arguments that such a circumscribed notion of freedom is not freedom at all originates in the Marxist tradition. It runs along the lines that if a woman chooses to be a contracted mother, for example, she is being forced to choose between being poor and being exploited so she picks what she sees as the lesser of two evils. We must remember, however, that it is still only one option in the sense that, in the West at least, most prostitutes are not conscripted. The prostitute is more worker than concubine and the difference is, in abstract, analogous to that between wage-labour and slavery. Should other workers then be prevented from selling their labour? There appears to be something fundamentally illiberal in the radical feminist attitude to prostitution but the key point is this: if one is going to try to prevent other people engaging in what is seen as degrading activity, just where does one start? Here we can see how the antecedents of radical feminism in a sense lie in the evangelical moral reform campaigns of the last century. Those campaigns were at least partly based on the premise that women were morally superior to men, though this superiority took the form of a refinement dependent upon a lack of involvement in society.

Bouchier sums up rather well the significance of radical feminism for wider society:

If the concept of patriarchy is radical feminism's chief contribution to the ecosystem of ideas then, according to Bouchier (1983:87), the strand has a natural affinity with anarchism which has arguably led to the opening up of new possibilities for social organization. Against this latter point we must argue that radical feminism's ideological features are not particularly original and that they contribute greatly to its lack of popularity in the dominant culture.

Furthermore, the perceived extremism of many radical ideas and actions and the sensationalist distortion of these by the mass media - most notably the false report of bra-burning by protestors at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City in 1968 - have contributed to widespread female rejection of the feminist movement. This is despite women's own dissatisfaction and despite the fact that they have internalized the movement's influence. As Bouchier (1983:216) has noted, among others, this internalization is so common it even has a popular label: the I'm-not-a-feminist-but syndrome. He identifies this rejection as a response to the stereotypical image of feminism as a secretive, dogmatic, man-hating and humourless movement which could hardly appeal to any sane person.

Although Naomi Wolf (1993), for example, has pointed out that a great number of young women are given the impression that the rights they enjoy were granted by a naturally evolving society, the I'm-not-a-feminist-but syndrome has a certain logic if one sees its exemplars as wanting to reject sectarian or ideological tendencies but at the same time acknowledge the movement's influence on our culture. Thus we can conclude this chapter with the following analogy: if the patriarchal system was an untamed continent then the pioneering work of radical feminism on the frontier margins has aided and encouraged the development of civilization in its wake.