Women and
the Radical Movement
by Anne Koedt
Within the last year many radical women’s groups have sprung
up throughout the country. This was caused by the fact that move¬
ment women found themselves playing secondary roles on every
level—be it in terms of leadership, or simply in terms of being
listened to. They found themselves (and others) afraid to speak up
because of self-doubts when in the presence of men. They ended up
concentrating on food-making, typing, mimeographing, general as¬
sistance work, and serving as a sexual supply for their male com¬
rades after hours.
As these problems began being discussed, it became clear that
what had at first been assumed to be a personal problem was in
fact a social and political one. We found strong parallels between
the liberation of women and the black power struggle—we were
both being oppressed by similar psychological/economic dynamics.
And the deeper we analyzed the problem and realized that all
women suffer from this kind of oppression, the more we realized
that the problem was not just confined to movement women.
It became necessary to go to the root of the problem, rather than
to become engaged in solving secondary problems arising out of
that condition. Thus, for example, rather than storming the Penta-
Speech given at a city-wide meeting of radical women’s groups at the
Free University in New York City on February 17, 1968. First printed in
Notes From the First Year, June, 1968. The speech is representative of
the early attempts to define the relationship between the new left and the
beginning feminist consciousness. The word feminist then was scarcely if
ever used for fear that women’s oppression would not be considered
“radical.” By 1971 the critique of the left was more sharply delineated, cf.,
The Fourth World Manifesto.
318
Women and the Radical Movement 319
gon as women, or protesting the Democratic Convention as women,
we must begin to expose and eliminate the causes of our oppression
as women. Our job is not only to improve the conditions of move¬
ment women any more than it is only to improve the conditions of
professional working women. Both acts are reformist if thought of
only as ends in themselves; and such an approach ignores the
broader concept that one cannot achieve equality for some members
of one’s group while the rest are not free.
In choosing to fight for women’s liberation it is not enough,
either, to explain it only in general terms of “the system.” For the
system oppresses many groups in many ways. Women must learn
that the technique used to keep a woman oppressed is to convince
her that she is at all times secondary to man, and that her life is
defined in terms of him. We cannot speak of liberating ourselves
until we free ourselves from this myth and accept ourselves as
primary.
In our role as radical women we are confronted with the problem
of assuring a female revolution within the general revolution. And
we must begin to distinguish real from apparent freedoms.
Radical men may advocate certain freedoms for women when
they overlap with their own interests, but these are not true free¬
doms unless they spring out of the concept of male and female
equality and confront the issue of male supremacy. For example,
men may want women to fight in the revolution because they need
every able bodied person they can get. And they may need women
to join the work force under a socialist economic system because
they cannot afford, like capitalism, to have an unemployed (sur¬
plus) labor force not contributing work and being supported by the
state. And men may therefore advocate state nurseries so that
mothers are not kept from work. But has the fundamental concept
of women changed? Do these changes mean that men have re¬
nounced the old supremacy relationship, wherein women must
always be defined in terms of men? Has the basic domination
changed?
It is important to analyze the history of revolutions in terms of
special interest groups. The American Revolution was a white male
bourgeois revolution. The issues were self-government and the right
to make a profit without England’s interference; the Declaration of
Independence was specifically written to justify independence from
320 Anne Koedt
England. It was a document which guaranteed rights neither to
blacks nor to women. Crispus Attucks, one of the first black men
to lose his life for the revolution, was fighting in a vicarious revo¬
lution—the white revolution. Betsy Ross sewing the flag was par¬
ticipating vicariously in a male revolution. The rights gained were
not for her.
It is always true of an oppressed group that the mere fact of
their existence means that to a certain extent they have accepted
their inferior-colonial-secondary status. Taught self-hatred, they
identify instead with the oppressor. Thus such phenomena as blacks
bleaching their skin and straightening their hair, and women re¬
sponding with horror at the thought of a woman president.
The economic revolution—i.e., change from capitalism to social¬
ism—can also be viewed in terms of male interest. Under capi¬
talism, the majority of men were exploited and controlled by a few
men who held the wealth and power. By changing the economic
structure to socialism, this particular economic exploitation was
largely eradicated. Women in the Soviet Union fought for and sup¬
ported such a revolution. But whether out of a genuine hope that
non-exploitation would be applied as liberally to them, or worse,
out of a lack of even a minimum awareness that they themselves
were important, the Soviet revolution remained a male power revo¬
lution, although many new benefits fell to women. The Soviet Union
is still primarily male governed; women’s integration into the labor
force meant simply that she transferred her auxiliary, service rela¬
tionship with men into the area of work. Soviet women are teach¬
ers, doctors, assistants, food handlers. And when they come home
from work they are expected to continue in their submissive role
to men and do the housework, cooking and take primary responsi¬
bility for child rearing.
It is important for radical women to learn from these events. The
dominant/submissive relationship between men and women was not
challenged. Not confronted. We were asked by them instead to
equate our liberation with theirs—to blame our inferior conditions
on the economic structure rather than confront the obvious male
interest in keeping women “in their place.” We never insisted upon
as explicit a program for freeing women as men had demanded for
freeing themselves from economic exploitation. We never con¬
fronted men and demanded that unless they give up their domina-
Women and the Radical Movement 321
tion over us, we would not fight for their revolution, work in their
revolution. We never fought the primary cause, hoping instead that
changing the secondary characteristics would win us freedom. And
we ended up with a revolution that simply transferred male su¬
premacy, paternalism and male power to the new economy. A
reformist revolution that only improved upon our privileges but
did not change the basic structure causing our oppression.
A black male revolutionary today would not be satisfied know¬
ing only that the economic structure went from private to collective
control; he would want to know about racism. And you would have
to show him how white power and supremacy would be eliminated
in that revolution before he would join you.
Until we make such similar demands, revolution will pass us by.
