# Radical feminism

Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other social divisions such as in race, class, and sexual orientation. The ideology and movement emerged in the 1960s.

## Quotes

* The word ‘radical’ means ‘going to the roots’. It is derived from the Latin radix, meaning root. Radical Feminism goes to the root of oppression and the way out. And I define it as “way of being characterised by (a) an Awesome and Ecstatic sense of Otherness from patriarchal norms and values (b) conscious awareness of the sadosociety’s sanctions against Radical Feminists (c) moral outrage on behalf of women as women (d) commitment to the cause of women that persists, even against the current, when feminism is no longer ‘popular’; in other words, constancy.
** Mary Daly quoted in Interview Mary Daly, Philosophy Now, Issue 33, (September/October 2001)
* To be a Radical Feminist now is to do quantum leaping. That means to act with fantastic courage because you see real hope now, not lovely little lah-didah hope (a very contained hope), but really great Hope for participation in Quintessence, which is the harmony of the universe.
** Mary Daly quoted in Interview Mary Daly, Philosophy Now, Issue 33, (September/October 2001)
* The contemporary radical feminist position is the direct descendant of the radical feminist line in the old movement, notably that championed by Stanton and Anthony, and later by the militant Congressional Union subsequently known as the Woman’s Party. It sees feminist issues not only as women’s first priority, but as central to any larger revolutionary analysis. It refuses to accept the existing leftist analysis not because it is too radical, but because it is not radical enough: it sees the current leftist analysis as outdated and superficial, because this analysis does not relate the structure of the economic class system to its origins in the sexual class system, the model for all other exploitative systems, and thus the tapeworm that must be eliminated first by any true revolution.
** Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. 1970. p. 37.
* Radical feminist movement has many political assets that no other movement can claim, a revolutionary potential far higher, as well as qualitatively different, from any in the past.
** Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. 1970. p. 38.
* If any revolutionary movement can succeed at establishing an egalitarian structure, radical feminism will.
** Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. 1970. p. 39.
* Revolutionary feminism is the only radical programme that immediately cracks through to the emotional strata underlying ‘serious’ politics, thus reintegrating the personal with the public, the subjective with the objective, the emotional with the rational – the female principle with the male.
** Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. 1970. p. 210.

## See also

* Second-wave feminism
* Transfeminism

## External links

* Authority control: WorldCat search