跳房子
外文翻译
Feminist Consciousness After the Women’s Movement
Barbara Epstein
There is no longer an organized feminist movement in the United States that influences the lives and actions of millions of women and engages their political support. There are many organizations, ranging from the National Organization for Women to women’s caucus in labor unions and professional groups, which fight for women’s rights, and there are many more organizations, many of them including men as well as women, who priorities include women’s issues. But the mass women’s movement of the late sixties, venties, and early eighties no longer exists. Few, among the many women who regard themlves as feminists, have anything to do with feminist organizations other than reading about them in the newspapers. Young women who are drawn to political activism do not, for the most part, join women’s groups. They are much more likely to join anti corporate, anti globalization, or social justice groups. The young women are likely to regard themlves 值得作文>灸法的作用
as feminists, and in the groups that they join a feminist perspective is likely to affect the way in which issues are defined and addresd. But this is not the same thing as a mass movement of women for gender equality. A similar dynamic has taken place in other circles as well. There are now very large numbers of women who identify with feminism, or, if they are reluctant to adopt that label, nevertheless expect to be treated as the equals of men. And there are large numbers of men who support this view.偶得>信息的英文
肾安胶囊The extent of feminist or proto-feminist consciousness, by which I mean an awareness of the inequality of women and a determination to resist it, that now exists in the United States, is an accomplishment of the women’s movement. But it is also something of an anomaly, since it is no longer linked to the movement that produced it. When the first wave of the women’s movement in the United States went into decline, after woman suffrage was won in 1921, feminism went into decline with it. By the 1950s, feminism had almost entirely disappeared, not only as an organized movement, but also as an ideology and a political and social nsibility. Even in the early sixties, in the New Left, to describe onelf as a feminist was to invite raid eyebrows and probably more extreme reactions. 晚安妈妈讲故事
Now, for a cond time in U.S. history, the memory of a movement that engages the energy of very large numbers of women is receding into the past. But this time feminist consciousness has if anything become more widespread. This rais the question: what accounts for this difference? How and what does feminism change when it becomes a cultural current rather than a movement for social change?
In part this different history may have to do with the disparities between the first and cond waves of feminism. The first wave of feminism began, in the 1840s, as a demand for women’s equality generally. The women’s movement emerged out of the abolitionist movement, and at first feminism was part of an egalitarian worldview, cloly connected to antislavery and antiracism. But in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and to an even greater degree over the first two decades of the twentieth, mainstream feminism narrowed to the demand for woman suffrage. Leading feminists, mostly middle- and upper-middle-class, native-born white women, even made racist and anti-immigrant arguments for woman suffrage. Though the women’s movement also included working-class women, many of them are socialists, for whom feminism remained a part of a broad
er commitment to social equality, by the cond decade of the twentieth century, radicalism was a minor current within the women’s movement. Emma Goldman, who combined determination to resist the oppression of women with anticapitalist politics, was not typical of feminists of the first two decades of the century. For most feminists, and for the public, feminism had come to mean the vote for women and little more. Once suffrage was won, feminism lost its raison d’etre and so had little future either as a movement or as consciousness.
The cond wave of the women’s movement turned out differently. It did not narrow ideologically, nor did it run into any dead end, as its predecessor had. If anything over time the radical currents within the movement gained influence; women who had entered the movement thinking that women’s equality would not require major social changes tended to become convinced that gender inequality was linked to other dimensions of inequality, especially class and race. The women’s movement declined, in the eighties and nineties, mostly becau the constituency on which it had been largely bad, young, mostly white, middle-class women, gradually put political activity behind them. Th
e women were beneficiaries of, what John Kenneth Galbraith has called, the “culture of contentment” of the eighties and nineties.
They benefited, along with the rest of the class, from the prosperity of the time; they also benefited from affirmative action. Even as they left political activity, few feminists thought that the aims of the women’s movement had been accomplished. Many thought that they could continue to work towards the aims in the arenas, mostly professional, that they were entering. Feminist consciousness was sustained in part, no doubt, becau it was widely understood that its aims had not been achieved, and becau many women who left the movement remained committed to its goals.
This in itlf would not have led to the widespread acceptance of feminism that has taken place over the last twenty years. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, some commentators have argued that the inequality of women in the Arab world is a sign of the deep cultural gap involved: to reject feminism is to reject modernity and the West. For instance, Laura Bush, speaking on the weekly presidential radio address, on November 1
7, 2001, supported the Bush administration’s attack on Afghanistan on grounds of the denial of women’s rights by the Taliban. In the sixties, probably even in the venties, such an argument would have been unthinkable. Many feminists, especially radical feminists, thought that their challenge to male supremacy was also a challenge to the existing social order. Many, who regarded themlves as guardians of that social order, agreed. How has feminism become an accepted part of modern, Western society rather than an enemy of it?
莫言的蛙
