What Is Feminism
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Abstract
This work consists of a series of essays, mostly retrospective, by intellectuals and academics, all veterans of the British, American, and Canadian women's movements. The overall idea is to take stock of the prospects and problems raised by the women's movement during the past two decades. It should be stated at the outset that even to raise the question "what is feminism?" is important. "Second wave feminism," like the New Left, Black Power, and Socialist movements to which ? at least in the United States ? it largely succeeded has developed its own shibboleths and unquestioned assumptions that make criticism from within dif ficult. The editors' introduction to this volume alludes without being wholly explicit to what appear to have been special problems in its compilation. They speak, for example, of the "enormous difficulty" involved in such questions as defining feminism, of the "many ... people from a wide range of social and ethnic back grounds [who] were invited to participate and accepted but got into difficulties," at the fact that "the book developed] into something other than what we first intended" and of their determination not to "lose sight of the celebration behind the worries" but instead to make "creative use of anxiety." As in most collections, it is hard to find a unifying theme in the essays. Only a few directly address the question that gives the anthology its title ? and it is mostly these that I will discuss. Before beginning, however, I wish to note that most of the essays frequently touch upon two related, but distinguishable, themes concerning feminism. The first is the fact of enor mous diversity among women which raises the question of what kind of feminist perspective and practice can unify them. The second relates to the reality of internal divisions and contradictions among feminists. The most frequently cited of these divisions is between a point of view that stresses the similarities between men and women, and one that stresses the differences between the sexes. Furthermore, in several of the essays the fact of diversity and or conflicts among women is related ? though rarely clearly and directly ? to another question: the relationship of the women's movement to its Eli Zaretsky, "What is Feminism?," Labour/Le Travail, 22 (Fall 1988), 259-266.