Joanna Russ, in What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and
the Future of Feminism (St. Martin's, 1998), warns feminists very
explicitly about the tendency of feminists in the 1990s to
characterize everything that they do or enjoy as "feminist." One part
of this tendency involves "celebrating women and women's work without
bringing up anything as nasty as sexism," (3) regarding the
"affirmation of women" as a lifestyle choice that-- Russ is here
quoting Barbara Haber-- turns away from
a position in which we recognized that [the] family is [the] building
block of patriarchy... Mainstream feminists have moved back to
reaffirming the notion that... family is a safe and wholesome
place to be. Radical feminists have affirmed [the] family as
the source of our cultures... [this] coincides with a reactionary
administration's push back to family values.
A Civil Campaign, I am persuaded, succeeds as a feminist
romance to the degree that it both celebrates women as strong
and smart and responsible for their own lives and regards gender
privilege and the sexual oppression that maintains and enforces
it as being like the weather-- something to be coped with, but
not actively-- and particularly not collectively-- opposed.
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