The Feminists (also known as Feminists—A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles, formerly as October 17th Movement) Greer, Germaine (1970). '' The Female Eunuch''. New York: McGraw-Hill, p. 295. was a second-wave

radical feminist 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 ...

group active in New York City from 1968 to 1973.

History

The group was founded in 1968 as a split from the New York City chapter of

National Organization for Women The National Organization for Women (NOW) is an American feminist organization. Founded in 1966, it is legally a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S. states and in Washington, D.C. It ...

(NOW) by members who felt NOW was not radical enough. It was originally called the after the date that it was founded, but soon changed its name to The Feminists.

Ti-Grace Atkinson Grace Atkinson (born November 9, 1938), better known as Ti-Grace Atkinson, is an American radical feminist activist, writer and philosopher. Life and career Atkinson was born into a prominent Louisiana family. Named after her grandmother, Gra ...

was the group's central figure and informal leader until she left the group in 1971; other prominent members included

Anne Koedt Anne Koedt (born 1941) is an American radical feminist activist and author of "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm", a 1970 classic feminist work on women's sexuality. She was connected to the group New York Radical Women and was a founding member ...

(who left in 1969 to co-found

New York Radical Feminists New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) was a radical feminist group founded by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt in 1969, after they had left Redstockings and The Feminists, respectively. Firestone's and Koedt's desire to start this new group was ...

Sheila Michaels Sheila Babs Michaels, also known as Sheila Shiki-y-Michaels (May 8, 1939 – June 22, 2017), was an American feminist and civil rights activist credited with popularizing Ms. as a default form of address for women regardless of their marital st ...

, Barbara Mehrhof, Pamela Kearon, and Sheila Cronan. The Feminists' best-known action may have been in September 1969, when members picketed the New York City Marriage License Bureau, distributing pamphlets protesting the marriage contract: "All the discriminatory practices against women are patterned and rationalized by this slavery-like practice. We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage." Morgan, Robin, ed., '' Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From the Women's Liberation Movement'' (N.Y.: Random House, 1st ed. 1970), p. 537.

Ideology

According to

Germaine Greer Germaine Greer (; born 29 January 1939) is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the radical feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century. Specializing in English and women's literat ...

in '' The Female Eunuch'' (1970), The Feminists promoted not having leaders in society, "characterized men as the enemy", described "Love" as "the response of the victim to the rapist", and believed that "the proprietary relationship of marriage" and uterine pregnancy would "no longer prevail". The Feminists held that women were oppressed by their internalization of

patriarchal Patriarchy is a social system in which positions of dominance and privilege are primarily held by men. It is used, both as a technical anthropological term for families or clans controlled by the father or eldest male or group of males ...

sex roles A gender role, also known as a sex role, is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on that person's sex. Gender roles are usually cente ...

, and hence suffered from a kind of

false consciousness In Marxist theory, false consciousness is a term describing the ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the ...

. To liberate themselves from such oppressive roles, The Feminists held that the feminist movement must be entirely autonomous from men and eventually came to hold that women should be free of men in their personal lives as well. The group was strongly opposed to the

sexual revolution The sexual revolution, also known as the sexual liberation, was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the United States and the developed world from the 1 ...

, holding that it was simply a way for men to get easier access to women's bodies.

was one of the first radical feminists to be specifically critical of pornography. They at first advocated that women practice

celibacy Celibacy (from Latin ''caelibatus'') is the state of voluntarily being unmarried, sexually abstinent, or both, usually for religious reasons. It is often in association with the role of a religious official or devotee. In its narrow sense, th ...

, and later came to advocate

political lesbianism Political lesbianism is a phenomenon within feminism, primarily second-wave feminism and radical feminism; it includes, but is not limited to, lesbian separatism. Political lesbianism asserts that sexual orientation is a political and feminist ...

. The separatist ideas of The Feminists were reflected in their membership quota, restricting women who lived with men to one-third of its members, and excluding married women entirely in 1971. After Atkinson's departure, The Feminists moved in the direction of advocating

matriarchy Matriarchy is a social system in which women hold the primary power positions in roles of authority. In a broader sense it can also extend to moral authority, social privilege and control of property. While those definitions apply in general ...

and developing a "woman's religion", ideas that later came to be known as

cultural feminism Cultural feminism, the view that there is a "female nature" or "female essence", attempts to revalue and redefine attributes ascribed to femaleness. It is also used to describe theories that commend innate differences between women and men. Cultu ...

. Although The Feminists disbanded in 1973, they played an important role in the development of cultural feminism,

separatist feminism Feminist separatism is the theory that feminist opposition to patriarchy can be achieved through women's separation from men.Christine Skelton, Becky Francis, ''Feminism and the Schooling Scandal'', Taylor & Francis, 2009 ,p. 104 Because much o ...

, and

anti-pornography feminism Feminist views on pornography range from total condemnation of the medium as an inherent form of violence against women to an embracing of some forms as a medium of feminist expression. This debate reflects larger concerns surrounding feminist v ...

(Barbara Mehrhof later became an organizer for

Women Against Pornography Women Against Pornography (WAP) was a radical feminist activist group based out of New York City that was influential in the anti-pornography movement of the late 1970s and the 1980s. WAP was the most well known feminist anti-pornography group out ...

), tendencies that were predominant in radical feminism by the late 1970s.

History

Ideology

References

Further reading