Radical feminism’s internal contradiction prefigured the modern-postmodern feminist split.

Evidence

For my purposes here, the crucial issue is the way in which contradictions within radical feminism prefigured, marked the shift to, and enabled or even produced postmodern configurations. On the one hand, radical feminism located the foundational oppression in the gender division itself and premised its political movement on eradicating gender difference. On the other hand, radical feminism argued that women as the oppressed group must band together as women, shunning men, the oppressor, because gender oppression as policed by the patriarchal family is founded on the primary attachment of individual women to individual men, and on a ”divide and conquer” separation of women from one another by means of sexual rivalry between women over men. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 852

Categorization

• XREF: Recasts the ch33 claim that second-wave feminism fused modern universalism with postmodern binary critique. — connects to: Second-wave feminism’s slogan inverted into a privatized politics by decade’s end — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 644; Second-wave feminism fused modern universalism with postmodern binary critique inseparably. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 831; The personal is political inverted into the political is personal as feminism went postmodern — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 865 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Discourse on marginalized women oscillates between Marxist dogmatism and celebration of the other. #expands (0.72) — Elizabeth Grosz, Criticism, Feminism and the Institution, 120
• Postmodernism fragmented into disassociated specialisms that modernism once unified. #corroborates (0.72)
• Conflicting expectations of equality and otherness produce women’s lack of balance #expands (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 668