Genna G’s Reviews > From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 4 > Status Update

[...] The Brussels conference showed anarchy in effective action. Anarchic structure lets people exercise and relinquish power; everyone is heard when there is a flexible center of attention.

The ideal feminist organization is the leaderless group. Freedman writes: "We are anarchists not by ideology but by need. We are moved by an underclass appreciation of power—by our certainty that the kind of power that oppresses us can never be ours—to envision a utopia in which there is no governance other than self-governance," in which bonding, caring, and sharing replace authority. [...]

One of feminism's most important achievements is its deconstruction of the family as a natural unit and its reconstruction as a social unit. This breakdown made possible the recognition that the private realm idealized as the nursery of humane values is, in fact, the primary site of women's subjection.

Only after we recognize that women's subordination to men is systemic and structural can we begin to build a base for a humane, felicitous world.

Most activists believe feminism can reach its goals without radically changing society, but others do not. Traditional Marxist feminists locate women's oppression in the class system. Socialist feminists are rooted in traditional Marxism, but find gender and class oppression inseparable. [...]

[...] Because helping one group of women may, in fact, harm another, feminist groups are sometimes at odds with each other. But in all forms, feminism is a movement to help women as a group against the oppression of men as a group.

Feminism has many forms, so scholars refer to it in the plural: feminisms. Most historians define feminism as an attempt to change women's position in society—one that often takes the form of a political movement or organization. I define feminism as a set of values that encompasses all attempts based on a female perspective, by either women or men, to improve the lot of any group of women. [...]

The women's revolution asks people to live for it, not die for it; women believe, with Emma Goldman, that revolutions are to dance at.

PART TWO.
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY-DAWN.
[...] Many women seem, basically, to be spiritually anarchic: they do not easily bow to authority, rarely revere authority, and are loath to act against their own values in the name of authority. The feminist movement challenges the very root of patriarchy, the idea that
one person can be humanly superior to others and entitled to have authority over them.

Welfare indirectly gave people a basis for political organization that was not based on personal networks and the traditional political parties. This was a major shift: politics in the early twentieth century had been characterized by class conflict—and class was determined mainly by work and social relations within the workplace.