http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/4025684

Contemporary feminist thought

"This book is a history and critique of contemporary feminist thought, principally in the United States, from 1970 to the present. The focus is chiefly although not exclusively on the ideas of radical feminism, as expressed in the work of Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone, and on the elaboration of these ideas in the writings of Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, and Mary Daly, among others. The book is organized into three parts. Part I considers those writers who, building on the foundations laid down by Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan, established the framework for the renewed discussion of feminism in the 1970s. In this phase of the debate, the socially constructed differences between the sexes were judged to be the chief source of female oppression ... Part II of the book traces the development of a second phase of contemporary feminist theory, namely, the rejection of androgyny and the adoption of a woman-centered perspective. The sex-roles analysis of the early 1970s was taken up and given wide circulation in the media and the academy, and had evoked a widespread but selective response in many quarters ... Part III of the book argues that, in some recent feminist theory, the woman-centered analysis has brought radical feminism to a theoretical and practical impasse. By shifting from a focus on sex roles and androgyny to a woman-centered perspective, Rich, Chodorow, and others were able to extend and to deepen the analysis of the social construction of gender initiated by Millett and Firestone. But in the subsequent development of this line of argument in the work of Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, and others, some of these original insights have been lost."--Introduction (p.xi -xii.).

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