女性意识外文翻译

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2024年6月14日发(作者：)

外文翻译

Feminist Consciousness After the Women’s Movement

Barbara Epstein

There is no longer an organized feminist movement in the United States that

influences the lives and actions of millions of women and engages their political

support. There are many organizations, ranging from the National Organization for

Women to women’s caucuses in labor unions and professional groups, which fight for

women’s rights, and there are many more organizations, many of them including men

as well as women, whose priorities include women’s issues. But the mass women’s

movement of the late sixties, seventies, and early eighties no longer exists. Few,

among the many women who regard themselves as feminists, have anything to do

with feminist organizations other than reading about them in the newspapers. Young

women who are drawn to political activism do not, for the most part, join women’s

groups. They are much more likely to join anti corporate, anti globalization, or social

justice groups. These young women are likely to regard themselves as feminists, and

in the groups that they join a feminist perspective is likely to affect the way in which

issues are defined and addressed. But this is not the same thing as a mass movement

of women for gender equality. A similar dynamic has taken place in other circles as

well. There are now very large numbers of women who identify with feminism, or, if

they are reluctant to adopt that label, nevertheless expect to be treated as the equals of

men. And there are large numbers of men who support this view.

The extent of feminist or proto-feminist consciousness, by which I mean an

awareness of the inequality of women and a determination to resist it, that now exists

in the United States, is an accomplishment of the women’s movement. But it is also

something of an anomaly, since it is no longer linked to the movement that produced

it. When the first wave of the women’s movement in the United States went into

decline, after woman suffrage was won in 1921, feminism went into decline with it.

By the 1950s, feminism had almost entirely disappeared, not only as an organized

movement, but also as an ideology and a political and social sensibility. Even in the

early sixties, in the New Left, to describe oneself as a feminist was to invite raised

eyebrows and probably more extreme reactions. Now, for a second time in U.S.

history, the memory of a movement that engages the energy of very large numbers of

women is receding into the past. But this time feminist consciousness has if anything

become more widespread. This raises the question: what accounts for this difference?

How and what does feminism change when it becomes a cultural current rather than a

movement for social change?

In part this different history may have to do with the disparities between the first

and second waves of feminism. The first wave of feminism began, in the 1840s, as a

demand for women’s equality generally. The women’s movement emerged out of the

abolitionist movement, and at first feminism was part of an egalitarian worldview,

closely connected to antislavery and antiracism. But in the last decade of the

nineteenth century, and to an even greater degree over the first two decades of the

twentieth, mainstream feminism narrowed to the demand for woman suffrage.

Leading feminists, mostly middle- and upper-middle-class, native-born white women,

even made racist and anti-immigrant arguments for woman suffrage. Though the

women’s movement also included working-class women, many of them are socialists,

for whom feminism remained a part of a broader commitment to social equality, by

the second decade of the twentieth century, radicalism was a minor current within the

women’s movement. Emma Goldman, who combined determination to resist the

oppression of women with anticapitalist politics, was not typical of feminists of the

first two decades of the century. For most feminists, and for the public, feminism had

come to mean the vote for women and little more. Once suffrage was won, feminism

lost its raison d’etre and so had little future either as a movement or as consciousness.

The second wave of the women’s movement turned out differently. It did not

narrow ideologically, nor did it run into any dead end, as its predecessor had. If

anything over time the radical currents within the movement gained influence; women

who had entered the movement thinking that women’s equality would not require

major social changes tended to become convinced that gender inequality was linked to

other dimensions of inequality, especially class and race. The women’s movement

declined, in the eighties and nineties, mostly because the constituency on which it had

been largely based, young, mostly white, middle-class women, gradually put political

activity behind them. These women were beneficiaries of, what John Kenneth

Galbraith has called, the “culture of contentment” of the eighties and nineties.

They benefited, along with the rest of the class, from the prosperity of the time;

they also benefited from affirmative action. Even as they left political activity, few

feminists thought that the aims of the women’s movement had been accomplished.

Many thought that they could continue to work towards these aims in the arenas,

mostly professional, that they were entering. Feminist consciousness was sustained in

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