The significance of feminist movement offered a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation. Feminist movement can end the war between the sexes. It can transform relationships so that the alienation, competition, and dehumanization that characterize human interaction can be replaced with feelings of intimacy, mutuality, and camaraderie. After many organizations were established, leaders expressed a desire for greater participant diversity, they wanted women to join who were not white, materially privileged, middle class, or college-educated.
· Contemporary feminist activists argue that eradicating sexist oppression is important because it is the primary contradiction, the basis of all other oppressions. Racism as well as class structure is perceived as stemming from sexism.
· Sexist oppression is of primary importance not because it is the basis of all other oppression, but because it is the practice of domination most people experience, whether their role be that of discriminator or discriminated against, exploiter or exploited.
· Challenging sexist oppression is a crucial step in the struggle to eliminate all forms of oppression. Unlike other forms of oppression, most people witness and/ or experience the practice of sexist domination in family settings.
Where does this sexist oppression comes from?
In the essay, "Dualist Culture and Beyond," philosopher John Hodge stresses that
the family in our society, both traditionally and legally, "reflects the Dualist values of hierarchy and coercive authoritarian control" which are exemplified in the parent-child, husband-wife relationships.
It is in this form of the family where most children first learn the meaning and practice of hierarchical, authoritarian rule. Here is where they learn to accept group oppression against themselves as non-adults, and where they learn to accept male supremacy and the group oppression of women.
Here is where they learn that it is the male's role to work in the community and control the economic life of the family and to mete out the physical and financial punishments and rewards, and the female's role to provide the emotional warmth associated with motherhood while under the economic rule of the male. Here is where the relationship of superordination-subordination, of superior-inferior, or master-slave is first learned and accepted as "natural." Even in families where no male is present, children may learn to value dominating, authoritative rule via their relationship to mothers and other adults, as well as strict adherence to sexist-defined role patterns
· Even as we are loved and cared for in families, we are simultaneously taught that this love is not as important as having power to dominate others. Power struggles, coercive authoritarian rule, and brutal assertion of domination shapes family life so that it is often the setting of intense suffering and pain.
· Feminism is the one radical political movement that focuses on transforming family relationships. Feminist movement to end sexist oppression affirms family life by its insistence that the purpose of family structure is not to reinforce patterns of domination in the interest of the state.
· Within the present family structure, individuals learn to accept sexist oppression as "natural" and are primed to support other forms of oppression heterosexual domination.
It is not merely the politically naive who demonstrate a lack of awareness that forms of oppression are inter-related.
An important stage in the development of political consciousness is reached when individuals recognize the need to struggle against all forms of oppression.
The fight against sexist oppression is of grave political significance-it is not for women only. Feminist movement is vital both in its power to liberate us from the terrible bonds of sexist oppression and in its potential to radicalize.
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