Views
According to Germaine Greer, it promoted not having leaders in society, "characterized men as the enemy," considered "Love" to be "'the response of the victim to the rapist'", and believed that marriage as a "proprietary relationship" and uterine pregnancy would "no longer prevail."
The Feminists held that women were oppressed by their internalization of patriarchal sex roles, and hence suffered from a kind of false consciousness. To liberate themselves from such oppressive roles, The Feminists held that the feminist movement must be entirely autonomous from men and eventually came to hold that women should be free of men in their personal lives as well. The group was strongly opposed to the sexual revolution, holding that it was simply a way for men to get easier access to women's bodies. (Ti-Grace Atkinson was one of the first radical feminists to be specifically critical of pornography.) They at first advocated that women practice celibacy, and later came to advocate political lesbianism. The separatist ideas of The Feminists were reflected in their membership quota, restricting women who lived with men to one-third of its members, and excluding married women entirely in 1971. After Atkinson's departure, The Feminists moved in the direction of advocating matriarchy and developing a "woman's religion", ideas that later came to be known as cultural feminism.
Although The Feminists disbanded in 1973, they played an important role in the development of cultural feminism, separatist feminism, and anti-pornography feminism (Barbara Mehrhof later became an organizer for Women Against Pornography), tendencies that were predominant in radical feminism by the late 1970s.
Read more about this topic: The Feminists
Famous quotes containing the word views:
“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour.”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
“But of all the views of this law [universal education] none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the book-worm.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)