The Feminists - Views

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.