Feminist Arguments

Abstract

The issue of representation has been fundamental for the modern feminist movement. While equality, especially in relation to equal pay and equal opportunity, continued to be a fundamental objective of women activists, what marked the re-emergence of feminism as a political and social movement from the late 1960s was a new articulation of the contradictions of ‘femininity’, of motherhood and gender for women in the industrial West, together with a new analysis of the conditions — social as well as economic — producing these contradictions. The conditions which made possible this new articulation were the series of conjunctural changes in the decade 1960–1970. The ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s refers to the tumultuous personal experience of a generation for whom sex and sexual pleasure came out of the bedroom and the closet, off the back seat of cars and cinemas, and into the public sphere. Sexuality and its pleasures were asserted as an affirmation of identity and as a human right. But the ‘sexual revolution’ also refers to the gradual development of a broad acceptance in western societies of new norms of sexual activity involving non-marital sexuality both heterosexual and, with its decriminalisation, of homosexuality (in Britain, for those over 21 years of age).¹