A certain air of astonishment and distaste has greeted the sudden appearance of women's liberation groups in England. Their growth represents a hitherto untapped source of political energy and expresSTOR.
As victims of a double oppression, our liberation demands a specific form of action and a specific theory. Our oppre ssion is no respector of class boundaries; HOwever i aKes different class-rooted forms. This is both a strength and a problem for Women's Liberation. The strength is its appeal-to all women. The problem is that this generic oppression means that men are most easily attacked as the main enemy, rather than the structures which maintain and use the family and male domination against us.
For the deliberately blind Women's Liberation is simply reduced to "the new feminism", labelled historical anachronism criticised with puritan severity and therefore easily dismissed. Or else its presence is ascribed to the current stagnation of the left and it is hopefully seen as one of the groups which will come together to form a new revolutionary organisation. The latter position at least has the merit of recognising the revolutionary potential of women's liberation, but fails to ask what this potential is. and therefore what women's liberation is about. Women's liberation joins in the struggle to create a full fledged revolutionary theory and with it of a revolutionary strategy for England. But on the other hand, the formation of this new theory and strategy are still conceived by the organised left in traditional terms, and therfore the role and implications of women's liberation are undervalued and displaced.
To conceive our political theory and strategy-in terms of existing political institutions and the relationship of the left to them reveals its pitfalls as soon as it is applied to the problem of women. If we look at our position today it becomes immediately apparent that women are still denied formal equality. Neither within the factory, nor within the rest of society, do they have the same rights as men. To their economic and legal inequality is linked their cultural and psychological oppre ssion, to create a generalised area of social subordination.
The left has traditionally seen these elements in terms of a casuality-it is the economic and legal inequality which determines all forms of subordination (as the economic base determines the superstructure). Therefore, remove these inequalities and the rest automatically falls. This
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