Women's Liberation Movement A Class Analysis Essay

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Review of Literature

Source A
Reference: Dixon, M. (1977). The Rise and Demise of Women's Liberation: A Class Analysis. Available: http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/CWLUArchive/dixon.html. Last accessed 10th March, 2014.
Type: Thesis
Summary: This source is a thesis by well-known woman’s rights activist Professor Marlene Dixon. The thesis examines the downfall of the Women’s Liberation movement, stating that it “never produced a coherent program” and failed to generate a “coherent political analysis”. The issues taken up by women’s groups reflected only the problems of “younger, middle class women”, such as the demand for legal abortion (“rather than a demand for universal health and nutritional care”). the need for safe daycare centres (“rather than a universal daycare with compensatory education …show more content…

These failures proved that women “knew something was very wrong, but did not know what” and failed to make a lasting impact on the state of feminism by focusing “not upon male supremacy as a part of class exploitation”, but on it’s result – male chauvinism; not upon the need for “revolutionary social and economic changes, but upon the individualized struggles between men and women”. This focus only emphasized the conflict and contradiction between men and women instead of looking at the issue politically, as a result of the capitalist system of class exploitation. Marlene Dixon stated that women were “far too slow to recognize class struggle for what it was” within the liberation movement, and

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