Modern radical feminism: public and private patriarchy

Abstract

Unlike most conventional political theory, radical feminism does not see state power as the central political issue. From this new perspective, the state is but one manifestation of patriarchal power, reflecting other deeper structures of oppression, and women’s well-documented exclusion from its formal institutions is a symptom rather than the cause of gender inequality. Therefore although the radical feminist analysis of the state has tended to be implicit rather than fully developed in its own right, this neglect itself embodies a theory of state power which is seen as neither autonomous nor as reducible to the needs of the economy, but as inextricably connected to areas of life such as the family and sexuality that have usually been seen as private and non-political, but which are now seen as basic to all power relationships in society.