Reformist feminism became their route to class mobility. While it was in the interest of mainstream white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to suppress visionary feminist thinking which was not anti-male or concerned with getting women the right to be like men, reformist feminists were also eager to silence these forces. These discussions did not trivialize the feminist insistence that “sisterhood is powerful,” they simply emphasized that we could only become sisters in struggle by confronting the ways women - through sex, class, and race - dominated and exploited other women, and created a political platform that would address these differences. Diana Press published revolutionary insights about class divisions between women as early as the mid-’70s in their collection of essays Class and Feminism. Discussions of class differences occurred early on in contemporary feminism, preceding discussions of race. Utopian visions of sisterhood based solely on the awareness of the reality that all women were in some way victimized by male domination were disrupted by discussions of class and race.
Sisterhood could not be powerful as long as women were competitively at war with one another. But women could not band together to further feminism without confronting our sexist thinking. The focus shifted to an all-out effort to create gender justice. As contemporary feminism progressed, as women realized that males were not the only group in our society who supported sexist thinking and behavior - that females could be sexist as well - anti-male sentiment no longer shaped the movement’s consciousness.
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