Feminism questions the use of difference to legitimate hierarchy, an arrangement that Starhawk terms “power over.” The idea that there’s no justification for using woman as “the nigger of the world” (Yoko Ono) remains fundamental to the whole cause. For most of the women (and some of the men) who absorb that truth, feminism is a life-changing, irreversible experience: hard to practice day to day, harder not to.
So feminism is a way of being that’s still uphill, not quite a campaign that can be won. Thus it should come as no surprise
that the founding mothers of contemporary feminism are still
hard at it, pushing the understanding forward. Three of them
— Steinem, Friedan, and Morgan — have produced books which
