ABSTRACT

I am to speak these words in Europe,1 but I have been searching for them in the United States of America. A few years ago I would have spoken of the common oppression of women, the gathering movement of women around the globe, the hidden history of women’s resistance and bonding, the failure of all previous politics to recognize the universal shadow of patriarchy, the belief that women now, in a time of rising consciousness and global emergency, may join across all national and cultural boundaries to create a society free of domination, in which ‘sexuality, politics . . . w ork ,. . . intimacy . . . thinking itself will be trans­ formed’.2