ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 considers feminism’s fraught historical – and present – relationship with the ideas of selfishness, self-interest, and individuality. It looks at branches and philosophies of feminism – radical, intersectional, and postfeminist – each of which treats the self-other dynamic and the ethics that accrue to it in different ways. It asks if it is possible to articulate a vision of the feminist self – of feminist self-fulness – beyond the bounds of the freighted and over-simplistic dichotomy of collectivism and individualism. In particular, it demonstrates that the second-wave feminists of the 1970s, who were nominally concerned with an analysis of “class woman,” are surprisingly aware of the importance, and historical erasure, of female individuality and individualism. It suggests that it is crucial to attend to such issues in a climate in which the exhortation to “centre others” in one’s politics is a feature of much recent feminist ideology and activism.
