ABSTRACT
A. ny definition of feminism must see it above all as a social and ft political force, aimed at changing existing power relations between women and men. In Maggie Humm's words, 'The emergence offeminist ideas and feminist politics depends on the understanding that, in all societies which divide the sexes into different cultural, economic or political spheres, women are less valued than men' (Feminisms: A Reader (1992)). As a movement for social change, therefore, feminism's theoretical developments have been bound up with demands for political change. The beginnings of'second wave' feminism, the term now usually used to describe the post-1968 women's movement, were thus marked both by new political groupings and campaigns, such as those organized around abortion legislation, demands for legal and financial equality, and equal opportunity at work, and by the publication of ambitious theoretical works such as Kate Millett's Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (both 1970). Both works offered themselves as texts of revolution, Firestone insisting that what she called the 'pioneer Western feminist movement' of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must be seen as only the first onslaught of 'the most important revolution in history', and Millett heralding the emergence of 'a second wave of the sexual revolution'. Both sought to re-claim a feminist history; both identified feminism as theoretical standpoint with the women's movement as political practice.
