ABSTRACT
The task of modern feminists is not a light one. No matter which way women move within the framework of existing, male-dominated societies, the content of the gender roles and their relationship to reproduction ensure that they are caught within the gender scissors; the ‘equal’ right to be a man is not the answer for someone who is actually a woman. Converselyand this was where the attempt of ‘socialist’ feminism to accommodate traditional roles fell down-the kind of society where men and women could be different but equal is impossible without a fundamental change in the male role and its values (and hence by definition, in the female too). The result is that two momentous and inseparable intellectual challenges face the contemporary women’s movement: it has to show how gender can be reconstructed to solve the problem of the place of motherhood in modern women’s lives and it must conceptualise a workable society based on women’s values, as well as or instead of men’s. The closer women get to power, whether this is over their own, individual lives or the direction of society as a whole, the more urgent these challenges become.
