ABSTRACT
Second wave feminism was labouring for the birth of women as full human beings. Chapter 3 opens with reflection on the difficulties some late-twentieth-century women had in believing that they were more than a figment of the masculine imagination when, for almost the whole of recorded history, they had been spoken on behalf of, rather than for, themselves. Betty Friedan and others had articulated how empty, unreal, and self-alienated women felt when they had achieved the state ideologically required of women: that in which there is no appreciable difference between herself and the perfect image of herself. The chapter goes on to elucidate how, after Friedan, it soon became apparent that the price of becoming a woman whose existence precedes and exceeds any prescribed feminine essence could be her social isolation or sanity. Feminist attempts to become not-a-thing ran the risk of becoming nothing or no one at all. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the so-called third wave of feminism was the most systemic of all feminist idoloclasms. By the 1990s, postmodern feminism’s preference for ‘troubling’ gender, in addition to what became intersectional feminism, had shattered or cancelled earlier feminist aspirations to a sovereign female self. The third wave deconstruction of ‘woman’, and of her claim to be the object of oppression, marked the end of the liberatory idoloclastic project or, perhaps, signalled to its indefinite duration.
