ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses feminism in a few pages than trying to discuss Marxism, fascism, or indeed most other isms'. To discuss such 'ism' one either has to stay on the general and unilluminating level of the common denominator, or else disentangle the different species of the genus and examine each one individually. In the case of feminism the variant species are more than usually diffuse, and it is arguable that some of them do not even belong to the same genus, or that there is not even a common denominator. Janet Radcliffe Richards has argued, in The Sceptical Feminist, that anyone who accepts that women suffer from systematic social injustice because of their sex is a feminist. The statement 'I am a feminist' tells the audience no more than that the speaker is dissatisfied with some thing, or set of things, about the role of women in society, probably with an implication of male dominance being involved somewhere.
