ABSTRACT
On Donna Haraway’s own terms, to be successful, the work would need to have produced a different mindset towards unity among feminists and socialists. The text has certainly been extremely influential in forming attitudes within contemporary cultural theory, though its arguments were divisive among activist groups and have since been criticized for gaps and shortcomings. Haraway wrote the manifesto in response to a commission from the Socialist Review, a long-established quarterly journal of politics and culture which had requested an essay on the current state of socialist feminism in the United States from a number of writers. In an interview published in 2004, she recalls that the journal’s Boston collective considered it politically suspect; they thought that she was celebrating technology uncritically and that her critiques of some feminist theory were anti-feminist. Haraway’s manifesto is clearly a text of the 1980s, and more specifically than that, a US-American text of the 1980s.
