ABSTRACT
Surprisingly, the majority of writers call themselves ‘feminists’. The conservative or antifeminist women see themselves as part of the movement for equal rights for women and see ‘women’s libbers’ as the ‘extremists’. A number of the feminists, however, regret the passing of the term ‘Women’s Liberation Movement’ which denoted a more activist and socialist-based movement, and the emergence of ‘feminism’, which is often interpreted, as Barbara Ehrenreich (1981) comments, as ‘lifestyle’ feminism. Antifeminists argue that sex differences are innately biologically determined, and feminists that they are caused primarily by social conditioning. Francis argues that women must be different by virtue of their childbearing capacity. But Carnahan quotes the changes women and men have already made in their lives as evidence for the conditioning argument. Mitchell’s view, however, is that at birth we enter the socially constructed categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, with biology as the reference point and implemented by conditioning.
