ABSTRACT
In this society, power is commonly equated with domination and control over people or things. Women active in feminist movement had ambivalent responses to the issue of power. Radical feminists challenged the prevailing notion of power as domination and attempted to transform its meaning. Many participants in feminist movement sincerely believed that women were different from men and would exercise power differently. They had been socialized to accept a sexist ideology that stressed such difference, and feminist ideology reaffirmed the primacy of these differences. Feminist rhetoric pushing the notion of man as enemy and woman as victim enabled women to avoid doing the work of creating new value systems. While feminist activists urged women to work to acquire economic and political power, they did not offer guidance and wise counsel about the exercise of that power. Feminist ideology should not encourage as sexism has done women to believe they are powerless.
