Feminist Deaths and Feminism Today

Friedan and Andrea Dworkin. Friedan and Dworkin join an unfor tunately growing list of well-known feminist thinkers who have died over the last few years. The passing of Friedan and Dworkin makes us think about the feminism they represented and indeed about the history of feminist thought itself, its ebbs and flows, its metaphoric births and deaths. Ideas, after all, are as living as people, with peri ods of growth, maturity, and decline. While Friedan's and Dworkin's works are routinely studied in colleges and universities, it would be inaccurate to describe either writer as an academic feminist, let alone a literary critic. Neither has had much influence on feminist literary theory, at least not directly. Yet both women were feminist theorists who offered theoretical para digms?albeit from drastically different points of view?for under standing women's oppression. The quintessential liberal theorist of second-wave feminism, Friedan argued that women must be brought into "full participation in the mainstream of American society," to quote the "statement of purpose" that she drafted for the National Organization for Women in 1966 (Natl. Organization for Women 97). In contrast, Dworkin rejected the liberal-feminist goal of assimilating into mainstream "Amerika" (as she termed the United States), dedi cating her life's work to "ending male dominance as the fundamental psychological, political, and cultural reality of earth-lived life" (17). Although their visions of feminism and their personal styles as feminists could not have been more different, Friedan and Dworkin shared some qualities as feminist theorists. Both women wrote books that present sweeping arguments about the causes of and solutions to women's oppression, speaking of "Women" as a monolithic category encompassing half of humanity. In their work, they attempted to speak to and for all women, offering a feminism based on women's putatively shared experience of gender. The influence of this type of feminism can be seen in two major trends in the feminist literary criticism that theories and methodologies