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1、外文翻译Feminist Consciousness After the Womens MovementBarbara Epstein There is no longer an organized feminist movement in the United States that influences the lives and actions of millions of women and engages their political support. There are many organizations, ranging from the National Organizat
2、ion for Women to womens caucuses in labor unions and professional groups, which fight for womens rights, and there are many more organizations, many of them including men as well as women, whose priorities include womens issues. But the mass womens movement of the late sixties, seventies, and early
3、eighties no longer exists. Few, among the many women who regard themselves as feminists, have anything to do with feminist organizations other than reading about them in the newspapers. Young women who are drawn to political activism do not, for the most part, join womens groups. They are much more
4、likely to join anti corporate, anti globalization, or social justice groups. These young women are likely to regard themselves as feminists, and in the groups that they join a feminist perspective is likely to affect the way in which issues are defined and addressed. But this is not the same thing a
5、s a mass movement of women for gender equality. A similar dynamic has taken place in other circles as well. There are now very large numbers of women who identify with feminism, or, if they are reluctant to adopt that label, nevertheless expect to be treated as the equals of men. And there are large
6、 numbers of men who support this view.The extent of feminist or proto-feminist consciousness, by which I mean an awareness of the inequality of women and a determination to resist it, that now exists in the United States, is an accomplishment of the womens movement. But it is also something of an an
7、omaly, since it is no longer linked to the movement that produced it. When the first wave of the womens movement in the United States went into decline, after woman suffrage was won in 1921, feminism went into decline with it. By the 1950s, feminism had almost entirely disappeared, not only as an or
8、ganized movement, but also as an ideology and a political and social sensibility. Even in the early sixties, in the New Left, to describe oneself as a feminist was to invite raised eyebrows and probably more extreme reactions. Now, for a second time in U.S. history, the memory of a movement that eng
9、ages the energy of very large numbers of women is receding into the past. But this time feminist consciousness has if anything become more widespread. This raises the question: what accounts for this difference? How and what does feminism change when it becomes a cultural current rather than a movem
10、ent for social change?In part this different history may have to do with the disparities between the first and second waves of feminism. The first wave of feminism began, in the 1840s, as a demand for womens equality generally. The womens movement emerged out of the abolitionist movement, and at fir
11、st feminism was part of an egalitarian worldview, closely connected to antislavery and antiracism. But in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and to an even greater degree over the first two decades of the twentieth, mainstream feminism narrowed to the demand for woman suffrage. Leading femin
12、ists, mostly middle- and upper-middle-class, native-born white women, even made racist and anti-immigrant arguments for woman suffrage. Though the womens movement also included working-class women, many of them are socialists, for whom feminism remained a part of a broader commitment to social equal
13、ity, by the second decade of the twentieth century, radicalism was a minor current within the womens movement. Emma Goldman, who combined determination to resist the oppression of women with anticapitalist politics, was not typical of feminists of the first two decades of the century. For most femin
14、ists, and for the public, feminism had come to mean the vote for women and little more. Once suffrage was won, feminism lost its raison detre and so had little future either as a movement or as consciousness.The second wave of the womens movement turned out differently. It did not narrow ideological
15、ly, nor did it run into any dead end, as its predecessor had. If anything over time the radical currents within the movement gained influence; women who had entered the movement thinking that womens equality would not require major social changes tended to become convinced that gender inequality was
16、 linked to other dimensions of inequality, especially class and race. The womens movement declined, in the eighties and nineties, mostly because the constituency on which it had been largely based, young, mostly white, middle-class women, gradually put political activity behind them. These women were beneficiaries of, what John Kenneth Galbraith has called, the “culture of contentment” of the eighties and nineties.They benefited, along with the rest of the class
