<p>»Liberation« as opposed to »emancipation« to denote freedom from sexual classification altogether rather than merely an equalizing of sex roles. Nevertheless, I have always found the name heavy, too flavored with New Left rhetoric, and ashamed to acknowledge any relation to Feininism. I prefer to use »Radical Feminism«</p>

<p>The Woman's Party struggled on through a depression and several wars, campaigning for the next big legal boost to women's freedom, an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Fifty years later those who are still alive are still campaigning. The stereotype of the crotchety old lady with her umbrella obsessed with a cause already won is the product of the ossification of feminism created by The Fifty-Year Ridicule.</p>

<p>Hereafter abbreviated W.R.M.</p>

<p>For example, witches must be seen as women in independent political revolt. Within two centuries eight million women were burned at the stake by the Church—for religion was the politics of that period.</p>

<p>Barbara Deming, Prison Notes (Boston: Beacon, 1970), pp. 119-120.</p>

<p>Perhaps a transcendent ideal of modern socialism may unite elements of the two movements. However, I think that for the moment new feminism's allegiance to abolishing sexism and black liberation's allegiance to blackness are both too strong for that.</p>

<p>Robert Staples, »The Myth of the Black Matriarchy«, Black Scholar 1 (January-February 1970): 15. Staples, who thinks the black woman more aggressive, independent, and self-reliant than the proto-typical white woman, finds the myth of the black matriarchy a »cruel hoax«, which the white ruling class has imposed in order to create internal dissensions within the black community.</p>

<p>Black Scholar 1 (January-February 1970): 29.</p>

<p>Such attitudes, once clandestine, are now much discussed in many places. Among them are Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Delta Book, 1968); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, rev. and abrd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Grove Press, 1966); Theodore R.

<p>Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 193, gives a brilliant analysis of the way in which biology, economics, and cultural assumptions may have come together to breed American racism. He says that while the South enjoyed the black body and the North made it taboo, for both regions it was: the very incarnation of that fecal substance with which the whole world had been smeared by the repressed coprophilia of the bourgeois order.