Reclaim The Night

Feminists have long struggled with some non-feminist’s notions that our mantra is man hating. While that is not true of feminists as a whole, that was the main focus of a movement in the UK in the late 1970s. Called Revolutionary Feminism and lead by Sheila Jeffreys, the movement advocated political lesbianism and the complete denouncing of heterosexual relationships, which they felt was the only ultimate way to liberation. It did not matter if you slept with women or not; to be a true feminist, to them, was to be a lesbian. In 1979, they wrote Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism, which further pushed the Revolutionary Feminists into embodying that man-hating stereotype, which the media and non-feminists latched on to in an attempt to discredit the feminist agenda in general. Yet their impact on the feminist movement was much larger than the controversy that surrounded them for their literature and ideals. Read more after the jump!