Women who have been inside the feminist movement have themselves confirmed the Marxist ties to radical feminism. According to Tammy Bruce:
In order to attract as wide a base as possible, the sixties Leftists hid their socialist sympathies and, in some cases, actual Communist Party membership. Betty Friedan is a classic case. In the book that launched the modern feminist movement—The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963—she portrayed herself as a politically inactive housewife who simply had had enough of sexism. Forty years later, Friedan told the real story. In Life So Far, published in 2000, she recounts, “I would come into New York on my days off from the hospital [and] would go to Communist Front meetings and rallies … I looked up the address of the Communist Party headquarters in New York and … went into their dark and dingy building on 13th Street and announced I wanted to become a member.” This was in 1942, a quarter-century before she and a few others founded NOW. Friedan’s revelation that, while she may have been a bored and frustrated housewife, she had also been a member of the Communist Party, shed some much needed light on how left-wing politics have been masquerading as authentic feminism.[5]
Tammy Bruce claims that “Betty Friedan, a former Communist Party member, was only the precursor of the hijacking of feminism to serve other political interests.”[6] She also notes that Gloria Steinem has served “as an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, which boasts of being the largest socialist organization in the United States and is the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.”[7] Furthermore, Patricia “Ireland details her support of the Communist Party in her autobiography, What Women Want, she admits her socialist sympathies and participation in pro-Communist rallies in Miami….”[8] Tammy Bruce also emphasizes that “today’s feminist leaders are more concerned with pursuing a socialist agenda than with helping women achieve equality.”[9]
Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge affirm that today’s radical feminism is:
Not merely about equal rights for women … Feminism aspires to be much more than this. It bids to be a totalizing scheme resting on a grand theory, one that is as all-inclusive as Marxism, as assured of its ability to unmask hidden meanings as Freudian psychology, and as fervent in its condemnation of apostates as evangelical fundamentalism. Feminist theory provides a doctrine of original sin: The world’s evil’s originate in male supremacy. (Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies, p. 183)
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