Abstract

Recently, Marcuse identified the women's liberation movement as “perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement that we have.” He denied that feminism is simply a body of ideas about women's equality, intended “;for women only.” Rather, in his view, feminism recovers certain unfulfilled, Utopian visions within the socialist tradition. Feminism contains an image “not only of new social institutions, but also of a change in consciousness, of a change in the instinctual needs of men and women,” freed from the requirements of domination and exploitation. Feminism also challenges the classical theory of the revolutionary subject. Marcuse, therefore, regarded feminism as a critique of socialism, but one which can be incorporated within a more advanced socialist perspective.