Charles_F_Bell wrote:VW may have equated féminisme with equal civil rights, or just a moral sense that women are not inferior to men, and the quotes you cite reflect only that, but not the equality of results, and sometimes the undisguised hatred of men by womyn, that post-1960's feminism advocates, in the same vein as pre-1960's negro rights movement, which politically was complete in 1957 in the U.S.A. with that year's Civil Rights Bill, is not the same as today's thoroughly racist-socialist tone.
I'm not sure how you can possibly suggest that the Civil Rights Movement politically ended in 1957? I find such a remark sickening. Google Jim Crow.
I did enormous research a few months ago on the struggle for the ERA in Georgia in the 1970s and early 1980s, and I can tell you that it was a sight more complicated than "we hate men." I read of a woman in Georgia who proposed in the state Senate that a law which insisted that no rape charge go through without a witness be amended: after all, a charge of theft could go through without a witness. She was the only woman there, and the reaction among the men? Was laughter, and the general consensus that any woman who gets raped asked for it. She was disgusted and certainly did role up her sleeves to fight. Then she went home to the husband who loved and respected her. It wasn't men she abhorred, you see: it was stupidity.
(By the way, I was forced to research the archives of primary source material within our university's library to find this information. It naturally didn't make it into any of the institutional history books. Which is actually what Virginia Woolf was writing about. You appear to be enormously uneducated on this topic.)
You've heard of The Harlem Renaissance. Not actually a united front. Within the movement were those who wanted to present black Americans before the public without the stereotypes which had been shackled around black American necks since before the American Civil War. Others wanted to exercise their artistic freedom and write of black characters with raw honesty. (See Richard Wright.) Then there were the white benefactors like Charlotte Osgood Mason, who paid writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston to work according to her agenda.
A civil war existed within the movement. The same is true of feminism.
In the 1960s, white women who had the time and the money ("give a woman 500 pounds and a room of her own") took on the feminist movement in America. One of their central goals was to get women out of the house and working. They were strongly inspired by the book The Feminine Mystique: what is this feeling of deadness in middle class white women in America? why aren't we happy? perhaps because we have no meaning in our lives, and simply exist to wash the dishes. we should get jobs. (Was the basic trajectory.)
Women who had to work to keep body and soul alive didn't see how winning the right to work was such a victory. They'd been working all along. Women of color and women who had immigrated to America? Were left behind. They wanted help supporting their children, help against abusive husbands, help for mothers who were deserted, help in the face of rape, help existing as marginalized figures three times oppressed in America: for their gender, for their color, and for their lower "class" existence.
Many of the women at the forefront of the movement in the 1960s (generally middle class white women with a nuclear family) felt that winning the right to work alongside men was the end of the feminist movement. Objections from marginalized groups within the movement were ignored. Some women starting protesting loudly that men were the enemy and female power was EVERYTHING. These people often caught the attention of the media, and still do today. Some women scorned other women who chose to marry and stay at home as RUINERS OF feminism. They insisted upon a radical stance. Others strongly felt (and feel) that feminism should defend the right to choose, and worked to defend women who went to college to get an M.R.S., married, spent twenty years at home with no work history that was valued by the public (for they certainly were working all along), and then found themselves deserted by husbands who preferred a younger wife. Women in this position were left with children to feed, no work history, and no hope. Feminists both fought in defense of them and aggressively attacked them, because feminists (shockingly enough) come with different personalities and agendas.
I was chatting with my mother recently (pardon me, I may begin to babble here) about the pay inequality situation in America. She mentioned that women currently make 78 cents on the dollar compared to men, which is a three cent increase from the pay difference when she was a secretary before she married my dad. There was a long moment of silence, and then we both burst out laughing. Part of feminism today is about that. The moments when mothers and daughters glance at one another and realize that in the entire life which has passed between them, we have achieved three cents.
Much of the movement today is generated within Women's Studies classes in universities (where the average college student is illiterate.) The current discussion centers on how to get the movement out of the classroom and back into the media. The radical stuff you see in the media doesn't represent the movement as a whole: it represents personalities within the movement who scream loudly enough the media notices. Meanwhile, you don't hear as much about the quiet souls who haven't a drop of aggression in them, but who want to work for peace. On behalf of the mothers who fought before them, on behalf of a history entirely ignored by the media. Much of that struggle centers today on an awareness of the reality of intersectionality, and seeks to gain equality for everyone -- male or female, American or Saudi Arabian, gay or straight, black or white. It's a movement in defense of humanity.
During the struggle for the vote in America, many women picketed outside the White House and created all sorts of havoc to force the President's hand: give us the vote, sir, or you are fighting for democracy overseas and denying it to half the population here at home. That certainly offended a few staunch gentlemen (and ladies) who had no idea why the women were picketing but sure as shoot knew they were doing something which hadn't always been done.
The picketing made it into the media and was certainly an in-your-face tactic. Thank goodness.
I say all of the above in response to your remark "and sometimes the undisguised hatred of men by womyn, that post-1960's feminism advocates." You have no idea what post-1960s feminism advocates. You're just a fussy-breeches with a bee in his bonnet, who makes the same disgusting jokes that those men in the courtroom in Georgia did forty years ago ("ride-side-up"). We have advanced three cents, apparently, but you, sir, haven't advanced at all. (That's the college student in me talking, not the feminist. You'll have to forgive me. I'm ridiculously ignorant, as well as illiterate.)
PS: If you Google the woman you imply needs a ride, you'll find that she is a soul who suffers from depression, and that she imprinted that tattoo on her leg to artistically capture the way the world sees her ("I'm fine") and the way, when she glances down at the same tattoo, she sees herself ("Save me.") Shame on you. For your filthy mind, for your filthy remark, and for your misogynistic lack of sensitivity. Poor you. So a few women are angry. Is it any wonder?
That, sir, is the feminist speaking.
him to the end of the sentence faster. 
drama and discomfort, that's a comedy. If she doesn't, that's a proper tragedy. For her.
