【正文】
外文翻譯 Feminist Consciousness After the Women’s Movement Barbara Epstein There is no longer an organized feminist movement in the United States that influences the lives and actions of millions of women and engages their political support. There are many organizations, ranging from the National Organization for Women to women’s caucuses in labor unions and professional groups, which fight for women’s rights, and there are many more organizations, many of them including men as well as women, whose priorities include women’s issues. But the mass women’s movement of the late sixties, seventies, and early eighties no longer exists. Few, among the many women who regard themselves as feminists, have anything to do with feminist organizations other than reading about them in the newspapers. Young women who are drawn to political activism do not, for the most part, join women’s groups. They are much more likely to join anti corporate, anti globalization, or social justice groups. These young women are likely to regard themselves as feminists, and in the groups that they join a feminist perspective is likely to affect the way in which issues are defined and addressed. But this is not the same thing as a mass movement of women for gender equality. A similar dynamic has taken place in other circles as well. There are now very large numbers of women who identify with feminism, or, if they are reluctant to adopt that label, nevertheless expect to be treated as the equals of men. And there are large numbers of men who support this view. The extent of feminist or protofeminist consciousness, by which I mean an awareness of the inequality of women and a determination to resist it, that now exists in the United States, is an acplishment of the women’s movement. But it is also something of an anomaly, since it is no longer linked to the movement that produced it. When the first wave of the women’s movement in the United States went into decline, after woman suffrage was won in 1921, feminism went into decline with it. By the 1950s, feminism had almost entirely disappeared, not only as an organized movement, but also as an ideology and a political and social sensibility. Even in the early sixties, in the New Left, to describe oneself as a feminist was to invite raised eyebrows and probably more extreme reactions. Now, for a second time in . history, the memory of a movement that engages the energy of very large numbers of women is receding into the past. But this time feminist consciousness has if anything bee more widespread. This raises the question: what accounts for this difference? How and what does feminism change when it bees a cultural current rather than a movement for social change? In part this different history may have to do with the disparities between the first a