【正文】 t 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 and second waves of feminism. The first wave of feminism began, in the 1840s, as a demand for women’s equality generally. The women’s movement emerged out of the abolitionist movement, and at first feminism was part of an egalitarian worldview, closely connected to antislavery and antiracism. But in the last decade of the nieenth century, and to an even greater degree over the first two decades of the twentieth, mainstream feminism narrowed to the demand for woman suffrage. Leading feminists, mostly middle and uppermiddleclass, nativeborn white women, even made racist and antiimmigrant arguments for woman suffrage. Though the women’s movement also included workingclass women, many of them are socialists, for whom feminism remained a part of a broader mitment to social equality, by the second decade of the twentieth century, radicalism was a minor current within the women’s movement. Emma Goldman, who bined determination to resist the oppression of women with anticapitalist politics, was not typical of feminists of the first two decades of the century. For most feminists, and for the public, feminism had e to mean the vote for women and little more. Once suffrage was won, feminism lost its raison d’etre and so had little future either as a movement or as consciousness. The second wave of the women’s movement turned out differently. It did not narrow ideologically, nor did it run into any dead end, as