Collegial Relations: Feminist Radicals in the Academy

Throughout the United States in the late 1960s, young, predominantly white women worked together under the banner of "women’s liberation" to craft distinctively radical forms of feminist theory that would transform the meanings of feminism, womanhood, and oppression. While scholars have suggested that women's experiences in college likely made them more inclined to critique women's status in society, current studies fail to account for exactly how the academy helped shape feminist radicals' worldviews.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, American women had unprecedented access to institutions of higher education.  But despite this shift in student demographics, academia remained a largely male institution that often reproduced the sexism prevalent in American society.  Radicalized by the chauvinism they faced within the ivory tower, radical women graduate students and faculty formed friendships, exchanged ideas, and educated themselves about women's oppression.  Combining their enthusiasm for study and thought with an intense desire for liberation, these women established the support systems and knowledge base necessary to the growth of feminist radicalism.  Using essays, newsletters, and other materials created by radical women scholars during this time, this paper will argue that the relationships cultivated among radical women academics helped foster both the development and circulation of feminist radical thought in the late modern feminist movement.