“American Electra: Feminism's Ritual Matricide”

Ahead of Sheila Rowbotham's visit to New York to launch Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century, the ever wonderful Harper's magazine has run an extended article by Susan Faludi in which she details the generational rifts among feminists in America. 

No one who has been engaged in feminist politics and thought for any length of time can be oblivious to an abiding aspect of the modern women's movement in America-that so often, and despite its many victories, it seems to falter along a "mother-daughter" divide. A generational breakdown underlies so many of the pathologies that have long disturbed American feminism—its fleeting mobilizations followed by long hibernations; its bitter divisions over sex; and its reflexive renunciation of its prior incarnations, its progenitors, even its very name. The contemporary women's movement seems fated to fight a war on two fronts: alongside the battle of the sexes rages the battle of the ages.

Visit Harper's to read the article in full.

And of course, Faludi's article is sure to come into the discussion at Sheila Rowbotham's Brecht Forum event on Monday October 4th where she will be interviewed by Anwyn Crawford, author most recently of Permanent Daylight for Overland.