Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical reordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts. Radical feminists view society as fundamentally a patriarchy in which men dominate and oppress women.
Radical feminists seek to abolish the patriarchy in order to "liberate everyone from an unjust society by challenging existing social norms and institutions. Shulamith Firestone wrote in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution Early radical feminism, arising within second-wave feminism in the s, [3] typically viewed patriarchy as a "transhistorical phenomenon" [4] prior to or deeper than other sources of oppression , "not only the oldest and most universal form of domination but the primary form" and the model for all others.
Radical feminists locate the root cause of women's oppression in patriarchal gender relations, as opposed to legal systems as in liberal feminism or class conflict as in anarchist feminism , socialist feminism , and Marxist feminism.
Radical feminists assert that society is a patriarchy in which the class of men are the oppressors of the class of women. The first dichotomous division of this mass [mankind] is said to have been on the grounds of sex: Radical feminists argue that, because of patriarchy, women have come to be viewed as the "other" to the male norm, and as such have been systematically oppressed and marginalized. They further assert that men as a class benefit from the oppression of women.
Patriarchal theory is not generally defined as a belief that all men always benefit from the oppression of all women. Rather, it maintains that the primary element of patriarchy is a relationship of dominance, where one party is dominant and exploits the other for the benefit of the former.
