Abstrakt
The relationship between the left and feminism has never been exactly simple, and this remains true at the present day. Times change, but one may still find the spirit of the Second International haunting contemporary left intellectuals.
It was the Second International that forged a seemingly indissociable link between feminism and the attribute "bourgeois," and which made of feminism a social and political force antagonistic to socialism. Beginning in 1896, this line was formulated by Klara Zetkin and sustained by her female successors, who were attempting not only to win women supporters for social democracy and later for communism, but also to gain support and recognition from their male comrades.
Later historiography has only further confirmed the clear dividing line between feminism and the left.1 One doubts whether the reasons which led the Second International to pose "bourgeois feminism" against socialism as such have disappeared. And today it is as if the very same question, whose outcome was a clear divide between class politics and feminist politics, has returned in discussions of so-called "identity politics."2 And despite the fact that one of the sources of the second wave of the feminist movement in Western Europe and the United States was the "New Left," there are certain left critics today who identify feminism with neoliberalism and regard women as symbols of neoliberalism.