In the 1970s a growing current within the women’s liberation movement began to embrace a conscious anarchist orientation. These activists rejected the liberal turn of the mainstream wing of the movement as well as the state socialism of Marxist feminists.
Small groups of women “rediscovered” Emma Goldman and began to theorize a synthesis of feminist and anarchist politics. The feminist historian Julia Tanenbaum explains that “most anarcha-feminists were initially radicalized by the political and cultural milieu of the antiwar movement, but it was their experiences in the women’s liberation movement combined with the influence of Emma Goldman that led them to develop anarcha-feminism as a strategy.”
Although self-identified anarchists formed only a relatively small portion of the women’s liberation movement, their political impact stretched far beyond their small groups and publications. The feminist movement generally practiced what Helen Ellenbogen called an “intuitive anarchism”: they organized in decentralized groups, rejected hierarchy, and embraced horizontal notions of sisterhood. Anarcha-feminists built on the classic anarchist principle that the state is an institution of hierarchy and domination.
A crucial innovation of anarcha-feminists within the 1960s–1970s women’s liberation movement was their analysis of the patriarchal nature of state power. As Arlene Wilson of the Chicago Anarcho-Feminists put it in a manifesto published in the Siren newsletter in 1971, “The intelligence of womankind has at last been brought to bear on such oppressive male inventions as the church and the legal family; it must now be brought to reevaluate the ultimate stronghold of male domination, the State” which she describes as “rule by gangs of armed males.”
Indeed, the manifesto declares that “we believe that a Woman’s Revolutionary Movement must not mimic, but destroy, all vestiges of the male-dominated power structure, the State itself.” [...] The state was inherently patriarchal because it replicated the paternal rule of the father over society. As Love and Rage later put it in its 1997 “Draft Political Statement,” patriarchy “operates as a foundation of state power, used to justify a paternalistic relationship between the rulers and the ruled.”
The state reproduces at a higher scale the father’s rule over the family, which is “disguised as protection and support” but is “often enforced through violence and sexual terrorism.” Thus the state could only be the enemy of all women. Simply electing women to the top of the government could never change the basic patriarchal structure of its hierarchical power.
Read more in my recent article "To Repulse the State from Our Uteri: Anarcha-feminism, Reproductive Freedom, and Dual Power" in Radical History Review https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article/2024/148/90/384729/To-Repulse-the-State-from-Our-Uteri-Anarcha?guestAccessKey=7806bc55-d93d-4b68-ac99-8c9b089b52ef
